DEAR SEAN:

How do I get a girl to like me? I am a 7th-grader who goes to (blank) Middle School and I really want her to think I am cool even though I’m not one of the cool kids… I am a little chunky, but I’m really nice.

Please write me back with advice,
UNCOOL-IN-THE-7TH-GRADE

DEAR UNCOOL:

Let’s take a look at “coolness.” First, when I was your age, coolness was dependent upon a surprisingly short list of criteria.

1. Did the child in question own, or have sufficient access to, and was thereby able to use at will, without administrative or parental restriction, a Sony Walkman radio?

Secondly: Did this kid wear dorky khaki pants?

It was that easy.

The problem for me was, of course, my mother believed in the Gospel According to Khakis. She ironed my slacks with so much starch the creases could slice cantaloupes.

Thus, while other kids wore blue jeans, I wore khakis that had been—and this is very hard for me to say—purchased from Sears.

AND…

These were not just pants.

They were “Husky” pants. You might not know what that is. They were pants designed for boys who loved church potlucks. I looked like a khaki-colored Butterball ham.

So anyway, there was this girl. Her name was—never mind, it doesn’t matter. I thought she was wonderful. She was one of the “cool” kids. I wanted her to notice me.

More importantly, I wanted her to notice me AT THE ROLLER RINK.

Now, I know what a kid from your generation might be thinking: “What’s a roller rink?” I’m glad you asked. Because long ago, after the dawn of the electric lightbulb, we had big buildings that were dimly lit and smelled like body odor. We would skate for hours to such unforgettable hits like: “Do the Hustle,” “Love Train,” and “Tico Tico.”

If you were worth your salt, you asked…

A frozen yogurt joint. I’ve just finished supper. My belt is tight from eating too much pizza.

There are too many yogurt flavors to choose from in this place. Triple Dark Peruvian Fudgesicle, Very Berry Quite Contrary, Oreo Delight, Midnight Mudpie in Mississippi—shut my mouth. Of course, the Orange Julius flavor doesn’t taste too shabby, either.

Then again, artificial orange doesn’t always set well with me. When I was a boy, the doctor gassed me with orange-flavored laughing gas just before tonsil surgery.

All I remember after that is hearing nurses play Righteous Brothers music through a transistor radio while I breathed in orange fumes. Ever since then I have detested Sunkist, orange-flavored bubble gum, and I can’t hear “Unchained Melody” without breaking into a nervous sweat.

So I’m sampling yogurt flavors, and that’s when I see her. She’s twelve, maybe thirteen. She’s with her family. She is small, with red hair. I have a soft spot for redheads since God accidentally made me one.

The girl is feeding her little brother with a spoon. The boy has a

cast on one arm and a sling on the other.

“He fell,” the boy’s father explains. “He was climbing our gutter on the porch.”

“The gutter?” I say.

“The gutter.”

He broke one arm and injured his other shoulder. No sooner had he hit the ground than his twelve-year-old sister came running to the rescue. And as the story goes: she carried her brother indoors, over her shoulder. Big Sister has been caring for Little Brother ever since.

“I love taking care of people,” the girl tells me. “I’m gonna be a nurse one day.”

The girl’s mother says that her daughter has always wanted to be a nurse, from Day One. And earlier this year, before Little Brother attempted his solo flight across the Atlantic, the girl actually got her chance to be a real nurse.

It happened when her…

She reads the Bible every morning. She also smokes off-brand cigarettes. For an old-school Methodist like her, the two go hand in hand.

She’s eighty-four and frail. She digs a cigarette from a carton, her daughter lights it. The doctor says she shouldn’t smoke, but the Good Lord understands.

She tells a story.

“After my husband left us,” she begins, “I was raising my kids, doing all I could to survive. He left me with eighteen bucks in our bank account—no lie.”

Then, the worst happened. One day, she walked into work and her boss fired her.

Instead of crying, she lost her temper. She attacked him. She threw a lunch bucket at him. She landed several good slaps to his face. Her friends pulled her away. This woman, in case you’re wondering, is a regular barrel of gunpowder.

That night, she loaded her children into a station wagon and drove straight for her sister’s in South Carolina. Radio blasting. Cigarettes burning.

“I was crying,” she says. “And worried about everything, I was just sick.”

Her car

broke down somewhere outside Athens, Georgia, at two in the morning. An empty highway. Not a soul for miles.

Her station wagon sat in a ditch. Her children were in the backseat, asleep. She leaned against her steering wheel and the tears came freely. This was officially rock bottom.

Her sobbing was interrupted by the sound of transfer truck brakes, when a big rig pulled behind her with its Earth-shaking engine. Headlights blaring.

A man stepped out of the cab and walked toward her.

She recalls: “Here I was, a young woman, in the middle of nowhere, and this man comes walking up. I was pretty scared.”

He was tall. She remembers this very clearly. And older. He asked if she needed help. She told him what had happened with a nervous voice.

His smile put her at ease. He said, “Pop the…

It happened long ago, when this writer was just a kid. And even though the writer is a grown man now, even though he has a family, he’ll always be a kid when he retells this story.

The kid had a father. The father was forty-one. Tall. Handsome. Red hair. One Sunday, the kid’s family threw his father a birthday party. It was a grand affair with steak for supper. There was singing, joyous voices, card games, redneck music on a boombox, and laughing.

The kid’s mother made a cake with blue icing. The room went black, the candles were lit. The kid’s father took one breath and blew them all out. Everyone seemed so happy.

The following Tuesday, something was off. The kid noticed his old man’s face had changed somehow. Something behind the eyes was different. It was like the kid didn’t know this man anymore. How could it happen so quickly? How could the utter joy be replaced with The Blackness?

There was a fight between his father and mother. A big one.

A nuclear fight. The Hiroshima of Mom-and-Dad fights. Violence ensued. Threats were shouted. His father’s mind was not working normally. Something had snapped inside the man’s mind.

The kid’s mother pleaded. The father screamed things that weren’t making sense. The forty-one-year-old tossed furniture against walls. He hurt people. Spit frothed at the corners of his father’s mouth. The kid’s world was coming apart. All that was missing was Chicken Little.

“Daddy’s lost his mind,” was all the kid could tell his baby sister who screamed into the folds of his T-shirt.

“Call 911” shouted the kid’s mother.

There are too many things that happened on that night to write here. And besides, the goal of this writing is not to bring you down, I merely want to talk about a sickness.

The sickness I speak of is a sickness of the mind, but an…

Dan Lovette became an usher at the Baptist church on Easter Sunday, March 26th, 1961. He stood at the door shaking hands, passing out bulletins. He got a lot of funny looks because nobody knew Dan.

Weeks earlier, Pastor Lovette had introduced Dan as his older brother. Dan was a tall man with a soft voice, and rough skin. He wore a brown suit that was too small. He hardly spoke to parishioners.

He sat on the front row during sermons. After service, he smoked cigarettes behind the church. People asked the pastor questions about Dan, but the preacher was quiet when it came to his older brother.

Over the years, folks saw a lot of Dan Lovette. He could be seen pushing a mower, changing the church sign, painting the clapboards, passing out bulletins on Sundays, or cleaning the sanctuary on Monday afternoons.

Dan lived in a back room of the church, behind the choir loft. His earthly belongings amounted to one cot, a hot plate, a coffee pot,

a transistor radio, a shaving kit, and one brown suit.

Nobody can forget the Sunday that the pastor announced he would be baptizing Dan after service, this surprised people. Most fundamentalists thought it was quite strange, scandalous even, that the pastor’s own brother had never been baptized.

Even so, sixty-four church members stood near the creek, watching the tall man wade into shallow water behind his younger brother, the preacher. It was a simple ordeal. Down Dan went; up he came. Applause. Bring on the banana pudding.

But life was not all pudding and baptisms. In 1974, tragedy hit the church. The pastor was in a car accident on his way home from Montgomery, doctors thought he’d had a stroke while driving.

For weeks, Dan sat beside his brother’s hospital bed without sleep or food. He lived in a hospital room.

And on the next Sunday, Dan Lovette took the…

Somewhere in Maryland. It’s an eerie feeling, cycling in the woods, far from civilization. You could die out here and nobody would know for days until your income taxes were late.

The newspaper story would read, “Cyclist tries to fend off copperhead with tennis shoe and dies.”

My wife and I have been doing this remote trail together, but somehow we got split up this afternoon. I don’t know how I lost her. I know she’s biking ahead of me somewhere, but I haven’t seen her in a mile. I’m starting to get worried, thinking about all this copperhead business. I hate snakes.

This trail is full of fatal snake stories. You hear idle chatter from fellow hikers retelling tales about how some hapless soul once got snakebitten on the face by a copperhead while trying to take the snake’s picture.

There are a million chilling tales like this circulating around the trail.

So your senses get very heightened while you’re out here. Which isn’t a bad thing, actually. It’s exhilarating. It makes snacks taste better. Your vision gets

sharper. Scenery seems more intense.

After another few minutes, I see my wife in the distance. I am relieved to finally find her. She has stopped on the trail, straddling her bike, waiting for me. Her tiny black silhouette is far away against a cloudy sky. A canopy of oaks drape over her. She doesn’t see me yet.

This woman has been with me for nearly two decades. Sometimes it still feels like we just met last Tuesday.

Oh, how I wish time would slow down.

I’ve been thinking about some deep stuff in the woods this afternoon. It’s easy to do that in this space. It’s probably because you’re always staring at ancient trees that will outlive everyone’s great-great-great grandkids.

And you’re looking at towering volcanic prehistoric rocks that just sit here undisturbed. You think about how these rocks will…

CONFLUENCE, Pa.—We are in an itty-bitty town that is dotted with old houses. The low mountains slope downward into three giant converging rivers. There are herculean oaks everywhere. Lots of wildflowers. If they were going to remake “Sound of Music,” they would shoot it in Confluence.

And I’m scribbling notes about it all in my little notebook. Because this is what I do. I have carried a notebook for years now, it goes everywhere with me, and I write everything down. You never know when inspiration will hit you with a two-by-four.

Today the little Pennsylvania community is overrun with cyclists who are biking the Great Allegheny Passage through the Appalachian Mountains. Which is what my wife and I have been doing for the last five days.

We ride for hours until our butts have lost all sensation. Then we pull over and cheerfully pop handfuls of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication.

Out on the trail you get to know your fellow trail-riders because you pass each other a lot. You’re following the same bike route.

You sleep in the same towns, shelters, hostels, or roadside ditches. You eat at the same spots. You steal the same canteen water from the same unsuspecting residential homes.

I meet an older couple from Manhattan, New York. They are doing the trail together with two top-of-the-line mountain bikes. He’s 67, and recently recovering from a stroke. She is 63 and his lifeline.

He has a voice like a guy who might own a pizza joint in Brooklyn. She sounds like Edith Bunker. I love these people.

He’s fallen off his bike twice on the trail due to muscle weakness from the stroke. But he’s not discouraged.

He says, “Listen, I got no broken bones—knock on wood—and no cuts. I’m making it to the end, or so help me.”

I meet a young man from California. He’s doing the trail entirely on foot. Sometimes he hikes…

STONYCREEK TOWNSHIP, Pa.—The Flight 93 National Memorial sits on a broad green pasture. The field is remote, interrupted only by minimalist monuments standing in the distance, surrounded by vivid wildflowers.

One monument is a 93-foot high musical instrument, with 41 colossal wind chimes, making clunking sounds that sing across the meadow like a glockenspiel.

There is no other structure like this in the world.

The monument honors the 41 passengers and crewmembers from United Airlines Flight 93. The hijacked plane that crashed in this field 19 years ago.

The National Park Service runs this place today. But not so long ago this was open farmland.

It happened on a Tuesday morning. Perfect weather. Clear sky. Locals saw a Boeing 757 jerking through the air at an awkward angle.

Farmers watched in slack-jawed amazement. Commuters pulled over to see a commercial airliner bounce from the sky and slam into the Earth.

When the plane hit soil it sounded like the world had come apart at the bolts. A mile-high column of

black smoke wafted into the air. The clear sky was ruined.

Earlier that morning the flight had been due for takeoff from Newark International Airport at 8:01 a.m. But, because this is America (Land of the Free and Home of the Flight Delayed) the flight was running late by 41 minutes.

The passengers and crew were chatty that morning. People made conversations over Styrofoam coffee cups. It was usual talk.

They chatted about their kids’ soccer games. Work. The new fad diet that wasn’t making their thighs any smaller.

In the cockpit, pilot Jason Dahl was going through his preflight stuff. He was 43, cobby build, with a smile that looked like he could have been your favorite uncle Lou.

Jason always carried a little box of rocks with him. They were a gift from his son. When a man carries a box of rocks simply because his kid collected…

OHIOPYLE, Pa.—When we started this ridiculously long bike trail, I had no idea what the heck I was getting myself into.

A guy learns how out-of-shape he is when he’s riding a silly trike in the Appalachian Mountains.

That’s the ironic thing about doing trails. By the time you finish the trail you’re finally in-shape. But by then it doesn’t matter. Because the trail is finished and it’s time to eat Hostess products again.

My wife and I have been biking for two days in the Allegheny region of the Appalachians. Our route follows the roaring Youghiogheny River and it led us here, to the tiny town of Ohiopyle. Population 56.

My body hurts. And I mean all over. If it’s attached to me, it hurts. No matter how small the body part.

My fingernail? Hurts. Hair cuticles? Hurt. My nose? Totally sunburned.

Yesterday, my wife and I were the only people on a long stretch of trail that cut through the prettiest hill country known to mankind. We shuffled through miles of loveliness that became so overwhelming

you half wished the scenery would stop.

But the trail doesn’t stop. It goes on and on. And all you can do is pedal.

That’s what we do now. We pedal. We pedal until we forget we’re pedaling. We’re just existing. Breathing. Zombies. Two pieces of meat with legs.

Why are we pedaling? How did we start? It’s as though we’ve always been doing this. I came out of the womb pedaling. I will pedal until I die. And when they put me in the ground they will notice that my feet are still twitching.

My wife and I mostly ride in silence. It’s an odd thing, being on a trail from sunrise to sunset. You don’t talk much. In fact, you don’t have anything important to say. And you realize you never had anything important to say. Ninety percent of all…

SMITHTON—Sunrise. A small Pennsylvania town. I’m sipping weak coffee, writing from the porch of a small 1893 inn that overlooks Appalachia. American flags fly from every post, beam, telephone pole, and CB antenna.

Long ago this simple-looking inn used to be owned by a local brewery. The original bar is still in the barroom.

Back in the day, a barkeep would have served his lukewarm beer for pennies and rented rooms upstairs for a buck. But today, this place is just a remnant of old America.

The inn was turned into a bed and breakfast a few years ago. Mostly it caters to bicyclers who are foolish enough to cycle the Great Allegheny Passage Trail. Take, for example, me and my wife.

Ah yes. The trail. About that. We have been pedaling this multi-state trail for a full day. We started yesterday morning in Pittsburgh. We arrived in Smithton at sundown. After our long ride, we crawled into bed and fell asleep in under nine seconds.

It seems like we’ve been cycling for a hundred

thousand miles, but I looked at a map and realized we have only traveled fifty. We have a long, long, LONG way left to go. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.

Already my legs feel like they’ve been beaten with a blackjack billy club. My joints are sore, my eyes are sunken, I’m dehydrated, and I’ve lost all my teeth.

Still. The profound greenery of Appalachia is worth the effort. In fact, it’s too much beauty for the written word.

This morning, I stumbled onto the porch to see nothing but tree-covered hills draped in chowder-thick fog. I saw Queen Anne homes, Victorian rooftop spires, and church steeples. And Canada geese were flying overhead, honking out a morning melody.

“You actually have Canada geese here?” I said to a local guy who was beside me.

“Course we have geese,” he said, “This…