Lake Martin is busy, the rich scent of smoked meat fills the air, and my LDL cholesterol count is already rising. 

Pontoon boats are everywhere. Happy children ride in tubes, pulled behind fast outboards. The kids are screaming as they happily pee in the lake at high speeds. 

And all this reminds me that my childhood was severely different than theirs. 

Do you remember going back to school after a long summer? Remember how the first thing we always had to do was write an essay entitled “How I Spent My Summer.” 

Well, I never had anything good to write. Namely, because I was a chubby redhead from a strict fundamentalist family. 

During the summers, kids in my family did not go to lakes because we were not allowed to participate in “mixed bathing,” lest our carnal desires were awoken in third grade. 

We were not allowed to watch Disney movies. Such as “Pinnochio,” because whenever Pinnochio lies his nose grows in a “X-rated way.” 

Nor were we permitted to watch “Snow White.” 

“Snow White is

smut!” the preacher shouted to our un-air-conditioned church. “What kind of harlot lives with seven tiny unmarried men?!” 

That one really got the paper fans going. 

As sanctified children, our only form of entertainment was watching our grandfather play a Weltmeister accordion, watching Billy Graham crusades, or browsing the women’s undergarment section of the Sears catalog.  

The children in my world attended—at minimum—seven different summer VBS programs. Thus, while other kids were water skiing, eating Flintstone Push Ups, I was memorizing Revelation 13 for scripture drills: 

“​​And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the…

The 94-year-old woman gets a jumpstart on Decoration Day every year. The cemetery gets busy at her little church in Elmore County. She likes to be early to the party.

She has brown-flecked hands. Tissue-paper skin. She arrives at the cemetery accompanied by her grandson. They get there in the morning, before the heat of the day. When fog still hangs above the earth.

Her grandson helps her out of the car. She uses a four-pronged cane to walk. Her grandson carries a box of decorations.

“What was my grandfather like?” the kid asks.

“He was a good man,” she says, placing a black-and-white photo on her late husband’s grave. In the photo, a young man is wearing an Air Force uniform.

He was a pilot. He dropped bombs for a living.

“He never got over it,” she said. “It haunted him, killing all those people just by mashing a button.”

Southerners do not “press” a button. They “mash” it.

“After the war,” she went on, “he used to wake up at night sometimes, crying,

and I didn’t know what to do but rub his back.”

Memorial Day is what most people call it now. But it’s still called Decoration Day in many areas. Especially in the Appalachian portions of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, north Georgia, northern and central Alabama, north Mississippi. Also, in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, the Rocky Mountain regions of Colorado Utah, and in parts of California.

It all started after the Civil War. Women and children would decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. By World War I’s end, some 120,000 Americans died in combat. By World War II, nearly 420,000 American soldiers were deceased.

In U.S. towns, from coast to coast, families placed framed photographs on graves. Stuffed animals. Little flags. Keepsakes. Notecards.

“I remember when you couldn’t visit a cemetery without seeing photographs everywhere,” says the old woman. “They don’t do…

I met her for coffee. She was middle-aged. Her hair was purple. On her arm was a tattoo which read “HOPE.”

Her story was simple. She was 14 and pregnant. The daughter of a rural preacher, in the mountains of North Alabama. She had never even cut her hair.

Hers was a tribe who wore long skirts, beat Bibles, and spoke in tongues. She was a good kid. But she made a mistake. A big one.

And they kicked her out.

The day the girl left her home, she walked out of her household carrying only a backpack. She had no phone. No money. No nothing. She wore a Walmart maternity dress. Her mother snuck her $100 in cash.

The girl met her best friend’s sister in a Dollar General parking lot. Her friend’s sister was 19, waiting in an idling Toyota Camry. And away they went. That was the last time the girl saw her immediate family.

The girl had her baby in Tennessee. Her best friend was around for the birthing

process. Her best friend held her hand and reminded her to breathe.

Our heroine got a job at a retail store. She had a crappy apartment with a window-unit A/C. She utilized free daycare. She used a cheap ride-sharing service to get to work.

In other words, she had nothing.

But her son was smart. One of the smartest, in fact. He was enrolled in programs for advanced students. Once upon a time, the school system would have called him gifted. But government funding decided that it wasn’t equitable to say some schoolkids were gifted/talented. This made parents mad.

Nevertheless, the gifted boy excelled in his studies. And as his mother continued to work double shifts in fast food joints, deep-frying ribbon-cut potatoes, her son studied into the wee hours.

He was dual enrolled. Which means that by the time he graduated high school, he had a…

How I dropped my phone into the depths of Lake Martin is still a great and confusing mystery which evidently involves beer.

My wife and I were at the lake for the week. We were getting ready to go kayaking. It was sunny. I wore an oversized life vest designed for someone roughly the size of Herman Munster. I wore SpongeBob swim trunks.

I had a thick layer of zinc on my nose because I am a redhead and will turn into a vine-ripened tomato after four minutes of UV exposure.

TRUE FACT: George Washington was a redhead, so was Thomas Jefferson. Also, Judas Iscariot.

So anyway, my wife and I deposited our two rental kayaks into the water. Which isn’t easy. Kayaks are heavy, especially with coolers strapped to the hull.

The correct way to launch a kayak requires a lot of attention. You must hold your kayak securely or else the current will suck your vessel out to sea and you run the very real risk of running out of

beer.

No sooner had we placed kayaks into the water that they began drifting away. “Help!” shouted my wife. “Don’t let it get away!”

I am male. When a woman cries for help, I must respond. This is basic male instinct. Just like the instinct to protect, to provide, and the instinct to discuss the importance of relief pitching.

So, drawing on my training as an English major, I dove into the lake. I didn’t realize, of course, that my iPhone was in my pocket. At least not until I saw my phone sinking to the bottom. I saw my glowing home screen, falling gently away from me, downward into the depths.

Thankfully, I was able to retrieve the phone from the lake floor, but by then it was too late, my phone was deader than soft rock.

And since our rental cabin is hundreds of miles from…

He was tall, lean, and young. When he approached me, he hugged me. Then, his mother hugged us both. A three-person club sandwich.

He must’ve been a foot taller than I was. His voice squeaked with adolescence. His skin was freckled. He had a long neck. He recognized me.

“I liked your books, sir,” he said, through a nervous stutter.

Sir? No way. Such titles are reserved for men who wear penny loafers when fishing.

“I read them all when I was in the hospital,” the boy went on. “I kinda got to know you, and it was like we were friends.”

His mother tells me his story. It’s a long one, and it’s not mine to repeat. But he has the determination of a saint, and he still has a long road ahead of him. He suffers more than other kids his age. And as things stand right now, he might not survive his struggle.

Before he walked away, he told me something. Something that stuck with me.

“You know what I do when I’m

down?” he said. “I list ten things I love every day. I write’em on paper. My dad told me to do that.”

He tapped his finger against his head. “Gotta keep on thinking ‘bout things I love.”

I was mute. I couldn’t seem to find words. I noticed a large moon-shaped scar beneath his hairline. I tried to say something, anything, but I just smiled.

He hugged me one more time. His mother took his arm, they walked away. The boy walked with a pronounced limp, holding his mother for balance. And I can’t quit thinking about him.

On the off-chance that he is reading this, I’ve come up with a few things I love:

1. I love Mexican food. In fact, I have had a lifelong love affair with it. A Mexican man I used to work with with used to make a…

“Sit wherever you want, sweetie,” the Waffle House waitress said.

I slid into my booth. Alan Jackson was singing overhead about the Chattahoochee. Birmingham traffic was whizzing outside the plate glass.

My waitress was Latina. She was older, but energetic, with the face of a cherub.

“What’re we drinking, hon?”

I told her.

She gave me a few seconds to look at the menu. But reading the menu took me a while; I was exhausted. Recently, my wife and I have been traveling back and forth between Florida and Birmingham. We used to live in Florida. We still have lots of family there.

I’ll never forget when we packed up our entire Floridian lives into tiny boxes, and moved those boxes 263 miles north.

“Know what you wanna eat?” said the waitress.

“Eggs, waffle, and hashbrowns,” said I.

She made a note. “Want anything done to your hashbrowns?”

“Yes. I want them drowning in enough grease to clog a municipal drainage pipe.”

“Toast?”

“Please.”

“Wheat or white?”

“The kind I’m not supposed to eat.”

She smiled and wrote on her notepad. The waitress welcomed a few

more patrons into the establishment. Then she tucked her pen into her apron and looked at me.

“You been traveling a long way today?” she asked.

“Why, do I look that haggard?”

“No. Not haggard just… A little droopy.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

“Listen, hon, at my age, it’s either droopy or it don’t work anymore.”

The woman then recited my order to the cook. She read it in that wonderful Waffle-House language all servers use.

Long ago, I used to work as a short order cook in a breakfast joint. They made us wear a white paper cap known as the “confidence killer.” My favorite part of the gig was when waitresses would call out orders in diner-speak.

WAITRESS: “Alright, boneheads! Gimme Adam and Eve on a raft with some bad breath…

Lessons from my blind rescue dog.

—Wherever you are, find the dog-people.

—The only things in life that matter are people and food. Although not necessarily in that order.

—You learn everything you need to know about a person by the way they talk to you.

—When you are blind, friends are very important. If you hang around the wrong ones, you’ll get lost.

—Food tastes SO good.

—But not broccoli.

—If you do enough of the things that scare you, you won’t be scared of those things anymore.

—Out of all the animals on the earth, humans are the only ones who can be cruel.

—Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you will end up peeing in the house. So just remember, if you DO pee indoors, try not to walk through your own puddle.

—There is no such thing as a little triumph.

—Being afraid is okay. Everyone gets afraid. But being afraid doesn’t have to slow you down. You can be afraid and be strong at the same time. In fact, sometimes the strongest creatures are also the most

afraid.

—If you DO, however, walk through your own ginormous puddle of pee, and your feet become wet with puppy urine, whatever you do, DON’T climb onto Dad’s bed with your pee-feet and put your paws on his pillow and root around like you are searching for exotic truffles.

—There is no value in celery.

—Or spinach.

—Life is far easier if you have a bad memory.

—Follow the voice of someone who loves you and you will be okay.

—The most valuable possession you own is your trust. But trust has a shelf life. So give it to someone fast or it will spoil.

—Children are always nice to blind dogs.

—People in hotels do not like it when you sniff their butts at the communal coffee machine.

—If someone loves you, they will prove it…

“We’re experiencing a slight flight delay,” the captain said over the airline intercom. “No big deal, folks.”

We have all boarded the plane. We are all crammed in this passenger cabin like No. 9 sardines.

“…This delay should only take 30 minutes. Again, no big deal.”

The passenger next to me is a guy from Hoboken, New Jersey, named Bill. Evidently, Bill from Hoboken has serious sleep apnea.

I know this because he fell asleep and is currently snoring so loudly I can feel the vibrations in my molars. Every few seconds, Bill stops breathing. So I nudge him. Whereupon Bill snorts in a Warner Bros.-cartoon-like snore so intense you would swear Bill is faking it. But I assure you Bill is the real deal.

The captain speaks overhead. “Howdy, folks. Just want to keep you informed. Nothing to be alarmed about, we’re just having serious electrical problems with our doors.”

Serious problems with the doors. I’m thinking doors are somewhat important to basic airline safety. If you do not have doors,

you have giant holes in your airplane. How is this “no big deal”?

“…So we’re just waiting on the airline mechanic,” the captain adds. “Should take another 15 minutes. Again, no big deal.”

No big deal. An airline pilot could be told by a neurosurgeon that he has an inoperable, fatal brain condition, and he would reply, “No big deal.”

Most airline pilots were military pilots in a previous life. Some of them were fighter pilots. Therefore, nothing short of nuclear war is a “big deal” because they are not normal humans. Military pilots were the kids in your neighborhood who rode bikes with no hands. You probably did this, too. But your military pilot did it on the roof of his house.

Meantime, Bill from Hoboken is currently on an apnea roll. He is snoring so noisily that everyone is directing hateful stares at me. I smile…

Richmond, Virginia. I was in a coffee shop. The loud TVs were delivering what passes for American news.

Prince Charles recently had his portrait painted by British artist Jonathan Yeo. The painting features a violent red-and-pink background which, many critics feel, makes the prince appear as though he is burning in hell.

Caitlin Clark made her WNBA debut, breaking ESPN viewership records, spurring TV network corporate officers to commit to giving themselves huge raises.

Season Three of “Bridgerton” is here. “Bridgerton” is Netflix’s hit romantic-comedy series about attractive people wearing attractive period costumes and somehow this is important national news.

I sat at the cafe counter wondering what it means to be an American in today’s media-centric world. When did headline news become all about celebrities? Why do we care?

I asked the coffee-shop guy what he thought it means to be a modern American.

He wore a flat face and said, “This is my first day working here.” Then he walked away.

As I was leaving the cafe, the TV headline read: “IMPORTANT BREAKING NEWS: Kansas City Chiefs

Kicker Disses Taylor Swift.”

Disses.

Have mercy.

So anyway, many Richmond local friends agreed that I should visit Saint John’s Episcopal Church, which wasn’t far from the cafe. Saint John’s is—according to historians—maybe the most historically important meeting house in the United States.

I made the trip to Saint John’s.

When you first see the old church, you are immediately struck by a strong, patriotic feeling, deep inside yourself. That feeling was located somewhere near my bladder to be exact. Because at the time, I had to go like a Russian racehorse.

I asked the lady at the visitor’s office about restrooms, I said it was urgent. She said the bathrooms were locked today. God bless America.

Thus, I hurriedly finished my historical church tour whilst squeezing my legs together because the nearest public restroom was a mile away and, as…