DESTIN, Fla.—The fireworks crackled above our little beach town. The moon was out. The beaches of my youth looked the way they always do: slammed.

“I wanna go home,” I told my wife while I hauled cheap beach junk onto a crowded shore. “I don’t care about fireworks.”

She laughed. “C’mon, it’ll be fun.”

“Define fun.”

My idea of fun is not communing with greased-up tourist torsos on a public beach to watch low explosive pyrotechnics.

“I brought a radio,” my wife said, sweetening the deal.

“Wow. A radio. Gee, Wally, neato.”

That remark got me a rib contusion.

The beach was covered in blankets and families. Loud children played tag in the dark. People grilled. There were the sounds of fireworks that shook your skull. My wife fired up the old transistor and immediately Alan Jackson started singing about the Chattahoochee.

Against my will I actually made some new friends among the summer people. Like the couple on the blanket next to ours who was eating popsicles and watching the sky. The guy said he was a preacher

from Katy, Texas, on vacation with his wife.

“Hey man,” he said, reaching into his cooler. “You wanna popsicle?” Then he glanced in both directions and said suggestively, “They’re homemade.”

Before I could consider the deeper meaning of the clergyman’s coded words my wife answered for us both and pretty soon we were sucking frozen homemade ice pops that were made entirely from tequila.

The preacher smiled. His tongue was royal blue. “Good stuff, huh?”

Texans.

After that I found myself laughing often and sometimes singing backup with our little radio. Also I had double vision. Before my wife could stop me I was already introducing myself to total strangers on nearby blankets like I was running for public office.

I met a guy cooking hotdogs on a Coleman camp stove, he was from Atlanta. He was shirtless, large, with skin…

I’m driving on the interstate with Elvis. I found him at a truck stop. The “Aloha Live From Hawaii Via Satellite” album was on a clearance CD rack for $8.95 plus tax and I figured what the heck. It is now playing on my truck radio.

Forty-seven years ago this record peaked at number one and has yet to be outdone in my opinion. This album has it all. It has energy. Heart. Soul. A blazing hot rhythm section.

They called it “the concert seen ‘round the world” because in 1973 around 1.5 billion people viewed Elvis’s televised performance worldwide, more than tuned in to see the moon landing.

And it’s evident why. There is something electric about the whole album. Hearing a 6,000-plus crowd cheer like lunatics inside the Honolulu International Center is spellbinding. And when the king’s “Taking Care of Business” band opens with “See See Rider,” the concert takes on the intensity of a veritable nuclear event.

I can visualize Elvis taking the stage, wearing his American Eagle jumpsuit, doing his semi-karate

moves. I can see his 30-piece orchestra, the Sweet Inspirations backup singers, his silver screen smile, and his flowery lei.

No, they don’t have music like Elvis on the radio anymore.

Which is why I don’t listen to the radio. Today’s stations only play today’s “hits.” If you want oldies you need digital streaming services. Sadly, I have a non-digital truck radio that was manufactured back when today’s pop-stars were still filling their Pampers with fresh hits. So I’m obsolete.

Still, my old-fashioned radio is hanging in there. A few days ago I scanned local stations just to see what today’s music was like. I ended up learning a lot about modern society.

For starters, song melodies don’t matter anymore, neither do instruments, lyrics, or talent for that matter. They’d let you on the radio if you were playing an electric chainsaw.

Secondly, your average…

Dear Young Person

I am an imaginary old man. I am every World War II veteran you never knew. I am each faceless GI from the bygone European War. Or any other war for that matter.

I am in my 90s and 100s now. Lots of young folks probably don’t even know I exist.

In my war, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of infantrymen, airmen, sailors, marines, mess sergeants, seabees, brass hats, engineers, doctors, medics, buck privates, and rear-echelon potato-peelers.

We hopped islands in the Pacific. We served in the African war theater. We beat the devil, then we came home and became the old fart next door.

Wartime was one heck of an era to be young. Let me tell ya. When we went overseas we were still teenagers, smooth skinned, scared spitless, with government haircuts, wearing brand new wedding rings. We hadn’t seen action yet, so we were jittery and lots of us smoked through a week’s rations of Luckies in one day.

Then it happened. It was different

for everyone, but it happened. Shells landed everywhere. People screamed. And in a moment our fear melted away and we had war jobs to do. It didn’t matter who we were or which posts were ours. Everyone worked in the grand assembly line of battle.

When the smoke cleared and the action was over, we had new confidence in ourselves, and we were no longer boys.

And anyway, we weren’t just boys, we were girls, too. There were 350,000 females serving in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II. People forget that.

Speaking of women. We guys were always talking about our sweethearts, wives, and mothers. If you mentioned someone’s girl a man was liable to talk for hours about her. And even if you’d already seen his wallet photos before, you never interrupted a guy talking about his gal. Because eventually you’d be talking…

Good morning, Erin. You don’t really know me, and I don’t really know you, but I wanted to thank you for inviting me to your wedding last weekend. It was a beautiful service.

You picked a good man to marry. Todd is an old friend. He’s moral, kind, loud-mouthed, and he can handle more adult beverages than any man I’ve ever known because he is an Episcopalian.

He is giving. Once, I saw him empty his wallet and give it to a handful of Latino boys outside the hardware store. It was cold weather. They were looking for an honest day’s work. They were wearing T-shirts. He gave them cash to buy coats.

That’s your new husband.

Anyway, it was a nice ceremony. They tell me that you and your mother decorated the chapel all by yourselves—and on a puny budget. It was breathtaking. We in the vestibule were all raving about how beautiful it was as soon as we walked through the doors. The white colors, the draped linen, the floral arrangements, and the magnolia

blossoms.

Somebody’s redheaded toddler was running around in the back pews throughout the service. And not that this was an issue, but evidently he had something fragrant in his diaper. We all know this because we could smell him before we entered the chapel, from a distance of roughly three blocks away.

His mother chased him, she was livid. She wore the angry face of maternal wrath, adorned in pearls and heels. She couldn’t catch the kid. He eluded her grasp, then ran toward the altar of God just before the wedding started.

He waved hello to the congregation.

We waved back.

Then he dug a hand into the seat of his britches and fished around for something which we all sincerely hoped wasn’t semi-solid organic matter.

And once his furious mother caught him, we all knew this particular redhead would not see his…

It’s overcast. I’m on the wide porch of a friend’s house, chewing the fat on a vacation weekend. The house is perched on a little main road which cuts through a nondescript small town.

There are sounds of kids laughing and playing. Easy traffic. A dog barking. Lawnmowers running. A distant radio.

My wife is inside with everyone else, small bursts of laughter come from indoors. I’m on a rocking chair counting cars.

This is an old porch. The kind my father used to sit on. I can almost see his ghost, shirtless, reading baseball box-scores. Or carving a pine stick without any real reason for doing such.

And all of a sudden I see vehicles. Lots of them. A chain of wheels and bumpers that stretches backward to the tree line.

The first car is a police cruiser—lightbar flashing, driving at a dirge-like pace. Another patrol car follows. Then comes a slow-moving, extended Cadillac, black, with funeral curtains, and chrome fenders. The Caddy is followed by the world’s longest procession of traffic, each car with its

high beams on. A gazillion headlights. Maybe more.

The cars are soon flanked by a railroad crossing. The train is about to run. The barricades close, and the procession’s lead car slows to a halt at the gate.

The faroff whistle sounds out train-whistle code—two long, one short, one long. Earth rumbles beneath the diesel locomotive’s power. The motorcade begins to accumulate more vehicles behind the Cadillac while waiting for the train to pass.

There’s a man on the porch of the house next door to me. He's within spitting distance.

“A funeral,” I hear him say to his grandson over the din of the passing train as he opens his front door.

They step off their porch together to stand barefoot in the front yard while cars pass and the procession gets longer.

“Why’re we standing here like this, Grandpa?” says the…

DEAR SEAN:

I know you have more important questions, but I’ve seen pictures of you wearing a cowboy hat and want to ask if you think it’s stupid for me to wear one? My brother says I will look stupid.

Thank you,
14-YEAR-OLD-IN-TAMPA

DEAR TAMPA:

Your brother doesn’t love the Lord.

I am a Resistol hat man myself. And it is my firmly held opinion that we need more kids in this world wearing behemoth headgear and dressing up like Willie Hugh Nelson.

Our nation’s forebears wore broad-brimmed, high-crowned hats; from the Pilgrim days to Burt Reynolds. Even the pope has his own enormous hat. So why shouldn’t you?

Take me. I’m no cowboy. Not even close. I am what you’d call a middle-aged homeowner with a 30-year-fixed mortgage. I don’t own a horse or live on a ranch, although my wife says my truck smells like a substance common to barnyards. But none of this matters because the main reason I wear a cowboy hat is this:

It works.

For years I worked on construction and

landscaping crews. We baked out in the sun all day, and ball caps didn’t cut it. In Florida, baseball hats are about as useful as ejection seats in a helicopter.

With a standard ball cap your neck and lower face remain exposed. And speaking as a card-carrying fair-skinned redhead who can develop third-degree sunburns in a movie theater, I need total coverage.

The second reason I wear the big hat is because I come from rural people, cattle people, livestock auctioneers, VFW bingo champions, and septic-tank installation specialists. These men wore tall hats with wide brims, and there was nothing unusual about it.

I received my first cattleman’s hat when I was very young and I never took it off. I have early photographs of myself wearing a diaper, sucking my thumb, and sporting a Resistol hat for my mother’s Bible study…

You’ve never heard of him. And neither had I until this morning when I received an email from a woman who I’ll call Matilda. She told me about a man she knew years ago.

He was living in his car, parked in a big-box superstore parking lot near the interstate. He was mid-40s, tap-water blue eyes, olive skin, he spoke only Spanish with a strong Argentinian accent.

His dwelling was a beat-up two-door ‘80s model Honda CR-X, which is perhaps the ugliest automobile ever manufactured in the history of mankind save for the Ford Pinto. With a close third being a ‘92 Buick Skylark I once owned.

Nobody really knows how he arrived in the parking lot except that his Honda went kaput one night. He managed to push the CR-X into the store entrance, and after that it was home sweet home.

Each night he would lie beneath his Honda with an electric lantern and a Chilton auto repair manual, turning a ratchet, but never getting closer to actually

repairing anything.

To avoid suspicion, he regularly pushed his hunk of vehicular repulsiveness into different parking spaces. Sort of like a game of musical Hondas. But management never ran him off because everyone liked him. In fact, the security guards helped him push the car.

Matilda says, “The employees got used to him being around, he was the first person to say good morning to me every day.”

Honda Guy quickly became a minor legend among employees. There was the night when a stranger placed a garbage bag full of puppies into the store’s Dumpster. Honda Guy saw it happen. He rescued nine newborn hounds and nursed them to life in his backseat. Later he walked several miles to deliver them to a shelter. He kept one puppy for himself.

There was the time an elderly woman’s car broke down. It happened when the temperature was over 100 degrees outside.…

I am on a video call using my laptop. I stare at the blank screen waiting for my virtual host to arrive.

Meantime, I see the miniature version of my prodigious Mister Potato Head face on my monitor. I am trying to ignore the fact that I look like I’ve been sleeping under a porch for the last several decades. I try to fix my hair, but I only make more fall out.

I’m having a rough morning.

The conference call is joined by another entity, but no image yet. Then comes the voice. An adult woman speaks. “Hello? Can you see us?”

“No.”

“How about now?”

“Still no.”

“Hold on. Anything?”

“Nada.”

The sound of technological fiddling. “Wait... This stupid... Freakin’ camera… I need to... Get my…” Crashing noise. Followed by: “Anything?”

“No.”

I sympathize with tech confusion. I don’t jibe with the digital effluvia of modern life. No matter how I try, I cannot feel warm and fuzzy about video calls, GPSs, or applying signatures to PDF files. These are dark arts.

I bought my first cellphone when I was a

grown man with a mortgage. Back then mobile phones were novelty devices roughly the size of cinderblocks, you had to carry them in leather holsters like Little Joe Cartwright. We’ve come a long way.

Suddenly, a face appears on my screen. A mother seated beside a 12-year-old girl. The mother scheduled this call last week as a surprise for her daughter.

Both ladies are wearing strings of pearls.

“Hi!” they say with a wave.

The girl is first to speak. “These are my grandmother’s pearls, they’re not real, they’re Majorica, she let me borrow them for this, I read your story about how your mother-in-law always wears pearls.”

My mother-in-law would be monumentally proud. Eighty-one-year-old Mother Mary wears pearls and poppy-red Color Envy matte lipstick to check her mailbox.

The mother straightens her daughter’s necklace and says,…

On Sunday mornings long ago I would walk into the clapboard church early, a few hours before service, to find the old woman sitting on the piano bench, warming up the Mason & Hamlin.

Her fingers were twisted with arthritis. Her hair was freshly blued. She was a walking advertisement for the Estée Lauder bath powder product line.

I was the church’s pitiful guitarist. They let me play acoustic beside the venerable pianist during the clapping songs. We played uptempo tunes like:

“I got a home in Gloryland that outshines the sun,
“I got a home in Gloryland that outshines the sun,
“Way beyond the blue…”

I wasn’t a great guitarist, I contributed very little in the way of talent. But the old woman once told me: “It don’t matter how little you have, as long as you give it away.”

So I gave it away. Although I’m not sure many wanted it. I would arrive at the church carrying my heavy guitar case, before the people showed up, slip in the

back pew, and listen to her finger through a Debussy piece by memory. “Clair de Lune.” Eyes closed. Channeling old Claude.

She was my friend, and she proved it a few times.

One time someone in the congregation got peeved because I showed up to play guitar wearing blue jeans and a button down that wasn’t starched like marine-grade plywood. It was the old pianist who defended me against the fundamentalist fashion police.

And there was the time I invited four of my landscaping coworkers to Wednesday night's meeting to see me play. Four of my Mexican friends showed up wearing neon work shirts and grass-stained boots and sat right up front.

The preacher intercepted my friends and guided them to the back pews so their collective appearance wouldn’t be distracting for others.

It was the old woman who gave that young minister a verbal dressing…

He bought his son a new truck for a graduation gift. Well, actually, the truck isn’t new, it’s a 2008 Silverado 1500, lightly used, with only 72,000 miles. Not a bad deal.

As soon as they bought the vehicle the first thing they did was take it for a long ride along the smooth, scenic rural highways of Alabama. Disney World for Chevy and Ford owners.

The graduate and his dad piled into the front cab and tore out for the hinterlands. Graduate at the wheel; Dad in the passenger seat, gripping the chicken handle. University of Alabama sticker on the bumper.

The graduate did all the things guys are supposed to do when they purchase a truck. He lightly let go of the wheel at medium speed to make sure the steering didn’t pull. He gave the gas pedal a workout.

He made sure the radio was working, although they couldn’t find any theme music. American radio went downhill a long time ago. There was a time when you could hear

Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, or Spade Cooley on the airwaves. Today, nobody even knows who those guys are.

The graduate kept his window down. The fields of peanuts and cotton whipped by at fifty-five. The kid draped his hand out the window and made an airplane with his flat palm.

They stopped at a gas station. His dad got pork rinds and coffee. The graduate got spicy ghost-pepper beef jerky, the kind that will wreck a man’s bowels for the next nineteen years. Young man’s food.

“Can I drive?” said Dad, sounding like a young man himself.

“Sure.”

So they switched places. Dad took the wheel and draped his flat palm out the window and made an airplane too.

And he thought about the graduate beside him. A boy who is older than the others in his graduating class. A kid who finished school much later than scheduled…