Dear Miss Jean Lee,

I don’t know if you remember me or not, but I remember getting our photo taken together at the Methodist church in Enterprise. You put your arms around me. You squeezed.

I know a good hugger when I meet one. You gave me the same kind of hug my granny used to give.

It was the same way my mother used to hug me, too, just after I’d skinned my knee. She would squeeze me and say, “Sssshhh, it’s gonna be okay.”

Mothers always say that.

I am a connoisseur of good hugs. I collect as many as I can. I have collected hugs that came from as far away as Michigan—which is as far north as I have ever traveled.

But none can compete with your hugs. Yours are top-shelf.

There are people in life who are special. When they walk away, they leave you in better shape than they found you. These are the sort who hug well.

I

used to work with a woman like this. Her name was Millie, we worked in a commercial kitchen together. She was an elderly black woman with a happy face and large eyes.

She was your all-American cook. She could prepare food that would cause people to stand up, throw their napkins on the floor, and shout.

She was a hugger, too. Before each shift, the waiters and waitresses would all get hugs from her. Myself included.

One time, I remember a twenty-one-year-old girl was upset because her boyfriend left her. Millie held that girl for nearly thirty minutes saying, “Ssssssshhhhh.”

Her culinary creations were the products of a lifetime spent before stoves. Her gumbo, for instance, could heal a broken heart. She made fried chicken so good that even barnyard chickens idolized her.

She passed from pancreatic cancer. The kitchen staff all attended the funeral…

I’m standing in a Walmart self-checkout line behind four elderly men. They are wearing polo shirts, tucked into khakis. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re on vacation.

They are pushing a cart full of food, toiletries, and beer. The checkout line is long.

One man says, “I don’t know why they have these god-forsaken self-checkout lanes. I don’t wanna check my ownself out.”

One of my favorite old-man words happens to be “ownself.” It’s even better in its plural form, “ownselfs.”

“Yeah,” adds another man. “It’s just like when they did away with full-service gas stations, remember those?”

“Back when you could get your windshield cleaned, tank filled, a Ko-Kola, and didn’t even have to get outta your car.”

“You know, I reckon if someone tried to wash a fella’s windshield today, the driver would be so shocked he’d think he was getting mugged.”

“Hey, I got mugged once. In Chicago. I thought it was a joke at first.”

“Did he beat you up?”

“Wasn’t a he. It was a woman.”

“A woman mugged you? Did she want your wallet?”

“She certainly didn’t want my body.”

“I’ve never been mugged.”

“Me neither. Ain’t never even been to Chicago.”

“Heard they have a bad smell downtown.”

“Ain’t that bad. Just watch out for the lady muggers.”

“How does this self-checkout thingy work? Are we supposed to just scan things our ownselfs?”

“Here, let me do it, Don, I self-checkout stuff all the time back home.”

“I don’t understand, why we can’t just have a cashier, what was wrong with cashiers?”

“The world’s changing.”

“It sure is. Just yesterday, my grandson asked me to watch a movie on his iPad, he kept pausing it every two seconds to answer texts. He can’t focus for more than a minute.”

“I don’t text.”

“Me either.”

“Yeah, I…

I’m watching my dog run on the beach. She’s running alongside the waves. She stops every few moments to stare.

She’s not too sure about waves.

Last week, it was Father’s Day, and I’m a father—well, almost. I have a bloodhound named Thelma Lou. That’s almost like being a father. The only difference, of course, is that human babies don’t chew your wallet then poop inside your boot.

You read that right. My dog didn’t poop ON my boot—as in the exterior. She did her business INSIDE my boot. The basic physics behind this acrobatic marvel are astounding. I only wish I could’ve captured it on video, it would’ve been worth millions.

So poop in a boot, that makes me a father. At least this is what I’m going with.

People without kids, like me, still have the same amount of love parents have. That love has to go somewhere. That’s where dogs come in.

My first dog was a border collie. My father bought it. We named it Pooch. Pooch was bred to herd sheep, but since there were

no sheep around, he herded redheads.

When my mother yelled my name, Pooch would dart off the porch like a bullet. He’d circle me, yelping, nipping. When he died, I thought a piece of me died.

My next dog was Goldie. A retriever. Long, pretty hair, happy face. I raised her from a pup.

Goldie was Hell on Wheels. She lived beside me. She slept while I did homework, she chased baseballs. In the woods, when I was busy with little-boy things, like catching frogs, or swinging on limbs, she watched over me.

Cody was next. She was my father’s dog. She was a chocolate dog who loved my father. I can close my eyes and see him strolling from the barn to the shed, Cody trailing two feet behind him.

When he died, she laid on a pile of…

WASHINGTON, D.C.—I am in town for the American Library Association’s annual conference. Imagine: fifty gazillion librarians, mostly women, wearing tennis shoes, pearls, and smiles.

Did I say fifty gazillion? Let’s make it five hundred gazillion.

I met an old woman from Kansas. She is a librarian in a small town of two hundred. I met a librarian from Martha’s Vineyard, one from Key West, a few from Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Lexington, Las Vegas, Sheboygan.

I met a guy from Morgantown, West Virginia, the hometown of Don Knotts. I met a woman from Andy Griffith’s hometown, in Mount Airy, North Carolina.

It was a busy day. I shook hands, hugged necks, and in a few cases, kissed librarians from every state in the U.S., including Alaska, and Hawaii.

Also, some from Shanghai, Puerto Rico, Iran, Montpellier, Moscow, Greenland, Sydney, South Africa, and one from Auburn University.

I have history with librarians. I was a seventh-grader when I dropped out of school, after my father’s suicide. My family’s life went down the

toilet.

At some point during my youth, I started visiting the library. And I visited a lot.

The library was a dilapidated building. It smelled like mildew and old paper. It had floor heaters, mouse traps in the corners, and a bathroom not quite big enough to hold a representative of the Lollipop Guild.

The librarian was a slight, elderly woman who wore tennis shoes and pearls. She would often find me wandering the aisles and ask what book I was looking for.

She knew who I was. And she knew about my educational failures.

“I don’t know which book I want,” I would often reply.

One day, she handed me the book Lonesome Dove.

“Do you like cowboys?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“You’ll like this,” she went on. “I’d bet money on it.”

I took…

I am waiting for my wife to get ready. We are going out to dinner. She is in the bathroom. I see her in front of a mirror, pinching her belly. She asks if I think she is fat.

“No,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I feel fat.”

“You aren’t.”

“How about now?”

“Still no.”

“What about from this angle?”

“Negative.”

“From this side?”

“Nope.”

“What about when I turn around?”

“No.”

“How about when I hike up one leg, spin in circles, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance?”

“No.”

“Do you REALLY mean it?”

“If you were any skinnier you’d have to stand up five times just to make a shadow. Now can we please go to dinner?”

“But I feel fat.”

My whole life has been spent in the company of women. When my father died, he left me in a house of estrogen. There, I learned something about the opposite gender.

Namely, women often think they are fat. And they are always wrong about this, no matter what their size.

It isn’t their

fault. Every printed advertisement and commercial tells them to feel this way. But it wasn’t always like this.

Things were different seventy-five years ago. Back then, nobody went around saying Marilyn Monroe looked like a North Atlantic whale, or told Doris Day she needed to go paleo.

People weren’t this obsessed with being skinny. Consequently, American families ate more bacon, and butter. And you know what they say: “The family that eats bacon and butter together, stays together.”

But things have changed. Famous women from bygone eras would be called “large” or “fluffy” in today’s world.

Marilyn Monroe, for instance, would be considered a Clydesdale. Barbara Eden, a Holstein. Ginger and Mary Ann wouldn’t have a chance with their muffin-tops. Daisy Duke would be playing the part of Boss Hogg.

Last…

I found a brown paper bag full of tomatoes on my doorstep, along with homemade tomato chutney. I don’t know where the stuff came from, but the tomatoes were homegrown.

If there is a pleasure more marvelous than homegrown tomatoes, it’s probably illegal. And I don’t want to know about it since I come from Baptists who don’t do illegal things because it could lead to secular music.

But I was reared on homegrown tomatoes. And there will be tomatoes at my funeral. I’m serious. Funeral guests will be encouraged to place tomato products into my casket.

Any tomato product will do, as long as it’s not tomato aspic. I would rather have a colonoscopy in a third-world country than eat tomato aspic.

When I was a kid, there was a woman in our church named Lida Ann who always made tomato aspic. She peppered her aspic with mature green olives, capers, and little gray canned shrimp. She placed her dish on the buffet table and it looked like a giant, R-rated donut.

My mother would force me to eat it because, “Lida Ann is a sweet old woman, and she went to all that trouble.”

“I don’t care if she’s Twenty-Mule-Team Borax,” I would say, “I don’t wanna eat it.”

Then my mother would pinch me until I cried. So I would shuffle toward the potluck line, use a butter knife, and smear the tomato-flavored hell onto a cracker.

Miss Lida Ann would kiss my cheek and say, “Why don’t you take the rest home, since you’re the only one eating it.”

Miss Lida Ann would wrap it in aluminum foil and send it with me. And for the rest of the week, my mother would leave it on the counter. The stuff was so bad that all the flies pitched in to get the screen door fixed.

My mother was…

A cocktail party. A nice house. There were a lot of young people in fancy clothes, drinking fancy drinks, using fancy words like “sazerac.”

My wife was buying a drink when she whispered to me, “Look honey, they have sazeracs.”

“How about that?” I said. “My mother had those once, but she had surgery to remove them.”

My buddy, Phillip, and his wife were with us. Phillip’s wife let me have a sip of her sazerac and I almost gagged because it tasted like Windex.

“You know what?” said my wife. “I wish we woulda gone to Red Lobster, I feel old around these people.”

“Me too,” said Phil’s wife, Miranda.

“Let’s leave,” Phil suggested. “Besides, it looks like all these people do for fun is count carbs.”

“We can’t just leave,” said Miranda. “They’ve already seen us, they KNOW we’re here.”

So we were stuck.

The house was in a nice part of town. The rumors going around the room were all about the famous interior designer who had decorated

the home—whose name I can’t use. The designer is from L.A., and flew in just to “stage” this house for the party.

Each room had impressive furniture, and impressive photographs on the walls. The photographs featured the young couple, posing before exotic scenery, wearing skimpy bathing suits.

“Looks like they’ve been to Rome,” I said.

“And the Bahamas,” said Miranda.

“And this girl definitely ain’t a Freewill Baptist,” said Phillip, who was raised as a Freewill Baptist against his will.

My wife sipped her glass and made a sour face. “I think there’s something wrong with my sazerac. It tastes like Pledge furniture polish.”

“At least yours tastes like Pledge,” said Miranda. “Mine tastes like Four-Oh-Nine Degreaser.”

But Phillip and I were not interested in sazeracs, we found a place in the courtyard where we held Michelob Ultras…