As our rental car eased into Gettysburg, past the brick-and-plank storefronts selling tourist trinkets, women’s fashion, artisan tacos, funnel cakes, and free CBD samples, my imagination was running amok.

It’s hard to imagine how many were killed in this battle. I don’t want to imagine. I don’t want to envision 160,000 men fighting on the soil of Adams County, Pennsylvania.

I don’t want to visualize the fields of matted down grass, sticky with blood. Nor do I want to think about how historians say this town had an ever-present odor for years after the battle.

What I want to think about instead, is a woman named Lydia Hamilton Smith.

You did not learn about Lydia in school. You’ll probably never hear her name.

But she was a local here. Lydia was born on Valentine's Day in a lowly tavern backroom, just up the road. Her mom was African American, her dad was Irish. You can just imagine how she was treated as a girl.

She married a free Black man named Jacob, and gave birth to

two sons. Her husband died in 1852 and she became a single mom.

She found a good job as housekeeper for a well-to-do guy in town. Things were going well for her.

But then came the 1860s.

Lydia’s oldest son died. Her other son, Isaac, a banjo player, enlisted in the 6th US Colored Troops in 1863. He marched off to Virginia.

War takes everything. It takes everything from every-ONE. It’s hard to imagine living through a war on our own soil. It’s hard to imagine enemy fire, shattering the windows of your schoolhouses, chewing up the clapboards of your local church.

Modern Americans are insulated from such horrors. But our own Civil War wasn’t that long ago. Six or seven generations.

Lydia was probably in the house on the day the battle took place. It was early July, 87 degrees. Sunny. The main…

Bobby and I played music before a theater of people at the Vista Retirement Community in Wyckoff, New Jersey. The Vista is a giant cruise ship on land, minus the lifeboats, slot machines, and go-go dancers.

The theater was dark except for randomized blinking medical alert bracelets, glowing like fireflies in the night. Parked next to the theater entrance was a corral of aluminum walkers tied to the hitching post.

I looked across a sea of white hair in the auditorium and realized I was the youngest in this room.

And here is no happier feeling than being a kid in the presence of one’s elders.

Americans are afraid of their elderly. Our culture is terrified of aging. Thus, our elders are often herded to the proverbial outskirts, and largely ignored.

If you don't believe me, look at our advertisements, commercials, and media. Young, young, young. You will not see white hair on television unless it is a commercial wherein Joe Namath heartily encourages you to apply for a reverse mortgage.

Prescription commercials show actors who are SUPPOSED to be elderly because they have grayish locks, except they are in their early 40s, with nasal piercings and sleeve tattoos.

We glorify youthful skin, physical beauty, muscular macho-ism, perpetually colored hair, ripped abdominals, and perfect butts that defy the cherished laws of physics.

You will not find a single ad featuring a lead role for someone over age 40. What you will find is youthful pop stars, dressed in dental-floss thong bikinis, taking the stage, earning billions for shaking their pelvis on camera.

Which is why Elvis deserves an apology. Elvis might have shaken his pelvis on camera, too. But at least he never took it out and showed it to anyone.

So anyway, it was a lovely theater at the retirement home. Bobby and I stood on a grand stage and did our best. Bobby played a banjo. I tortured…

We arrived in New Jersey at 5:18 p.m. The first actual New Jerseyan I met was the lady gas-station cashier.

“Will this be oh-WALL?” she asked, ringing up my coffee.

“Ma’am?” I said.

She gave me a no-nonsense glare. “I said ‘Will this be oh-WALL?’ Just the KWAH-fee?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She smiled. “Where you from?”

“Birmingham, ma’am.”

Another smile. She handed me a receipt and threw out a hip. “I ain’t your ‘ma’am,’ Alabama.”

We were officially welcomed into the Garden State by a celebratory traffic jam about the size of a rural voting district. After a few hours, we arrived at our destination. The Vista, a continuing care retirement community in Wyckoff.

I expected the Vista to be a nursing home. I expected three-pronged canes, and residents with walkers, all roving in tight social clots, like the Sharks and the Jets.

But the Vista is not a nursing home. At least not like any I’ve seen. This is a senior living community with first-class services and amenities, and over 160 finely detailed apartment homes offering stunning

views of the Ramapo Mountains. This is a permanent cruise ship.

The staff couldn’t have been friendlier. Residents were just as friendly. Everyone kept asking Bobby and me to “twalk” for them. Apparently people in Jersey like listening to us twalk.

We carried our luggage through the hallways. On our short journey we were suddenly accompanied by three kind older ladies who wanted to know all about us. Who we were. Where we were from. And how come we were so cute.

Three elderly women turned into five. Five turned into 7. Seven turned into 12. Soon, Bobby and I were the biggest thing to hit the Vista retirement community since the dawn of Velcro shoes.

I made instant friends with a woman named Mary Miller. Mary is slight, with perfectly coiffed hair, flawless makeup, T-strap pumps, and pristinely reapplied lipstick. She is…

Interstate 59 shot past our windows like a streak of pigeon excrement on a commercial airline windshield. We crossed into Tennessee, heading northward to New Jersey. The radio played Jerry Reed. And I was busy counting barns.

A barn in the distance. Overgrown with fairytale weeds. Freshly painted. Its rooftop, all-black, with bold white letters, reading: “See Rock City.”

And I felt a warm smile playing at the corners of my mouth.

“See Rock City,” we all said in soft voices.

The American interstate is a mind-numbingly ugly affair. Wholly unlovely in every way. There is no charm on an interstate. No romance. No beauty. You will pass few shotgun homes, no quaint water towers, no Rockwellian town squares made of brick and glass.

No. On an interstate, you exist in an artistic hell, entirely conceptualized and maintained by your captors at the Federal Highway Administration Department. Huge culverts, hideous overpasses with all the charm of Soviet bunkers. Concrete, concrete, and more concrete. It ain’t pretty.

Unless you’re talking about the barns.

I collect

old barns. I carry them with me. A good barn is hard to find. Most are falling apart. Their wood, unpainted and gray with age. Rusted rooftops, vanishing into corrosion.

Barns are getting harder to find. American barns are disappearing at an alarming rate. At one time, this nation had an estimated 6.8 million barns. Today there are 650,000.

But if you keep your eyes open, you’ll still see them.

The humble American barn comes in many different styles. You have gable barns, broken gables, Dutch gambrels, English gambrels, hip roofs, gable-on-hips, roundtops, gothics, cylinders, monitor barns, bank barns, pole barns, kit barns, centric barns, and the ever-present salt-box shed your grandfather probably had.

Some are well-maintained, still in use, standing erect, freshly painted. Some have succumbed to slow deaths, God rest their souls.

But Rock City barns are a collector’s item.

It all started in…

Late morning. Bobby and I packed the car for the Great American Road Trip. I tossed my fiddle into the backseat. Bobby placed his banjo in the trunk. I ate my third Larabar.

“Ready to shove off?” said Bobby.

“Aye, aye,” said I, with a mouthful.

Bobby took the first shift behind the wheel, exiting Birmingham, doing a cool 65 mph, aiming our headlights toward the Mid-Atlantic. Our backseat, full of banjos, guitars, mandolins, multiple fiddles, and three quarters of the nation’s supply of Larabars.

My wife forces me to bring Larabars when I travel. I have thousands. Otherwise, I tend to receive the majority of my nutrition from the Frito-Lay food group. Larabars, you will note, are high in fiber. And my wife is obsessed with lower-intestinal health.

“Did you ‘go’ today?” my wife will often whisper, with concern. Sometimes asking this question in public places such as, for example, funerals.

“Why are you so interested in my bathroom habits?” I will aggravatedly reply.

My wife will then turn to any eavesdroppers and say, “It’s

okay, he’s just constipated.”

For the next nine days, Bobby Horton and I will be playing a week’s worth of shows spanning from New Jersey to the Keystone State. We will finish our trip at the historic Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

You might recognize the name Bobby Horton. He composes music for all the Ken Burns documentaries. He’s a boyhood hero of mine.

I’ll never forget when I first heard Bobby’s music. It was only a few years before my father died. Dad was watching the PBS Civil War documentary; I was lying on the floor in front of the TV, flat on my stomach, reading the latest installment in the “Archie” saga.

When I heard the documentary’s music coming from our Zenith console, I was so mesmerized I forgot all about Veronica, Betty, and Jughead. The music captivated me.

Namely, because music…

I don’t know what to do about AI.

Humanoid robots. Automated cars. Augmented reality smart-glasses. Smart dishwashers. Robotic surgeons. And what about the weird AI images all over my newsfeed? Where are these freaky AI pictures coming from?

A masterfully crocheted wedding dress that can’t be real. A sand castle the size of a YMCA. A portrait of Jesus made entirely from broccoli, captioned: “Squint your eyes and see the Risen Savior!”

Frankly, I think AI dropped the ball with the Broccoli Jesus caption. Humans could think up MUCH better captions for such an image. (“Broccoli take the wheel!”)

Likewise, my newsfeed features dozens of phony AI images of mothers cradling disabled children, captioned, “Nobody will wish my baby a happy birthday.” This, accompanied with ba-zillions of birthday wishes in the comments.

Or the AI image of a 121-year-old woman blowing out birthday candles, captioned: “Nobody will wish me a happy birthday.” This is followed by a throng of comments.

What the hell is going on?

What’s the point of these pictures? We beat

Russia to the moon and now we’re using our hottest technology to make portraits of religious figureheads out of cruciferous vegetables? (Broccoli is my co-pilot!)

AI is also taking over the field of writing. News articles, for example. I have a friend who works for a prominent news outlet. I asked why news items read so bizarrely nowadays.

“AI of course,” he says.

I’ll explain. In olden times, writing an article was a lengthy process. First, a journalist would think up an idea. Then, journalists physically left their desks for gumshoe research. After which, journalists would tap out a godawful rough draft which usually had the same literary value as, say, poo.

After the rough draft, journalists would THEN be forced to mercilessly retype, reword, restructure, reorganize, rethink, and re-edit their work until the article finally resembled well-thought-out, well-informed, passable poo. This was how the American…

I found old photographs in the attic. I rifled through hundreds of old Polaroids. Most were infant pictures of me naked.

I was a fat baby. People were concerned about me as a newborn. “Have you seen Sue’s baby?” people would say. Then they would inflate their cheeks and do an imitation of the Pillsbury spokesperson.

My hair was the color of a carrot. My belly looked like a No. 9 bowling ball.

In one photo, I was taking a bath in the kitchen sink. My parents made no attempt to hide my butt from the camera. In fact, I found many pictures wherein my fundaments were actually the focal point.

My mother took these pictures.

I know this because my mother was obsessed with my butt. She was always showing these pictures to company.

“Can I refill your tea?” my mother would ask people. “Would you like to see a picture of my son without pants?”

There are various photographs of me standing with my rear facing the camera. In these pictures

I’m wearing a ten-gallon hat, holding a little pistol, and my unmentionables are showing.

“Sean was very chilly that day,” my mother would explain.

There are photos from my first day of school. I was with my school friends, holding a huge sack lunch in a supermarket paper bag. Thank God I had my pants on.

I was holding a bag-lunch, likely, because my old man was extremely frugal. I can specifically remember my father used to insist on meeting pizza deliverymen halfway.

Also, my father used to cut my hair on the porch to save money. My dad was not a trained aesthetician, but used the Eyeball Method. He would shave one side, then the other. He pronounced the haircut finished when I looked like Uncle Fester.

The Little League pictures. Those are hard to look at. I was a chubby first baseman. My uniform fit…

She was 9. And obsessed with animals. How could she not be? She was the daughter of a farmer, animals were life.

She especially loved the baby animals. They were so fuzzy, so adorable, she simply could not put them down. She was always rolling in the dirt with various baby pigs, or tiny goats, or anything that was even remotely cute.

One day, the old ewe gave birth. The sounds of maternal distress came from the barn. At the time, she was helping her dad do chores. But she quickly became distracted by the sheep in labor.

The baby lamb was sickly. Frail and underweight. And it turns out that sheep aren’t the world’s greatest moms. The mama sheep rejected her own baby and walked away.

Her dad said the lamb would die without its mother. Just part of the great circle of life, he said. Nothing anyone could do about it.

The little girl pleaded with her father. “Please let me

keep it!”

Tears streamed down her little cheeks. A little girl with tear-stained cheeks is pretty hard to ignore.

Her dad gave in. But keeping the lamb was a bad idea, he reminded her. It would surely die. After all, the lamb couldn’t even stand up on its own. Usually, a lamb can stand upright a few minutes after birth.

The little girl scooped up the tiny creature. She cradled the lamb. And my sources say the lamb even slept with her that night, unbeknownst to her parents.

The next morning, a glimmer of hope.

When the girl awoke, the lamb was standing on its own legs, looking right at her. And he was even able to drink milk.

After that, the girl was never seen without the lamb. She bottle fed it. She took it everywhere. Wherever she went, the lamb followed.

One day,…

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Even though this name has been so misused, misapplied, and misappropriated throughout history.

I mean, what even is your actual name? People in various countries call you different things. There have been wars over which is the correct name.

How many people have been slaughtered in, quote-unquote, “Your Name?” We humans are still fighting about what, exactly, that name is.

The American evangelicals, ironically, choose a Middle English translation of a Latinized version of a Greek iteration of a Hebrew nickname, that was officially sanctioned by King James I, who most historians believe was bisexual. I’ll bet the evangelicals love that.

Still, other people use other words for Your name. But the Jewish culture, in my humble opinion, gets it right. Because they won’t even say your name. It’s too holy. Plus, once you use someone’s name, you’ve already kind of boxed that someone in. But you can’t be boxed in.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in

heaven. Because heaven knows sometimes it sucks down here.

Even so, there’s got to be a plan to this mess we call life. There are all these coincidences happening. People call these instances different things: Grace, providence, karma, synchronicity, God winks. Whatever you call them, they happen. Every moment. And there seems to be a reason for it.

Give us this day our daily bread. Us. Not just me. Us. Collective. Personally, I have never known hunger, I was raised in a food secure household. But there are many other people included in “us.” People who are starving. People who don’t have what they need. And it’s not just bread.

There are people lying in hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, or crack houses. They are drunk, and homeless, living from dumpsters. They have needs. And it doesn’t seem fair that I sit on my duff, eating Fritos…

I miss the newspaper. Before the internet. I’m talking physical newspapers. The kind you unfold.

I miss the morning routine of it all. Walk to the end of the driveway, barefoot, pre-sunrise. Messy hair. Morning breath. Unsheath the newsprint from its plastic. Soy-based ink on your fingers. That low-grade, wood-pulpy newsprint smell.

Also, I miss the design of a newspaper. A newspaper is a work of organizational art. The broadsheet layout, headlines, dropheads, bylines, datelines, section numbers, and… (Continued on A3).

I miss shaking open the paper with a grand gesture, organizing each section on my table, reading pages in a specific order: Funnies first. Sports next. Then, senseless acts of politics.

I miss the corny car-dealership ads. And the ultra-serious advice columns, with headlines like: “Help, my daughter says I wear ‘granny panties,’ what should I do?”

I miss the Far Side.

I miss low-quality photography, op-ed columns written by the extremely self-righteous, crossword puzzles, the classified section, and the “errata” section—I doubt people even know what that is anymore.

I used to deliver newspapers

with my mother. Our lives revolved around newspapers. We have hurled—seriously—tens of thousands of papers in our lifetimes.

We serviced the majority of the continental United States in Mama’s little Nissan Altima with a heater that smelled like recently produced cat poop.

At two in the morning, sitting in her front seat, we rolled each copy into a giant enchilada, shoving each paper into a plastic wrapper, while drinking enough coffee to concern a cardiologist.

We delivered to expansive neighborhoods, subdivisions, business districts, apartment complexes, 2000-story beach condos, newspaper machines, hotels, you name it.

But do you know what my favorite part was?

My favorite part of the delivery process came toward the end of our shift. It would be sunrise. Old folks would be standing in driveways, awaiting delivery. The newspaper was THAT important to them.

Mister Oleson stood at his mailbox while…