I watched a fifteen-year-old boy with cerebral palsy hit a baseball. It was something else. His father pitched full speed from the mound, just like a major-leaguer. The boy held the bat with unsteady hands.

Crack.

Base hit.

The kid smacked it so hard it made the fence. His mother cheered in the bleachers. So did I.

The fifteen-year-old didn’t even run. He started to cry. So did his daddy. They held each other in the batter’s box for awhile.

“You don’t understand,” said his mother. “They’ve been working on just HOLDING a bat for years. He NEVER gets a hit.”

He did today.

Tanya—I meet her in the Walmart. She has six children with her. The oldest is pushing the cart. Two are in the basket. Three follow.

These are not her biological children.

Tanya’s been fostering for a long time. She used to do it with her husband—he died several years ago.

Her husband had been raised in the foster system. He had been passionate about fostering.

“We used to spend every dime we made on these kids,” she says. “My

husband would say, ‘If you only knew how hard it is growing up feeling like nobody wants you. I know what it’s like.’”

After his death, she carried on his tradition. And even though she’s unmarried, she welcomes new kids by the handful.

Yolanda. She is from Ecuador. She was a victim of human-trafficking. She was saved. Since then, she’s made a new life for herself. She is about to become a certified personal fitness trainer.

As part of her rehabilitation, she started spending time in gyms. She enjoyed it so much that she decided to make it her profession.

“I LOVE working out,” says Yolanda. “I take out all my angry thoughts on these machines.”

Yolanda has a boyfriend. They just got engaged last month. He is from Mexico. He is a Pentecostal preacher.

“I’m always…

It’s National Redhead Day so I went to get my haircut. Because I am a committed redhead.

On the day I was born, the doctor who delivered me happened to be a redhead, too. The first thing the he saw when I exited the birth canal was my hair.

They tell me he high-fived my father—who was also a redhead. My mother says they shouted, “We redheads gotta stick together!”

And when nurses handed me to my mother, she was so overcome with maternal emotion that she touched my hair and her first words were: “Why is my son’s head shaped like a triangle?”

I’m not kidding about this. When I was a newborn, I had a pointy head and bore a striking resemblance to a sharpened No. 2 pencil. Because of this, my mother made me wear a stocking cap for the first three years of my life.

Anyway, I normally get haircuts by Miss Connie, who has been cutting my hair for a long time.

She’s a sweet lady, and I know she won’t mind me telling you that she has a wandering eye.

The first time I ever met Miss Connie, I was the only customer in the empty salon. She greeted me at the door. One eye was staring at me, the other was not.

She smiled and said, “Don’t freak out, I know I’m cross-eyed, but I cut good hair. Now, which one of you boys wants to go first?”

She laughed.

“Just kidding,” she said. “I can see fine, Sweetie. In fact, I have double vision, which means I see TWICE as good as you.”

She laughed again until she choked.

I considered throwing myself in front of a moving bus to avoid her scissors, but that woman ended up giving me the best haircut I ever had in my life. I’ve been going back…

My earliest memory is of my mother. She’s at a breakfast table. She sits alone in a gaudy brown kitchen, head bowed, hands folded.

She is speaking in a whisper, I don’t know who she’s talking to. I’m too young.

Her eyes are closed. The sun is rising in the window behind her. She’s dressed for work, sipping coffee.

“What’re you doing?” I ask.

“That’s between me and the Good Lord,” she says.

My teenage years. A few years after my father took his own life. These were hard years. She sat on an a burgundy sofa. She closed her eyes and whispered toward the ceiling.

I couldn’t make out her words.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“It’s between me and the Good Lord,” she says.

Over time, I grew into my big feet, and my large nose. I turned into a man—sort of.

My mother fell ill. Deathly ill. She moved to Atlanta so my aunt and uncle could care for her.

I drove to Clayton County to visit her. She greeted me in the driveway at 2 A.M. on a cold November morning.

In

the glow of my headlights stood the once-healthy woman who raised me. She was nothing but hickory sticks and muscle.

The next morning, I found her sitting cross-legged on an easy chair. Her eyes closed, whispering to the ceiling fan. The skin around her eyelids wrinkled like tissue paper.

Doctors told us the disease would kill her. The illness was eating blueberry-sized holes in her muscles. It would eventually reach her heart.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

Then, she touched my hair. “You know that when you were a toddler, I used to rub your hair like this, and it would make you go to sleep?”

She rubbed my hair. I leaned into her lap the way I did when I was a child.

The woman held a grown man the…

A little restaurant. The men in the booth behind me are old. They are telling jokes to one another. They are loud men. They have white hair, mugs of coffee, hearing aids.

One man wears overalls. Another wears suspenders with bass fish on them. Welcome to Rural America.

Whenever one man finishes a joke, the others slap their knees and say, “Hooooo boy!”

My waitress tries to take my order, but she can’t concentrate, we’re both eavesdropping on the old men.

An elderly man says:

“So a fella and wife go to Heaven. There’s a BIG CROWD, standing around. And Saint Pete says to everybody:

“‘Men, listen up! Whichever men wore the pants in their household, form a single-file line over HERE! And all men who were henpecked by their wives, stand over THERE!

“And almost every man went to the henpecked line. Except ONE guy, who stood alone in the other line. So Saint Pete shook the man’s hand and said, ‘Sir, I just wanna congratulate you.’

“‘For what?’ the

guy said. ‘I’m only here because my wife told me to stand here.’”

The punchline hits like an atom bomb. One man laughs so hard he almost ruptures his gallbladder.

“Hoooooo boy!”

When I was a boy, my father had hundreds of jokes like this. I would overhear him tell these anecdotes to his roughneck friends and I wished I were like him.

The men I come from speak the language of humor. They gathered on the courthouse steps, or at barbershops, not to discuss feelings or family issues, but to tell funny stories.

As a boy, I wanted to be my father. I wanted to know his stories and tell his jokes. Some kids did math homework, others went to football practice. I memorized the one about the farmer’s daughter and the preacher.

My father would place me on a…

Mobile, Alabama—a hotel. Early evening. I register at the front desk. Tonight, I am a pilgrim, looking for a room and a hot meal.

The hotel is overrun with folks in brightly colored West African attire. I’ve never seen so many ornate outfits in all my life—and I’ve been to Branson.

“What’s going on tonight?” I ask the clerk behind the desk.

“A Nigerian wedding,” he says. “Hotel’s almost completely booked.”

He hands me my room key and says: “Enjoy your stay.” He blows a bubble with his bubblegum.

I wait for the elevator beside three elegant black women wearing gold turbans. Their evening gowns are magnificent. Their heels are six inches tall.

I compliment their turbans.

They giggle. “These are not turbans,” one woman says. “We call them ‘geles.’”

My people do not go for elaborate headwear. I was raised evangelical. Our wedding attire consists of earth-tones, penny loafers, and SEC neckties.

I ride the elevator with my new friends. They fill the elevator with

laughter, exotic words, and unique perfume.

One young woman asks me, “You are a cowboy, sir? No?”

“No ma’am. Baptist.”

“But your boots. Americans who wear boots are cowboys, no?”

I glance at my ugly kicks. “No, these are just plain-old redneck shoes.”

When I reach the fifth floor, I pass more Nigerians in the hall. These are happy people with big personalities. Suddenly I feel very sorry that I did not grow up somewhere exotic.

Because the weddings of my childhood were not exotic. They were dry affairs in chapels full of people whose idea of a “good time” was watching Lawrence Welk and eating leftover pear salad. My cousin, Alberta, would sing, “Morning Has Broken,” and we would eat fried chicken in the fellowship hall. The end.

I arrive at my room, located at the end of the…

Montgomery, Alabama—my hotel breakfast tastes like reconstituted pulpwood. The biscuits are hockey pucks. But the coffee ain’t bad.

I stand in the food-line behind two teenage boys wearing soccer uniforms. They load their paper plates with enough food to last an entire winter.

They are laughing. Smiling. Youth is a potent drug.

One boy displays his phone to the other. “Did you see THIS video?” he says.

“Oh, DUDE!” says the other. “That’s the BEST.”

“I know, the BEST!”

“Totally.”

Also in the dining room with me: more kids who wear uniforms. Twelve-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds, fourteen-year-olds, and their sleep-deprived parents. The kids are sipping dangerous amounts of orange juice and making lots of noise.

One kid listens to music on his phone—for the benefit of the entire dining room. This music sounds like a diesel engine warming up on a January morning.

More kids in uniforms exit the elevator. They walk through the dining room with loud voices, fixing their plates in a frenzy.

The hotel breakfast attendant,

Tamika, watches them move through the buffet-line like a pack of caffeinated golden retrievers.

So we can see, at this point, that there are more kids in this article than there were when I started. The lobby is full of them.

But the truth is, I like being around young people. They don’t talk about osteoporosis, gallbladders, goiters, arthritis, or the paramount importance of fiber. To them, everything is wonderful, new, exciting, and “the best.”

I overhear these kids using the word “best” at least fifty times per paragraph.

“Have you tried these eggs?” says one boy. “They’re the BEST.”

“I know, right?” says the other. “But did you try the cheese? It’s the BEST.”

“Totally!”

The alleged “cheese” he’s talking about is not the best. It is the kind of industrial cheese that can sit on a counter for…

The windows are down. The weather couldn’t get any prettier. My dogs are leaning out the passenger window, tongues flapping in the wind. They are happy.

The dirt roads are like a large, interconnecting maze. Choose one road, it leads to another, then another, and another. Soon, you’re in No Man’s Land, and you’re the only truck around for miles.

I pass barns in open fields, and cattle pastures, and a John Deere, combing the peanut fields, dust rising behind it.

I stop when we reach my friend’s farm, located on the edge of the world. I kick open the door and watch Thelma Lou and Otis run for parts unknown. They shoot into the distance. Lots of running. Lots or barking. Lots of eating piles of cat poop.

I sit on the porch with my friend.

My friend is old, he has dementia, but he was self-reliant once. Long ago, we worked together. He was strong, and he swung hammers with the best of

us. Today, he wakes up and needs a nurse. Still, sometimes he feels good enough to go feed his cats, or is fortunate enough to go for a walk. But mostly, he naps, or watches TV with his nurse.

Before I leave, I give him a hug. He tells me to, “Stay outta trouble.”

He has always said that. Most old men do.

I load my dogs into my vehicle, and we’re doing forty, going down more dirt roads. We pull over at a filling station.

I’m pumping gas, and I meet a man who is driving a transfer truck from Nashville. We have a short conversation.

He’s been driving for thirty-two years. He started an online business last year with and the project took off. He started earning more with the online venture than he did with his truck.

“Got three more shipments…

Boys, I’ll make this short: treat her good.

Real good.

Treat a girl the way you’d treat the most valuable human you’ve ever touched. No. Treat her like the most rare human you’ve NEVER touched.

Try to think of the most priceless creation on earth. A Rembrandt painting, an 11th century Bible, the Cup of Christ, the Stetson of Willie Nelson.

Treat your girl like that. Times a hundred.

Treat her like she’s been removed from a bullet-proof case and hooked to your arm by Billy Graham himself.

Open every door for her, pull out every chair, hold her pocketbook when need be. Admire her like a painting—not a magazine.

When you spend time together, look straight into her eyes. After all, her eyes lead to her mind, which leads to her heart, which leads to her soul.

Above all—and I am governmentally serious about this—do not look at your god-forsaken phone. Not even once. I mean it. Don’t hold it in your lap, don’t set it on the table, don’t keep it in your pocket, don't make trips to

the bathroom to send texts.

When you’re with her, leave your smartphone in your glovebox. Then, place your car in neutral, lock the doors, set the vehicle on fire, and push it into the nearest muddy ditch.

You’re in public with a famous Rembrandt painting—on loan from the Louvre. Don't waste time.

See how the light hits the angles of her face. Watch the way she wrinkles her forehead when she laughs.

Listen with big ears. Let yourself drift upon the harmonics of her voice like you’re tubing down the Blackwater River with a cooler full of Budweiser and Doritos.

Ask questions. But don't ask common ones. Be original.

Ask how old she was when she lost her first tooth. Ask about her dog, and where it sleeps.

Would she rather hang-glide or flea-market? Winn-Dixie or The Pig?…