I am backstage, about to tell stories onstage. A woman with a clipboard announces, “Ten minutes to showtime.”

I am tuning my guitar, hoping I won’t stink tonight.

This is what all performers think about before they go onstage. They say silent prayers that all go, more or less, the same way.

“Dear God, don’t let me stink tonight.”

It’s easy to stink at storytelling because there is no school for it. There are no credentials, either.

Which leads me to ask: “What am I doing with my life?”

I am still unclear on how I started telling stories for a living. The only education I have in storytelling came from elderly men who wore Velcro shoes.

I have always had a soft spot for old men. From childhood, I believed that I was an old man trapped inside a kid’s body. I never fit in with peers. This was only made worse by the fact that I was raised fundamentalist.

As a young man, I would find myself in a crowd of teenagers who were smoking cigarettes, sipping longnecks, far from parental eyes. And for some reason, nobody ever offered me any real chances at sinning.

I would have appreciated the opportunity, but they viewed me as different. It was as though I were elderly.

Once, as a joke, my friend Jordan handed me a lit cigarette in front of everybody. I didn’t want anyone to think I was a wimp, so I took the biggest drag I could. I almost died from a coughing fit.

My friends howled when they discovered that I had peed my pants a little from hacking so hard.

I can’t believe I just told you that.

Thus, I was blacklisted. I was the old man of the group. During social situations, I would generally hang in the corner, drinking prune juice, adjusting my Velcro…

And on the Eighth Day, when the Lord finished creating the world, and was leaning back into his recliner, watching Golden Girls on TV Land, the Devil snuck into Heaven’s control room and said unto himself, “Let there be yellow flies.”

And up from the pit of Hell, where the worm dieth not and the creator of Miracle Whip is imprisoned forevermore, arose a swarm of Floridian yellow flies (also known as deer flies). And the Devil saw it and he said that it was “pretty good.”

And here we are.

The Panhandle yellow fly is a vicious, aggressive, bloodsucking insect. When they bite, two things happen. First, you swell up like a water wing. Second, you die.

My cousin Ed Lee claims that, after many years of personal research, he has found a sure-fire repellent for the yellow fly.

“Beer is the secret,” Ed Lee explains. “Seriously, there are complex B vitamins in beer, they come out through your pores and yellow flies don’t want nothing

to do with B vitamins.”

A few nights ago, on Ed Lee’s porch, he tested his hypothesis with an adult beverage in his hand. Ed Lee’s bare legs were covered in yellow flies.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked. “You have yellow flies all over your legs.”

“You worry too much,” came his response.

Long ago, I dated a girl who moved to Florida from Arkansas. She said they didn’t have yellow flies up there.

A few yellow flies got trapped in her mother’s car while she was driving. They bit her mother twenty-eight times. When she got home she called for her husband, he was bitten thirty-six times. A few days later, they moved back to Arkansas.

And one time my uncle’s friend, Jerry, was sitting on a screened porch. There was a rip in his screen door. Flies came in by the dozen.…

Winn-Dixie—they remodeled this store not long ago. It’s something else. A little too fancy, if you ask me.

I’ve been shopping here since the old days. Back then, it was your average supermarket. Linoleum floors, decent beef, clinically depressed cashiers.

Today, they have deli counters that sell salmon sushi. I’d rather lick the restroom floor than eat salmon sushi.

The woman behind me in the checkout line is old. She is frail, with white hair, and big glasses. She is every American granny you’ve ever seen. I’ll bet the closest she ever came to sushi was a wild night at the Baptist clothing swap.

She is holding onto her daughter for support.

Her daughter is Hispanic—black hair, dark skin, late fifties. The two women couldn’t look more different.

They have a full cart. They have purchased all the usual supermarket fare. Chicken, tuna cans, jars of peanut butter, Duke’s mayonnaise, Colonial Bread, and enough paper towels to sink the U.S.S. Uruguay.

We make friends.

“Howdy,” is the woman’s first word to me.

“Howdy,” I say.

The old woman tells me about herself.

She adopted her Hispanic daughter when the girl was three. The toddler had been abandoned at a shopping complex. The child didn’t understand English, and she was sick with a chest infection.

“She almost died,” the old woman says. “I had to do something to help.”

The old woman met the girl at a foster facility. Some of the her church friends used to visit local foster homes to give attention to needy children.

“There were only a few of us who did that,” the old woman goes on. “We were so young. We’d hold the babies, play games, read stories, sing to’em sometimes. You know, mom stuff.”

Mom stuff.

“Kids need touching to survive,” the lady adds. “It’s been proven. Look it up.”…

DOTHAN—There’s a festival on North Saint Andrews Street. Hordes of people. Families. Face painting. Popcorn. Fried catfish. Beer. Bluegrass. Laughter. Kids everywhere.

The Blayne Hardy Barfield Foundation is throwing a Family Fun Day.

The foundation is named after Blayne Barfield, a young woman who committed suicide four years ago. I ask Blayne’s husband why he started this foundation.

“For my little girl,” he answers. “To break the silence, man. I want people to know that they can talk about it. ”

I meet a few who do.

One lady is watching the band, eating coleslaw and hushpuppies. She has cropped silver hair and a bright sundress.

“My son took his own life,” she says. “He was twenty-eight, wanted to be an actor, or anything involved with movies.”

She shows pictures on a cellphone.

A few moments later, I am standing in line for the restrooms. I meet a girl. She is wearing a T-shirt with the word “cowgirl” on the front. She is early

twenties, cheerful.

She says, “Yeah, I was the one who found my mother after she… Well... It was bad. I was sixteen, and I’m just now starting to talk about it, my therapist says I should.”

She speaks to me like I am a friend. Because I am a friend.

In fact, I am just like her.

I was twelve. When my father took his life, I was watching TV in another county.

At the exact moment the shotgun blast blew a hole through my uncle’s roof, I was watching the commissioner of Major League Baseball announce that the World Series would be cancelled that year.

The universe has a strange irony to it.

That night, the minister helped my mother break the news to me. He sat beside the fireplace and seemed nervous. I didn’t know what he was about to say.…

TUSCUMBIA—Momma Jean’s is a sleepy cafe out in the country. They serve hoecakes here. Not plain cornbread, but the stuff your granny made in a skillet.

It looks like a pancake, and tastes like a home run feels.

This is the kind food that would’ve made my uncle lick his lips and shout, “Go ahead on!”

Which is country talk.

My father would sometimes holler “Go ahead on!” at a preacher who was on a roll. It’s also a phrase that people shout at Little League games when cheering for their kids.

Sometimes, we shout it at wedding receptions when our eighty-three-year-old aunt is shaking her moneymaker to “Viva Las Vegas.”

And we say it when a cook has blessed our heart. It is an all-purpose phrase.

Momma Jean’s is your all-American joint with fried food, good veggies, and paper towels on the table. And I am so hungry I could eat a Presbyterian.

The old man in the booth behind me has tall hair. The elderly

woman beside him has hair shaped like a helmet. They are saying grace. The man does the talking.

The woman chimes in, saying, “Yes, Lord.”

I overhear them praying for someone named Maria. Their prayer lasts a long time. Whoever this Maria is, these elderly people are not letting her be forgotten.

On the other side of the restaurant are a few men wearing neon work vests and boots. They are covered in dust and drinking iced tea.

When their food arrives, they hold hands and bow heads. After the prayer is over, a young Hispanic man makes the Sign of the Cross.

I’ve never seen so many people saying grace in one diner before.

I’m scanning the menu. This restaurant has it all. They serve pintos, collards, cabbage, catfish, chicken, and lemon icebox pie.

Lord have mercy. It’s been a…

I was the second person to hold her. Daddy said to me, “Whatever you do, don’t drop her.”

She looked like a white bullfrog. She smelled like vanilla and grass clippings. I promised I’d take care of her forever.

That was harder than it sounded. This girl grew into a kid overnight, and she did reckless things.

She used to leap off round hay bales, flapping her arms, yelling, “CATCH ME!”

She liked to see how long she could hold her breath underwater. She climbed trees that were too high. She ate too much bacon.

Her first word was, “NO!” Her second word was “NONONO!” She used these words when I tried to force an oyster past her lips. She pitched a fit.

I’d never known anyone who didn’t like oysters. They were the food of our forefathers. Our ancestors consumed oysters when they learned the War Between the States was over. It was celebratory food. The food of holidays. And of summer.

She was four when Daddy died. The morning of his death, I sobbed alone on our

back porch. She crawled onto my lap.

“Don’t cry,” she said.

I did anyway.

We took care of each other. I did her laundry and taught her how to fry bacon. And when our dog had puppies, I showed her how to hold them—there’s an art to handling newborn pups.

Once, I rented a library book on French braiding. She let me practice until her hair resembled overcooked spaghetti.

She tried out for the school play. I attended her audition. She was nervous, and the smug drama teacher told her she had no talent.

I’m a quiet man, but I wasn’t that day. I called the teacher a greasy Communist who didn’t love the Lord. I’m sorry about ever saying that now. I don’t know if she really was greasy.

Throughout her high-school years, she worked different jobs. Once,…

I am about to go fishing. Don’t ask me why. You don’t need a reason to go fishing. That’s one of the great things about it. It is reasonless work.

My late father-in-law taught me that.

Certainly, some men fish like they are on a mission for the U.S. government. These men are either constipated, or they drink Coke Zero.

But for most of us, fishing is just sitting on a boat and fighting off dehydration. It is a beautiful waste of time. And it is even more wasteful when you throw fish back, like I do.

I haven’t always released fish. I used to keep them, and I would even pay to get the big ones mounted.

In my office, for example, there are five fish on the wall. In my den, six.

There is a nice redfish I had mounted by an old man in Choctaw Beach, long ago. He would mount fish for twenty-five bucks. He was a little senile, and he screwed up one of my fish by painting it green.

When people see this fish, they often say, “What kinda fish is that?”

“A very jealous one,” I say.

And nobody laughs because that is the worst joke you will ever hear.

But somewhere along the way, I started releasing fish. I would drag them into the boat and I couldn’t bring myself to gut them. So I would remove the hook, name the fish, and let them go.

I have named nearly a thousand fish in my day.

The first one I ever named was while fishing with my father-in-law, Brother Jim—I never referred to my father-in-law any other way.

I caught a speckled trout on a number-six hook, and I felt bad for the fish. I kept thinking about what it must be like to be a speckled trout. I wondered if the…

A busy Cracker Barrel. My family sits at a large table. My mother on my left. My wife on my right. My sister across from me. Her two children. My brother-in-law, and my mother’s boyfriend.

That’s a lot of people. Don’t make me count them all.

Long ago, there were only three of us. My mother, my baby sister, and twelve-year-old me. Back then I didn’t know what we were. Whatever it was, it didn’t feel complete.

I’ll never forget when the church had “Family Fun Fair” on the Fourth of July. I begged my mother not to attend because, I kept telling her, we weren’t a “true family.” Not since my father had died.

I could tell this hurt her. But I meant it. When people looked at us, I could practically feel pity leaking from their eyes. And pity sucks.

Family Fun Fair was reserved for real families. The kind who had a living father, a mother, two-point-five kids, a dog, a riding lawnmower

in the garage, and a Kitchenaid mixer.

We did not have these things. We had a push mower that leaked oil. And my mother’s cheap handheld mixer was basically a gasoline engine with beaters.

Fourth of July was the holiday that hurt most.

That was the holiday when American families would swarm together like honeybees. They would park their cars on the curbs, throw loud barbecues, laugh too much, and holler.

My friend Jackson, for instance, had nearly forty people at his family reunion. They participated in something they called “Boat Day.”

Who ever heard of Boat Day? How ridiculous, I thought. Everyone in his family would crawl into their respective boats and cruise in circles, water-skiing, shouting, and carrying on like they were the happiest clowns you ever saw.

Gag me with an outboard prop.

Even so, my mother did not leave…