My favorite hymn is the one about leaning on everlasting arms. I got to thinking about this song today when I was sitting on the porch with my sister. We were both singing.

“Leaning, leaning,

“Safe and secure, from all alarms…”

My sister is a 33-year-old woman. She is beautiful. Funny. And she’s got a way about her. She’s meek. And you can just tell that she’s been humbled in her life.

I know a thing or two about being humbled. Which is a very different thing than simply “being a humble person.”

Being a humble person, for example, means that you don’t cut in line, take the last biscuit, or sing karaoke.

But being “humbled” (past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb) is a thing that is done to you. Usually, without your consent. Being humbled is an experience that feels a lot like getting your head shaved.

I have been humbled a lot throughout life. In fact, I will be humbled as soon as I submit this very column when a reader with an English degree writes

to me and says there is no such thing as a “past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb.”

My sister has been humbled too many times for anyone’s good.

It all started when my father died in a traumatic way, an event I’ve written about enough. When this horrible thing happened to my family, my sister and I both quit going to school.

At the time, I was 11, and had no use for sentence diagrams dealing with worthless concepts, such as, to pick a concept at random, intransitive verbs. My sister, however, was in kindergarten when she quit school.

As a result, my sister didn’t learn how to read until she was 20 years old. She became highly skilled at hiding this. Some people never knew she couldn’t read.

When you get older, it gets harder to learn how to read. And once you miss your…

One of the first official dates with my wife took place at her parents’ house. That night, her extremely nosy parents promised not to eavesdrop, nor bother us, nor hide behind the sofa and wait for us to kiss.

Her parents agreed to let us have the entire downstairs to ourselves. And I was nervous. What would we talk about? What would we do? Would her parents leave us alone, or spy on us?

My story takes place in an era when VHS cassettes still roamed the earth. My date and I decided to rent a VHS movie. Although as it turned out, we were so timid we couldn’t actually decide on a movie.

HER: Which movie do you want?

ME: Oh, anything you want.

HER: I don’t care, I’ll watch anything you wanna watch.

ME: Makes no difference. What do you wanna see?

HER: Whatever you wanna see.

ME: I don’t care.

HER: Neither do I, you choose.

ME: No, you.

HER: It’s up to you.

ME: No, it’s your call.

And so it went. Because all young lovers are afraid

to come right out and say something like, “Darling, I do believe I’d prefer to watch something produced by the genius that is Monty Python.”

We had the same hem-hawing conversation about which restaurant to choose for dinner. And in the end, we went hungry because we never settled on a place. We ended up driving in circles for three hours constantly saying, “Where do you wanna eat?” “I don’t care, where do YOU wanna eat?”

Eventually we returned to her parents’ house and spent the rest of the evening trying not to exhibit symptoms of dangerously low blood-sugar.

As it happened, our date night got worse. Because the movie we rented turned out to be the foulest, most inappropriate skin-flick Hollywood ever released. It was so bad we could not watch it.

Five minutes into the film…

I am in the lobby of my hotel, waking up. The coffee is lukewarm. The breakfast is freezer burnt. And the overhead music playing is “Highway to Hell.”

You can’t get away from canned music. It’s everywhere. Like the IRS. Playing in public spaces just loud enough to hear the music thumping, throbbing, pulsating, lamenting, howling, crying, screaming, bawling, thrumming.

There are no old songs used for canned music anymore. These days, most canned music is young music. The kind currently being produced by kids who are barely old enough to buy lotto tickets.

Kids.

It’s hard to find silence anymore. Silence is not a thing in our modern world. The National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division recently measured noise pollution and discovered noise levels have tripled in the last few years.

The roar of traffic, the booms of bulldozers. Whirring distant blenders, making smoothies. TVs blaring 24-hour news channels. Every 11 seconds, somewhere in this country, someone uses a leafblower.

But

canned music is perhaps the most aggravating of all these things. This piped-in music is constantly running inside supermarkets, restaurants, public restrooms, colonoscopy exam rooms, etc.

Per day, Americans are exposed to an averaged 76 minutes of “unchosen” music in public. Stores use this music to develop what businesspersons call “immersive branding” experiences.

The canned music tunes are usually ones you’ve never heard before, produced by artists young enough to be your grandchildren, with names like Rihanna, Ke$ha, and Lady Gaga.

You cannot avoid this music. The music is blasted in parking lots, public parks, and nursing homes. When you are in the hospital, drawing your final breath, Ke$ha will be singing “We R Who We R” overhead, and the nurses will be humming along as they wheel your body off to the morgue.

It’s gotten so bad that some stores are removing canned music. Many Walmarts…

I’m stuck in Nashville traffic. And so, apparently, is everyone else in the Western Hemisphere.

The main culprit here is the highways. Nashville’s highway system is a mess because these roads were built to accommodate approximately 11 cars, whereas there are currently 229 trillion Nashville residents.

So this is a problem. A big one. Because right now I am idling in a thousand-mile line of cars, stuck in a cloud of blue exhaust, and we are moving approximately one nanometer per hour.

I think I’ve figured out the problem here. The problem is, everyone is trying to use the interstate at the same time. Which is bad.

This is just common sense. If everyone in the world tried to take a shower at the same time each morning, the world would run out of water. It’s the same principle. A plus B equals C.

But the traffic problem isn’t getting any better. Because nobody is doing anything about it except buying more electric cars.

Tennessee Department of Transportation reports that, on any

average afternoon in Davidson County, there are strings of electric cars longer than the ladies-restroom line at a Taylor Swift concert.

“The traffic is really difficult,” says a friend who commutes in Nashville traffic every day. Each morning, he spends 120 minutes in his SUV, fighting hundreds of motorists just backing out of his driveway.

He wants a new job, but of course, there are no new jobs in Nashville, only new buildings.

Nashville is one of the leading cites for adding new real estate. In the time it’s taken you to read these paragraphs, Nashville has already built two arenas and one NASCAR súper-speedway.

The skyline changes almost daily.Things have gotten so bad construction-wise that as soon as one new structure is built, demolition crews arrive to tear it down so they can begin erecting a new Starbucks in its place.

This town’s…

It was late. I pulled into the campus after seven o’clock to attend my last class of the semester. My last college class. Ever. It was a night class.

In America, most self-respecting people my age were finishing supper, settling down to watch “Wheel of Fortune.” But I was in school.

I had been attending community college for 11 years. I had been taking a lot of night courses. Which meant that I had perfected the art of eating supper in my truck, on the way to class. I drove with my knees, ate with my hands, and controlled the radio with my big toe.

Supper often consisted of foil-wrapped tamales, purchased from Carmela, a middle-aged Mexican woman who visited our construction jobsites. Carmela traveled in a battered ‘84 Nissan Maxima that looked like a roving salvage yard.

Every time I’d buy a tamale, Carmela would pat my cheek and say, “Joo are very sweet boy, but joo need a bath, joo smell like goat butt.”

So parked my truck. I

rushed into class, smelling like the fundaments of a horned barnyard animal.

Eleven years it had taken me to finish school. Me. A middle-school dropout. My formal education ended in seventh grade, after my father took his own life with a hunting rifle. I simply quit going to school. I was a rural child. It wasn’t a big deal. Nobody seemed to care what rural dropouts did.

I got my first job hanging drywall at age 14. I started working in bars, playing music shortly thereafter. I had a lot of jobs. I hung gutter. I worked as an ice-cream-scoop. I was a telemarketer. I was a nobody. I was white trash.

Until I enrolled in community college.

I enrolled as an adult, and my life changed. I became alumni at Okaloosa-Walton Community College.

I completed high-school equivalency courses. I finished the collegiate coursework. It took me eleven years.…

These aren’t my stories, but I’m going to tell them.

Let’s call her Dana. Dana was going for a walk near her home. It was a dirt road. Her high-school reunion was coming up, she was getting into shape.

A truck pulled beside her. He slowed down. He rolled his window open, he asked if she needed a ride.

Something was wrong. It was the way he looked at her.

Before she knew it, he’d jumped out of the vehicle. She tried to get away. He overpowered her and threw her into a ditch.

She landed a few good hits to his face, but he outweighed her.

He used a pocketknife. He pressed it against her. She screamed something. She doesn’t remember which words she used, but she aimed them toward heaven.

Something happened.

His body froze. Completely. He was like a statue, only meaner. She wanted to run, but she was too scared.

That’s when she saw another man standing above her attacker. He was tall, with a calm face.

“It’s gonna be okay, Dana,” the tall man said. “Go on home, sweetie, everything’s gonna be

okay.”

Here’s another:

Jim was dying. A seventy-something Vietnam veteran with high morals, pancreatic cancer, and a two-packs-a-day habit.

Doctors said his cancer would kill him.

Treatments were hell. Jim met a man in the VA hospital. A homeless man with a duffle bag. A fellow vet.

They shared a few cigarettes. They swapped stories. They understood each other. Jim invited the man home.

The man stayed in Jim’s guest room. He stayed for several months.

He became Jim’s caregiver. He wiped Jim’s mouth after episodes of vomiting, he stayed up late during sleepless nights, he helped Jim bathe. He’d pat Jim’s back when nausea got bad, saying, “It’s gonna be alright.”

And he was there on Jim’s final day, too. He waited in the den while Jim’s family gathered around his bed.…