“I used to be a beauty queen,” said the waitress.

We were in Southern Mississippi. The waitress was older. Maybe in her 70s. Which is getting younger every year.

The woman brought my breakfast and my coffee. The food was hot. The coffee was the temperature of three-day-old bathwater.

“A beauty queen?” I said.

“Yeah,” the waitress said. “Won a local beauty contest when I was 24, I thought I was going to die of shock. Hadn’t never won nothing in my whole life.”

She had no confidence as a young woman. She grew up on a farm with six brothers. The only girl in a family of nine.

“My brothers were always trying to steal my food.”

She learned to work hard, how to bale hay, and how to handle large animals. You can always tell someone who has handled large animals. They don’t make sudden movements.

As a girl, she never thought she was pretty. She grew up in overalls and bare feet. Her mother cut her hair, and her daddy said she’d make a fine farmer’s wife.

“Then my aunt Jeannie came along,” she said. “My aunt said I should enter this beauty contest. And I was like, ‘What? Me? I’m ugly.’”

But her aunt insisted.

Her aunt took her into town to get her hair did. The older ladies in the salon wore helmet hair and pink nylon capes. They swarmed her like bees.

“They put so much hairspray on me I think I was an environmental hazard.”

The ladies did her makeup. They plucked her eyebrows. They did her eyelashes. They applied powder, rouge, and a gallon of base.

“I didn’t even recognize myself.”

The contest was a foreign experience. She felt like a fish out of the pond.

“My aunt told me to walk like Marilyn Monroe, and to speak on the microphone like Queen Elizabeth.”

The young woman won the contest. It was…

“Welcome to Moe’s!” the man sang to us.

He was pushing a mop, wiping down tables at Moe’s Southwest Grill in Daphne, Alabama.

We walked into the restaurant and were greeted by an older man in a faded cap and a T-shirt which read HERE FOR THE QUESO.

He was singing his greeting along to the melody of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

“Welcome to da Moe’s….
“Welcome to da Moe’s….”

We had been on the road for a week. We were tired, depleted, suffering the adverse effects of road-trip calorie deficit. What we needed were fats and carbs. What we needed were intravenous burritos.

“We gonna take care of yooooooooou at da Moe’s!” sang the man with the mop. “Oh yeeeeeah!”

His name was Roger. He was smiling, singing his greeting to all who entered.

He used different melodies for each welcome. He borrowed his melodies from Aretha Franklin, James Taylor, Boy George, and Prince. But the gist was always the same:

Welcome to da Moe’s.

Most customers smiled when the vocalist gave the salutation. And, amazingly, almost everyone would sing back.

Many impromptu

performers would warble:

“Thank you!” Or: “Okaaaay now!” You could tell these customers weren’t exactly trained singers inasmuch as many sounded like English Springer spaniels with sinus infections.

“Welcome to da Moe’s!” Roger sand to a college kid.

“Thank you!” the kid replied in the style of Elvis Presley.

“Welcome to da Moe’s!” Roger sang to an elderly woman.

She began to blush. Finally, the woman caved and sang her reply in the tremulous alto voice of a front-row Baptist. “Thannnnk yooooou!”

“I been working at da Moe’s for 13 years,” he said. “Every day I try to cheer people up. You know how it is, people have bad days sometimes. We all have’em. But when you sing, it give you reason to forget your bad day.”

Roger used to be a janitor at Daphne Middle…

I prayed for you tonight. Before bed. I’m serious.

I don’t get down on my knees or do anything crazy like that. I don’t kneel. Namely, because if I knelt I wouldn’t be getting up again without the assistance of EMTs.

So you might be wondering what I prayed for. Well, that’s easy. I prayed for you to laugh. That’s how I start every prayer for you.

I can’t know what you’re going through right now, nor how badly you hurt. But I know one thing: there is no better feeling than laughter.

I prayed this for Dan and his wife, Freida, who have practically been living at the oncologist’s office recently. I pray this for my cousin Cosby, and for my cousin Bentley, to laugh so hard they spill their beers.

I prayed for the family of the guy down the street—the ambulance was at their house today, and everyone was in the yard weeping as a covered gurney was wheeled away.

Also, I pray tomorrow will be better than today.

I don’t care if

today was a decent day, I pray tomorrow is off the chain. I pray that you have a brief moment of awareness tomorrow, as you eat your PBJ, or your Swiss Cake rolls, wherein you say to yourself, “Man, this is a pretty good day.”

I pray this for my friend Loe, who just lost her nephew. And for Regina, whose grandson has been fighting for his life. I pray this for Mark, whose dad is now on hospice care. For Laney (6 years old) whose dog died. And for Jon (15) who has his very first date with his very first female on Friday.

And normalcy. That’s a big one. I also pray for you to have some normalcy.

There is no sensation more wonderful than feeling normal. Normal enough to read a book, or watch reruns, or to eat Captain Crunch for…

Pineview Street. A nondescript house. Off-white. One story. Nothing fancy. Nice neighborhood. Manicured lawns.

On the back of the house is a newly built wheelchair ramp. I knocked on the door. The caregiver answered.

Inside, the first thing you saw was medical stuff. Prescription bottles. Walkers. Plywood duct-taped over the carpet, so wheelchairs could move freely. A hospital bed sat in the den.

“You have visitors,” the caregiver announced.

The old man was sitting in his wheelchair. Facing the picture window. He turned and smiled.

White hair. Robin’s-egg blue eyes. He’d lost weight since I last saw him. But the smile was still there.

He was born in 1936, reared in Monroe County, Alabama. And John Finklea still has the voice of a preacher. It’s all about inflection.

“How’s my buddy?” he said, pumping my hand.

He’s old school. The kind of preacher who preached six or seven revivals in a week, then mowed the church lawn on Saturday night.

He’s baptized throngs in Brewton, Alabama. And buried half the residents in Union Cemetery.

Recently, he had a bad fall. It caused a brain

bleed. He’s doing better now, but one of his legs is paralyzed. And he’s relearning how to walk.

There are stories about him. Lots of them.

“Brother John hung out with the drunks,” one local woman told me. “He wasn’t like any preacher we’d ever known. He’d go fishing with’em, hunt with’em, laugh with’em. He’d do everything but drink and cuss.”

He sat in deer stands, shoulder-to-shoulder with rowdy individuals, cheaters, and men with untoward reputations. And he never thumped a Bible at them.

“He was just their friend.”

But when the lives of his friends fell apart; when the proverbial fertilizer hit the fan, who do you think they called first?

“I remember one time,” said a local man, “Brother John baptized a man in town who had been bad on drugs. There were some…

Take the interstate exit and follow the pavement to the rural route. Go past the fields of autumnal cotton, past the lopsided trailer homes sitting in fields of blond stubble, past the abandoned filling station, and soon you will find the little town.

You’ll see the hi-welcome-to-our-city-sign, covered with smatterings of tin badges for the Lion’s Club, Kiwanis, Rotary, and the all-you-can-eat catfish joint. You’ll see the feed and seed, the vacant downtown storefronts Walmart killed, and finally you’ll see the little white dog trot house.

Well, at least it used to be white. Today it’s more mildew colored.

In the overgrown yard are the remains of ancient outdoor Playskool toys that predate the Carter administration, and the bones of a rusted swing set that went to be with Jesus a long time ago.

Elderly Martha was standing on her porch waiting for me when I pulled up. Martha is not her real name, but it will have to do.

She speaks with an accent that’s thicker than pancake batter. She raised her family here.

She retired here.

“I used to work at mill,” she told me. “I was the nurse lady who bandaged people who got hurt.”

She poured two mugs of coffee. Weak coffee. The brew was the color of iced tea. It was the kind of coffee many old-timers often drink. I once asked an elderly guy why old people made their coffee so weak. The returning answer was: “So we can drink it all day long.”

Case closed.

The woman sat at her kitchen table, staring into her mug of brown water, and told the inexperienced writer across from her the story that brought him here.

Her story took place in the winter. She remembers it vividly. The tree branches were naked, the sun was setting. She was leaving the mill after a very long workday.

“My mama lived with us at the time,” she said.…

Cracker Barrel. Somewhere in Louisiana. It was late. Approaching closing time. Cracker Barrel officially closes at 9 p.m. But it wasn’t 9 yet.

So they let us in.

They were apparently short staffed. The employees were in the weeds. They had a bunch of grumpy customers, most of whom kept demanding more ranch.

Nevertheless, the waitresses treated each person in the dining room like they were one of the Kennedys.

My wife and I had been on the road since 5 a.m. We’d crossed three state-lines, and survived on gas-station fare. Earlier that day, in Mississippi, I ate a gas-station hotdog that will remain in my lower intestinal tract for the following 62 years.

I was road weary. Starting to see double. I had done a performance in Florida that morning, and we were on our way to Texas where I would make a speech for a roomful of people who sold tires.

The waitress came to our table. I ordered the catfish. Cracker Barrel’s catfish is heaven. The most underrated dish on the

menu. You get two cornmeal crusted U.S. farm-raised filets, three hushpuppies, tartar, and a King James Bible.

I was busy eating cornbread when I noticed the guy sitting next to our table.

He wasn’t elderly, but he moved like an old man. Careful and slow. He was wearing a chewed-up ballcap. His face was unshaven. His plaid had holes in it. His shoes were Velcro.

He could have been 60. Could have been 80. Hard to tell. Each time he took a bite, he shook so badly that food fell off his fork. He wore a bib of many colors.

A stroke maybe? Multiple sclerosis? Perhaps Parkinson’s. Every time he tried to eat, it wasn’t working out. He wasn’t getting any food into his mouth.

There was a young woman sitting nearby. With her friends. She was maybe 16.

She was a typical teen of our…

Mobile was pretty. The sunset was peach. The Dolly Parton Bridge at sundown will move you. That’s the bridge’s nickname. They call it that because of the dual arches which resemble bosomage.

I was in town to make a speech for some businessmen and businesswomen involved in a lucrative field, such as distribution, insurance, auto sales, the federal government, etc.

My speech went good. And by “good” I mean they didn’t throw expired vegetables at me. The vegetables were ripe this time.

Afterward, I went out for a sandwich and—God willing—a malted beverage. I went to T.P. Crockmiers, one of the oldest bars in Alabama.

I had company. She sat beside me. An elderly woman. White hair. Pink shoes. She was wearing pearls. She said she was celebrating something.

“What’re we celebrating?” I asked.

She raised a glass. “My husband’s life.”

“When did he pass?”

“Few years ago. On this day. He was a veteran.”

“Vietnam?”

“Lord, no. How young do you think I am? He was in Italy when troops landed in Normandy. Don’t get fresh with me, son.”

I looked

at her. I wanted to ask how old she was, but my mother told me never to ask such a thing if I wanted to maintain an oxygen habit.

She was 95.

“I wish you’d known Mobile back then,” she said. “This town was heaven. It was so alive. So busy. Everyone was leaving their farms to move here. Seemed like everyone in the U.S. wanted to be in Mobile, to build ships.”

She’s not wrong. During the War, Mobile became the second biggest city in Alabama. People migrated from all over the Lower Forty-Eight.

They were living in tents in vacant lots. Old houses became boarding houses. One shipyard worker would awake early for his shift, and another would come behind him and sleep in his bed.

In ‘45 her husband came home after war. She had…

When I arrived home, I could hear Marigold, stumbling up the stairs. Marigold is my blind dog.

Marigold hangs out in our basement. It’s a safe place. We have a sofa down there. She lives on it. When she knows we’re home, however, she staggers up the stairs to find us.

She is a coonhound. Black and tan. About as big as a minute. We call her “Tiny.” She has long floppy ears and a sewed-up eye. Scars all over her body from past dog fights.

Marigold was blinded by her previous owner. A man who bought her for a hunting dog. He paid a lot for a purebred. He kept her in a cage. When he found out she was gunshy, he made her pay.

I don’t know what he used to blind her. The butt of a rifle maybe. Perhaps a length of rebar. Either way, he fractured her skull. Screwed up her optic nerve.

When they found her, she was ribs and skin. And her cranium was broken. Wandering along rural highways, avoiding

cars by sound. Someone put her in the backseat of their car. And somehow, she made her way to us.

Other than her vision, she is a healthy dog. She loves our backyard and bays at local cats. If you’ve never heard a hound dog bay at a cat, you don’t know what you're missing.

“I’m home, Marigold,” I said when I enter our house.

I was answered with the tenor voice of a hound dog.

When she got to the top of the stairs, she began negotiating obstacles. Looking for me.

It’s impressive to watch her navigate. She uses her muzzle to find her way. The floorplan is in her mind. She knows where all furniture is. Knows where all walls are. Knows each obstruction. Marigold traces the perimeter, and finds her way.

I was just watching her. Tail just a wagging.

When…

Dothan, Alabama, is chilly this morning. The temperature is hovering at 20 degrees. Wind chills down to 16. It’s so cold, the maids in my hotel were salting the hallways.

The sun was rising over Circle City. The cloudless sky was the color of a Chilton County peach. Ray’s Restaurant was open for the early crowd. Ray’s has been opening up for the early crowd since Richard Milhous Nixon was in office.

Each morning, the oldsters huddle themselves over Ray’s bottomless coffees. They cuss, clear nasal passages loudly, and solve the world’s issues. Where would the federal government be without these men?

I order my eggs over medium. The cook is a borderline genius. The yolk of an over-medium egg should not run. It should merely creep. They can cook eggs in Dothan.

On my serpentine route through town, I pass the National Peanut Festival fairgrounds.

Dothan has been celebrating the Peanut Festival since 1938. The festival is like Woodstock for tractor owners. If you’ve never been, you need to go. The greased hog

chase alone is worth the price of admission.

I once attended the peanut festival when I was 18. I was dating a girl from Dothan. We went out on a few dates. She said I was the first guy she ever went out with who didn’t have a Skoal ring in his back pocket.

There are other world-famous attractions here, too.

Such as the World’s Smallest City Block. At the Intersection of Troy, Appletree, and Museum streets. This little triangle of land was given the official title by “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” in 1964.

The city block originally measured 20 feet by 20 feet. It still stands today. Bring the family.

There’s the Dothan Opera House. They’ve been running since 1915, hosting everything from vaudeville acts to Boy Scout badge ceremonies.

There is Annie Pearl’s Home Cooking Restaurant, one of my top-five favorite restaurants. The…

Cairo, Georgia. It’s not pronounced like the city in Egypt. Cairo is pronounced like the syrup. And truthfully, locals say it more like “KAY-reh.”

“The O is silent,” a waitress in the diner tells me.

This is a small town if ever there was one. In the booth across from me, an old-timer says: “Cairo’s so small we don’t have a town drunk, so we all take turns.”

Cairo actually isn’t that small. You’re looking at 10,000 residents. Which is Manhattan compared to other places I’ve performed.

You’re looking at a guy who headlined in Hartford, Alabama. Three times. I played Hartford thrice.

And once, I performed in a township in Kentucky so small I got pulled over for using my turn signal. “You don’t use turn signals in this town, son,” the officer explained. “Everyone here already knows where you’re going.”

Tonight I perform in Cairo, inside Georgia’s oldest theater. The theater sits on North Broad Street. The Zebulon. The place was built by Ethel Blanton, in 1936. She named the place after her husband, Zeb.

People don’t name

their kids Zeb anymore.

In downtown Cairo you’re one century backward on the timeline. The historic district is the old hub of the village. A place where a night on the town only takes eight minutes.

There’s the old train depot, built in 1880, which was stuccoed over and converted into the Cairo Police Station, once upon a time.

There’s the W.B. Roddenbery Building where cane syrup used to be produced. Cairo is nicknamed the “Syrup City.”

There’s the Citizens Bank (1908). The United States Post Office (1935), which looks just like it did when Roosevelt was calling the shots. The post office even has a mural depicting Roosevelt’s New Deal.

I pull into the theater parking space a few hours before showtime. The Zebulon has put my name on the marquee.

And I stare at that name for a…