An airplane. Crowded with people. There is a young woman on my right. She is Mennonite. She wears a long dress. A haube sits atop her shock of red hair.

She’s hard to miss because she is the only person not playing on a phone.

She’s very nice. Very chatty. She rarely takes a breath between sentences.

Her name is Eva. She is 24. Eva has already made friends with everyone in our section.

People like Charles, 62. He’s an introvert. But Eva gets him talking. Charles has diabetes. Life has been hard for him recently because his disease is still new.

“I became diabetic last year,” he said. “I think the stress of my job got to me. The doctor said stress can make you sick.” Charles looks very distraught over this. Like he’s about to cry.

Eva touches his hand and says, “I want you to know that I’ll be praying for you.”

And somehow you just know she will be.

Seated on Eva’s other side is an older woman named Marteen. Who is on her way

to South Carolina to meet her estranged sister. They’ve been estranged for 34 years. They hated each other. But they’re ready to extend the olive branch of peace.

Marteen says with a laugh, “I hope my sister recognizes me now that I’m fat.”

Eva smiles. “I’ll pray your reunion is an experience of forgiveness.”

Eva says it just like that.

Across the aisle from Eva is a kid named Cal. He’s on his way to basic training. The flight attendants on the plane make a big deal about this. All the attendants have written Cal letters, or given him cards. They give him gift baskets, snacks, and homemade chocolate-chip cookies the size of tractor tires.

Cal is embarrassed, he tells Eva. Nobody has ever made a fuss over him.

He tells Eva he was raised in foster homes. He ran away…

A gas station. Rural east Texas. A young man sits in front of the ice machine, and he’s babbling nonsense. He is shirtless. He is dirty. People pass him as they walk into the convenience store.

But one old man doesn’t.

Because this old man has been homeless before. He knows what’s going on. The old man knows that about 30 percent of homeless persons are mentally ill. He knows that 30 percent are addicted. He knows this kid is probably blitzed out of his gourd on a substance.

The old man knows all this because he was once that guy.

The old man makes a few calls. In a few minutes an Episcopal priest and a few other church members are standing before the young shirtless man. They are asking him if he has anywhere to spend the night. They’re offering him a hand.

The young man sees the priest’s collar and he starts to cry.

“Please help me,” the kid sobs. “I don’t want to live like this anymore.”

Within minutes,

the kid is taken to the hospital. An anonymous donor pays for him to visit rehab. The kid is clean within a month. That was 15 years ago.

Today, the kid is an employee at the same rehab that saved him.

Cincinnati. Her family moved to this town for work. After a year, she learned her husband was having an affair. Her competition was a 22-year-old. She caught them in the act. And she almost had a nervous breakdown.

After the divorce, she never thought she would love again. So she raised kids on her own. She got a job working at K-Mart. She disappeared into the throngs of working-class Americans.

Until she met Ron. Ron was a widower with three kids of his own. He worked in the stock room. He was cute. One day, he worked up the nerve to ask her out. He asked…

I am backstage, about to tell stories onstage. A man with a name tag and a clipboard announces, “Ten minutes to showtime.”

I am tuning my guitar, hoping I won’t stink tonight.

This is what all performers think about before they go onstage. They say silent prayers that all go, more or less, the same way.

“Dear God, don’t let me suck.”

It’s easy to stink at storytelling because there is no school for such things, so you don’t know if you’re getting it right.

I am still unclear on how I started telling stories for a living. The only education I have in storytelling came from elderly men who wore Velcro shoes and wore their slacks up to their armpits.

I have always had a soft spot for old men. From childhood, I believed that I was an old man trapped inside a kid’s body. I never fit in with peers, and I never wanted to. This was only made worse by the fact that I was raised as a tee-totalling fundamentalist who was forbidden from

touching NyQuil.

As a young man, I would find myself in a crowd of teenagers who were smoking cigarettes, sipping longnecks, far from parental eyes, and for some reason, nobody ever offered me any real chances at sinning.

I would have appreciated the opportunity, but they viewed me as different.

I was blacklisted from social situations because I was the old man of the group. During social scenarios, I would generally hang in the corner, drinking prune juice, adjusting my Velcro footwear, holding everyone’s car keys.

People called me “D.B.,” which was short for “Designated Baptist.”

Ah, but my truest friends were elderly men. What I liked about them most was that they had already gotten their petty teenageness out of the way. They were more interested in major sins. For example, Biloxi.

After my father died, I looked for anyone with white…

In my front yard is something beautiful. Something living. Something that sometimes reminds me of my mother.

It is a tree, about eighty feet tall, with a gnarled trunk, long limbs, and thick waxy leaves.

When we were building our little home, some twenty years ago, a hapless workman with a chainsaw tried to cut this tree down. I rushed to its rescue and stood between his chainsaw and the tree, shouting, “Turn that thing off!”

Later that day I tied a nylon ribbon around the trunk, reminding all workmen not to harm this beautiful thing.

On cool mornings I would often sit beneath the branches, reading, sipping coffee. This softwood is home to many local creatures like neighborhood cats, squirrels, lizards, butterflies, ladybugs, moths, and 52,349 birds who twitter above me and occasionally drop air-to-surface poop artillery onto my hair.

Don’t get me wrong, this tree is not exceptionally good looking. Actually, it’s average as trees go. Its bark is peppered with scars, knots, and blotchy steel-colored freckles.

It’s

not especially old, either. This particular tree is pushing 50 years old, although the one in my backyard is closer to 120. Still, many of these tough trees have endured droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the devastation of real estate development.

The older ones have lived through eras of war, stock-market crashes, the ragtime age, the jazz age, the disco age, and these trees will survive the veritable hell that is the pop country age.

When I look at my tree I am fascinated by its tenacity. I’m told that these things are hard to kill.

There are about 210 varieties of this particular tree, they are the oldest known flowering species on planet earth. There are fossils of these flowers dating back 100 million years.

This means these plants were alive back when the Tyrannosaurus rex was calling the shots. They also predate honey bees. Which is why this tree…

The wedding was held at an abandoned bank building in small-town Florida. A rundown building. Old security cameras still mounted on the walls. Ballpoint pens on chains. The bride got the venue for a bargain.

I was working as a Sheetrocker at the time. I got off work early and showed up with John Tyler to erect the folding chairs.

There were 40 chairs, the brown kind that were, at one time, responsible for 99 percent of all finger amputations within the U.S.

Next, the caterer arrived. Although, she wasn’t an actual caterer, she was the groom’s grandma. Her name was Marge. She was gray-haired, wiry, from Queens, New York.

Marge barked orders like a jayvee football coach. She had a northern accent that sounded like submachine gun fire, and everything she said sounded like she was supremely ticked off.

Marge and her daughters prepared so much food they had to rent a U-Haul van just to carry all the chafing dishes.

The designated gift area was located at the old walk-up

teller windows. When guests arrived they were to bring presents to the windows that were manned by Laney Daniels and her mom. Laney accepted all gifts and asked guests for valid IDs and account numbers.

Gifts were then stored in the walk-in vault.

The altar was a couple music stands I stole from a local school, both covered in text which read: “Property of Okaloosa Walton Community College.” Which I thought was a nice touch.

And the flowers. You should have seen the magnolias and lilies, Marge did the place up nicely, you would have never recognized the old bank.

Soon, cars began arriving in the parking lot. Before the ceremony, I stood in the safety-deposit-box vault with the bridegroom. I was sick with nerves, holding a book of common prayer in my trembling hands.

“Thanks for doing this,” said the groom, my longtime friend and committed partner…

A filling station. Somewhere near the South Carolina state line. I made a pit stop. I have a long way to get to Charleston. I raced inside the store with both hands gripping my bladder chakra.

I asked the clerk where the bathrooms were.

I was already doing the “I really gotta go” dance. A dance that looks like you’re running in place while also undergoing a public brain seizure.

The guy behind the counter was named Jeremy. I know this because it was on his nametag. Jeremy wore a Metallica shirt. His ballcap was sitting back on his head, revealing a sweaty mop of grayish hair. He was covered in a slick film of sweat, reading an auto magazine. He had a five o’clock shadow that was pushing six thirty.

Jeremy slowly pointed to the bathrooms.

Very. Slowly.

“Bathrooms are back there,” he said.

I was so grateful I almost exploded into a river of pure gratitude.

I walked to the men’s room, stiff-legged, trying not to make any sudden movements that would compromise the integrity of strained urinary muscles.

I grabbed the doorknob.

I tried to turn it. But the door was locked. So I jiggled the knob a few times.

Nothing.

I walked back to the front counter, moving even more gingerly than before, just in case the spirit moved.

“The men’s bathroom is locked,” I said.

Jeremy looked up from his magazine and gazed at me with the same blank stare often seen on the faces of the comatose.

“Your men’s bathroom,” I said again.

He looked at me but remained silent.

“It’s locked,” I said.

He nodded. “Okay.”

I smiled.

I tried to breathe deeply. But not too deeply. Breathing too vigorously flexes the body’s diaphragmatic breathing apparatus, which is located very close to the urethral sphincter. Breathe too deeply with a full bladder and you’ll end up in the ER.

So I went to…

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. 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. He sat on the front row during sermons. After service, he smoked cigarettes behind the church. People asked the pastor questions about Dan, but he 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 clapboards, passing out bulletins on Sundays, or cleaning the sanctuary on Mondays.

Dan lived in a back room of the church. His earthly belongings were: a 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 thought it was strange that the pastor’s own brother had never been baptized. But no explanation was given.

So, sixty-four church members stood near the creek, watching the tall quiet man wade into shallow water behind his younger brother.

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. Dan sat beside his brother’s hospital bed without sleep or food. He lived beside his brother’s bed, taking care of his brother’s every need.

The next Sunday, Dan Lovette took the pulpit with tired eyes. It was a hushed room. It was the first time any members…

We had no money. We’d been married for less than 24 hours. We rode in my beat-up Ford Ranger, painted primer gray.

My wife was seated directly beside me on the bench seat. Our hands clasped together. Our knees touching.

Trucks used to have bench seats before Planned Parenthood got involved.

We crossed into South Carolina, limping into Charleston County on fumes. The 21-year-old dropout, and his breath-stealing bride.

It was a motel. Not a hotel. Big difference. The guy behind the counter was wearing a wifebeater, reading the box scores.

I approached the counter. “I think we talked on the phone,” I said. “I made a reservation. We’re the newlyweds.”

He lowered his newspaper. He said, “Mazel tov” without dropping the cigarette from the corner of his mouth.

Our room was dated. Orange carpet. Yellow walls. A shower with a rusted drain. The entire room smelled like—how should I put this?—poop.

There were cigarette burns in the bedspread. We slept atop bath towels. We brought our own pillows. The room featured a mermaid night light

with glowing boobs.

The next day we walked through the city. Chucktown was the most exotic city I had ever visited unless you count Texarkana.

The cathedrals, the shops, the cobblestones, the horses and buggies, the single houses, Rainbow Row.

We went out for dinner one night. I think it was the cheapest restaurant in town, not far from a Circle K. I wore my funeral clothes. My wife wore a dress.

The hostess looked at us, wearing our Walmart clothes. “Are you the newlyweds who made a reservation?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, tugging at my necktie.

“We have a special table for you.”

She gave us a table on the…

An old highway. Somewhere in America. Two lanes. No shoulder. Faded yellow lines. Oh, the things you see while driving old American highways will enchant you.

I pass a young woman walking the side of the highway, carrying supermarket bags. She is young. Ponytail. Sunday dress. There is a little boy on a bicycle following her.

This makes me smile. Because I am glad to know children still ride bikes.

When I was a kid, an estimated 69 percent of American children between ages five and 14 rode bikes. Today, it’s down to nine percent. The percentage drops every year.

Growing up, bicycles were our religion. A kid and his bike were invincible. Your bike carried you far from home, into new realms, introducing you to the world at large.

We kids had no technology. We had no social media. No smartphones. The bike was our internet, our phone, and our Instagram.

Used to, our entire neighborhood would be littered with tiny bicycles, scattered in random front yards. And if

you wanted to know where your friends were, you just looked for the bikes.

I pass a Baptist Church, tucked in the trees. Big gravel parking lot. Cars parked everywhere. Mostly trucks or economy cars with muddy tires. No Land Rovers.
The cemetery backs up to a cattle pasture. On the church lawn, I see a couple kids in dress clothes, roughhousing in the grass. If I were a betting man, I’d say one of those kids is about to get his butt reddened.

I pass a baseball park off the highway. And although it’s Sunday, the stands are full. There are players on the field. White polyester uniforms. Parents cheering.

Which is unusual to me.

Because it’s Sunday. When I was a kid, we were not allowed to…