I was watching cable news today, they said this was the most challenging time in our national history. They said that circumstances have never been this bad. They said we’d be lucky to make it through these hard times in good enough shape to bury.

They said a lot of things.

Well, I got to thinking about “they” today. Who are “they,” anyway? “They” are everywhere. You can’t get away from “they.”

They are always talking at you. They are always making predictions. They are always telling you about things that are going to happen.

They are your invisible critics who love telling you what you can and cannot do. They are the voices that make quick judgments, and pretend to know the score. They’re everywhere, and they never shut up. You’ve heard them before.

“They say not to eat eggs…”

“They say to avoid butter.”

“They say you should sing ‘Happy Birthday’ three times while washing your hands in the sink…”

“They say, with your kind of cancer, your chances of survival are bad.”

“They say you might never get your

life back after the big mistakes you made.”

“They say you’re done for.”

“Hold up. Wait a second. They’re now saying butter and eggs are good for you.”

They, they, they.

You can’t get away from them. Their voices penetrate your brain from every angle. And if you ever start to actually concentrate about what they’re saying, you’ll discover something important:

They are full of beans.

They have no idea, they don’t know you, they don’t know how you’re made, or what kind of uncharacteristic strength lies within you. In fact, they don’t know jack diddly.

They said that Gerald would never recover from the chemo treatments that nearly killed him. They also said he was going to die before age 40. Gerald is 89 today, and healthy. And I wonder what “they” would have to say about…

Nighttime. I’m driving a two-lane highway. I like two-lanes. I like old fence posts. Old barns. I like all sorts of things. I like driving. It puts me at ease.

You have no reason to care about this, but I used to worry a lot. I still do, but I worried more back when I was a kid. After my father passed, I was afraid of everything.

Confession. As a boy, sometimes I’d lie in bed and feel so scared I couldn’t catch my breath. I don’t know what I was afraid of exactly. I suppose nobody tells you grief feels just like fear.

So I was afraid. Plain and simple. Afraid
of almost everything. Afraid my family would die. Car accidents were another particular fear. I was afraid of vacant houses, doctors, hurricanes, tsunamis, realtors, two-percent milk, etc.

Of course, it wasn’t like this before my father pulled his own plug. Once upon a time, I played baseball, ate ice cream, and fished in creeks, carefree.

Fear has a way of taking over. At night, I’d wonder if death was going

to swallow me whole. Irrational, I know. But young boys aren’t rational.

But getting back to night driving. When I was fourteen, I’ll never forget when my friend and I snuck out of Saturday night prayer meeting. We were there with his grandmother. She was a sweet, white-haired woman who memorized Bible verses and smoked Winstons like a tugboat.

I remember when my pal leaned against his grandmother’s car and jingled her keys which he’d taken from her purse.

“Wanna go for a drive?” he said.

“Right now?” I said.

“Why not?”

“Um, it’s prayer meeting?”

His smile was a wild one.

I didn’t want to. I was—you can probably guess—too afraid. I was afraid we’d wreck. Afraid we’d wake up in county lock-up with orange jumpsuits and a roommate named Bad Bart McThroatslicer.

But my friend…

This old house. There is something about it. I have memories here. Too many. Leaving those memories behind is going to be tough.

Yeah, I know a house is just an inanimate object without a soul or personality. Believe me, I get that. There’s nothing magical about lumber and shingles. A house is just rooms, electrical outlets, lightbulbs, and a few broken toilets.

But then, sometimes—sometimes—a house is more than that. Sometimes a house is a home. And this house was one such home to me.

I’m thinking about all this while looking at my late mother-in-law’s half empty home.

Currently, all my mother-in-law’s things have been packed away, her drawers exhumed, her belongings placed into cardboard boxes for safekeeping.

Right now we are temporarily staying here, but soon this house will be a tomb. Soon, the estate-sale people will take over from here and sell these things. It’s hard to believe that bargain hunters will fill this home, buying all items that remain. It’s hard to picture my mother-in-law’s china sitting in someone else’s cupboard.

If you’ve

ever wanted to reflect on the temporal nature of your life, look around your house and visualize a bunch of yard-salers placing bids on your rocking chair, your flatscreen, or your Frigidaire. There you are.

Over the past weeks, my wife has been cleaning closets and sifting through eighty-some years’ worth of her mother’s belongings. We have poured over every black-and-white photo album, tried on every feathery hat, read every old newspaper clipping, played every Bobby Vinton LP, and cried in every room of this home. All the while, we were sort of ignoring the inevitable:

This is it. These are the last moments we’ll spend in this home. The end.

So we have eaten our nostalgic dinners at my mother-in-law’s dining table, amidst a house that is strewn apart, retelling old stories, and reminding ourselves of olden times.

This residence is…

It is raining. It has rained all day. My wife is making chicken soup because soup goes with rainy weather. It’s been a lazy, wet, boring, sleepy day. My wife has had the soup simmering since breakfast.

“The secret to good soup is plenty of time,” my wife told me earlier. “Time equals flavor.”

I liked that phrase so much I had to write it down on a legal pad. The same pad I am using to write you. I made a note to work that clever little sentence into this column.

“Time equals flavor.” That’s good.

Anyway, my dogs have been cooped up because of the weather. Around ten o’clock, they finally went stir crazy and started a professional wrestling league in the den.

So I left for the quiet porch with my legal pad. I have been here all day, listening to rain.

Once, I was in New York City. It rained downtown. It didn’t faze the city buzz. Life kept moving. Horns kept honking. People kept racing from Point A to Point B.

But here in the

woods, a good rain stops everything. In this weather, our small world becomes lethargic.

I can smell my wife’s soup from here. She made it from a chicken we bought from our friend, Lonnie. Lonnie is a strange hippie who names all his animals. Apparently, the chicken’s name was “Daisy” before the bird met its end.

My wife likes to know these things before she buys chicken. She likes to know the bird had a good life, and if possible, a Christian name.

Once, Lonnie tried to sell us a frozen chicken he had named “Mary.” My wife wouldn’t take it because Mary was her mother’s name.

The rain keeps falling.

I take a break from writing to read a book. It’s not high-brow literature. I’m a little embarrassed to tell you what I’m reading.

It is Minnie Pearl’s book…

Little did I know that after I wrote a column on angels a few days ago, my inbox would become a veritable explosion of stories about angels.

Throughout these last days I have been reading so many angel stories that I haven’t had time to do anything else, such as eat or bathe.

Truthfully, I was going to write something different today, but if there is one thing I’ve learned by reading all these emails and messages, you can’t talk too much about miracles.

CHARMIE—I want to tell you my angel story. I rarely tell it because—well, you know—people look at you funny.

I was camping, just me and my cocker spaniel, in a remote campground in Washington State. It was a beautiful day. I was sitting at the picnic bench, enjoying the sunshine when a loud carful of several drunk guys stopped in front of my picnic table and started saying disgusting things to me.

No one else was around and it was frightening. I was praying like crazy. “Ok, God, what do

I do?”

Suddenly one of the guys starts approaching me, but stops and screams, “Santa Madre de Dios!” And they all saw something behind me and became so afraid that they ran away.

I was scared to look over my shoulder, expecting a grizzly bear or something. But there was nothing. I don't know Spanish except that I knew that “Madre de Dios” means Mother of God.

An angel protected me from a horrible fate.

JANIE—It was 1981, I was 17 years old when I started dating my future husband. We went on a fall picnic to Kings Mountain outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.

I needed to use the restroom but we didn’t want to pack up and move our stuff, so he stayed with our picnic while I walked to the restrooms. As I got to the facility, I saw a man leaning against the…

Walmart. The cereal aisle. I’m browsing a wall of colorful boxes. I’m interrupted by the voice of a child. A kid is riding on the front of a buggy like George Washington crossing the Delaware. His mother is driving. His father is following.

The kid is making airplane noises.

The child is small. His joints are bony. His skin is pale. He is bald. There is a half-moon-shaped scar on his scalp. Another scar travels down the back of his neck.

He jumps off the cart. His tennis shoes hit the floor hard with a loud squeak.

“Can I buy EVERY kinda cereal?" he asks.

“You’re not going to feel like cereal after surgery,” his father says.

“Let’s wait until surgery’s over,” adds his mother. “Once you’re better, then you can have as many boxes as you want.”

The boy is younger than young. Barely out of toddlerhood. He looks sick. And the parents’ words just hang in the air.

Surgery.

Next I see his mother and father scoop him into their arms. I have to leave the aisle quickly because of the prickling behind my nose and eyes.

All of a sudden, I am in the produce section. I see a Mexican family. They are standing in a huddle, speaking rapid-fire Español.

The youngest girl—maybe 10 years old—is teaching two adult women to speak English. The girl holds an onion toward them.

“UN-yun,” she says.

They adults say, “OWN-YOAN.”

“UNNN-yunnnn.”

“OWN-EEE-OWN.”

The girl laughs. The women laugh and remark, “Qué difícil es inglés.”

Which, you know, is so true.

Next I pass two elderly women, sharing the same walker to putter through the dairy department. They are having a heated conversation loud enough to affect the climate.

“Are we out of cheese?” says one.

“How should I know? You wrote the list, Charlene.”

“Don’t snap my head off, it was just a question.”

“Don’t gimme that. You’re always blaming…

JOHN—My angel story takes place when my wife was dying, and I watched everything go downhill in a matter of months. And every night, I would hear a voice tell me “You can get through this, John.”

On the night she died, I heard that voice again. And this time it was my wife’s voice saying, “John, I’m okay. Don’t quit believing.”

LYNN—When I was a young woman someone tried to attack me during a home invasion, but the man was never able to touch me. I screamed for help and something prevented the man’s hands from physically touching me, like he was paralyzed. I know it was an angel that saved me.

BARBARA—A few weeks after my husband’s death, in a fitful sleep state, I heard my husband’s words spoken gently: “Honey, remember Psalm 30:11.” Then the voice went away.

The first thing the next morning, I looked up the verse. I found these words:

“Thou has turned for me my mourning into dancing; thou has put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.”

KATHY—It was 1977 and we had traveled from Alabama to North Dakota for my grandparents’ 50th anniversary. I had twin girls—a daughter, a son, and another son on the way.

On the day we were loading the car, after the reunion, my sister asked one of the twins (Angie) to tell us about a dream she had.

Angie said, “Angels from heaven came down and brought me to heaven and I saw Jesus.”

I worried about it all the way home and for quite a while after that. But the memory of my daughter’s dream eventually faded.

Flash forward to 1978, the girls were almost 7 years old. It was a sunny day, unseasonably warm, and the girls went to play outside with friends.

Suddenly, I had an overwhelming need to look out the window. It was as though the world was standing still.…

There is one particular evening that will stand out in Carolyn’s mind forever. The evening when her husband was rounding a curve on a rural highway, with her in the passenger seat, and a disaster happened.

It was late, the night was indelible-ink black, and there was a large deer standing in the headlights, wearing that look of bewilderment on its face. Her husband’s reflexes kicked in and he jerked the wheel.

Bad idea.

The car lost traction and plunged through the flimsy guardrail, tearing down the steep embankment. The next thing Carolyn remembers is awaking upside down in her seat, suspended by a seatbelt, half conscious. Then she heard someone say her name.

“Carolyn.”

At first she thought it was her husband speaking. But when she opened her eyes she saw that he was unconscious.

And still, she kept hearing her name.

“Carolyn. Wake up.”

She turned to see a young man staring at her from behind the passenger window. He had scraggly facial hair, a plaid shirt, and a kind face.

“Come with me, Carolyn,” the young man

said.

Then he lifted Carolyn and her husband out of the car and carried them both.

She doesn’t remember much after that except that, after a few minutes, she and her husband were both safely propped against a tree, waiting for ambulances, and the young man vanished.

The first responders asked Carolyn all the usual questions. Then they asked how she managed to muscle her heavy husband out of the vehicle. She told them it was the young man.

They looked at her like she was one short thigh short of a blue plate special.

“Ma’am, there’s nobody on this highway,” they said.

Here’s another one I heard. This story came to me from a young man who I’ll call Jeremy, from Kansas.

Jeremy was babysitting his infant daughter one night while his wife was away at work. Jeremy had…

I’m watching the Braves game on TV, eating a hamburger, trying not to get my keyboard greasy.

The Atlanta Braves are locked in a treacherous battle against the Philadelphia Phillies. Both teams are fighting for a shot at the pennant, and neither team is going down without taking fistfuls of flesh and hair with them.

This column is part of my longstanding tradition wherein every year I write a handful of boring baseball columns. I do this faithfully although I’m no expert on baseball, nor am I an athlete. Also, I’m hard pressed to believe that the same ball players I care so deeply about would ever visit my place of work to cheer for me.

Even so. There’s just something about baseball.

To me, stickball is more than just an American sport. It’s not merely vivid green grass, halide lights, peanut vendors, or howling fans who have been overserved. Baseball is my past. Baseball is boyhood on a stick.

Of course the game has undergone many changes since my day. Even the

entertainment delivery methods have changed.

The TV I’m watching, for example, is about 68 inches wide, plasma, high-definition, and connected to my mobile phone. This television has the capability of answering emails, browsing the Internet, obeying spoken voice commands, and communicating with military aircraft.

When I was a kid, however, the technology of baseball was different. Our beat up television ran on unleaded and picked up one-point-two sports channels. There was WGN, out of Chicago, and TBS out of Atlanta.

The Chicago station broadcasted games wherein the Cubs lost each night by double digits, whereupon Harry Caray would sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to a stadium of clinically depressed Chicago fans at Wrigley.

But the Atlanta channel had Dale Murphy, John Smoltz, and the fighting Atlanta Braves. To us, they were America’s Team. Los Bravos. The Tomahawks. The Peach Clobbers. They were ours. And there…

I am saying grace before supper. And a lot is going through my mind. Namely, because we are eating biscuits tonight. And I love biscuits. When I am done saying this blessing, I will experience one of the best feelings on planet Earth. Which is peeling open one of my wife’s hot, handmade catheads.

Steam will rise from the soft bread to kiss me square on the nose. And I will swear I can almost hear the Vienna Boys Choir singing “Ave Verum Corpus” somewhere in the distance.

I have a long childhood history with biscuits. The day after my father’s funeral I remember awaking to find our kitchen covered in a fine dusting of Gold Medal Flour. There were old coffee cans of lard on counters, and matronly women in beehive hairdos.

The oven had transformed the kitchen into a sauna. The sound of female chatter was like the sound of geese on a pond. I sniffed the air.

Hallelujah. They were making biscuits.

After a funeral you have a lot

of food around. This happens when someone you love dies. Church ladies with solemn faces show up at odd hours to leave hot pans on your porch, or shoeboxes of fried chicken, or Tupperware containers with notecards attached to the lids.

You receive a lot of biscuits. This is because the American biscuit is not something that merely sits in a bread basket, covered with gingham. A real biscuit is true. It is something real.

Next time you eat a biscuit think of the hands that mixed the flour. Human hands that have seen their share of pain, and loss, and life. See the fingers flex when they knead lard into the ivory dough. Watch the dusty palms use an upside-down cup to stamp each one.

Verily. This is love.

The ironic thing is, after my father’s funeral I didn’t feel like eating. I had no appetite. I…