There comes a time when a man must stand up for what he believes and ask for extra gravy on his chicken fried steak. Which is exactly what I am doing.

I am asking my wife to cover my plate in white pepper gravy.

I have a long history with chicken fried steak. It goes back to when I was a child.

Chicken fried steak was a real treat in our household. We rarely ate it at home. And we hardly ever went out to eat, either. Eating out was too expensive, and my father was so cheap that he wouldn’t have given a nickel to see Jesus ride a bike.

If we ever did go out, I was only allowed to order ice water. No ice.

Until one fateful Saturday morning, for an unknown reason, my father decided to take our family to a breakfast restaurant.

I can still remember it. The place was a dive. Vinyl seat cushions. Napkin dispensers. George Jones was singing

overhead.

My father told me I could have anything I wanted on the menu. So I ordered chicken fried steak and asked the waitress for extra white gravy.

My father said, “You’ll never finish all that.”

I laughed at my critics.

The waitress brought me a steak that was about the size of Venezuela. I ate three bites and had to be carried out of the restaurant on a stretcher.

When I got older, I visited a themed restaurant outside Little Rock that claimed to have the world’s biggest chicken fried steak.

When I ordered, the perky waitress said, “You sure you wanna order that? You look kinda puny, kid.”

“I’m sure.”

My steak arrived on a platter with a Bowie knife sticking from the top. And I could swear I heard George Jones singing overhead.

“Stand back,” I said. “This could get…

The weather is perfect. Families sit on blankets, eating fried chicken that was cooked in iron skillets. A band plays music on a miniature stage. Guitar, fiddle, and mandolin.

This is the church my friend’s mother attends. It’s tiny. Most of the congregation is late-sixties or mid-seventies. But there are plenty of young families, too.

Tonight, they are having a picnic.

The chapel is the only structure around for miles, surrounded by farmland and hayfields. Behind the all-brick building is an outhouse. It’s not operational anymore, but it’s maintained for historical purposes.

“It’s a two-seater,” says Brother Williams, a deacon. “When I was a boy, I did my business out there a lot.”

How nice.

The fiddle, guitar, and mandolin are playing the song “Precious Memories.” And I can’t think of a better tune for tonight because the memories are getting thick.

These are Baptists, but not the hardshell kind. These are the sort who go to college football games toting soft coolers.

Even so, no matter what

kind they are, you can’t get Baptists together without having food. It’s in our DNA. Scripture says, “Wherever two or three are gathered, a chicken must be brutally murdered.”

There is some serious fried chicken here tonight. The real kind. Homemade. Church ladies place this food on a table that’s covered in gingham. The tablecloth is clipped with clothespins to keep it from blowing away.

In the pasture behind the church, children are playing a game of Tag.

I see an old man with a dog. He’s wearing an Auburn University cap—the man, not the dog. The dog follows the man everywhere he goes, begging for food from strangers.

I meet a woman who moved to the area from the big city.

“I used to have a good job in Birmingham,” she says. “I was in marketing, worked with some pretty big…

I volunteered in the Methodist nursery last Sunday. The colorful room was overrun with babies. Marsha was my team leader for the day, and the only woman with first-hand experience handling a loaded diaper.

Working in the nursery is a pretty straightforward gig. Basically, all you do is wear a nametag and wait for a baby to cry, then hold them.

Your other job—and this is an important one—is to sniff the air and locate Number Two.

Marsha is very proactive when it comes to finding Number Two. She is constantly on the lookout for Number Two. Sometimes she even interrupts adult conversations to shout, “I smell Number Two!” Then she conducts randomized diaper checks.

I get the impression that going Number Two is all babies ever do. And don’t ask me where it all comes from because during snack time, I couldn’t get any babies to eat their pureed sweet potatoes without spitting up on themselves.

But let me assure you, these kids are definitely eating when nobody’s watching.

Because every kid in the room waddles as though his or her diaper contains a No. 6 bowling ball.

Before today, I hadn’t changed many diapers. As a boy, I helped change my kid sister’s diapers. But I don’t remember much about it.

All I can recall is that my mother used cloth diapers and washed them outside with a garden hose and a crucifix.

But Marsha has her finger on the pulse of today’s diaper scene, which is very different from the old days. Modern diapers are made of plastic, with ventilation systems, and color-coded accident indicators, which work sort of like mood rings.

“Changing diapers couldn’t be easier,” Marsha explains.

All you do is lay the baby down, keep the kid still, remove the kid’s recent installment, wipe the baby’s legs, sanitize the child, apply baby powder, and tag his or…

GULF SHORES—I have always liked this beach town. There is something about it. Not only is it situated on the Gulf, but wherever you go there is a feeling in the air that seventy percent of the tourist population has been drinking since noon.

I have good memories here. My wife went to college here. A good friend got married on these beaches. I have fished here.

Right now, Earl is giving me a ride in his truck.

Earl is white-haired, and quiet. He drives while I sit in the passenger seat.

It is night. I have just finished doing my one-man show in an auditorium where I told stories, jokes, and sang for two straight hours. I am exhausted and I have lost my voice.

When I exited backstage, Earl was waiting beside his truck.

Earl’s job is to give me a ride to the other side of the building so I can stand by the door, shake audience members’ hands, and apologize for ruining two

hours of their lives.

Earl is relaxed and easygoing. He can sense that I am tired.

“How about we go for a drive?” Earl suggests. “So you can catch your breath.”

I nod because my voice is shot.

Soon, I am lost in thought. And do you know what I am thinking?

I’m thinking that for most of my life, I’ve never felt like I did a “good job” at anything. Sure, I’ve done okay, but I never felt like I did anything worthy of a pat on the back.

I realize that admitting this makes me seem pathetic. But then, I come from perfectionists who used to mow their lawns twice per week. These were men who would see tiny patches of grass the lawnmower missed and freak out. Then, they would jog outside to clip the grass with scissors.

But as…

I wasn’t going to write this, but I have to. Not only for me, but for the good of our children, and our children’s children. No matter how hard it is to address. I’m talking, of course, about the highly controversial issue of homemade ice cream.

Ice cream wasn’t always under scrutiny like it is today. It used to be okay to eat ice cream. But then, suddenly it wasn’t okay, and lots of companies started coming out with healthy frozen yogurt.

A few years later, news reports claimed frozen yogurt was just as bad as ice cream. So they came out with “sugar-free” frozen yogurt, made with “aspartame.” And the world as we knew it fell apart.

Aspartame is actually a lot of fun to say. It seems like a dirty word, but isn’t. You can use it in social settings and it’s acceptable.

EXAMPLE: “Have you seen traffic today? It’s a real pain in the aspartame.”

So Americans were eating sugar-free yogurt sludge by the gallon, hoping

to live to be one hundred, and doing step aerobics. Life was all right again.

Companies started going bonkers and making bizarre frozen yogurt flavors like Blackberry-Garbanzo Bean, and Coffee-Bubble Gum, and Toenail.

Then, reports came out with new information claiming aspartame was deadly.

One report stated: “Aspartame turns your bodily fluids into formaldehyde, side effects include: Numbness, tingling, and profound interest in Jazzercise.”

All of a sudden, journalists were telling mankind to stay away from anything that even remotely looked like sugar-free frozen yogurt, and for mankind to eat quinoa instead.

Which is probably why a few months ago, I found two fifty-pound bags of red quinoa in our pantry. It wasn’t long before we were eating what looked like chicken feed for every meal until sometimes—especially if we sat in one place for too long—grade-A eggs would start appearing beneath our…

The women’s U.S. national team won the Women’s World Cup. I watched it on TV with my wife. We cheered like fools. My wife crushed an aluminum can on her forehead and shouted “GIRL POWER!”

I am not usually a soccer fan. In fact, I barely know how the game is played, but I watched the World Cup, and I hollered.

It’s hard not to get excited about a group of hometown American girls from places like Salina, Kansas, Fayetteville, Georgia, Saint Louis, and Cincinnati, beating the pants off the whole world.

The whole world.

Long ago, I dated a girl who played soccer. She was tough as nails, and drank raw egg yolks for breakfast. We were not a love connection. Primarily, because I am a baseball man myself. Plus, this girl could bench press a ‘63 Buick Skylark, and she scared me.

Anyway, my wife got very excited about all the raw girl-power being displayed during Women’s World Cup. So excited that when she

high-fived me, she dislocated my shoulder.

You’d like my wife. When we first married, she had no logical reason to be with a guy like me. I was a high-school dropout who had worked construction since age fourteen. She was a college grad.

But she married me anyway—against the advice of some very smart people.

My wife helped me enroll in, and finish community college. And it was my wife who tutored me through collegiate math classes. It’s a wonder we stayed married after Algebra II. Because it took me three semesters to figure out that a coefficient was not a geographical land mass.

So she’s no world-class athlete, but she is a chef de cuisine.

When I first met my wife, she’d just graduated from culinary school. She worked in fancy-schmancy joints with menus that were overpriced, and European.

The names of the…