The little seagull built her nest beneath the train tracks. She was huddled over her squeaking chicks. Her nest was only inches from the steel rails.

Two railway track maintainers stood at a distance watching her. Their neon vests, reflecting in the early morning light. Their hard hats pushed upward on their heads. They weren’t sure what to do with the bird.

“What is a bird doing on the tracks?” said one employee.

“How in the world did she get there?”

The mama bird looked so snug. So content. And she made it clear, she wasn’t leaving.

“We should probably move her,” said one employee.

“You can’t move a bird nest. If you move the nest, the mama might abandon her chicks and they’ll die.”

“But we have to move it or the train will kill them. A bird’s nest can’t survive this close to the tracks.”

The railway employee removed his helmet and ran his hands through his hair. This was the last thing he needed this morning.

Just then, a train was coming. Oh, no. The horn blasted.

Two long. One short. Standard warning blast for a train approaching a crossing grade.

“Crap,” said one employee.

“What’ll we do?” said the other.

“I don’t know.”

The two railway employees just stared at each other. Unsure of what move to make next. They could either move the nest and probably kill the chicks, or leave it alone and watch them all die.

Nobody made any moves. Soon, it was too late. The booming CSX diesels were already roaring along the rails.

The two employees stood at a distance watching in mock disbelief as the monstrosity of iron and steel passed, with screams of metallic thunder.

It took a long time for the train to finally complete its crossing. The approximate length of a freight train in the US is 1.5 miles long. Sometimes it can be even longer, stretching…

“Dear Sean, yesterday’s column disappointed me. You cannot be a true believer and believe in ghosts at the same time. God simply doesn’t work that way.

“...I wonder if you know that ghosts are actually demons. …I’m shocked that you would entertain the subject of witchcraft in your writing. Please consider me a former follower. Thanks.”

Dear Former-Follower:

You won’t read any of this, since you no longer follow me. And, for the record, I don’t blame you for unfriending a witch. If I were you I wouldn’t follow me either. If for no other reason than because this witch uses way too many commas. So, believe, me, I, totally, get, it.

I guess I really demoralized the proverbial pooch with my last column about ghosts in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I should have known better. You are right. Ghosts are evil. Ghosts are not holy. There can be no such thing as a holy ghost.

Well. Wait.

Let me start over.

I’ve been in Gettysburg for the last three days with my friend Bobby. We are lowly

musicians, playing a week’s worth of Civil War shows at the historic Majestic Theater.

We dress in Civil War attire. We sing and fiddle 160-year-old music for visitors who come to Gettysburg. We play two shows each day. And I’m honored to say we are receiving many standing ovations. True, these ovations are usually moving toward the exits. But still.

So anyway, getting back to ghosts. Ghosts are a huge topic here in Gettysburg. This town is home to the most reported paranormal activity claims in the world. Several companies offer ghost tours. Ghosts are a big business here.

Moreover, many tourists report seeing weird things. I am currently staying in a historic hotel, for example, that is supposedly haunted.

Throughout the years, staff members and guests have allegedly seen a Civil War nurse roaming these hallways. Her name is Rachel. Others claim to…

Gettysburg is a place of ghosts. That’s what they say. This town is known to historians and ghost hunters as the promised land for paranormal activity.

There’s the phantom regiment, sometimes heard marching through the streets.

There’s the specter of a little girl at the Tillie Pierce House, often heard playing in the other room, laughing and running around.

There are the cries of agony reported at Penn Hall. The historic college once served as a makeshift hospital during the war. Multiple claims have been made.

In the 1980s, for example, a few college administrators were working late. They took an elevator to the lower portion of Penn Hall. When the elevator doors opened, the administrators saw a room full of apparitions dressed in hospital attire, tending to fallen soldiers.

There are numerous reports of random figures walking battlefields. Noises heard, such as distant drumbeats, or feet marching, or faraway cannonfire. A lady in white, seen roaming streets, or standing in the killing fields.

Well, I don’t believe in ghosts. Never have.

But I have

to admit, there is a different vibe in this town. It’s in the air. I cannot describe it. It’s sort of a warm hunch you feel in your belly. A feeling that never leaves you.

“It’s always been this way,” says a woman who has lived in this town for 50-odd years. “When I first moved here, I felt kinda like there were angels all around me. All the time. Watching me. You get used to it.”

Tonight, Bobby and I perform at the historic Majestic Theater, built in 1925. It’s a nice theater. A big marquee, lit with candy-colored neon. Art deco interior. Exquisite popcorn.

But there is also a feeling in this place. A deep-in-your-gut feeling. Weird.

Then again, the land beneath this theater likely served as an impromptu embalming site for thousands of bodies after the battle. The amount of death this…

As our rental car eased into Gettysburg, past the brick-and-plank storefronts selling tourist trinkets, women’s fashion, artisan tacos, funnel cakes, and free CBD samples, my imagination was running amok.

It’s hard to imagine how many were killed in this battle. I don’t want to imagine. I don’t want to envision 160,000 men fighting on the soil of Adams County, Pennsylvania.

I don’t want to visualize the fields of matted down grass, sticky with blood. Nor do I want to think about how historians say this town had an ever-present odor for years after the battle.

What I want to think about instead, is a woman named Lydia Hamilton Smith.

You did not learn about Lydia in school. You’ll probably never hear her name.

But she was a local here. Lydia was born on Valentine's Day in a lowly tavern backroom, just up the road. Her mom was African American, her dad was Irish. You can just imagine how she was treated as a girl.

She married a free Black man named Jacob, and gave birth to

two sons. Her husband died in 1852 and she became a single mom.

She found a good job as housekeeper for a well-to-do guy in town. Things were going well for her.

But then came the 1860s.

Lydia’s oldest son died. Her other son, Isaac, a banjo player, enlisted in the 6th US Colored Troops in 1863. He marched off to Virginia.

War takes everything. It takes everything from every-ONE. It’s hard to imagine living through a war on our own soil. It’s hard to imagine enemy fire, shattering the windows of your schoolhouses, chewing up the clapboards of your local church.

Modern Americans are insulated from such horrors. But our own Civil War wasn’t that long ago. Six or seven generations.

Lydia was probably in the house on the day the battle took place. It was early July, 87 degrees. Sunny. The main…

Bobby and I played music before a theater of people at the Vista Retirement Community in Wyckoff, New Jersey. The Vista is a giant cruise ship on land, minus the lifeboats, slot machines, and go-go dancers.

The theater was dark except for randomized blinking medical alert bracelets, glowing like fireflies in the night. Parked next to the theater entrance was a corral of aluminum walkers tied to the hitching post.

I looked across a sea of white hair in the auditorium and realized I was the youngest in this room.

And here is no happier feeling than being a kid in the presence of one’s elders.

Americans are afraid of their elderly. Our culture is terrified of aging. Thus, our elders are often herded to the proverbial outskirts, and largely ignored.

If you don't believe me, look at our advertisements, commercials, and media. Young, young, young. You will not see white hair on television unless it is a commercial wherein Joe Namath heartily encourages you to apply for a reverse mortgage.

Prescription commercials show actors who are SUPPOSED to be elderly because they have grayish locks, except they are in their early 40s, with nasal piercings and sleeve tattoos.

We glorify youthful skin, physical beauty, muscular macho-ism, perpetually colored hair, ripped abdominals, and perfect butts that defy the cherished laws of physics.

You will not find a single ad featuring a lead role for someone over age 40. What you will find is youthful pop stars, dressed in dental-floss thong bikinis, taking the stage, earning billions for shaking their pelvis on camera.

Which is why Elvis deserves an apology. Elvis might have shaken his pelvis on camera, too. But at least he never took it out and showed it to anyone.

So anyway, it was a lovely theater at the retirement home. Bobby and I stood on a grand stage and did our best. Bobby played a banjo. I tortured…

We arrived in New Jersey at 5:18 p.m. The first actual New Jerseyan I met was the lady gas-station cashier.

“Will this be oh-WALL?” she asked, ringing up my coffee.

“Ma’am?” I said.

She gave me a no-nonsense glare. “I said ‘Will this be oh-WALL?’ Just the KWAH-fee?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled. “Where you from?”

“Birmingham, ma’am.”

Another smile. She handed me a receipt and threw out a hip. “I ain’t your ‘ma’am,’ Alabama.”

We were officially welcomed into the Garden State by a celebratory traffic jam about the size of a rural voting district. After a few hours, we arrived at our destination. The Vista, a continuing care retirement community in Wyckoff.

I expected the Vista to be a nursing home. I expected three-pronged canes, and residents with walkers, all roving in tight social clots, like the Sharks and the Jets.

But the Vista is not a nursing home. At least not like any I’ve seen. This is a senior living community with first-class services and amenities, and over 160 finely detailed apartment homes offering stunning

views of the Ramapo Mountains. This is a permanent cruise ship.

The staff couldn’t have been friendlier. Residents were just as friendly. Everyone kept asking Bobby and me to “twalk” for them. Apparently people in Jersey like listening to us twalk.

We carried our luggage through the hallways. On our short journey we were suddenly accompanied by three kind older ladies who wanted to know all about us. Who we were. Where we were from. And how come we were so cute.

Three elderly women turned into five. Five turned into 7. Seven turned into 12. Soon, Bobby and I were the biggest thing to hit the Vista retirement community since the dawn of Velcro shoes.

I made instant friends with a woman named Mary Miller. Mary is slight, with perfectly coiffed hair, flawless makeup, T-strap pumps, and pristinely reapplied lipstick. She is…

Interstate 59 shot past our windows like a streak of pigeon excrement on a commercial airline windshield. We crossed into Tennessee, heading northward to New Jersey. The radio played Jerry Reed. And I was busy counting barns.

A barn in the distance. Overgrown with fairytale weeds. Freshly painted. Its rooftop, all-black, with bold white letters, reading: “See Rock City.”

And I felt a warm smile playing at the corners of my mouth.

“See Rock City,” we all said in soft voices.

The American interstate is a mind-numbingly ugly affair. Wholly unlovely in every way. There is no charm on an interstate. No romance. No beauty. You will pass few shotgun homes, no quaint water towers, no Rockwellian town squares made of brick and glass.

No. On an interstate, you exist in an artistic hell, entirely conceptualized and maintained by your captors at the Federal Highway Administration Department. Huge culverts, hideous overpasses with all the charm of Soviet bunkers. Concrete, concrete, and more concrete. It ain’t pretty.

Unless you’re talking about the barns.

I collect

old barns. I carry them with me. A good barn is hard to find. Most are falling apart. Their wood, unpainted and gray with age. Rusted rooftops, vanishing into corrosion.

Barns are getting harder to find. American barns are disappearing at an alarming rate. At one time, this nation had an estimated 6.8 million barns. Today there are 650,000.

But if you keep your eyes open, you’ll still see them.

The humble American barn comes in many different styles. You have gable barns, broken gables, Dutch gambrels, English gambrels, hip roofs, gable-on-hips, roundtops, gothics, cylinders, monitor barns, bank barns, pole barns, kit barns, centric barns, and the ever-present salt-box shed your grandfather probably had.

Some are well-maintained, still in use, standing erect, freshly painted. Some have succumbed to slow deaths, God rest their souls.

But Rock City barns are a collector’s item.

It all started in…

Late morning. Bobby and I packed the car for the Great American Road Trip. I tossed my fiddle into the backseat. Bobby placed his banjo in the trunk. I ate my third Larabar.

“Ready to shove off?” said Bobby.

“Aye, aye,” said I, with a mouthful.

Bobby took the first shift behind the wheel, exiting Birmingham, doing a cool 65 mph, aiming our headlights toward the Mid-Atlantic. Our backseat, full of banjos, guitars, mandolins, multiple fiddles, and three quarters of the nation’s supply of Larabars.

My wife forces me to bring Larabars when I travel. I have thousands. Otherwise, I tend to receive the majority of my nutrition from the Frito-Lay food group. Larabars, you will note, are high in fiber. And my wife is obsessed with lower-intestinal health.

“Did you ‘go’ today?” my wife will often whisper, with concern. Sometimes asking this question in public places such as, for example, funerals.

“Why are you so interested in my bathroom habits?” I will aggravatedly reply.

My wife will then turn to any eavesdroppers and say, “It’s

okay, he’s just constipated.”

For the next nine days, Bobby Horton and I will be playing a week’s worth of shows spanning from New Jersey to the Keystone State. We will finish our trip at the historic Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

You might recognize the name Bobby Horton. He composes music for all the Ken Burns documentaries. He’s a boyhood hero of mine.

I’ll never forget when I first heard Bobby’s music. It was only a few years before my father died. Dad was watching the PBS Civil War documentary; I was lying on the floor in front of the TV, flat on my stomach, reading the latest installment in the “Archie” saga.

When I heard the documentary’s music coming from our Zenith console, I was so mesmerized I forgot all about Veronica, Betty, and Jughead. The music captivated me.

Namely, because music…

I don’t know what to do about AI.

Humanoid robots. Automated cars. Augmented reality smart-glasses. Smart dishwashers. Robotic surgeons. And what about the weird AI images all over my newsfeed? Where are these freaky AI pictures coming from?

A masterfully crocheted wedding dress that can’t be real. A sand castle the size of a YMCA. A portrait of Jesus made entirely from broccoli, captioned: “Squint your eyes and see the Risen Savior!”

Frankly, I think AI dropped the ball with the Broccoli Jesus caption. Humans could think up MUCH better captions for such an image. (“Broccoli take the wheel!”)

Likewise, my newsfeed features dozens of phony AI images of mothers cradling disabled children, captioned, “Nobody will wish my baby a happy birthday.” This, accompanied with ba-zillions of birthday wishes in the comments.

Or the AI image of a 121-year-old woman blowing out birthday candles, captioned: “Nobody will wish me a happy birthday.” This is followed by a throng of comments.

What the hell is going on?

What’s the point of these pictures? We beat

Russia to the moon and now we’re using our hottest technology to make portraits of religious figureheads out of cruciferous vegetables? (Broccoli is my co-pilot!)

AI is also taking over the field of writing. News articles, for example. I have a friend who works for a prominent news outlet. I asked why news items read so bizarrely nowadays.

“AI of course,” he says.

I’ll explain. In olden times, writing an article was a lengthy process. First, a journalist would think up an idea. Then, journalists physically left their desks for gumshoe research. After which, journalists would tap out a godawful rough draft which usually had the same literary value as, say, poo.

After the rough draft, journalists would THEN be forced to mercilessly retype, reword, restructure, reorganize, rethink, and re-edit their work until the article finally resembled well-thought-out, well-informed, passable poo. This was how the American…

I found old photographs in the attic. I rifled through hundreds of old Polaroids. Most were infant pictures of me naked.

I was a fat baby. People were concerned about me as a newborn. “Have you seen Sue’s baby?” people would say. Then they would inflate their cheeks and do an imitation of the Pillsbury spokesperson.

My hair was the color of a carrot. My belly looked like a No. 9 bowling ball.

In one photo, I was taking a bath in the kitchen sink. My parents made no attempt to hide my butt from the camera. In fact, I found many pictures wherein my fundaments were actually the focal point.

My mother took these pictures.

I know this because my mother was obsessed with my butt. She was always showing these pictures to company.

“Can I refill your tea?” my mother would ask people. “Would you like to see a picture of my son without pants?”

There are various photographs of me standing with my rear facing the camera. In these pictures

I’m wearing a ten-gallon hat, holding a little pistol, and my unmentionables are showing.

“Sean was very chilly that day,” my mother would explain.

There are photos from my first day of school. I was with my school friends, holding a huge sack lunch in a supermarket paper bag. Thank God I had my pants on.

I was holding a bag-lunch, likely, because my old man was extremely frugal. I can specifically remember my father used to insist on meeting pizza deliverymen halfway.

Also, my father used to cut my hair on the porch to save money. My dad was not a trained aesthetician, but used the Eyeball Method. He would shave one side, then the other. He pronounced the haircut finished when I looked like Uncle Fester.

The Little League pictures. Those are hard to look at. I was a chubby first baseman. My uniform fit…