Sundown. I’m on vacation, sitting on the beach. I’m wearing a red Hawaiian shirt, swim trunks, a Resistol summerwear cattleman’s hat, and I’m reading Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”

I’m carefully keeping my electrolytes and B vitamins balanced with a healthful tonic that comes in longneck bottles.

In the middle distance, I’m watching a mother teach her son to swim.

“Don’t let me go, Mom!” the kid shouts, and his voice ricochets off the smooth water. He’s maybe 6 years old.

“I won’t let you go,” his mother says.

“Please! Don’t let go.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Keep kicking your legs, honey, I’ve got you.”

The colors of the sun paint a Monet on the Gulf’s glasslike surface. The kid’s father is also watching the ordeal. The dad is half in the water, knee-deep, videoing the whole thing on his phone.

“Wave to the camera!” shouts Dad.

And in this moment I am eternally grateful that I was born before the Age of Phone Video. I wouldn’t have wanted my chubby childhood on film.

I don’t need visual documentation of my fledgling moments. Such

as the second-grade Christmas pageant when I dropped a frankincense box off the gymnasium stage and nearly gave Mrs. Simms a subdural hematoma.

Besides, I don’t look good on camera. If someone would have videoed my first swim lesson, I’ll tell you what they would have witnessed: incoordination.

The guy who first attempted to teach me to swim was named Rodney. Rodney was a lifeguard at our public pool. He had army tattoos and a deep affection for unfiltered Camels.

The main thing I remember about Rodney was that he drove a 1970 Dodge Charger (B-body) with a 440 Six Pack Hemi hood cutout and a pistol-grip shifter. Not that this matters.

When it came to swimming, Rodney’s philosophy was pretty laid back. He would throw us kids in the shallow end like bowling balls…

“First you gotta peel the eggs,” says the old woman as she peels hard boiled eggs over a sink. “This is the hardest part. You gotta have good fingernails.”

We are having a video call. The white-haired woman is standing in her kitchen. When she finishes peeling, she fires up an Oster electric mixer that whirs like a son of a gun.

“I use an electric mixer to whip my egg filling ‘cause my hands get tired stirring.” She laughs. “My deviled eggs are so good.”

Good. The goodness of mankind is a hotly contested idea in today’s tense world. Historically, this is nothing new. People have scoffed at the idea that mankind is intrinsically good since Eve took up dressmaking. Many believe there is no inherent goodness in human nature.

And then there are people like Miss Reba, with her deviled eggs.

Reba is 83 and a committed deviled-egg artist. The woman has been cooking for funerals, weddings, and local clambakes for 60-some-odd years. And she’s still chugging.

“The secret to good deviled eggs,” says Miss Reba,

addressing the phone camera, “is there ain’t no secret.”

This makes her giggle again. Then Reba takes a sip of a potent clear drink her daughter, Annie, mixed in honor of our phone call.

I ask the old woman, “What’s in the glass?”

Reba takes a sip. “Ovaltine.”

Miss Reba’s deviled eggs are famous in four counties. This particular batch is for the family of a 17-year-old girl who died in a car wreck. These eggs are for the funeral.

Sometimes Reba has been known to travel up to six hours to deliver her deviled eggs.

I asked why Reba does this. Why prepare food for random people, then go to the trouble of hand delivering it?

“Because I need them to see my face. Need them to know someone’s praying for’em. Deviled eggs are my excuse for dropping by.”

Miss Reba…

An old Florida village. Not the touristy kind with swimsuit shops and scooter rentals. This is a place where the local high-school colors are probably camo and orange.

We are vacationing nearby this week. I am in search of tuna dip.

I pull into a random seafood market. The place isn’t fancy. This is rural Florida, where all seafood markets are required by state law to look like rundown miniature correctional facilities.

In the sandy parking area an old man and a kid leap out of a dusty Suburban then walk inside. The old man wears an Atlanta Braves ballcap. His grandson, maybe 9 years old, wears a Freddie Freeman jersey.

Inside the market, the old man never speaks. He communicates via sign language with the boy. I don’t speak sign language, but I speak fluent Kid. And I see a lot of love on that little freckled face.

When the employee at the counter is ready to take their order, the old man gestures to the kid who serves as our translator this afternoon.

The kid

points and speaks to the guy at the counter. “We want three pounds of those.”

The seafood market employee is a man with a shaved head, lots of inkwork, and an unlit cigarette wedged in his lips. We must have caught him just before a smoke break.

The inactive cigarette bounces when he talks. “Three pounds of shrimp? Anything else, boss?”

The kid checks with Granddaddy for instructions. The old man looks over the motherlode of seafood displayed on ice. Choices, choices. He signs to Junior.

Junior translates. “Yeah. What’re those things?”

“These? Grouper cheeks. Good eating. Want some?”

The kid signs to the old man who nods.

“Yes, please.”

The kid never stops signing, even when speaking to the cashier. It’s called being polite to Grandad.

“Sure thing, bossman.” The guy behind the counter is trying to act nonchalant about this exchange,…

I am driving toward the edge of the known Earth on a remote Franklin County highway. We’re going on vacation, and my old Ford is taking us there.

The speed limit is 65 mph, but we Fords just do the best we can.

I’m a Ford guy. My father and grandfather were Ford men. We Ford patrons have our critics, we’ve heard all the demeaning jokes. But we’re okay with being teased about our vehicles.

You can say what you will about our cars, but I’d rather push a Ford than drive a BMW.

This afternoon, I’m the only vehicle on this chipped, Floridian pavement. Save for a ‘78 Bronco Ranger XLT ahead with a bumper sticker that reads: “That’s not a leak, that’s just my Ford marking its territory.”

Ford guys.

I am driving through the real Florida. I roll past Panhandle hamlets and locales the general public rarely hears about.

Port Saint Joe, Apalachicola, Eastpoint, Tate’s Hell State Forest, Carabelle, Saint Teresa, Alligator Point, the Ochlockonee Bay. Florida’s “Forgotten Coast” becomes the “Big Bend” where, mercifully, you often lose

cellular service.

I check my phone. No signal. Hallelujah.

The beach house we rented this week is off the map. It’s an outdated shack, built during the Carter Administration. It’s got all the archaic fixtures you don’t see anymore.

The bedrooms are clad in honest-to-goodness shag carpet. In the kitchen is an olive drab rotary phone. They have tube TVs, and a Scrabble game that’s missing all the O’s.

There is a window-unit AC which only works if you slam your beer on it. The water heater is roughly the size of a football; hot showers last 27.3 seconds.

No cable, no internet. I’ll be writing these columns using my trusty 28-year-old portable AlphaSmart word processor—a primitive device that requires nothing but double-A batteries and a few Fonzie-at-the-jukebox slaps.

I’ve almost forgotten how good it feels to be disconnected…

He was two years old when his mother gave him away. He has one faint memory of her. In the memory, she is sitting in the backseat, holding him. He remembers radio music. Sunlight. That’s all.

It’s a short recollection, but it’s all he has.

His addict mother underhanded him to his aunt like he was an unwanted Labrador. His aunt had worse addiction problems than his mother, the situation didn’t work out. He was five when his aunt gave him to the foster system.

Group homes are not places you want to find yourself as a kid. Three squares and a bed. It’s no day at the Best Western. In orphanages love is hard to come by. Hope can seem like a myth.

When he was thirteen he came down with pneumonia. It landed him in the hospital for a week. He didn’t care if he survived.

At night, he’d often stare out his hospital window and wonder if anyone even cared whether he lived.

“I was alone, man,” he told me. “I was a kid

who was totally alone. Lotta people don’t know how that feels. I hope they never do.”

One night a woman with gray hair and kind eyes visited the boy’s room. She was a night-shift nurse. She saw him looking at the Milky Way through the window.

“Whatcha staring at?” she asked.

“I dunno. Stars, I guess.”

Their relationship was as easy as throwing a rock. She talked. He listened. She told stories that left him engrossed. A good story can do a lot for a lonely kid.

The woman told a particularly moving story the kid would never forget. It was a tale about her grandmother, who had been raised in orphanages during the Great Depression. This story hit the boy where he lived. His ears grew ten sizes while she talked.

She told him how her granny wore ratty clothes and ate…

The things I could write about pound cake. I could go on and on and bore you to death, but I won’t.

After my father died, I remember visiting a Methodist church with my boyhood friend, and he was introducing me to people. He was raised Methodist, I was not. My people were Baptist.

The Methodists were cheerful. My people didn’t believe in cheer. Our pastor preached hard against alcoholism, promiscuity, and narcotics because these things could lead to cigarette smoking.

My friend pointed to one lady in the congregation. She was slight, with gray hair, and a blue skirt suit.

There are some people you don’t forget. She was one of those people.

She had a heavenly glow. People smiled when they passed by her like she was unique.

“Who’s that woman?” I asked.

“That is the Pound Cake Lady,” my pal said in reverence.

After the Methodist service, my friend led me to a downstairs fellowship hall. The Methodists put out a bigger spread than any I’d ever seen. There was even a special table dedicated

to cornbread and biscuits.

It was too much. Overwhelming. I even saw people standing outside the fellowship hall, smoking cigarettes after their meal. It was as though they were unwinding after sin.

The woman in the blue skirt suit placed something on the end of the table. It was golden, fat, hulking, sacred pound cake.

“Hurry and get some,” said my friend, “before it’s all gone.”

He was right. The cake didn’t last four seconds among those chain-smoking Methodists. But when it disappeared, the old woman replaced it with another.

People blessed her name forevermore. Hallelujah. And so did I.

So every church has a pound cake lady. They are young, middle-aged, or elderly, and they are holy. These ladies are messengers, sent to humanity as proof that God is not gluten-free. He loves white flour, sugar, and butter, no matter what…

There is something about the way the sun falls upon the lustrous water of the Choctawhatchee Bay that lights my heart on fire.

No. Wait. I apologize. That sentence you read in the above paragraph was ridiculous. Lustrous? How immature and overly dramatic. This is because I wrote that sentence when I was about 17 years old, everything was dramatic back then.

That was probably the age when I truly decided that I wanted to be a writer. I was lanky. I was dumb. I was a fatherless dropout. I remember taking my Lettera 32 portable typewriter down to the bay, pulling it out of its travel case, and loading it with paper. I expected a wave of literary inspiration to just (bam!) hit me, but nothing happened. Nada. Zip.

Welcome to writing, kid.

I was sitting there on the shore, my typewriter was getting corroded with salt air, and the only sentence that came to me was the ridiculous one you just read.

But I remember the evening

I wrote it. I was camping by the water in a secluded spot. My dog was with me. Lady was her name. She was curly-haired, and faithful. Behind me was my pup tent. Ahead of me was that water. And that stupid typewriter.

What a dork. I can’t believe the level of dorkiness. I remember sitting by that bay, trying to write what I hoped would become a novel. I got maybe six words into it and realized I was an idiot.

You can’t write a novel at 17, your earlobes haven’t dropped yet. You know nothing of life, or about the joys of paying health insurance premiums that cost more than tactical helicopters. But there I was, trying, and I have to give Young Me credit for giving it his best shot.

Somehow, the kid thought that looking at the big water would give him the right words. But after…

I have here an email from a woman in North Carolina, named Pam, who writes:

“My dad died of COVID-19, and there could only be a few of us at his funeral for obvious reasons. I don’t know how to stay positive anymore, I don’t know how to cope, I’m crying while I write this. He was my best friend and he’s gone.”

Pam, after I read your letter, out of pure reflex I was tempted to say, “I am sorry.”

But I caught myself. People are programmed to say that little phrase without even thinking. We say it because we don’t know what else to say at funerals. It just slips out. I don’t care for the phrase.

I don’t mean to imply that saying “I’m sorry” is insensitive. It’s just that EVERYONE says it. And sometimes, it comes off as insincere.

The day of my father's funeral, for example, I must have heard this phrase about 24,192 times. By the end of the day I never wanted to hear “I’m sorry” again.

There are other things people

could say in these instances. People could always go with something honest, like: “Hey, I don’t know what to say.” Or they could just hug you and say nothing.

But alas, most folks stick with the old standbys. “He was a good man.” “Life is short.” Or my personal favorite: “He’s in a better place.”

Do you know what I wish people would say at funerals sometimes? The truth. As in:

“This really sucks.”

One time, my mother had a momentary breakdown shortly after my father passed. Her emotions overtook her. She screamed until her voice broke. She said over and over again, “THIS SUCKS!!!”

We’d never heard her say that word before. But she was saying how we all felt. And it needed to be said.

The ironic thing is, my mother didn’t talk that way. My mother is a…

We are getting gentle rain in Northwest Florida. I am on the porch, watching it fall. I love rain. We have been quarantined for 45 days, and I am going crazy. So the rain is a friend.

Maybe I like rain because of what it represented when I was growing up. See, the people I come from never stopped working. Not even on holidays, weekends, or during the World Series. It was always work, work, work. The only time they ever took a break was when the preacher was about to bury them.

Unless it was raining.

And this, I suppose, is why rain will always be special to me. Rain makes me think of days passed on the porch. The only time my father and mother would sit on the porch and refrain from blatant yard work was during a good rain.

My mother would be sewing something. My father would be shirtless, like a hick. He never wore a shirt at home. His people never wore shirts, either. He

hated shirts. One time I asked my father what life was like before I was born, and I’ll never forget when he said, “We used to walk around naked all day.”

I don’t think he was telling the full truth because my mother was a hand-raising fundamentalist who did not believe in nakedness. If she could have had her way, I would have showered with my clothes on.

My mother’s fundamentalist food was always particularly good on rainy days. This is because my mother would bust her butt in the kitchen since she couldn’t bust her butt outside.

She had these gospel records she would listen to while she would be frying something. Or a gospel radio show she would have playing, where Baptist quartets sang songs that only men who were castrated could sing.

Her food was legendary. That’s another thing about my family. We grew up breaking…

Yesterday I went for a walk. I have been going on a lot of walks ever since the word “quarantine” became a household term.

Sometimes, I like to be alone in the woods. I grew to become a big fan of the woods when I was a young man, growing up in a household full of females, waiting sometimes nine hours for the bathroom to be free. I visited the woods a lot back then.

One of my favorite secluded spots is near the water, in a big swamp.

When I arrived, I saw two men fishing. They sat on overturned buckets. One man was mid-60s, the other was about 19 maybe 20. Both wore surgical masks and they were sitting about 25 feet apart.

This is one of my all-time favorite fishing spots. But the funny thing is, this place has terrible fishing. That’s not why people come. They all visit for the same reason I do.

They come because these surroundings are a sanctuary. Large swollen cypress trees stand in

swamp water that goes on for acres, dotted with billions of lily pads, croaking frogs, a few gators, and egrets.

I love egrets. Sometimes I stop by this little place simply to watch egrets. Egrets have that ice-cold glare. A look that says they are smarter than you are. A look that says they don’t give a rip about what kinds of problems mankind gets himself tangled in. All an egret cares about is eating.

I introduced myself to the two fishermen.

“I’m Mark,” the young kid told me. “And this is my dad.”

Dad said, “I’d shake your hand, but...”

Right. Social-distancing. I stayed about 30 feet away from them.

Dad has a weak immune system after having survived an infection following a surgery last year. When the coronavirus epidemic hit, Mark was away at college in northern Alabama. They told Mark to stay away from home…