Yesterday, I jumped on the trampoline with my cousin’s kids. We hopped around for hours until I ruptured L4, L5, and S1. It was great.

I remember when my old man bought a trampoline for me and my kid sister before he died. Trampolines were a big deal in Kid World. My family had never known such shameless expenditures. A trampoline was a novelty such as had never been seen before by our kind.

The view of my people was that trampolines were for rich folks. They were luxury items for the well-off.

Moreover, my old man was tighter than a duck’s hindparts. We never expected him to splurge on a piece of equipment intended for something as unproductive and wanton as acrobatic play.

I come from a modest family of humble fundamentalists. We bought our bread from the day-old bread store. We saved our newspapers. We donated our used teabags to missionaries.

We never left lightbulbs on in rooms unless we were physically inside the aforementioned room.

My father inherited his frugality from

his grandfather. When my great-grandfather was on his deathbed, half blind from diabetes, he squinted into the darkness and said, “Is everyone here?”

“Yes, Daddy,” the family said. “We’re all here, gathered around your bed.”

“But, if you’re all here,” he said, “then why in the name of God are the lights still on downstairs?”

I remember the afternoon my father put the trampoline together in the backyard. It became the hottest news to ever hit the Kid Telegraph. One boy came all the way from Greensboro just to see it.

Within the span of one day, my backyard became the most popular place in six counties. After that, on any given weekend you could see a single-file line of runny noses stretching from our trampoline into the street.

We kids jumped for twenty-six hours per day until we either fell from exhaustion or sustained a…

Remember when you were little? Remember how whenever you were sick your mother made chicken soup? Remember what culinary pageantry this was?

Your mother would go to great lengths to boil poultry in a giant stockpot, filling the kitchen with steam so that the wallpaper started to peel. And she did this for you.

And even though you were as sick as a cup of warmed over manure, remember how wonderful that felt?

Remember how whenever you were scared, your beautiful mother would cradle you and tell you everything was going to be okay?

Remember how you would always ask her, “But how do you know it’s all gonna be okay, Mama?”

Then, remember how she would answer by pinching your little nose and singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” until your tears evaporated?

Of course you remember all this. And so do I. We never forget the people who made us feel protected. We were helpless kids with perpetually runny noses and unclean underwear, living in a dangerous world. But within Mama’s

embrace we were safe.

“He’s got you and me brother, in his hands…” she would sing, rocking you gently.

How about your teenage years? Remember those? Remember how you thought you were a tough little cuss? Nothing could harm you because you were Billy the Butt Kicker.

But inevitably something unpleasant would happen to you because that’s how life works. Someone would break your heart. Some hapless kid would call you stupid, ugly, or, God forbid, chubby. Your tough-guy façade would shatter, and you ran crying to Mama.

Because deep down you just needed to be held. You needed Mama to wrap her two wondrously soft, non-health-club arms around you and tell you that it was all going to be okay. Maybe even hum a song into your ear while swaying back and forth.

But then you got older.

Suddenly you weren’t a baby…

Here’s what I want you to do. Go outside and open your car doors. Now gather all your earthly possessions and shove them into your backseat. After that, strap the rest of your belongings to the roof, including your dishwasher, La-Z-Boy, lawn tractor, and all three of your children.

Now you know how my wife travels.

The only major difference is that we don’t have children, so our lawn tractor usually rides shotgun.

Packing the car is always a major challenge for us inasmuch as my wife does not travel lightly. My wife’s idea of travel is to bring everything but our window treatments.

Thus, whenever I prepare our vehicle for vacation mode, I painstakingly pack our car so that no space is wasted. When I’m finished packing, our automobile interior usually resembles the jigsaw puzzle from hell.

Even so, it never fails to amaze me, once our trip is finished we can never manage to fit everything back inside the car.

This often means that before we travel back home, my wife has

to make the difficult decision of leaving certain things behind, such as, for example, me.

This morning we awoke early to leave Birmingham after vacation. We have been staying in Alabama for a few weeks in a small rental cottage. We had a long drive ahead of us. But before we could hit the highway we had to pack our car.

(Cue Hitchcock music.)

As it turned out, the biggest challenge wasn’t physically loading the car. The worst issue was The Hill.

Birmingham is a hilly city in north-cental Alabama, nestled beneath the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Most residents have to use rappelling equipment to check the mailbox.

Our rental house was located on the summit of a steep hill which the locals loosely refer to as Mount Concussion. There were approximately 43,118 concrete steps leading from the curb to our porch. You could actually…

The old man saw her on the interstate. It was a dog, seated in the median of the busy highway. The old girl was frightened and unmoving.

The highway was screaming with traffic. On each side of the median were rivers of speeding headlamps. The road was too busy to cross. So the dog sat in the grass.

When the old man saw her, he flipped on his hazards. He eased to a stop on the shoulder and leapt into the tall weeds, bounding for her.

As the old man made his way through the grass, he was simultaneously removing his belt to use as a makeshift leash. Which caused his pants to fall down. Which revealed his bare backside to all eastbound motorists on I-10 that evening.

“I don’t wear underwear,” the old man told me during our interview. “Too constricting.”

When he reached the dog, she looked at him with pleading eyes. She was nervously panting.

“I spoke Spanish to her,” said the old man. “My mom was from Mexico City, she believed

that dogs listened to Spanish better than English. Dogs always listened to my mom.”

He looped the belt around the animal’s head then led her to his car. He noticed she was limping and whimpering.

“She was hurt worse than I’d thought,” he said. “She was bleeding all over my backseat.”

I’ll spare you the gory details and simply tell you that it was an ugly wound. A life-threatening one. She needed medical attention. And fast.

So our hero used his smartphone to search for emergency veterinary doctors.

The old man was on his way to Texas that night to visit his daughters. He was a foreigner in a foreign land. And he must have been quite a sight, too.

A confused old man, standing on the shoulder, in the middle of the night, looking at his phone, with a portion of his bare white…

Lord have mercy. Betty White is dead. She inherited her Eternal Reward today on New Year’s Eve, at age 99. Less than 24 hours before the New Year.

It’s been quite a year.

She was the last Golden Girl to go. Her co-star, Estelle Getty (Sophia), died in 2008 at 84 from dementia. Bea Arthur (Dorothy) died of cancer at 86 in 2009. Rue McClanahan (Blanche) died at 76 in 2010 from a stroke. And now Betty.

Lord have mercy.

Most people, of course, will forever remember Betty as her character, Rose Nylund, the giddy Golden Girl from Saint Olaf, Minnesota. But, for some reason, I will always remember her character from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

When I was a boy, our local channel would play Mary Tyler Moore reruns before I caught the schoolbus. I would sit before a screen and laugh whenever Betty White appeared. She cracked immodest jokes, which I somehow knew were inappropriate for freckled Baptist boys. I liked her right then.

But then, so did the rest

of the nation. She was America’s grandmother. And she was funny, as evidenced in few of Betty’s words:

“Facebook just sounds like a drag. In my day, seeing pictures of peoples’ vacations was considered punishment.”

“Vodka is kind of a hobby.”

And my personal favorite:

“The older you get, the better you get. Unless you’re a banana.”

This morning, my neighbor received her current copy of “People” magazine. I saw the glossy issue poking out of the old woman’s mailbox. The cover featured a photo of Betty White with a bold headline that read: “Betty White Turns 100!”

Betty died just seventeen days shy of her 100th birthday. Talk about black irony.

We lose beautiful things every day. Every morning, it seems like something wonderful breathes its last. This year I’ve lost too many friends and too many family members.

In 2021 I attended more funerals than…

The day before New Year’s Eve. I was stuck in Birmingham rush hour. A ten-mile line of standstill traffic stretched before me. It looked like I wouldn’t be getting home until sometime around the next papal installation.

The Dodge truck beside me towed a gooseneck horse trailer. Inside was a white horse, staring at me from her open window, chewing a mouthful of alfalfa.

You might not care about this, but as a boy I was obsessed with horses. I grew up around horse people. I rode some; I wasn’t any good.

Even so, I was always thinking about horses, drawing pictures of quarterhorses in notebooks, reading novels like “National Velvet” and “My Friend Flicka.”

“The Black Stallion” was perhaps one of the greatest horse movies ever made.

All these memories came back to me while looking at that horse. She ate her dinner of legume hay, sniffing the Alabamian breeze, cheerfully watching the passing eighteen-wheelers, the UPS trucks, the public transit busses, the Porsches, and the giant SUVs which were roughly the size of rural school

districts.

And I fell in love with her right there.

The horse had other admirers in traffic, too. There were teenagers in the Nissan ahead of me, rolling down their windows to greet her.

“HEY, HORSEY!” they howled.

Soon, everyone in traffic was staring at these obnoxious teenagers who tried wildly to get the horse’s attention.

After watching the teenagers for a few minutes, I decided that I had never seen behavior so ridiculous and immature in all my life, and I wanted to be part of it.

So I cranked down my window and joined them.

And do you know what? No sooner had I rolled down my window than I discovered other adult motorists were doing the same thing I was doing.

An older man in a nice suit, driving a Land Rover Defender, was speaking to the horse.

A young…

My phone vibrated. The first birthday text of the day came from the old man who coached my Little League team after my father died. He made a real impact on me during a time when I was most vulnerable.

“Happy birthday, Samuel!” he texted.

I was so moved. And although, technically, my name is not Samuel (it’s Sean), it is still nice to be remembered.

The next email I received was from a guy in Mayfield, Kentucky. He’s busy helping with the relief efforts after the devastation from the tornadoes.

“Happy birthday, Sean…” the man’s letter began. “I love you.”

I could not believe that in the midst of a veritable ground zero, this man took the time to wish me a happy birthday. This time, I cried.

Later, my phone vibrated again. An old friend who is currently undergoing cancer treatment in California messaged.

“Happy birthday, Sean…” was the gist of the email she sent during her chemo treatment.

This woman who is undergoing the worst trial of her lifetime paused to wish me well.

My cup runneth all over the place.

Throughout the day, the phone rattled in my pocket nonstop. My mother texted. My sister. Old coworkers. My cousins. My uncles. My old employers. Someone with important information about my vehicle warranty.

And I got a text from my pal, Guillermo.

Ah, Guillermo. I met Guillermo in a Walmart parking lot many years ago. My heap-of-junk Buick had broken down. Guillermo saw me from across the lot, struggling. He fixed my engine although he did not speak a lick of Norte-Americano.

That night, I figured out that Guillermo was living in his car in the Walmart parking lot. He was camped there until he got enough money to fix his Honda’s transmission.

And since I speak fluent hand gestures, I asked him if he wanted to come live with me and my wife.

I will never…

Erin has a guardian angel. A real one.

This supernatural cherub was a gift from her mother, long ago. It all started when Erin was six years old. Her dying mother called Erin to her sickbed, said a prayer, and gifted her daughter an angel. Simple as that.

After her mother passed, Erin was raised by her grandmother in a ramshackle house near the railroad tracks. Times were not easy. Her grandmother was a single parent, and kids ain’t cheap. Simple as that.

“We ate a lot of Hamburger Helper,” said Erin. “And we shopped at thrift stores.”

But an angel is worth a lot more than greenbacks. Especially an angel like hers, who has made himself evident at pivotal moments throughout her life.

There was the time in elementary school when Erin fell off a low balcony at her friend’s house. When she opened her eyes, she was in no pain. The doc couldn’t believe what he saw. Not a bone broken.

There was the time in high school when she was driving on

the interstate. A voice inside Erin said, “Take the exit, and wait at the gas station.”

She did. On that same highway, on that same night, an auto collision occurred involving an eighteen-wheeler. Four people died.

There was the time when Erin was engaged to a young man whom she thought she loved. The wedding was fast approaching, but something inside her said, “This is wrong. Do not marry him.”

She called off the ceremony, simple as that.

Erin gave back the wedding gifts. She returned the ring. And many years later, Erin realizes she made the right call. The man she might have married has already been remarried thrice.

Another time, she was in an apartment building visiting a friend. There was a man in the hallway who looked suspicious. He was standing too close to her.

When Sarah brushed past him, the man’s…

I don’t know how it started. But somewhere along the way people started sending me angel stories. So I started sharing them. Which only meant that I began getting more stories.

Currently, I still receive bundles of angel stories in the forms of messages, emails, and letters. As we speak, the spiders living in my USPS mailbox are getting squashed by angel stories that keep arriving.

Truthfully, I didn’t set out to be a writer of angels. In fact, I wanted to be a humorist. I began my career telling funny stories, trying very hard to make the occasional reader pee themselves.

But if there is one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s this: You must go where the angels take you.

Which brings me to my story. I was in a bookstore recently when I saw two Latina women shopping. They were in the same section I was in. In fact, they were looking at the same book I was looking at. The book was about angels, and it happened to be

in my hands.

I was thumbing through the pages when I noticed two five-foot women breathing down my collar.

Finally, the younger woman asked if I was going to purchase the book. I said, yes, I planned on it. Then I asked why she wanted to know.

“Because,” she said. “My mama wants this book. She is using it for research.”

Research? This got my curiosity piqued. I am a writer, and it is my job to get piqued. Sometimes I get piqued three or four times each day. It just relaxes me.

I asked what exactly the old woman was researching.

The old woman spoke in a booming voice not unlike the voice of Vincent Price from the 1953 film “House of Wax.”

“Los Ángeles,” the old woman said.

Then the elderly woman went on to tell me her tale. She spoke in Spanish and…

It was the night after Christmas, and Birmingham was quiet. I was on a walk through a neighborhood, watching street lights wink on at dusk.

The sunset was neon pink. There were sirens in the far-off. A distant train sounded its horn; two long, one short.

There were people walking dogs, old ladies watering ferns, and children riding scooters. And there were six kids playing a game of Wiffle Ball in their backyard.

“Heybatterbatterbatter…!” shouted the sweaty kids in the infield, punching their little hands.

“Swingbatterbatter…!”

The boy at the plate golfed one into right with his plastic bat.

“Throw him out!” shouted someone’s mom.

The throw was good.

“YOU’RE OUT!” shouted six kids in ecstatic unison.

The runner made the long walk of shame back to his mom’s lap and cried tears of sportsmanship.

Funny thing about Wiffle Balls. Not long ago, the State of New York declared that Wiffle ball, along with kickball and freeze tag, posed a “significant risk of injury” to kids. New York legislature decreed that any summer camp that included these activities

would be subject to government regulation.

Meanwhile, back at Wiffle Ball Inc. headquarters in Shelton, Connecticut, Wiffle employees probably thought this legislation was a prank.

Wiffle Ball dangerous? Wiffle Ball Inc. has been around for over half a century and has never—not once—been sued over safety issues. They have doled out over 60 million plastic balls since they opened their doors. There are Wiffle Balls on nearly every continent.

So people across the U.S. were ticked off about New York’s decision. They were vocal about it, too. They made a big stink, and they won. New York legislature finally removed Wiffle Ball from its list of regulated high-risk activities along with other allegedly dangerous sports like dodgeball, knitting, and Algebra II.

Anyway, as I walked past the kids playing Wiffle Ball, a stray plastic ball rolled onto the sidewalk and stopped only…