It was summer. I didn’t want to be camping, and neither did my wife, but there are some church obligations you must keep.

We had one job, and that was to prevent the Baptist youth group from committing sin. Teenagers have the natural ability to sin on camping trips. It is in their genes.

Teenagers can commit any one of the top-ten sins before breakfast. I’m talking classic sins like envy, malice, greed, or replacing the cream filling in a Twinkie with Colgate toothpaste.

And if kids can’t commit one of these, they invent new sins.

One such sin would be shining a flashlight into the chaperones’ tents and saying, “Oooooo.” Which is supposed to be frightening, but it isn’t. It’s not even remotely scary to hear a pre-pubescent voice say, “Oooooo” after dark.

If I were a kid, and I really wanted to annoy my youth chaperones—and I’m just thinking out loud here—I would empty a jar of honey into their shoes and let the sugar ants

engulf their sneakers like a hellish scene from a B-movie horror film. Not that I’ve ever done that.

When we were kids, my Little League team took lots of camping trips. On one such trip, my cousin brought an entire gym bag full of illicit items.

Because this is a family column, I won’t tell you what he actually brought. So let’s just say he brought cans of A&W root beer and some gospel magazines.

The problem was, my aunt was also on this camping trip. Do you remember the sadistic warden in “Cool Hand Luke” played by Strother Martin, who abused Luke because of a sick, twisted compulsion? My aunt was like him, only she was a Freewill Baptist.

She would make randomized tent visits. And on that particular night, she discovered her son’s tent was filled with the whole team.

She barged…

The grocery store is packed with tourists. And I mean packed. There are hundreds of them.

And I am stuck in a cluster of middle-aged men who wear neon-colored swim trunks and flip flops.

You could say that I’m here against my will. My wife sent me on a very important shopping mission to buy:

1. Salsa.
2. Neosporin.

And because no household can survive for more than forty-eight hours without salsa or the miraculous properties of Neosporin, here I am.

The middle-aged men in the checkout line are laughing and carrying on. They are wearing Margaritaville T-shirts, and their skin is a deep reddish-tan.

I can spot a Beach-Tourist-Dad tan a mile away. It’s all in the nose region.

Middle-aged male tourists, you see, rarely apply sunscreen to their noses—don’t ask me why. Thus, on a typical beach vacation, a Beach Dad often resembles the captain of Santa’s sled team.

As it happens, it’s a good thing Beach Dad isn’t ACTUALLY steering Santa’s sleigh because Beach Dad also drives like a clinically insane stuntman.

Sometimes, you can see Beach

Dad weaving his minivan through heavy traffic while singing along with a Jimmy Buffet greatest hits album, nearly causing ten-car pile ups.

But getting back to the grocery store. There’s a small boy standing in the checkout aisle behind me. He’s pushing a wheelchair with a woman in it. The woman is mid-seventies. She has a cast on her ankle.

There is also a teenage girl with her. The three-person clan is a nice-looking one. And because they are only buying sodas and popsicles, I insist they cut in line.

The boy wheels the woman ahead of me. The older woman thanks me.

I ask where they’re from.

“Arkansas,” she says. “These are my grandkids. We’re down here for two weeks.”

She tells me that she is still recovering from ankle surgery. Her injury happened a few weeks ago…

On my kitchen counter is a pound cake, sitting on a pedestal, beneath a glass dome.

Pound cake is the food of summer. It can make or break the entire season. A summer without pound cake is like church without singing. Or Monet without color. Or Andy without Barney.

When I was a younger man, my soon-to-be wife and I went through mandatory marriage counseling at our church. It was miserable. The minister was so uptight that he could have carried a corn cob without using his hands.

The pastor asked me what my “love language” was.

“My what?” I said.

“Your love language,” he said. “How do you receive love?”

“Come again?”

“Food,” my wife interjected. “Sean’s love language is pound cake, and so is mine. We speak Food.”

That preacher looked at us like we had june bugs crawling out our noses. And I never forgot that.

Because my wife was right. We speak Food. Food has always helped me

through life. I use fried chicken to fend off existential doubt. Pimento cheese gives me courage. And pound cake restoreth my soul.

And yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of High Cholesterol, I will fear no egg yolks, for Thou art with me.

Speaking of food, right now I smell steaks cooking on a grill. My neighbor, Tom, is having a holiday cookout and he is speaking my “love language” fluently.

It’s Fourth-of-July week and every house on our street has a driveway full of cars. There are American flags flying on every post, mailbox, and car antenna.

People linger on porches, holding bottles and aluminum cans, eating ridiculous amounts of goodies and laughing a lot.

The sun is low. I hear firecrackers in the distance. They sound like bottle rockets.

If you are, or you have ever been a boy,…

I met new cousins today. Well, they are new to me. These are cousins I never knew I had. Lots of them. They all looked so much like my father that I smiled until I cracked a tooth.

We spent the afternoon on the porch. Everyone who sat around the patio table was fair-skinned, with buckshot freckles, and reddish hair.

“You look just like we do,” said Andy, my new cousin, who I’ve never met before today.

“I just KNEW you were a Dietrich,” added my new cousin, Pat, who is around my father’s age. “I just knew you were John’s son.”

We talked. And talked. And talked.

You might think it’s hard to converse with people you’ve never met before, but it’s not. Not when they are people with happy personalities. And not when one of you is a writer who is chatty enough to make lifelong friends with a parking meter.

When we met, I couldn’t believe all the freckles.

I never knew any family who looked like me. I take after my father’s side, I have red hair, freckled skin, and unnaturally skinny legs that make me appear to be riding a chicken. People used to say I looked like just like Howdy Doody, minus the charisma.

As a young man I was a charity-case kid without much family. I often got invited to someone else’s Fourth-of-July family celebration out of pity. And I hated this holiday because I always felt like I was crashing someone else’s party.

But, over time you develop thick skin. I learned how to be my own man, I learned how to take care of myself, and I pretended not to care whether I had family or not.

I learned how to make conversation with inanimate objects like fire hydrants, house plants, and most models of U.S. manufactured toilets. But it was an act. I…

Today, I watched the Andy Griffith Show all day long. I had the day off, so I visited Mayberry.

I started with the very first episode, when Andy welcomes Aunt Bea to Mayberry. I watched a handful of others until it was time for bed. The last episode I watched was the one where Barney joins the choir. A classic.

Over the last twelve hours, I’ve seen it all. I watched the Mayberry Bank almost get robbed—twice. I’ve seen Barney muff things up with Thelma Lou. I tasted Aunt Bea’s god-awful pickles.

And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, Andy taught Opie to stand up to a bully.

During my childhood, the Andy Griffith Show came on the local station every weekday at five o’clock. Our TV only got three channels, and two of the stations came in fuzzy.

So I watched Andy Griffith each afternoon until I’d practically memorized the dialogue, the closing credits, and even the commercials between segments.

Commercials like the one with Coach Bear Bryant advertising for South Central Bell. “Have you called your mama today?” Bear would say. “I sure wish I could call mine.”

And the advertisements which all featured some unfortunate kid named Mikey, eating Life cereal at gunpoint.

And of course, there was the commercial with “Mean” Joe Greene, tossing his sweaty football jersey at an innocent child who offered him a Coca-Cola.

My childhood was not an easy one. After my father took his own life, I was a lonely boy who watched a lot of TV. I think I was trying to escape my own world by living inside a console television set. I enjoyed all the classic reruns.

Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, Batman, and I pledged my eternal love to Barbara Eden. The Beverly Hillbillies were okay in a pinch. Green…

PALATKA—It’s early morning in Florida. There are billions of crickets singing. I am overlooking the Saint Johns River, which cuts straight through Putnam County, and it’s hypnotizing.

If you were to ask what I am thinking about right now, I would tell you flat out: I am thinking of taco dip.

This is because I am a man. Men don’t think complex thoughts. We think painfully simple things. If you could peek inside a grown male’s head, it would shock you. You would find nothing but cobwebs, empty potato-chip bags, and Dale Earnhardt posters.

There is a bass boat out this morning. A man teaches his son to hold a rod. The kid tries to cast, but can’t get the hang of it.

Behind me is a narrow mainstreet, lined with storefronts, a bingo parlor, some gift shops, street lamps. Five or six steeples pepper the skyline.

There’s Angel’s Diner, Florida’s oldest dining railcar. Their burger is a spiritual experience on a bun. That’s not just my opinion, Billy

Graham once ate it and felt the same way.

Speaking of Billy Graham, he preached his first sermons in these parts. He was a nineteen-year-old when he was baptized and ordained here.

They say the tall skinny kid with the oiled hair could be heard shouting in the woods near Silver Lake. He would holler sermons at a specific pine stump for practice. Years later, I understand the stump finally repented.

Young Billy went on to preach in local country churches and shout to roomfuls of people who fanned themselves with paper bulletins.

It all started right here.

Just down the road is Saint Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. It’s got more history than you can shake a taco at.

Though, today Saint Augustine is more of a tourist attraction. The last time I was there, a man wearing…

There is something about this part of Florida. There is a certain feel to it, the closer you get to the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe it’s the cashiers at rural gas stations who call you “sugar” even though they are still in high school.

Or it could be the American flags in the abandoned field, next to the giant crucifix made of hay bales. Or the large sign next to a little country church that reads: “Body Piercing Saved My Life.”

I drive through Starke, I pass a band of Hari Krishnas standing at the traffic light. A bald man in a white tunic is playing bongos, another is playing the kazoo.

A woman knocks on my vehicle window. She looks just like my aunt Eulah, only she wears a sari and facepaint.

“Hey, sugar,” she says. “Blessings upon y’all.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I say.

“You want a flyer?”

“Why not.”

“Have a nice day, sugar.”

I am not interested in Hari Krishna, but this woman looks like

she could be kin. When I look at her, I cannot shake the idea that I am talking to my aunt Eulah.

The same aunt who I once stayed with for an entire summer. And when my cousin and I got caught placing an M-80 in the neighbor’s mailbox, she had to discipline me.

I never forgot that. She made me go into the yard and pick out my own hickory switch.

“My own what?” I said.

“You heard me, a hickory switch.”

“What does a hickory tree look like?”

“You’re walking on thin ice young man.”

I drive past a Christmas tree farm surrounded by free-range ostriches. Every few feet there are huge live oaks with Spanish moss in the branches.

Hampton is nice, so is Keystone Heights. Ever since Lake City, I have counted sixteen thousand Baptist…

Willie Nelson is on my radio. He is singing one of my favorite songs.

“In the twilight glow I see her,
“Blue eyes crying in the rain,
“When we kissed goodbye and parted,
“I knew we’d never meet again…”

I turn it up because I am a sucker for this tune. Though, I’m not sure why. When I was a boy, the lyrics never made sense to me.

After all, nobody with blue eyes ever cried in the rain for me. And I certainly didn’t have blue eyes. My eyes are gray. My mother used to say my eyes were the color of our pump shed.

Even so, there’s something about this tune that moves me. I can close my gray eyes and go back in time.

And I see my father’s work bench in the garage. A radio sits beside a chest of mini-drawers that is filled with bolts, nuts, screws, washers, and rubber grommets.

Crystal Gayle is singing “Don’t it Make

my Brown Eyes Blue?”

Then Willie begins playing over the speaker. My father turns it up.

“Love is but a dying ember,
“Only memories remain,
“Through the ages, I’ll remember,
“Blue eyes crying in the rain…”

And I am holding a GI Joe doll, watching a tall, skinny man work on something beneath a shop lamp, holding a screwdriver.

He does all his own repairs, this man. Because he believes it is wasteful to hire people to do work you could do yourself. Just like it’s disgraceful, and even unforgivable, to throw away refrigerator leftovers.

The people I come from are proud and self-sufficient, and they are not above eating ten-week old meatloaf that has turned Sea Foam Green. They cut their own hair. And their own lawns.

When I started travelling a lot for work, I hired a yardman to…