Across the parking lot: a man. He’s short. Gray hair. He asks if the kid is having engine trouble. The kid hardly understands him beneath his thick Mexican accent.

He is young. He is wearing a red shirt. A cap. He drives a Ford pickup that has seen better days. The roof is rusted, the wheel bearings are in bad shape.

The kid is on lunch break, parked in a grocery-store parking lot. He is eating bananas because fruit is cheap and he has a light wallet.

His windows are rolled down. He’s only got ten minutes before he’s expected back at a jobsite, to hang gutter on a three-story house.

It’s god-awful work. He’s not afraid of heights, but he certainly doesn’t love nine-hundred-foot ladders.

The kid finishes eating. He tosses a banana peel into his flatbed. He tries to start his truck. It makes a coughing noise. He tries again. The truck sputters. The kid cusses.

The old Ford has crossed the river.

These are the days before cellphones ruled the world, there’s no way to call the kid’s boss. His boss is already at work, probably glancing at his wristwatch.

The kid sits, wondering what happens after he gets fired.

He could always join the circus and clean up after the elephants.

Across the parking lot: a man. He’s short. Gray hair. He asks if the kid is having engine trouble. The kid hardly understands him beneath his thick Mexican accent.

The man pops the hood. He leans inward. He tells the kid, “Try it now!”

The kid turns the key.

The gray-haired man winks. “I know what is thee problem,” he says. “We can buy part in town. Come. We take my car.”

“I can’t,” the kid says. “I’m supposed to be at work.”

“Work?

The man understands this word.

They pile into the man’s Honda, which looks like it’s rusting apart. The…

He says, “I really didn't plan on doing this today. But this morning, I just realized that I love her so much, and I love her kids, too. I just want us to be a real family.”

I'm at a jewelry store to get my watch repaired. It’s a cheap watch.

The jeweler is a white-haired man with a grandaddy face. He’s staring at my watch, squinting.

“It’s Italian,” I tell him. “El Timexo.”

He says the thing needs a new battery-o.

There is a kid browsing the glass cases behind me. He’s young, skinny built. He’s wearing a neon-orange reflective vest, work boots.

He asks the girl at the counter if he can see a ring. She unlocks the case.

He looks at it, frowns, then hands it back.

He asks, “Should ALL engagement rings have diamonds?”

She tells the kid that there’s no constitutional mandate, but that it’s strongly recommended by the American Jeweler's Association.

He asks about payment plans. She shows him a flyer and tells him about financing options.

The kid asks to see a cheaper ring.

He looks hard at it. “You sure this is the right size? It looks so big.”

“Yep. That’s a six.”

“If it’s too

big, can I bring it back?”

“We can resize it.”

He takes a few heavy breaths. He sighs. He says, “I just hope she says yes. I mean, I think she will. But what if she doesn’t?”

The woman smiles. She holds up her left hand for him, showing him a small ring. Then, she tells the story that goes with it.

She was at a swimming pool. Her boyfriend showed up unannounced. He climbed the high-dive. He screamed his proposal from the top of the world.

She hollered, “Yes!”

So, he attempted a backflip. He slipped. He skinned his backside and hit his head on the springboard. He had to visit the…

...If you’ve read this far, you might as well know that I believe in something. I don’t know what it’s called, exactly, but I know it’s out there. And I know it's good.

Tallahassee, Florida—he was homeless. Long beard, weathered skin. I was sitting in traffic. He walked between lines of vehicles at the stoplight. He carried a cardboard sign. I rolled down my window and handed him all the cash I had—which wasn’t much. Maybe fifteen bucks.

He smelled like an open bottle.

He stood at my window and said, “I don’t know you, but I love you.”

Those words. I’ve thought about them for days. I thought about them when I drove past an ambulance this morning. Two cars looked like crushed Budweiser cans. Traffic backed up for a mile. EMT’s loaded a stretcher.

One paramedic was hugging a child in the median. The kid squeezed him and cried his eyes out. The EMT squeezed back. I’ll bet they don’t teach that in EMT training.

Here’s another:

After my friend’s wife died, he adopted a cat. It didn’t take long before he’d spoiled the animal rotten. He bought toys, an outdoor pet-bed, a food bowl, a collar.

The next morning, he woke to see three feral cats on his porch. So, he

did what any self-respecting man would. He named them.

The following day; two more feral cats.

“I went from being lonely,” he said, “to being Doctor Freaking Doolittle. Cats just trust me.”

Last week, I met an old man who sat at the bar of a rundown beer joint. He was watching the band play. He was deaf. In a loud voice, he asked if he could buy me a beer. I accepted.

He told me he’d totally lost his hearing a few years ago. He woke up one morning and he was fully deaf. His life changed. It forced him to retire early. It’s been hard.

Last year, his nine-year-old granddaughter begged him to attend her school concert. He showed up with a sour attitude.

For the school’s final musical number, one hundred and twenty elementary students sang…

One woman embraces me, then says I’m welcome in her guestroom any time I visit. Another man invites me fishing tomorrow. A six-year-old girl insists I take her fidget spinner as a gift.

A church lawn. The middle of nowhere.

He’s old. He’s wearing high-waisted trousers, a pressed shirt, and a fedora. So help me, a fedora. Seeing him is like seeing nineteen hundred and fifty-two.

My dog, Ellie Mae, follows this man.

There aren't many folks here, maybe fifty. Kids are playing with fidget spinners. Girls wear summer dresses. Young men wear boots. Middle-aged men in khakis.

This is dinner on the church grounds.

Behind the building is a hayfield, recently scalped. A few boys hop the fence.

Tables are lined with casserole dishes. Plastic pitchers of tea. Behind the church is a grill. It’s the sturdy kind made from a two-ton iron pipe.

The smell of pecan smoke makes the world seem happy.

Abe is cooking ribs and chicken. His name isn’t really Abe, he admits. It’s Danny. He was the youngest of eight brothers and sisters. He was an incurable tattle-butt. His mother nicknamed him “Honest Abe” to cure him of his habit.

The name stuck.

“Any hotdogs?” asks a kid.

“You want HOTDOGS?” Abe remarks. “Instead of RIBS? What’s wrong with you, child?”

I’m

next in line. I ask for a little of everything.

Honest Abe tells me greediness is a vice worse than gluttony.

The evening kicks off with a gospel quartet. The high-tenor is outstanding. He sings notes only Gabriel could reach.

On our blanket: two adults and ten empty plates. My coonhound is nowhere in sight. She has made friends with the old man in the fedora. They are across the lawn.

The unfaithful animal.

The quartet sings “Moving Up To Gloryland.” The baritone is singing so low, it looks like he’s about to lose consciousness.

The adults finish eating. The sun is almost gone. Kids are in the hayfield. And it looks like—if my eyes are correct—they’re playing Red Rover.

As I live and breathe.

I haven’t played Red Rover since fourth grade. Greg…

I remember nearly every bad word used on me. In sixth grade Doreen Severs called me “chunky.” I was a round-faced, chubby kid. Her remark made me cry for forty days and forty nights.

DEAR SEAN:

What should I do when a boy calls me fat? I’m not super skinny or anything, but I’ve always thought I was regular.

I want guys to like me, but this guy called me fat and got me thinking I'm ugly and fat, and now I'm wondering what I should say back.

My mom told me to message you.

Thank you,
FIFTEEN IN ALABAMA

DEAR FIFTEEN:

First off: I’m going to tell you what my granny would’ve told me. Though you might not want to hear it—God knows I never did.

Compliment that hateful boy. Tell him how nice he looks. Make a remark about his shoes. Tell him he’s got lovely eyes. Anything sweet.

You don’t even have to mean it.

Of course, this is the last thing you want to do. But it’s an old rural trick which folks like Granny called: drowning outhouse flies in honey.

Something you don't see many people do these days.

Listen, I wish I could tell you how to forget the insults, but that's silly. You can’t forget them any more than you

can forget being kicked in the teeth.

I remember nearly every bad word used on me. In sixth grade Doreen Severs called me “chunky.” I was a round-faced, chubby kid. Her remark made me cry for forty days and forty nights.

My mother forced me to approach Doreen the next day and tell her she had marvelous brown eyes.

I almost gagged on my words. But you should've seen Doreen’s face. You could’ve knocked her over with a residential lawn mower.

She never gave another lick of trouble.

The truth is, I don’t know much, but I can tell you the problem isn't you. Neither is the problem the boy.

It's much bigger than him.

In fact, it’s so big that it's almost invisible. And it can be found in magazines, swimsuit ads, underwear commercials,…

Behind me is a literature professor from New Hampshire. He’s a slender man. Polite. He has a big vocabulary. It takes two minutes to discover that “unparalleled” is his favorite word.

Monroeville, Alabama—the sun is setting. One hundred and nine people wait outside the courthouse to see “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

You can hear crickets downtown.

In line, I meet a millworker from Milton, a mechanic from Montgomery, a Birmingham neurosurgeon, a football coach, a peanut farmer.

Behind me is a literature professor from New Hampshire. He’s a slender man. Polite. He has a big vocabulary. It takes two minutes to discover that “unparalleled” is his favorite word.

He’s driven a long way to see this play. He is a well-known author—I know this because he tells me.

Three times.

“We’re excited about the show,” says the professor. “We hear it’s unparalleled.”

He’s right. This is the quintessential hometown play, in the world’s most famous hometown—second only to Mayberry.

This production has all my favorite stuff. Clapboard porches, antique automobiles, linen suits, ladies in cotton dresses.

The professor sits a few seats from me. He tells me he's memorized parts of the famous novel. He demonstrates this. He's pleased with himself.

“What brings you here tonight?” he asks.

“My cousin, Robert,” I say. “He plays

the farmer.”

The play starts. It's fast paced. The second act is a clencher, taking place inside the old courtroom. It's a majestic building with heart-pine floors made from trees which were once cut from a forest up the road.

The cast’s delivery is heartfelt. Close your eyes. You can hear sniffles from the audience. Most of those are mine.

Afterward, the professor remarks, “I can NOT articulate how this UNPARALLELED story and its cupidity absolutely ingressed me.”

Gazoontite.

Well, my vocabulary might be small, but I’m inclined to agree with him. This play is some kind of special. The soft accents, the down-home morals, the women wearing nylons thick enough to stop bullets.

This classic story is about community—one so small you need a magnifying glass to see it. It’s about small-town living. The good,…

She's a little girl with an uncle who looks like me. An uncle who once cried at a Willie Nelson concert when he discovered he had a new niece.

One year ago—Atlanta, Georgia. Willie Nelson stood on stage and sang my childhood. He sang: “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.”

I rose to my feet in honor of Mama—who expressly failed in this regard.

While Willie played for thousands, my wife handed me her glowing cellphone. There were photos of a pink newborn baby on it.

“That’s your niece!” yelled my wife.

I cried, then smiled for three hundred days.

Though it bears mentioning, life hasn’t always been worth smiling about. Take, for instance, the day we scattered my father’s ashes. That was a particularly bad day.

I had hoped his remains would catch the wind and fly away like angel dust. They dropped like a brick.

That following year, I wore out Daddy’s vinyl record collection, trying to remember him.

One of my favorite records: an album bearing portraits of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings on the cover.

I listened to “Mama’s Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” until I half-hated the melody.

But, of course, I never could hate that song. I sang it on my very first gig.

And I was god-awful.

At the end of the night, the owner paid me fifteen bucks and said, “Learn some new songs, kid. If I hear that damn Willie song one more time, I’m gonna go crazy.”

I tried to learn as many new songs as I could. After swinging a hammer during the afternoons, I’d practice music until the wee hours.

I peddled my unimpressive songs to rundown places and earned next-to-nothing for my mediocre performances.

They were joints Mama would’ve been ashamed of, with neon signs in windows and sad people at tables.

In one such…

For a woman who has spent her life working her fingers into nubs, Miss Liza has the disposition of a ten-dollar Hallmark card.

Not far from the water tower in Grove Hill, Alabama, sits Bertile’s. It's an old burger joint with hand-patted burgers and homemade biscuits.

Miss Liza stands behind the counter. She looks much younger than she is. There is gray in her hair.

She’s worked at this fast-food hole-in-the-wall for thirty years.

Thirty.

“She needs a day off,” one young employee tells me. “Miss Liza, she works EVERY day.”

Even Sundays.

“But I only work AFTER church,” Miss Liza says. “My husband is a preacher, we can't skip church.”

Miss Liza and her husband have managed to muscle through thirty-five years of marriage, raising two boys—working overtime. He's an electrician and preacher. She manages this burger joint.

She is a faceless working-class woman you'll probably never hear about—there's no reason you would, unless some fool were to write about her.

She's having a rough time. Her mother is dying. She has dementia. Liza makes the long drive to Meridian as often as she can to visit, but there's not much

time left.

“Visited last week,” she says. “When Mama saw me, she throwed her arms out and say, ‘Come here, Liza.’ My mama don't always remember me, so that was a blessing.”

Liza wipes her eye.

So do I.

“But, I ain't complaining,” she says. “We poor, but my children turned out to be good adults, God blessed me.”

Blessed. For a woman who has spent her life working her fingers into nubs, Miss Liza has the disposition of a ten-dollar Hallmark card.

I ask when she took her last vacation.

She laughs. “My last WHAT? No sir. Ain’t got time. My husband, he got the asthma, and health problems. I don't do vacations.”

There…

They ate fried chicken and potatoes, and afterward they did dishes. He went to Wednesday night church. He sat in a pew. He sang. It meant a lot to Granny.

Granny had family supper in her dining room last week. It was her first family supper in two decades.

She has a small family. Her nine-year-old granddaughter sat beside her. Her forty-three-year-old son sat across.

Hers is an old trailer. A double-wide. Linoleum floors, shallow ceilings. She bought it with her husband before he died. She's been poor her whole life.

This is the nicest home she’s ever had.

So supper. Her son wore a necktie and dress shirt. The little girl: long braids and a dress.

Granny said a prayer. She thanked God for second chances, little girls, and sons.

“My son’s an addict,” Granny tells me. “In and out of rehab. Learned a long time ago, an addict only thinks about themselves, it's how they are.”

Her son's little girl was born in a bad neighborhood—the kind where questionable transactions take place on the front porches.

The day his girlfriend announced she was pregnant, Granny redecorated the spare bedroom in her own home. She fixed the room just

like on HGTV. Pink drapes, frilly pillows.

One Sunday, when the baby was only a few months old, Granny parked herself on her son’s doorstep. The intoxicated girlfriend told her to get lost.

Granny would not.

“I’s gonna take my grandbaby to church,” she told me. “Wasn't leaving without her.”

The girlfriend lost it. She cussed, threw things.

Granny demanded the baby. Girlfriend refused. Granny called the law; a mess followed.

Police handcuffed her son and his girlfriend. He screamed at his mother. He told her he hated her.

Granny said, “'Course it hurt, but I just thought: 'Fine, he's just gonna have to hate me. ‘Cause I'm worried about this little girl.’”

Her son spent…

I had a burger and a beer for supper, outside Frisco City. I rode past water towers, cattle, and rusty mobile homes. I pulled into an overgrown hay patch and looked at the stars.

It’s late in Grove Hill, Alabama. There are dirt rows stretching from here to the tree line. The sky is starry.

I miss my father. No. I miss having a father. At this age, I can hardly remember what it was like.

When I was a boy, my friends and I once climbed a water tower. It was midnight. We were colossal fools. We could've fallen and ended up as teenage pancakes.

We leaned over the railing, looking at the farmland. Our boyish conversation drifted toward fathers.

“Daddy took me hunting last weekend,” said one boy.

“Oh yeah,” said another. “My daddy’s teaching me to throw a fastball.”

Daddy this, Daddy that. Give me a break.

We rode home on bikes. My friends snuck back into their own beds. Picture-perfect homes, with two parents sleeping in master bedrooms.

That night, I sat on a bicycle seat, looking at the sky. I asked how Daddy was doing up there. I needed something. A voice. A bright light. A gust of wind.

No response.

So I answered myself.

“Oh, I’m doing fine, son,” I

said to myself. “How about you?”

A colossal fool.

Anyway, I grew up trying to father myself. I’ve been doing that for a long time. Truth be told, it’s not very hard. You learn how to take yourself fishing, how to carve a Thanksgiving turkey, how to give yourself advice.

On my wedding day, I talked to my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“You’re a good kid,” I told myself. “You make me so, so, so proud, son.”

Ridiculous.

The day I finally graduated college, I sat in my truck for nearly an hour feeling like I should celebrate. I needed someone. Anyone.

So, I drove. I rode upward through three counties. I stopped at a joint where cars were parked. I sat at the bar. A little girl sat beside me on a stool, eating a hamburger…