The supermarket checkout line. She was white-haired and frail. She looked like a church lady to me.

Her buggy was filled to capacity so that it looked like she was pushing a coal barge up the Mississippi. The first item she placed onto the conveyor belt was an extra-large case of Coors.

“That’s a lot of beer,” said I.

She smiled. “On sale.”

“Are you the one who drinks it?”

She nodded. “Two beers a day keeps the doctor away.”

“I don’t think that’s how the saying goes.”

“Yeah, well, I hate apples.”

Her voice had the same timbre as a tuba. She wore a pink silk jacket draped over her shoulders, buttoned at the top, á la 1952. She wore green polyester slacks such as I haven’t seen since Florence Henderson was on primetime. You could have smelled her floral scent from across the county lines. Ea du old lady.

“Get over here and help me,” she said to me, as she struggled to unload her buggy.

She didn’t say please. She didn’t say, “Young man, would you be so kind…?” She told me to “get

over here.”

So I helped her.

“You’re a nice guy,” said the woman, watching me labor beneath the weight of her 1,439-pound bag of Pedigree dog food.

“Tell that to my wife,” I said.

“So you’re married?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I was married once.”

“Is that right.”

“Yep. I was happily married for ten years. Ten outta fifty-three ain’t bad.”

Then the woman cackled and told the bag boy to fetch her a carton of cigarettes. Marlboros. Menthols.

After which she dug into her purse and removed a stack of coupons roughly the size of a Tolstoy novel and gave it to the cashier.

The cashier girl accepted the coupons hesitantly and flashed me a look indicating that she was not enthusiastic about her career path right now.

“What was his name?”…

Cracker Barrel, 8:17 P.M.—it's busy tonight. There’s a boy in a wheelchair at the table beside me. His father is spoon feeding him cooked apples and fried chicken.

When the boy's sister says something funny, the boy claps and laughs.

His father wipes his face with a rag and says, “You’re my special boy.” Then, he kisses his forehead.

A nearby girl wanders toward the boy. She is four, maybe. Her hair is in locks. She stares at him with her hand in her mouth.

“Is he okay?” she asks.

The boy leans and gives a big “HELLO!”

There are apple bits on his chin.

The girl gives a smile brighter than a Christmas tree. “HI THERE!” she says in return. Then, she skips off.

Three tables from the boy is an old man. He is wearing a ball cap, Velcro shoes. He’s sitting at a two-top. He orders chicken-fried steak and potatoes. He has no cellphone to occupy his attention. No reading material. He sits.

He and I share a waitress. Her name is Blanche—it’s embroidered on her

apron. Whenever he speaks to her, he holds her hand. Something you don't see much.

He has a voice that sounds beautifully genteel. It's a wonder he's all alone.

Behind him is a table of Mexican workers—men, women, and kids. At least I think they’re Mexican. Every word they say is tagged with a diminutive “ito” or “ita.” They sit covered in paint and grit. They speak rapid Spanish. Lots of laughing.

One Mexican boy crawls into his mother's lap. She strokes his silk hair with her paint-spotted hand, saying, “Cariño mio,” over and over.

And though I don't know much Spanish, I imagine this, more or less, means: “You're my special boy.”

To their left: a teenage couple. He weighs a buck ten, she is a foot taller than him. They hold hands when they walk out. They kiss. They…

It was late. I had just finished performing my one-man spasm in Tupelo, Mississippi. We were tired. My wife and I had a long drive ahead.

But there was one stop I had to make.

The GPS was confused. Siri led us on a raccoon chase. We were going in circles. At one point, we realized we had passed the same Dollar Tree four times.

But eventually, we pulled into 306 Elvis Presley Drive.

The narrow house, the place of Elvis Aaron Presley’s birth, was as big as a minute. About the same size as the junk house my daddy grew up in. A shotgun house. White clapboards. Gray porch. Porch swing. Screen door.

I had my guitar in the van. So I sat on the porch swing and tuned it. The balmy Mississippi air will detune a guitar in only seconds.

I sang “Peace in the Valley.” Same tune we sang at my old man’s funeral. I still remember watching my daddy’s ironworker friends cover their weathered faces and sniff their noses.

My father was

an Elvis fanatic. There were only three performers he nearly idolized. Hank Senior, Ray Charles, and Elvis. One of those three was always playing in his garage workshop, over the tweed speakers of a Philco radio.

“If you were a kid in the fifties,” Daddy once said, “you loved Elvis. He was in our drinking water.”

And love Elvis he did. He could sing all the hits. Every lyric. Every inflection.

I have vague memories of driving in Daddy’s F-100, with my bare feet on his dashboard, with Elvis playing. Only, I could hardly hear Elvis over Daddy’s singing.

I don’t have many memories of making Daddy proud. Save, for one.

It was a Fourth of July picnic. I was 9. There was a plywood stage. There was a gospel quartet. There was a band.

The event planners asked me to sing an Elvis…

These aren’t my stories, but I’m going to tell them.

Let’s call her Dana. Dana was going for a walk near her home. It was a dirt road. Her high-school reunion was coming up, she was getting into shape.

A truck pulled beside her. He slowed down. He rolled his window open, he asked if she needed a ride.

Something was wrong. It was the way he looked at her.

Before she knew it, he’d jumped out of the vehicle. She tried to get away. He overpowered her and threw her into a ditch.

She landed a few good hits to his face, but he outweighed her.

He used a pocketknife. He pressed it against her. She screamed something. She doesn’t remember which words she used, but she aimed them toward heaven.

Something happened.

His body froze. Completely. He was like a statue, only meaner. She wanted to run, but she was too scared.

That’s when she saw another man standing above her attacker. He was tall, with a calm face.

“It’s gonna be okay, Dana,” the tall man said. “Go on home, sweetie, everything’s gonna be

okay.”

Here’s another:

Jim was dying. A seventy-something Vietnam veteran with high morals, pancreatic cancer, and a two-packs-a-day habit.

Doctors said his cancer would kill him.

Treatments were hell. Jim met a man in the VA hospital. A homeless man with a duffle bag. A fellow vet.

They shared a few cigarettes. They swapped stories. They understood each other. Jim invited the man home.

The man stayed in Jim’s guest room. He stayed for several months.

He became Jim’s caregiver. He wiped Jim’s mouth after episodes of vomiting, he stayed up late during sleepless nights, he helped Jim bathe. He’d pat Jim’s back when nausea got bad, saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”

And he was there on Jim’s final day, too. He waited in the den while Jim’s family gathered around his bed.…

When I was a kid we listened to the “Grand Ole Opry” on a transistor radio every week. We usually listened to the show out in my dad’s lawnmower shed each Saturday night. It was our thing.

My father's shed was a sacred place. Especially for a kid. It was the place where he kept his beer so my mother wouldn’t find it.

My mother was Baptist. Which is why Daddy often drank his beer warm, since there was no refrigerator out in the shed.

“Don’t you hate warm beer?” my father’s friends used to ask him.

“Yes,” my father would say. “But I might as well get used to it, because the beer in hell won’t be very cold.”

The little Philco radio sat atop his shelf, nestled beside the old oil cans, the Chilton automotive repair manuals, the WD-40 canisters, and the boxes of air new filters.

On Saturday evenings the Opry would play, and Daddy would often be sharpening a lawnmower blade, or lubricating his chainsaw, or separating bolts and screws, or whatever.

Warm beer in his hand.

The tweed speaker would vibrate with the sounds of Keith Bilbrey, hosting the show with his velveteen baritone. The musicians would play. Fiddles would whine. Banjos would ring. And I would marvel at the sounds of steel guitars.

I have always loved music. I played piano in our church. I began playing in church at age 9.

I played “Amazing Grace” at my grandfather’s funeral. I sang “Precious Lord Take My Hand” for my aunt’s wedding. I once sang for a supermarket poultry sale at the IGA. I sang:

“C-H-I-C-K-N-N,
“That’s how you spell,
“Premium chicken, friends…”

My father also let me sing at the VFW sometimes for his pals. My mother did not like it when my father took me to the VFW.

When I was 5, my father would take me to the VFW, sit…

I’m in Avondale Park. I’m watching random kids play baseball. The kids pepper the field. Gloves on their knees.

“Hey, batta batta batta!” they all chant. They look like third graders. The third-baseman looks like he has to go pee.

They all look like dreamers. Because that’s what all kids are, really. Dreamers. Do you remember what it was like to be a kid? Do you remember what it was like to get lost in a daydream?

The sun is low. The crickets are out. The pitcher is maybe 8 years old. And I’m falling into a daydream myself.

It’s hard to watch baseball without remembering my old man. My father loved baseball. No. He worshiped baseball. To him, baseball was high art.

Look at Norman Rockwell. You never saw Rockwell painting soccer, or pickleball, or water polo, or the luge. Rockwell painted baseball players. There’s just something about baseball.

My dad was a ball player. As an adult, he never missed a chance to play with a guys his age in some municipal field

somewhere.

I used to go with him to games. My father would consult the cooler between every major play, cracking open an ice-cold can of Ovaltine. And whenever he pitched, I heard ladies in the stands say things like, “Oh, that’s John Dietrich. I think he once played triple-A ball.”

But it wasn’t true. Not entirely. My father tried out for a professional ball club, and lasted only a few days. He was a sidearm pitcher. His pitching was too wild, they said. They rejected him.

But then, my father was a man fraught with rejections. His whole life was rejection after rejection.

He came from an abusive home. He grew up poor. He wanted to be a navy pilot, but he was deaf in one ear, so the navy rejected him. Talk about dreams. His lifelong dream was shattered.

He wanted to be a…

FOR A LONG TIME NOW, people have been sending me emails daily about not receiving my columns via email. This happens even though these people have subscribed, confirmed their email subscriptions, fasted for at least three days, and offered up a ritual blood sacrifice.

Other readers will say that sometimes they receive the column, and other times they don’t. It's hit or miss.

If any of this has been happening to you, you’re not alone. Please know, this problem is not you. In fact, the problem isn’t me, either. It’s El Niño.

Actually, the problem is a computer software glitch that nobody can seem to figure out. And believe me, I’ve spent hours of my life on the phone with technical support, being placed on hold, listening to smooth jazz muzak, trying to figure this issue out. Many of my recent gray hairs come from this.

So as a result, we’re trying out a different email platform to send out the daily column now. The email service is called Substack. We’ll see how it

goes. Who knows, the new software might suck—in which case, we’ll just go back to the other sucky software.

But don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything or make any changes to your email. We've transferred your address to the new service. The only thing you might have to do is make sure these posts don’t appear in your spam folder. However, if the column is not coming to your inbox, you might have to visit my site and resubscribe (Click Here). If this is the case, I'm sorry.

Lastly—I want to stress—this column is COMPLETELY FREE. This column will always be free until I kick the oxygen habit. The reason I mention this is because many other writers (better writers than me) use Substack, and many of these high-brow writers charge for their work. I do not charge. I will not charge. And that…

I’ll call her Rebecca. She’s from Washington D.C. Her email started off like this:

“Dear Sean, I don’t know what to do, my mother just died of brain cancer… I am only 18 years old, and she was all I have left…

“She read your Facebook posts, and I am hurting... I know you can’t help me, but I don’t know who else to tell.”

Well, Rebecca, I took the liberty of contacting a few friends who have stories you might be interested in hearing.

First, meet John. He is 36 years young, he works in food service, and he drives a ‘03 Toyota. He has great insurance. He doesn’t have a lot of money, but he’s pretty happy.

He hasn’t always been happy, of course. His dad died when he was 21 years old. John has quite a tale.

His father was a single dad. They grew up together. They were poor. When his dad died, John went into catatonic shock. He quit leaving his apartment. He ate only frozen pizzas only and somehow—the lucky stiff—managed to lose

weight.

But John’s life was not over. After a few years, John met Megan. Megan was six years older, and beautiful. But more than that, Megan was a caregiver for her ill mother, so she understood things. Big things.

Sometimes they would talk. She seemed to be the only human who “got” him.

They were soon married. And finally, John was introduced to the joys of being unable to use his own closet.

“I never thought I’d smile again,” John writes, “but I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Now meet Charry. She is 49. She and her mother were tight. They were so close that for Charry’s senior prom, long ago, she didn’t have a traditional date, she attended with her mother. Which, if you ask me, is bizarre. (“And now presenting the happy couple!”)

Her mother died…

Today, I celebrated International Women’s Day by buying my wife a valuable lottery ticket, potentially worth $20 million dollars.

I had to drive all the way from Alabama to Georgia to buy this ticket because, of course, Alabama has strict laws against gambling.

We Alabamians oppose the lottery. We consistently vote against it. Because, you see, the lottery is sinful. It is offensive to good morals.

If you are caught gambling in Alabama, for example, state officials appear on your doorstep, yank out your toenails with pliers, and force you to watch Jim Bakker reruns.

But this year for Women’s Day, I wanted to give something to my wife that really said, “I love you.” So I drove to Georgia and bought her $20 mil.

Currently, there are only five states in the Union that outlaw the lottery, most do this for sacred reasons. Those states are Utah, Alabama, Hawaii, Alaska, and Nevada.

That’s right. Nevada outlaws the lottery. The state that is home to Las Vegas. The only state where prostitution is legally

practiced within licensed brothels; where public intoxication is allowed; where public nudity is not only legal but strongly encouraged by local clergymen, has outlawed the lottery. Thank God.

Alabama is not far behind. The lottery has no future in the Twenty-Second State. I recently interviewed an Alabama lawmaker about this hot-button issue, asking whether Alabama would ever have a lottery.

“Probably not,” said the official. “Gambling was outlawed in the 1901 state constitution, and most of the state has a religious opposition to it.”

It’s important to note, these laws haven’t stopped ALL forms of Alabama gambling. You can still place bets in Atmore, Montgomery, and Wetumpka.

“But remember,” the lawmaker adds, “if you gamble in those places, you must be prepared to drown in the Lake of Fire.”

So I drove to Georgia.

I crossed over the state line and I found a place that…

A little breakfast joint. Birmingham, Alabama. The birth pangs of summer are in the air. Alabama feels like a Monet. Trees are pregnant with blossoms. Birds are everywhere.

On my way into the restaurant, I see a man seated on the sidewalk, weeping. A young woman sits beside him, rubbing his shoulders. I’m wondering what’s wrong. I’m probably staring, even. Which isn’t polite, but I can’t help it.

The first thing you should know about me is that I am very nosy person. I get this from my mother. I have my black belt in rubbernecking.

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” I overhear the man say. “I can’t believe it.” Then he blows his nose into a hanky. The young woman just cries with him.

Nosy, I tell you.

Inside the restaurant, the young waitress tells me to sit wherever I want. I sit in the corner so I can see the people in the place.

Because I am a longtime people watcher. Nosy people usually are. Put me in a crowded airport and I could die happy.

My waitress today is

a young woman with the tattoo of an infant footprint on her forearm. “What does the tattoo mean?” I ask.

“It’s my daughter,” she says. “She died shortly after she was born. It was a neural tube defect. She wasn’t even two days old, she died in my arms.”

“What was your daughter’s name?” I ask.

“Rachel.”

“I’m sorry.”

She thanks me. Then she takes my order. I order three eggs, over medium. One order of bacon. Hash browns. And white toast, for sopping material. It’s vitally important to have sopping material at breakfast.

The waitress leaves and I am left looking around the dining room, observing. It’s your typical morning café, with a typical cast of characters. Workmen. Corporate people. Travelers. You name it.

I see men clad in business clothes. One of them is Facetiming with…