I went to the mailbox today and found a package. Before I opened the parcel I already knew what was inside. And it brought my whole life back in a moment.

Sometimes, my memory can be foggy. But sometimes it can be remarkably clear. On rare occasions I can remember everything.

Like the first time I went to the fair. My old man took me to ride the carnival rides with my cousin. We paid our tokens. The glorious rides only lasted a blazing ninety seconds. They were so surprisingly short that you felt cheated at the end.

Or the way I once told Eleanor Nelson I liked her, by giving her a ceramic sculpture I made in art class. A figurine of two people paddling a boat.

“What’s this?” said Eleanor.

“It’s two people in a boat, what else?”

“Is that supposed to be me?”

“Maybe.”

“I look like I fell into a bee’s nest.”

“You mean a hive.”

“Huh?”

“Technically, bees don’t have nests, they have hives.”

“You’re a dork,

you know that?”

“I do.”

I remember my first taste of corn liquor—and I’m not making this up. My friend's father let me take a sip at a Church of God barbecue. I was visiting. The old man’s name was Mister Travis, but everyone called him Big T.

After one tiny sip, I knew why Big T always spoke in tongues at Little League games.

My wedding ring, I remember buying it. We went to the jewelry store to pick out rings. The man behind the counter had white hair and an accent that was pure Alabama. He greeted us with:

“Well look at this pair of lovin’ younguns.”

Now there’s a little gem of a phrase.

The honeymoon my wife and I took, I’ll always remember that. It was one for the books. I had never…

The General Motors Plant is closed today. It’s a Sunday. The parking lot is empty. The air is chilly. The way the sun hits the sheet-metal makes it look almost beautiful.

My father spent two years building this plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, not long before he died.

My father’s white welding truck would sit parked out front. Hoses dangling from the back, a clipboard on the dashboard, a welding mask in his front seat. Always a welding mask.

You would’ve liked him, everyone did. He was a foreman on this GM plant. Being a foreman in Tennessee was big news for him. Before, he’d always been just a welder. But a foreman, that meant he was more than just a worker bee. He was some body.

Being “somebody” isn’t the same as being “some body.” That single space between the two words makes all the difference.

You might run into “somebody” at the supermarket. But if you run into Jimmy Carter at the supermarket, you’ve just met “some body.”

My

father took me to his jobsite one day. The automotive plant was almost finished. He explained the ins and the outs of ironwork to me, but his words were miles above my head.

He talked about footers, joists, girders, column splices, and I can’t remember what else. All I remember is the welding mask, sitting on his front seat.

When the big project was finished, my father took his wife and boy to Nashville for a celebration meal. It was a fancy restaurant with white table cloths. My French fries were reddish-colored and spicy.

I’d never seen fries look so unnaturally colored before.

“What’re these?” I asked, poking at my plate. I expected a tentacle to slither from beneath the fries and steal my fork.

“Those’re seasoned fries,” my father said. “All the big cities have seasoned fries.”

“What’re they…

There used to be a time when country music was music. It was an era when women named Patsy, Kitty, Loretta, Dolly, or June strummed guitars and broke your heart.

Tassels hung from sleeves, rhinestones adorned three-piece Nudie Cohn suits, boots were shiny, and cowboys didn’t wear latex pants.

Times have changed. Today, on my truck radio I heard a song on the country station entitled “Red SOLO Cup.”

The song goes:

“...a red SOLO cup is the best receptacle,
For barbecues, tailgates, fairs, and festivals,
You sir, do not have a pair of (male body parts),
If you prefer drinking from a GLASS…”

Do what?

This is what passes for country music? At the EXACT moment this song played—and this is the truth, so help me Hank—I was drinking iced tea from a glass jelly jar.

I come from a long line of men who drank almost exclusively from Mason jars. In fact, my uncle Tater would not drink from anything else. He drank tea, water, milk, corn, you name it. Always a glass jar.

Even if

Uncle Tater would’ve dined at a five-star restaurant, he would’ve asked the waiter to pour his Château Margaux in a jelly jar, then he would’ve asked for ice cubes.

My uncle loved country music—the old kind. If he would’ve heard a song like the one I just told you about, he’d be kicking in his grave.

He wore coveralls and liked music with twin-fiddle intros, crooned by men with old-world names like: Merle, Lefty, Buck, Roy, Johnny, Ernest, and Hank.

He would’ve never trusted singers with modern names like: Keith, Jordan, Dustin, or Eric. In fact, he didn’t even like my name.

We were musical people. We sang, yodled, waltzed, clapped, and knew all the words to “I’ll Fly Away,” or “Will the Circle be Unbroken?” And if you ever heard my grandfather sing “I’m so Lonesome I Could…

We arrived in Southeastern Tennessee at dusk. Our cabin was covered in a thin layer of frost. But no snow.

I was hoping for snow.

My good friend, Jim, lives in this area and tells me they have a coyote problem. So I am keeping my eyes peeled for anything that resembles scavenging canines near our cabin.

I have always had a looming feeling that coyotes are going to be what finally kills me.

Anyway, we are in Tennessee for a getaway to celebrate our fifteen-year belated anniversary. After I finished unpacking, my wife insisted that I build a fire.

So, I went outside into the cold to get firewood. I loaded an armful, keeping a lookout for ravenous coyotes. I think I saw one or two on the roof, but I can’t be sure.

On my way back inside, my foot slipped on a piece of ice. I was airborne. The last thing I remember is watching hickory logs fly upward into the night.

When I awoke, I saw my old Little League coach, Mister Whiting, standing over me, smoking a cigarette.

He said: “Get on your feet, and quit whining or the coyotes will eat you!”

“Yessir,” I said.

Then he popped my rear and said, “Can’t never could! There is no ‘I’ in team! Quitters never win and winners never quit! Have you called your mama? I wish I could call mine!”

It was obviously a hallucination, Mister Whiting has been dead for many years. I can’t remember how he passed, it was either old age or coyotes.

I finally got a fire going. A roaring fire does something to the primitive man in me. I love a fireplace, and when I tend logs I do it with the sincerity I would use to guard a bank vault.

I kept looking out the window for snow, but no…

Three old men sit around a propane heater. They are chewing the fat, laughing about the old days.

I walk through their front door. A bell dings.

“Welcome to the coal-mining museum!” hollers one man. He stands, then leans onto a walking stick and adjusts his hearing aid.

The miner’s museum is a tiny building in the sleepy hamlet of Whitwell, Tennessee. Inside are relics dating back to the early days of coal-mining in Marion County.

There are old helmets, blade shovels, iron wagons, carbide head-lanterns, and large stumps of black coal.

“Mining goes way back in my family,” says J.T. “My great-grandfathers come from England to mine coal for the Queen.”

The other two men near the heater are also retired coal miners. Albert and Jimmy.

I get the dime tour from all three men at once.

There is too much to take in. On the walls are a million items J.T. has gathered over the years. I ask why he’s collected so many artifacts.

“‘Cause,” he

says. “I don’t want the world to forget about us miners.”

In the center of the room is a large display of photographs. In the pictures are his friends. Most of them deceased.

J.T. can point to any picture of any miner and tell you a story.

“This here was my buddy,” he says, tapping one photo. “Called him ‘Bugus,’ we all had nicknames.”

He taps another photograph. In the frame are two blonde women with blackened faces.

“These two ladies were coal miners. Bet you ain’t never seen women miners. Hardest dadgum workers you ever saw.”

These Appalachian men have enough tales to fill a box car. Sadly, they don’t have many around to listen. J.T.’s little museum doesn’t get many visitors.

Most days, he sits in this room, piecing jigsaw puzzles together on a card table, prepared…

Reeltown, Alabama—the high school parking lot is slam-packed with cars. People are parking on the grass, trucks park over at the fire department. I find an open space on the school lawn.

My wife and I enter the gymnasium. It’s loud inside. There are four hundred people seated at cafeteria tables. There is enough fried chicken in this room to short-circuit the U.S. government.

Local ladies tend to the crowd, dressed in aprons. High-school girls with pitchers refill sweet tea, young men with football jerseys gather empty paper plates.

This is a fundraiser for Wallace Mann.

You’d like Wallace. He is a country preacher in this community. And in this world, there are two different kinds of preachers. Country preachers, and everyone else.

“Brother Wallace always made the rounds,” said one man with white hair. “Do you ‘member when country preachers used to make the rounds? No, you might not, you’re too young.”

As it happens I once I worked as an assistant to a

preacher who made “the rounds.” He spent four days each week driving to hospitals, standing at bedsides, visiting nursing homes, holding hands, or taking out trash for an elderly man who couldn’t get out of his recliner.

“That’s what Brother Wallace would do,” the old man goes on. “He did it every week without fail before he got sick, he made the rounds.”

Mister Wallace is positioned near the stage in a motorized wheelchair. ALS has taken its toll on him. He is not able to move like he used to. Sometimes, just talking wears him out.

Miss Ann feeds him with a plastic fork. His family is seated around his table. He is wearing his high-school colors.

“Oh, he loves Reeltown football,” says his wife. “He used to play here, you know. He tells everyone he was was defensive guard. He used to guard the the…