She was crying in the airport. A college kid. Maybe 19. She had just goodbyed her family. They hugged each other at least 3,293 times before parting ways.

We were in a long line, waiting to pass through the TSA checkpoint. TSA is the wonderfully unique government institution wherein security agents with cheery dispositions frisk little old ladies and demand them to remove their insulin pumps.

The girl’s eyes were puffy and red. Her nose was stopped up. “Sorry,” she said, wiping her cheeks.

“You should be,” I said. “I’m horrified.”

She smiled.

Then the girl looked back at her family. They were still waving to her in the distance.

“I’ve never flown before,” she said.

“You’re in for a real treat.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I won’t spoil it for you.”

Ahead of us, a barefoot man with a walker was being patted down by TSA agents. His beltless pants fell to the ground, displaying the perpetual whiteness that follows him.

“Nervous?” I asked the girl.

“Little.” She looked at me. “You fly a lot?”

“Some.”

“You have any tips for

me?”

“Plant your corn early.”

“I mean about flying.”

I nodded. “You can use your shoes for a pillow when sleeping in the airport.”

A small trace of another nano-smile worked its way across her face. Meantime, her people were still waving goodbye, as she inched farther away from them.

“That your family?” I said, nodding toward her people.

“Yeah. My mom and sisters. My boyfriend. My little brother is the one on the left.”

“Where’s Dad?”

“He passed away a few weeks ago.”

“Weeks?”

“Last month.”

A crowded airliner. We were somewhere above Virginia. I was sandwiched between two passengers like Prince Albert in a can.

It has been said, if you’re a bad person in this lifetime; if you treat your fellow man poorly; if you live by the code of violence; if you are cruel to elders and children and UPS men; when you die you will wake up in economy class, riding in the middle seat.

Which is where I was.

The guy on my right was tapping on a laptop. The guy on my other side was scrolling TikTok. I had no armrests to speak of.

Throughout the flight, I noticed TikTok Guy kept staring at Laptop Guy. Like he recognized the man. Finally, TikTok Guy leaned over my passenger body to speak to Laptop Guy.

“Excuse me,” said TikTok. “Are you who I think you are, sir?”

Laptop nodded. “I am.”

“Omigod,” said TikTok. “Can I get a picture with you?”

And here is where things got awkward. Because there I was. Stuck between them. Like a man

trapped in hell. Or worse, the DMV.

There was no way to snap a selfie without also capturing the buck-toothed, redhead in the middle seat between them. And I wasn’t wearing any makeup.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe you should wait until we get off the plane to take pictures,” I suggested.

TikTok gestured to Laptop. “Do you KNOW who this is?”

“Yes. He is a man who will still be here when the plane lands.”

“This guy’s famous.”

Laptop shook my hand and recited his name. He was a young guy. Dressed nicely. Matinee-idol smile. I’d never heard of him, but that doesn’t mean anything. I live under a brick.

Laptop…

The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial sits on a French cliffside overlooking the coastline in Colleville-sur-Mer. It is home to the graves of 9,388 American soldiers; and a memorial to the 73,000 American Allied forces who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. D-Day.

On that day, 13,000 paratroopers were suiting up in the marshaling area.

ARMY SGT, 101st: “Before the jump, Eisenhower came to every one of us and said, “What’s your name, son?” Some guy would answer, “I’m So-And-So, from Ohio,” and Eisenhower would say, “Are you afraid?” And we all answered “No, sir.”

The planes took off under the cover of darkness. Some 15,000 aircraft were in the air on D-Day. You could walk across the wings like stepping stones.

TOM POCELLA, 82ND: “With the roar of the engines in my ears, I [jumped] out the door and into the silence of the night. I realized I had made the jump into darkness.”

It was a hard jump.

TURK SEELYE, 82ND: “After I left the door,

the plane [got hit by a shell and] nosed downward, and I watched the tail pass a few feet over my head.”

ED BOCCAFOGLI, 82ND: “I fell out because I slipped on vomit. Some guys were throwing up from nerves… my feet went out from under me, and I fell out upside down.”

Planes were going down left and right. The Allies lost 127 aircraft in a matter of hours.

HAROLD CANYON, 82ND: “Just as I approached the door, the top of the airplane opened up. It had been hit by some type of explosive shell. …The plane started going into its death spiral. It took everything I had to get over the threshold… I was the last man out of the plane.”

The paratroopers sailed to the ground and into a food processor.

CHARLES MILLER, 82ND: “It looked like a great big Fourth of July celebration. The whole sky was…

We went for a walk. Becca and me. Yes, I know that's bad grammar. But oh well. Whenever my 12-year-old goddaughter visits, we take walks through old Birmingham neighborhoods at dusk. We talk, laugh, and climb impossible hills with our pale, middle-aged, pathetic chicken thighs.

Becca uses one arm to hold me and the other hand to brandish her white cane. She’s gotten pretty good at using the cane.

I remember when Becca had just gone blind, and she wasn’t adept with her cane yet. Now, she can find her way through even the most confusing, disorganized, dangerous, and possibly fatal mazes. Such as, for example, my office.

But mostly, she likes to use her cane to whack me in the shins as we walk. She does this on purpose. She places her cane before my feet and I walk right into it and it always stings like a mother. This gives Becca great pleasure.

The rhythm of our walks usually goes:

Step, step, WHACK! Step, step, WHACK!

“Does that hurt?” she will say with a smile.

“Yes.”

“How bad

does it hurt?”

“I don’t know. Bad.”

“Scale of one-to-ten.”

“I need a baseline. How bad is ten?”

“Being burned alive.”

“Then it’s about an eight.”

Step, step, WHACK!

We met a lady who was playing with her grandson on the playground. The kid was on the swingset, swinging next to Becca.

The lady introduced herself. Then the lady asked what I did for a living. I was about to answer but Becca beat me to it.

Mid-swing, Becca shouted, “OMIGOSH! HE IS A WRITER! HE IS MY FAVORITE WRITER IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD! AND HE IS THE BEST WRITER OF ALL TIME HE…

Becca and I walked inside the nail salon, which was located in a stripmall that was almost completely obscured by a giant cloud of estrogen.

We were walking across the parking lot when a lady noticed Becca using her white cane. The woman rushed out of the salon to open the door. Although, frankly, I don’t know how this sweet woman managed because her hands were wrapped in tin-foil and Ziploc bags.

We were welcomed into the nail parlor by many smiles.

“This is, literally, so cool,” said the 12-year-old.

“Becca,” I said, “you don’t need to say ‘literally’ after every word.”

“Why not?”

“It’s redundant.”

“I, literally, don’t even know what ‘redundant’ means.”

There were women everywhere, undergoing medieval beautification rituals. Some women’s fingernails were being treated with power sanders. Others had feet submerged in tubs of what appeared to be melted industrial plastic.

“How may we help you?” said the lady cashier.

“I have no idea,” I replied.

She looked at Becca. “Would the young woman like a pedicure?”

“Yes, please,” said Becca.

The woman showed us a menu. “Would you like the

deluxe package or the basic French pedicure?”

“We want the el-cheapo package,” I said.

The woman smiled at me, but her heart wasn’t in it.

Soon, Becca was sitting in a ginormous massage chair which had more features than a tactical combat helicopter. Becca liked this chair very much. She set the chair to “knead” and the chair started gyrating.

“You should try this chair,” said Becca. “It’s, literally, blowing my mind.”

“Literally?” I said. “Or figuratively?”

Becca gave me a look.

The pedicurist was named Hai, an older man with grandkids Becca’s age. Hai is a big believer in pedicures. Hai believes Americans have the worst feet in the world because Americans neglect toe health. This is a problem Hai considers a national crisis, registering somewhere on the threat-scale between U.S. tax-code reform and…

The Scripps National Spelling Bee was broadcast a few nights ago on the Ion network, drawing a staggering 14 viewers not including nursing-home residents unable to reach the remote.

And I don’t know about you, but I was spellbound.

The winner was a 12-year-old seventh-grader from Saint Petersburg, Bruhat Soma, who attacked 30 words in 90 seconds and became the best speller in the English language. His winning word was “abseil,” a mountaineering term.

Bruhat received $50,000 in cash prizes, and had to beat away the ladies with a Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.

I was not a good speller in school. Every year we had a spelling bee and I always bombed. One particular spelling bee sticks out in my mind. My losing word was “purple.”

I never forgot that day. Namely, because nobody let me forget. Other kids were eliminated from the spelling bee with hard words like “onerous,” “munificence,” and “honorificabilitudinitatibus.”

My word was purple.

I knew how to spell purple, of course. Everyone knows how to spell this word. Even many forms of

inanimate fungal life know how to spell purple. But in my defense, I was nervous.

And in the heat of the moment, when powerful stage lights are shining on you; when the whole school is assembled in the gymnasium, staring at your face; when Arnold Williamson is making flatulent noises with his hands, that’s a lot of pressure.

Also, my main problem spelling “purple” was that I couldn’t remember whether this word ended in -EL or -LE.

I’ve always had a problem with the stupid -EL, -LE-, -AL rule. Even now, this spelling rule confuses the hele out of me.

And before you write me off as a dork, I looked up this unique spelling rule on a respected grammar website, and here’s what they said:

“...If the letter before the suffix (the ending) is a small or “wee” letter (ACEMNORSUVWXZ) then the ending is usually…

Today I read an article my friend sent to me. The article was something that went viral on social media. When I finished reading it, I felt so bad that I had to take some Pepto-Bismol and lie down.

It was depressing. The writer complained about nearly everything. Politics, religion, pollution, crime, taxes, pesticides, SUV’s, pop stars, the price of gas.

And worse, thousands of people agreed that this world is a terrible place.

Well, who am I to say that it isn’t? Nobody, that’s who. Even so, all that reading left me asking myself an important question:

What about chocolate?

Can this world be all that bad as long as we have milk chocolate? Have you ever had a Hershey’s bar when it’s room temperature? It’s a little soft, and it tastes sweeter than a Gaither Homecoming DVD.

It’s hard not to believe that everything is going to be okay while you’re eating chocolate.

And how about pimento cheese? Has the writer ever tried homemade pimento cheese? If he hasn’t, he ought to. Today, my wife

just made a fresh batch. I took one bite and I started shaking my leg like Elvis at a revival.

What about daylilies? Or peonies? Or tulips? The colors of summer are almost overwhelming. A pink peony is reason enough to believe life is good.

And there are also the mystical things of life. Things so beautiful that they are hard to name because they are too vast, too immense, and too wistful. Namely, I am speaking of beer.

Have you ever tasted a Budweiser after spending an afternoon mowing your lawn? Mowing the lawn in the heat is brutal and will make even the strongest person weak. But suddenly, here comes your wife with a beer that’s cold enough to crack your teeth. She hands you a beer and you say “Thank you, sweetie. Thank you for mowing our lawn.”

How about…

The Carolina mountains are covered in a down quilt of fog. It’s summer, but the temperature is a crisp 55 degrees.

The distant mountaintops look like blue humps in the hazy foreground. There are trees everywhere, trees so green they look fake.

The mountain highway winds back and forth like a half-inebriated copperhead, climbing upward, constantly twisting, turning, dipping, whirling, then doubling back. The Western North Carolina the scenery couldn’t get any more beautiful if it were made of golden bricks.

We pass a steep mountain pasture, not far from Mount Mitchell. The grass is so richly verdant, it’s lime green. The hillside is peppered with goats of all colors, grazing in haphazard formation. The goats are surrounded by a wooden fence that was at one time white, but is now weathered wood.

There is no traffic on this old highway. If you were to pull over, you could lie down in the middle of the road for half the day and live to tell the story.

It’s quiet out here. There are no vehicles. No overhead commercial airliners. No noisy A/C unit compressors. No ambient music. No nothing. Just the bleating of goats. Choirs of woodland birds. Light percussive rain, pitter-pattering on the leaves of the forest. And your own heartbeat.

I was reared in the country. Long before I moved to the city, it was the sticks that were my home. I was not raised in the mountains, but this place sort of reminds me of those early days.

My wife and I stop at a mountain gas station. The joint has seen better times. I’m not even sure whether this station is actually open for business, or whether it remains here as a shrine to the days of yore. The pumps are old, with spinning numbers. No credit card readers. No overhang.

I went for a walk with my niece, Lucy. Lucy is 5. We were in the forests of Equality, Alabama. Which isn’t the Middle of Nowhere, but you can see it from here.

The sun was low in the pines. The frogs were inheriting the earth. There were lightning bugs, which some Midwesterners call fireflies because—God love them—they’ve never been taught any better.

The only flowers in the ditches were black-eyed Susans. A few daisies. But not many.

“I want to pick flowers for my mama,” said Lucy.

Lucy’s Mama is my sister. My baby sister. She used to look just like Lucy.

My towheaded niece darted back and forth, grasping handfuls of wildflowers, reminding me of my kid sister.

My baby sister was impulsive. Hardheaded. Cocksure. I never worried about her when she dated boys. Because when my sister liked you she liked you. When she didn’t, you’d better be wearing a protective cup.

“Do brothers and sisters always love each other?” asked my niece.

“Yes. They do.”

“Do you love my mama?”

“Si.”

My sister and I grew up hard. It wasn’t the kind of childhood depicted in Hallmark Channel movies. Our father died by suicide. I dropped out of school in seventh grade. My sister quit attending class in Kindergarten. She finally learned to read in her mid-twenties.

But still, our childhood had its moments.

We watched a lot of TV together. We played games. We had our own short-hand language, which only we could interpret. She imitated me because there was nobody else to imitate.

I was a pitiful example. But what I lacked in fatherly behavior, I made up for in ice cream.

That’s right. Ice cream. My sister and I once worked at…

It was a classified ad in one of those nickel newspapers. It read:

"Gray Ford. Half-ton. Stick-shift. Some rust. Needs TLC. Sneads, Florida. $800."

My pal called about it. He needed a truck in a bad way. His old one had gone to be with Jesus, his wife was pregnant, and he'd just lost his job.

And in the days before texting, the only way to do business was to use the interstate.

Before we left, he went to the bank. He liquidated his account into a wallet full of eight hundred dollars.

I gave him a ride. We stopped at a gas station outside Cottondale. He filled my tank, then paid inside. He bought two sticks of beef jerky, two scratch-off lottos.

Thoughtful.

After a two-hour ride we hit a dirt road leading to a farmhouse that sat on several acres of green. Out front: an old man, smoking. He was bony, friendly, tall.

The truck was ugly, painted primer gray to hide rust. The bumpers were missing, the interior smelled like oyster

stew.

“Runs good,” the man said.

“I'll take it,” my buddy answered.

He reached for his wallet. And that's when it happened.

His pocket was empty.

My friend went ape. He retraced his steps. We tore apart my truck interior, dug through seats, and cussed. When he finally gave up, he sat cross-legged on the ground. He cried until his face looked raw. It was a lot of money to lose.

The elderly man sat beside him. He wrapped his arms around him. It had been a long time since a grown man had done that sort of thing to my pal. My friend was a fatherless orphan, like me.

When things calmed down, the…