Dear Sean

Dear Sean

Sean Dietrich

“Please don’t get weird and preach at me, I get enough of that, I just don’t know what to do about this and had to tell somebody.”

DEAR SEAN:

I know you usually write about good things, but I am pretty down and I don’t know what to do, I think about ending it all sometimes, but don’t know what to do about it. I have a wife and two young sons and dogs, and she [wife] really wants me to go to the doctor, but I hate doctors.

Please don’t get weird and preach at me, I get enough of that, I just don’t know what to do about this and had to tell somebody.

HELP

DEAR HELP:

I am terrified of doctors, too. I hate waiting rooms, needles, elevator music, blood-pressure cuffs, outdated issues of “Better Homes and Gardens,” the smell of rubbing alcohol, and god-awful fluorescent lighting.

When I was a boy, I disliked our family dentist so much that I would fake terminal diseases just to avoid him. My dentist was an old man who looked like Harry Caray and his breath smelled like a reclaimed water facility.

He smoked Winstons while he

worked, and listened to Glenn Miller cassette tapes. To this day, I can’t hear the Glenn Miller Orchestra without developing a nicotine buzz.

One day, the old doc looked into my mouth, he was humming along with “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” breathing smoke directly into my face, and he told me that he was going to install a permanent retainer on my bottom teeth.

I got so scared that I almost Chattanooga-Choo-Chooed in my shorts.

He glued a piece of wire to my teeth with an industrial adhesive often used on commercial runways. When I left his office, I felt like somebody had constructed a Steinway inside my mouth.

But the wire didn’t last. It came loose after only a month. When the wire dislodged, it left behind huge globs of hardened glue on the backside of my teeth.

Now, I should have told…

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Sean of the South

Best Friends

Sean Dietrich

Jacob was a foster child. He grew up in the Foster Pinball Machine. Birth to graduation. He was never adopted by a family.

He and I weren’t good friends, but we knew each other. I lost track of him at age fifteen. He moved away to a group home.

We got in touch a few years ago. I expected to learn he had a wife and kids, but that wasn’t the case. Jacob has animals.

Six dogs, three cats.

I don’t think Jacob would mind me saying that he marches to the beat of his own tuba.

He’s had little choice in the matter. His childhood was spent bouncing from family to family, looking after himself, remembering to eat regularly.

Today, he leads a good life. He’s a restaurant cook, he likes to hike, camp, and he’s had the same girlfriend for ten years.

I asked about all his animals.

“I dunno,” he said. “Just love animals.
Growing up, I was never allowed to have any.”

Jacob found his first dog after work one night. It was late. A stray black Lab was

sniffing trash cans behind a restaurant.

The dog bolted when it heard footsteps.

Jacob tried to coax it with food. The dog wasn’t interested. So, Jacob resorted to heavy artillery.

Raw ground beef.

He left an entire package on the pavement. The dog still wouldn’t come. Jacob gave up and crawled into his car to leave. Before he wheeled away, he glanced in his rear mirror.

The dog was eating a pound of sirloin in one bite.

“Started feeding him every day,” Jacob said. “I just wanted him to know somebody cared, that was it.”

For two months, Jacob cared. He fed the dog from a distance seven nights per week—even when he wasn’t working.

And on one fateful night, the old dog walked straight toward Jacob and had a seat.

“You shoulda seen how he…

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Sean of the South

Babies

Sean Dietrich

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

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…

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Sean of the South

Gulf Shores

Sean Dietrich

“Gulf Shores sure has changed over the years,” I say. “I don’t even recognize the town anymore.”

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…

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Sean of the South

Good Women

Sean Dietrich

Last week, I played music and spoke to a room of white-haired women. It was a dim-lit bar, with decent onion rings, heavy burgers, and waitresses who call you “sweetie.” Not exactly the place you’d expect to see the White-Haired Beauties of America.

But they were here. Ladies from all walks of life held glasses of beer and wine. A few had canes and walkers. A few got too loud. I was entertainment.

Eighty-two-year-old, Jo, approached me first. She wore a white blouse with houndstooth scarf. She asked if she could buy me a beer. I yes-ma’ammed her.

“Don’t yes-ma’am me, boy,” she said. “I’m trying to hit on you. Ruins the excitement.”

We sat at the bar together. She fired up her vaporizer cigarette.

“Doctor says I shouldn’t smoke,” said Jo. “But still I smoke two a day. One in the morning, one at night, and I vape until my throat’s raw.”

Jo is an M-80 firecracker. She is from rural Alabama and she sounds like it. She is a writer, a poet, an artist, and

a shameless flirt.

She told stories, of course.

Her words were a trip backward on the timeline. Suppers on church grounds, childhoods with calloused feet. Chicken pens, hog roasts, cotton-pickers, fish fries, front porches.

By the time she had worn out her butterscotch vaporizer, she was talking about her husband.

“I miss him so much,” she said. “He was a precious man, the best thing in my life. You look a little like he did.”

There was another woman. Ella.

She was eighty-nine. She asked if the band would play “Tennessee Waltz.” We played it at an easy tempo.

She slow-danced with her son. He was careful with her. When he dipped her, she was nineteen again. That’s when he blew out his back.

Ella’s husband died when she was forty. She never remarried.

“Always had me a few boyfriends,”…

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Sean of the South

Today

Sean Dietrich

Today is an important day. Maybe one of the most important of my life. I have been looking forward to this day since childhood, and now that it’s here I don’t know how to feel.

Today is National Cow Appreciation Day.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You didn’t even know there was such a holiday. But it turns out there is. And in honor of this day, my wife’s 2003 Dodge Durango died in the post office parking lot with us inside it.

It was ninety-eight degrees outside. I tried to flag someone for help. Many of these people simply waved at me, then pointed to their wristwatches, and drove away.

So that’s where I am now, waiting for a tow truck, writing to you on my phone.

But like I said, nothing can bring me down today. Nothing. Because you know what else today is? The Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

That’s right. All year, we baseball fans have been waiting for our

favorite players to form the All-Star team.

These are professional athletes who play the sport purely out of love. And also, because they make millions of dollars and sometimes throw huge parties on their yachts wherein partygoers drink so much champagne they push the piano overboard.

But.

That's not why today is special, either. No, sir. Today has nothing to do with cattle, or baseball, or Dodge Durangos that are as dead as iced catfish.

Today is important because of an orange hardback book, stolen from the Nashville Public Library in the early 1980’s.

Let me explain:

This old dusty book dates back to my late father, who was an avid reader. He was a blue-collar man who worked on steel every day of his life, and he read two or three books per week.

I remember him reading this exact book when I…

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Sean of the South

Homemade

Sean Dietrich

A boy will do almost anything for ice cream.

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…

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Sean of the South

American Girls

Sean Dietrich

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 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…

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Sean of the South

Barbecue

Sean Dietrich

Have you ever been to one of those barbecues where some guy is name-dropping all over the place? He’s talking about the big things he’s done, and everyone flocks around him because some people are actually impressed by this?

And when the food is served, the host asks this guy to say grace, or toast, or whatever.

The guy answers, “Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly.”

But he does anyway.

He makes a big speech, drops a few more names, tells a few more grandiose stories, and you need a seasickness bag.

But in truth, you hardly notice him all night because throughout the party, you are in the corner talking to an old woman—let’s call her Maddie.

Maddie is the mother of one of the guests. She is wearing slippers and a nightgown, but her mind is sharp. She looks out of place at this party, but you like out-of-place people because you are one.

Maddie survived the Great Depression, and she never talks about this

in public. It’s too painful. But tonight, her meds are kicking in, and she’s talking with you because she’s high as a weather balloon.

And you fall in love with her. You even contemplate kidnapping her to be your own private granny.

The more she talks, the more you want to tell everyone at the barbecue how incredible Maddie is, but everyone is too head-over-heels about Mister Name Dropper, who is telling a story about how he once ran into Kim Kardashian in an elevator in Toledo.

So the party ends, and Maddie goes to bed because she has chair yoga in the morning. And that night, you go home and feel so inspired that you start writing a novel.

And that’s how the book begins.

It’s a tribute to an old woman you met. Only, the more you write, the less it…

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Sean of the South

Funny Man

Sean Dietrich

But that is not what I remember most about those camping trips. What I remember was an old man named Brother Willie.

It was summer. I didn’t want to be camping, and neither did my wife, but there are some church obligations you must keep.

We had one job, and that was to prevent the Baptist youth group from committing sin. Teenagers have the natural ability to sin on camping trips. It is in their genes.

Teenagers can commit any one of the top-ten sins before breakfast. I’m talking classic sins like envy, malice, greed, or replacing the cream filling in a Twinkie with Colgate toothpaste.

And if kids can’t commit one of these, they invent new sins.

One such sin would be shining a flashlight into the chaperones’ tents and saying, “Oooooo.” Which is supposed to be frightening, but it isn’t. It’s not even remotely scary to hear a pre-pubescent voice say, “Oooooo” after dark.

If I were a kid, and I really wanted to annoy my youth chaperones—and I’m just thinking out loud here—I would empty a jar of honey into their shoes and let the sugar ants

engulf their sneakers like a hellish scene from a B-movie horror film. Not that I’ve ever done that.

When we were kids, my Little League team took lots of camping trips. On one such trip, my cousin brought an entire gym bag full of illicit items.

Because this is a family column, I won’t tell you what he actually brought. So let’s just say he brought cans of A&W root beer and some gospel magazines.

The problem was, my aunt was also on this camping trip. Do you remember the sadistic warden in “Cool Hand Luke” played by Strother Martin, who abused Luke because of a sick, twisted compulsion? My aunt was like him, only she was a Freewill Baptist.

She would make randomized tent visits. And on that particular night, she discovered her son’s tent was filled with the whole team.

She barged…

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