She wasn't going to wear an apron. Because the only girls who wore aprons were housewives, and she wasn't going to be one. It wasn't that she had anything against housewives, it was that she saw something else whenever she looked into the mirror.

“I didn't want to be a maid and cook,” she said. “I had too restless of a brain.”

But, this was wartime. And in small-town, rural Florida, once girls reached puberty, they had two career options: (a) teaching school (b) aprons.

And, since she had a God-given passion for not wiping snotty noses, she went away to the Florida College For Women, in Tallahassee.

“I was

in the marching band,” she said. “We got to travel everywhere. It was like being famous. Suddenly, this little farm girl was wearing sparkling uniforms with tassels. I loved it.”

And then the war ended.

In a few weeks, the entire world was overrun with soldiers looking to make new lives for themselves. And there weren't enough colleges to hold them all.

“So they renamed our school,” she said. “The name stuck—Florida State. You might've heard of it?"

It rings a bell.

"We girls weren't happy about it," she said.…

"Number one thing I'm afraid of is being alone," says my longtime pal.

But, this can't be right. Because my friend is not afraid of anything. He's fearless. Well, at least he's unafraid of snakes.

While we walked through an overgrown field somewhere outside McKenzie, Alabama, we heard a loud rattling noise. A sound which—due to centuries of accumulated folk-wisdom and various Biblical serpent-stories—mankind instinctively runs like hell from.

Which is what I did.

He laughed. “What're you running from?” He stooped down to pick up the thing. “It's just a little old rattler.”

The fifty-foot diamond-back was anything but "little." Besides, I hate snakes. Especially "little old" ones.

In kindergarten,

a zoologist visited our school. The man paraded around our tiny assembly hall with a little old albino python wrapped around his neck. The thing crawled inside his shirt-collar and...

I can barely write this.

Anyway, out of twenty-five kids in our class, one child had a nervous breakdown and did something truly awful in his pants. I won't tell you which kid. But I will say: Mrs. Welch called my mother to drop off a pair of clean britches and a bottle of bleach to the school.

My…

Miss Betty nearly drowned when she was twenty-six-years old, in a little pond.

“I'd never learned how to swim,” she said. “God, It was like fighting the strongest gravity. My bodyweight just kinda sucked me under.”

Betty lost consciousness.

“All I can remember,” she said. “Is that I was somewhere else, in my mind and body. I didn't see anything spectacular. But I did feel like I was leaving one place, going to another. Does that makes sense?”

Not really.

“I heard someone talking to me. Only, it was saying stuff in MY voice."

It was saying, "It's gonna be alright, Betty."

Next, meet Phillip, he's seventy-nine years young this July, and

he talks with a Carolinian drawl so thick, it smells like possum pie.

“I KNEW I was going to die,” Phillip said. “I mean, I knew it was my time. The doctor told me flat-out, 'Phillip, you're gonna die.'"

He went home and vomited himself to sleep.

Phillip refused medical treatment, hoping to live out his final days without hair-loss or bone-crushing nausea. And he started spending his money like a man whose face was on fire. He sold his things and bought an RV.

The nice kind…

Right now, I'm looking in my refrigerator. To the left of the beer, I see so much pimento cheese it's enough to give a man cardiac arrest. My wife made buckets of this stuff. And I should tell you: this isn't your average pimento cheese. This is Billy Graham in a Tupperware container.

And, in an unprecedented act of culinary selflessness, my wife has allowed me to share her top-secret Southern recipe.

So, without further delay, here's how she does it:

1. The very first step is to spend an entire childhood riding your bike down the sidewalks of a town about the size of

an area rug. I'm sorry, but you can't just can't make good pimento cheese if you grew up riding the public transit in East L.A. So get out there and start pedaling.

2. Buy a camouflage apron.

3. Read the entire Southern Living Cookbook collection. You'll find volumes 1 through 59,124 on my bottom bookshelf. Skip the holiday editions.

4. Own at least 1 string of pearls. It will take some time to break these puppies in. You must wear them often—this includes football games and showers.

5. Teach Sunday school.

6. Drink beer from…

I'm no psychiatrist, but that doesn't mean I can't prescribe mind-numbing medication—which I most certainly can. So, if you feel like your life has turned into cosmic kitty-litter clumps, here's a script straight from the doctor's notepad:

1. get in your car

2. head south.

Do it now—since it's summer. And do it on Sunday, because this is when small towns come alive. Don't take my word for it, listen to Joel:

“Sundays in my town were somethin' else. My dad invited folks home, after church. It was his goal to get so many people around our table that they had to stand around holding plates. His mac and

cheese was somethin' else.”

You'll note: "somethin' else," is Southern for, "pretty stinking good."

Marsha remembers Sundays from another point of view. “For my family,” she says, “the whole day was church. Mother and I arranged the flowers for two services. Afterward, we'd go home, hang up our Sunday clothes, eat lunch, then put'em back on for Sunday NIGHT.”

Sunday night service. You haven't seen anything until you've watched an out-of-town preacher slap the Bible on a Sunday night. It's somethin' else.

Now, meet Gregory and his brother, two middle-aged fellas…

We drove backroads, a cloud of dust kicking up behind us. Daddy wore his smudged-up work clothes. He looked out the windshield. Neither of us said much.

While he drove, we stared at the fields and farmland zipping past our windows. Such things have a way of making your mind run quiet. Barns. Farmland. Endless rows of fenceposts.

He turned at the large creek. The old metal bridge looked like a leftover from the heydays of the railroad. He rolled to a stop, then jammed the gearshift into park.

“See this bridge,” he said. “I used to spend a lot of time on this thing, haven't been here

in years.”

He jumped out of the truck. Then, he rapped his knuckles on the iron. A dull ringing suggested this thing was older and tougher than me.

I looked over the edge. It was a long way down.

He leapt onto the iron beam, then scaled to the top. “I used to do this as a boy," he called down. He held his hands outward and walked along like a tight-rope walker.

This was not altogether unusual for my father, he was an iron worker. He spent his days stick-welding, walking…

The nursing home has a big flat-screen television. And at ten in the morning, you can find white-haired women sitting in front of it, expressionless. TV blaring.

The woman to my left turns and asks, "Have you seen my daughter? I think she's coming today."

"Sorry, ma'am. Haven't seen her."

On TV: a fitness model explains the paramount importance of the perfect beach-body. This girl looks like she's made of plastic and Spandex.

The elderly woman has no problem talking over the noise. “HEY! That girl on television looks like my daughter. Do you know if my family's coming today?"

Fitness-girl is doing step-ups, and punching the air.

The

old woman goes on, "We didn't have time to exercise in my day. My daddy was a cotton-mill worker. We didn't know where our next meal was coming from. By the time I's fourteen, we'd moved twenty-one times around Alabama."

Now the girl on TV is demonstrating how to tone buttocks by squatting on a chair. “MY BUTT," the girl is saying, "is the most ESSENTIAL part of my being..."

The woman ignores the television. "I had a friend when I's young, she invited me and my little brother for supper.…

It sounded like a flock of dying cats. Whining, howling, singing voices, accompanied by out-of-tune guitars and laughter.

It was marvelous.

My neighbor. His family was in town for the holiday weekend. While their grill smoked, they sat on the porch working up a good beer-glow, singing.

I sat outside, my ear cocked toward them.

They sang tunes like: “Uncloudy Day,” or, “Peace in the Valley.” And when they got to “I Come To The Garden,” somebody's wife joined in and put them all

to shame. She knew every verse.

I remember my grandaddy saying once, “Record players stole common folks' voices."

As a five-year-old, all I could do was reflect on this, and answer, "Did you know butterflies can taste with their feet?"

Which is true.

He ignored me and went on, "Boy, there was a time when the only way to hear a song was to watch a man…