Walmart, 5:04 P.M.—this place is a nuthouse. There are so many folks here it looks like the walls are buckling. Nearly sixteen thousand shoppers with full carts, elbowing for a place.

There are two checkout aisles open. Two.

I'm standing in a line that stretches back to the Czech Republic.

I stopped in this hell-hole to buy more cheap Christmas lights for our tree. Our current lights are junk. Every time a bell rings a strand of lights goes out on our tree.

In line ahead: a young woman with two kids. She's dressed in a fast-food uniform, holding a baby.

Her infant is screaming. She's rocks the child back and forth, whispering. The baby locks eyes with me. Her crying stops. She smiles, then laughs.

The mother says in a thick, Alabamian accent, “Reckon she likes you.”

The young woman smiles her few teeth at me.

"Maybe she just smells my dog," I say.

She brings the baby closer. This child has the biggest brown eyes God ever made. Bigger than Barbara—our childhood Arberdeen heifer, who had eyes like

basketballs.

I didn't expect to feel this way while staring at a child, but something's happening to me. My voice is high-pitched. I'm making mouth-noises like an outboard motor.

The woman says, “You wanna hold her?”

“Me? No, that's okay, ma'am..."

At this stage in life, I've discovered that people like me weren't intended to hold babies—we're meant to watch everyone else have them.

But it's too late. The girl hands the baby over.

So, here I am, baby against my chest. She's light. She smells like flowers. Honest-to-goodness flowers. Her bald head is the softest I've ever touched.

The child locks eyes with me again. When she does, the world disappears. She smiles and it's summertime. She lays her head on my shoulder and falls asleep, drooling.

I was a wiseman in my grade-school pageant. Supposedly, three of us…

Help that boy, God. You know the one. The kid who wore hunter's camouflage in the Mexican restaurant. Who sat in the booth behind me.

He was there for a birthday party with all his towhead friends.

A girl his age asked him, “Have you ever even BEEN hunting, dork?”

What a first-class snot-bowl she was.

The boy answered, “No. But one day, my dad's GONNA take me."

"Oh yeah?" the girl said. "My mom says your dad lives in Tennessee, and that you've never even met him."

"So?" he said. "He would take me if he knew me."

Look God, I don't ask for much. But for the love of you, find someone to take that child into the woods.

He's already got camo clothing.

Also: if you have time, don't forget about the girl I saw outside the department store. She had crutches—the kind strapped to her forearms.

“Go shopping without me, Mom,” the girl said. "My legs hurt. I'll wait here.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” the woman answered. “I'm not leaving you. I don't have to shop, let's

go home.”

The girl said, “NO MOM. You NEVER get to do anything fun because of ME. Please go?”

The mother reluctantly agreed and went into the store. The girl sat on a bench and cried.

I know you saw that, Lord.

Listen, I know you've got a lot going on this season—especially with the Peach Bowl coming up. But please do something for her. Anything. You can send me the bill.

Something else before I leave:

Help the grandmother who kicked her rowdy granddaughter out. I'm sure she feels guilty about it, but she had to. The girl's mixed up in hard drugs and harder living.

Heaven knows where that kid will end up. But then, I guess you do know. Just give her a quick miracle or two, that's all I ask. Do it because that poor grandmother…

“Sure, I read what you wrote about me,” he said over the phone. “You made me sound more impressive than I am.”

Not really.

When I first wrote about the Alabama-born bartender, it was before Thanksgiving. I met him in a Pensacola sports bar. He's a widower, father of two boys, built like a defensive tackle.

Heart bigger than a residential king bed.

A month ago, he was leaving for Texas to meet his girlfriend's Mexican family. She's the first woman he's dated since his young wife died suddenly.

He and his boys planned to ask her to marry him. He packed neckties, khakis, the whole dog-and-pony show. He was nervous.

After I wrote about him, I tried tracking him down for a follow-up. I stopped by the bar where I first met him. He wasn't working. I tried a few days later. Someone said he'd moved to Texas.

A cook told me, "Hey man, I got his number. Let's call him."

So that's what's happened.

I sat in an empty bar before business hours, holding a cook's

cellphone. The giant television was broadcasting I Love Lucy reruns, a waitress was pushing a vacuum.

A voice answered. I reintroduced myself.

"'Course I remember you," he said. "My mom printed out your story and passed it around to her bridge club."

We small-talked. I asked how his marriage proposal went.

“Well, um,” he said. “Not at all like planned.”

Say it ain't so.

“I was nervous, man, I screwed it up. I guess I was just sick of wondering if she'd say yes or no. So I went for it.”

On the way to Texas, they pulled over in Louisiana for the night. They all stayed at a cheap motel. The next morning, she went to the lobby for a complimentary, room-temperature breakfast. He was already there, eating with his boys.

When he saw her, he knelt in the dining room.…

We delivered newspapers together. She'd drive the car. I'd fling. I'd aim for doorsteps. Seldom did papers land on doormats.

Sometimes, I'd hit cars parked in driveways so hard I'd set off burglar alarms.

Mama would laugh until she choked.

It bears mentioning, that in my life I've shoveled cow pies, cleaned chicken coops, baled hay, and unclogged septic tanks. Throwing papers remains the worst damn job I've ever had.

Ever.

Before the sun came up, Mama and I would arrive in an empty parking lot. A truck would deliver a pallet of newsprint with a forklift. After I signed for them, the delivery man would give me a look of sympathy.

We'd deliver roughly seventeen trillion papers to half of Florida. On Sundays: triple.

In the winter, Mama and I would sit in the vehicle, the heater blasting, stuffing newspapers into plastic bags. Often, I'd have a pissy attitude.

Not Mama. The woman could detail outhouses while whistling Dixie.

Thus, we'd canvas the city with a vehicle so packed with newspaper, the rear bumper scraped the

pavement.

Our route: four high-rise condominiums, three subdivisions, two trailer parks, a hundred newspaper vending machines, churches, whorehouses, space-stations, and one partridge in a pear tree.

When we'd finish, we'd watch the sunrise, eating donuts, drinking coffee. Then, I'd go back to my apartment and sleep for eight years.

Mama and I worked each day. Rain, sleet, or World Series. Weekends, black plague, holidays, Christmas Eve, even her birthday.

On her birthday, the roads iced over. And just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, I locked the keys in the car. My first reaction was to beat on the windows—I don't know why.

The sheriff deputy got a kick out of that.

Our deliveries were all late, the boss was fuming mad, he threatened to let us go.

We ate lukewarm fried chicken in the Winn Dixie parking lot. I sang…

I saw my old college professor in the supermarket, shopping. It was awkward. He never liked me.

“Heaven is a lie,” the venerable professor once said during class. “Just like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.”

Then he explained that God wasn't real. Neither were angels, nor Christmas, Easter, Elvis, or Beulah Land. He claimed the future of every human was to die and become, more or less, worm poop.

I disagreed with him in the middle of class. He asked why. I told him that I'd been to Graceland. Twice. He disliked me thereafter.

But I'm not sorry.

My first interest in heaven began when my father died. Once, I stood in an open hayfield, watching a gray sky, hoping for a glimpse of it.

Desperate boys do desperate things.

I prayed for a miracle, a sign. Nothing. If I'd been smart—like my professor—I would've given up on the idea. But I'm a slow learner.

My granny believed that when people died, they got sucked into the clouds. There, they could lean over a brass railing and see

the world below.

Weaver's Department store had one such railing. At Christmas, Mama would turn me loose in Weaver's with three bucks in my fat little hands for holiday gift shopping.

The first thing I'd do was clomp upstairs, taking two steps at a time. I'd lean over the second-floor bannister and people-watch—while resisting an urge to spit.

I still do this in airports, hotel lobbies, restaurants, and Walmart—the watching, not the spitting.

Take, for instance, yesterday. I sat outside Target, waiting on my wife. Busy folks rushed in and out of sliding doors. A little boy sat on the bench beside me.

His father dug through his wallet while the boy hummed to himself. The man handed the boy a twenty and told him to buy a gift for his stepmom.

"But Dad," the kid said. "Can't we call her Mom?"

Pace, Florida—today, the town is suburbia, but once it was Small Floridatown, USA. Think: men in camouflage, women in pearls, millworkers.

Schoolteachers.

Seventeen-year-old Jena was a good student. She had more ambition than her one-horse rural world could hold.

“In my first literature class assignment,” says Jena. “I wrote that I wanted to move far, far away from home and be a pediatrician.”

But good teachers have X-ray vision. They know which students will be pediatricians, lawyers, pipe-fitters, and which little hellcat wrote the F-word on the boy's restroom wall.

When Jena's teacher handed back her essay, it read:

"Dear Jena, I don't think you're supposed to be a doctor. I think you're supposed to be a teacher."

What nerve. But then, teachers are like that.

After high school, Jena attended the University of Florida.

"We exchanged a lot of emails once I left her classroom," says Jena. "She really cared."

But she was more than caring. The woman was pure love.

Four years and fifteen million essays later, Jena graduated. And just like her teacher predicted, she became an educator.

Jena

made the five-hour drive back to Pace to visit the old classroom.

It was a school day. Class was in session. Jena walked the halls to room 221. She pressed her ear to the door. A familiar voice with a thick drawl was reading aloud to the class.

Jena slipped into a seat on the back row to listen. When class was over, she stood before the teacher's desk like old times.

Before she could say anything, her teacher handed her a binder.

"What's this?"

"I made it for you," her teacher said.

Jena thumbed through it, starting with the first page. Every letter and email they'd ever exchanged.

And on the last page: an essay written by a restless seventeen-year-old who once wanted to "move far, far away."

When Jena read it, Niagara Falls.

Anyway, I'm getting…

We had a bench by our pond. A pine-log bench. It sat near the edge of the water. Daddy called it the Thinking Bench. I remember the day he built it—using only a sharp axe and cuss words.

It's funny, how I can remember things like benches, but not the last words he ever said to me.

Weeds grew around his bench. He trimmed the grass using a jack knife. Cody, his dog, would sit beside him.

One December morning, when the weather was unusually cold, I found him there. He'd been sitting all night. He wasn't moving. Eyes open. There was a thin layer of frost on his back and shoulders. His red hair stiff from the cold.

Mama ran outside with a blanket. He didn't want it.

“You could'a froze to death," she said. "You need serious help."

"Help doing what?" he'd say with vinegar in his voice.

He didn't trust shrinks. Besides, nobody seemed to know what professional help was. Fewer understood depression. Back then, these were modern ideas used by folks who ate snails

at dinner parties.

Daddy was the kind who made log benches. The kind who liked to sit.

Toward the end of his life, you could find him sitting in his workshop, shirtless. Lights off. No music. Staring.

Or: on the hood of his truck, parked on fifty acres. Leaning against his windshield. Or: in the corner of the barn, on the floor, knees pulled to his chest. Eyes pink and wet.

“What's wrong, Daddy?” I'd ask.

He'd wipe his face. “I don't know, dammit.”

“Will he be okay?” I'd ask Mama.

“I don't think so,” she'd say, giving honest answers—she was through pretending. "He needs help."

The day of his funeral, people with phony grins lined up to shake my hand, saying things like, “Your daddy was just sick...”

I heard that a million and three times. It offended me. These people…