I believe cornbread can save humanity. Before you write me off for being a lunatic, think about it. Nobody can think negative thoughts while eating hot cornbread from a skillet. Cornbread is powerful stuff.

I don’t know if you know this, but cornbread has already saved the nation once. In fact, cornbread is one of the reasons you’re alive right now. I’m being absolutely serious. Allow me to explain:

One of the first foods Native Americans taught the pilgrims—our uptight fundamentalist ancestors—to prepare was cornbread. Thus, our puritian forefathers’ diets were heavy on the cornbread.

It is a fact that cornbread kept our fledgling infant country alive during hard winters and prevented colonists from starving in dire circumstances. Cornbread was life.

So in light of this simple information, this means that, in a manner of speaking, without cornbread, there would be no America. Simply put, cornbread is more American than Chevys, Coke floats, mailbox baseball, and pugs dressed in bow ties.

And I’m talking about the real cornbread here, not the fare from a box.

I wouldn’t feed box-cornbread to a Labrador. No, I’m speaking of corn pone cooked in a greasy iron skillet, smeared with so much butter your cardiologist disowns you.

Long ago, I used to work as a drywall man. One day my coworker, Bill, asked if I’d help drywall his basement. Males are always roping their friends into huge projects like this, often promising to pay them with beer.

The thing is, no amount of beer would have convinced me to help Bill. Because Bill and I weren’t friends. Actually, we were enemies. It’s a long story, and I don’t have room to tell it, but we had a falling out over a girl. So I responded by telling Bill to get lost.

Bill started begging. “Please? Nobody else wants to help Sheetrock my basement. If you help me, I’ll get my mom to cook for…

I was 5 years old. I was with my friends, loitering behind the Baptist church. We sat on the concrete retaining wall overlooking the creek bed. We were practicing our spitting.

Mark Anderson arrived in a rush, rosy-cheeked, struggling to catch his breath. He held a cookie tin in his hands.

“I got’em,” Mark said.

Mark opened the tin and distributed the precious contraband. We knew he’d risked his life to smuggle this delicacy across the frontlines of his mother’s kitchen.

They were orangish strips, seasoned with cayenne. I took one bite and my world exploded.

It was like looking directly into a leafblower. The entire universe opened in a singular moment of spiritual oneness. All of a sudden, the work of Brahms, Webern, and Bartók immediately made sense. Suddenly I understood 19th century French poetry. All at once I grasped the transitory nature of existence, although, technically, I was still at an age where I peed the bed.

“What are these?” a newcomer asked with a mouthful.

“These,” said Mark sagely, “are my mom’s cheese

straws.”

Cheese straws.

If you’ve never had cheese straws, I hope you get some this Christmas. They will blow your hair back. Imagine a crumbly, savory, buttery, floury concoction, baked with enough cheddar to turn your bowels into stone.

Mark Anderson’s mother delivered her cheese straws to our doorstep every Christmas season. Her straws would inspire fistfights within my household.

No sooner would her biscuit tin arrive than my old man would confiscate the container like a purse snatcher. My mother would cut him off at the backdoor, threatening to alter his anatomy with a melon baller.

One year my mother actually tried making cheese straws, but it was a disaster. Her straws came out like briquettes of Kingsford charcoal, only with less flavor. Because as it turns out, cheese straws are fragile things to prepare. Almost like a fine soufflé, or a batch…

I’m a decent Scrabble player. I don’t want to toot my own trombone, but I’m not easy to beat. Scrabble is the only game I’m any good at. And I mean the only game.

I stink at all other forms of play. When I play chess, my opponent has to constantly remind me not to use the bishop piece to clean my teeth. I have never won at Monopoly. Playing Twister is how I ended up married.

When I was a kid, I liked playing Operation. But my gameboard never had batteries, so we played using the honor system. This led to many fights among boys. So my mother threw it away.

No, Scrabble is my game. And make no mistake, I am a fearsome opponent.

A common myth among the uninitiated is that Scrabble is for people who have big vocabularies. Not at all. The path to victory is knowing a little-known list of bizarre two-letter words that you would swear are fake words, but are actually in the official

Scrabble Dictionary. Words like: “ao,” “ko,” “xu,” “ua,” and my all-time favorite, “za.”

You throw “za” onto the board at just the right moment and you’re looking at a possible 2,457 point lead. Maybe more. I have won a handful of matches with this one word.

My mother taught me how to play Scrabble. I was a child and not that interested in the game at first. My mother is a passionate Scrabble player.

I remember that first game. The pieces came in a nondescript 1950s burgundy box. It looked nothing like the entertainment sold in today’s world. There were no flashy graphics, no bright colors. Only little wooden tiles and a beige gameboard that looked about as interesting as an air-conditioner service manual.

To kids many kids of my era, Scrabble was considered lame. In some circles, it was called “el lame-oh.” On the International Fun Scale, it…

MURRAY, Utah.—John works at a Nissan dealership in the service department. A customer called and said they had a big problem.

John explains, “I took a call from a very distraught lady this morning, stating their new kitten had gotten stuck behind the dash in their car.”

So, drawing upon his years of automotive customer service insight, John suggested that the woman “Bring it in.”

In the garage, three technicians began disassembling her dashboard with tools and flashlights. Which is not an easy job. They removed the stereo, the glovebox, and components of the AC unit. Finally, after a lot of work, one of the guys announced, “We have a tail!”

Applause.

Technicians shined lights into the deep crevices of the vehicle until one man rolled his sleeves up and said, “Okay. I’m going in.”

And anyone who has ever retrieved a sharp-clawed domesticated creature from a tight space such as, say, a set of box springs at your in-laws’ house, knows what an ordeal it is.

Imagine, several burly auto mechanics who often eat undercooked

red meat for supper and wash it down with Anheuser Busch products, trying to coax a kitty out of hiding. The men used very high-pitched baby voices and said things like, “Come here, cutie wootie. C’mon, you can do it. Come on, cutie wootie.”

Finally, a gray kitten emerged and an entire auto garage cheered. One of the mechanics even held the cat to his face and kissed her, saying, quote:

“She’s such a cutie wootie. Yes she is. Yes she is.”

Afterward, the large men had their pictures taken with the kitten.

John reports, “In my job, you never know what can happen.”

VICTORIA, Au.—Three brothers in Australia won the lottery yesterday. They’ve been playing the same numbers faithfully for 40 years.

It takes a lot of determination to play a game of chance for that long. Especially one that has left you…

Somewhere in Alabama. I am watching the first baseball game I’ve seen all season.

Eighteen Latino boys are playing in a shabby ball field of stubbled grass and red dirt. They have a few spectators, mostly adults with snacks, fold-up chairs, and surgical masks. The parents here are speaking Spanish. They also speak English, but you don’t hear any of it spoken tonight.

Except by me.

This is not sandlot baseball. Neither is this a suburban Little League game where parents scream at kids while suffering psychotic breakdowns. This is béisbol.

One of the Mexican mothers helps me with this word. It is pronounced: “BAZE-bowl.” Whenever I try to say it she laughs at me.

In every way this is the same gentle game my father taught me to play in an alfalfa field. The same game his father taught him.

But these boys play with more squint-eyed sincerity than I ever did. They are an underground ball club. Meaning: they aren’t doing this for anyone but themselves. They aren’t advertising it, either.

“We started

playing because they cancelled baseball,” says first-basemen Miguel (age 10). “With no games on TV, hey, we had to do something.”

Every boy lives within bike-able distance from his teammates. They are close friends who play in vacant lots, backyards, public parks, empty playgrounds, and school fields.

But what really impresses me is that they all chip in to pay a middle-aged guy to umpire for them. They call him “Chaparrito” because he is only five-foot six. He is not Latino, but fair-skinned, blondish, and originally from Muncie, Indianna.

“I’m not a real umpire,” the man says. “I actually work in pest control.”

But the boys tell me everyone looks up to Chapparrito because, rumor has it, he played minor league ball once. Chaparrito refuses to deny or confirm this rumor by winking at me.

Because he is not being hired by these boys to…

My wife and I are watching the NASA rocket launch on TV. And I am a nine-year-old boy again. I am cheering for the two-man space crew and it’s a wonderful day. This might be the first true entertainment I’ve enjoyed since this miserable quarantine began.

Thirty-six minutes until launch.

We sit before the television with popcorn, tortilla chips, and beer. I am giddy. Which is a welcome feeling. There hasn’t been much to be giddy about during a coronavirus pandemic.

“Go Crew Dragon,” says my wife, giving me a thumbs-up.

That’s official spacetalk, you understand. The crew is named Crew Dragon. We speak this way because this is a bona fide space party and we’re not thinking about sad things like infection-rate curves, death tolls, or cholesterol. Astronauts are launching into the cosmos for the first time in almost a decade. Pass the bacon cheese dip.

My phone dings. It’s a text from my old friend Billy. “ARE YOU WATCHING THIS?!”

“YES!”

We text in all caps the same way we might do during baseball games.

Because that’s the kind of grown-up guys we are.

The Demo-2 mission is a big one, and it’s nice to finally have something to cheer for. God knows, we don’t have any sports right now.

The mission is being piloted by Douglas Hurley, former Marine fighter pilot, and commander for the last shuttle flight in 2011. His copilot is Robert Behnken, former test pilot with over 708 hours in space, and six spacewalks. These guys are the real deal. I think I’m going to pee my pants from sheer joy.

I don’t know about you, but I have needed a little good old-fashioned entertainment. The COVID-19 crisis has suspended every cherished American institution. Baseball, basketball, maybe even college football. Yellowstone is shut down, the Grand Canyon is a ghost town, live concerts are a thing of the past.

Not to mention that I’ve…

I have here an email from a woman named Ella who lives in New York City. Ella writes:

“I turn 76 years old in two days... I’m trying not to lose my mind, but being trapped inside this little apartment and self-quarantining with my daughter and her roommate, I’m starting to go stir crazy!

“It’s been a long two years for me, I have survived breast cancer, and an autoimmune disease, please write something upbeat just for me that doesn’t even mention COVID-19 and take my mind off of it.”

Ella, since we don’t know each other, and since I don’t have your personal details, I guess I’ll just start writing something based on what I DO know about you.

For starters, you’re turning 76. This means that, if we do some basic math… Subtract the six… Carry the two… Divide the coefficient… Take the remainder and shove it up the cosine’s exponent… Made a mistake and kissed a snake, how many doctors did it take...?

You were born in 23 BC.

No wait. That can’t

be right. I’m sorry, Ella. Math has never been my strong suit. Let me try that again. You were born in 1944.

Before I wrote this, I was doing some research on your birth year and found out that ‘44 was a pivotal year. The war was still on, Navy ships were still being attacked, Roosevelt was president, America’s most edgy pop-star was Bing Crosby. There were also several historical figures born that year, such as Diana Ross, Jerry Springer, and of course Boz Scaggs.

Boz Scaggs. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in ages. Do you remember him? Of course you do, who doesn’t? He was a singer-songwriter who had a big hit from the movie soundtrack “Urban Cowboy,” starring John Travolta. The song was titled “Look What You’ve Done to Me.”

This song was majorly depressing. My friend’s older sister, Sandy,…

Help me. I am going to die. I’m not sure how exactly I got locked in this bathroom, it all happened so fast. I can’t remember much.

All I know is that we are staying in a rental house for the weekend. It’s an old home that was built back before the Babylonians discovered WiFi. My wife went into town to go shopping and I chose to stay home because I would rather be stabbed in the thigh with a BIC pen than go shopping.

Anyway, I was in the bathroom and when I tried to turn the doorknob to open the door the knob snapped off.

Thus, I am trapped without food or technology. I’m shouting for help, but my wife is long gone and the cleaning lady isn’t due for another several hours.

The gravity of this nightmare finally hits me all at once. I am stuck in this tiny hellhole without access to the outside world. I will never see the sunshine again. They will find my body covered in cobwebs. The coroner

will shake his head and say, “Looks like he got so hungry he ate a bar of soap and choked.”

Also, my cellphone is in the other room. This means no texts, no calls, and—here is the worst part—no Scrabble.

I am officially dead.

Scrabble has always been my game of choice. It was my grandmother’s favorite game, my mother’s favorite game, and it is the only game I voluntarily play. Unless of course I am in Biloxi, in which case I voluntarily visit the roulette table and play Let’s Set Fire To All Sean’s Twenties.

If someone were to ever put a competitive Scrabble table in the Beau Rivage Casino, I would have to reverse mortgage my house.

I play Scrabble every day on my smartphone. I keep ten or twelve games going at a time. I don’t want to toot my own…