The band was all right. They played to a crowded joint of people who’d clocked out for the weekend. Folks who needed something greasy to eat and cold to drink.

Band members had gray hair, Western-style shirts, hats, boots. The whole nine yards.

“They’re here every Friday,” said the bartender. “Aren’t they awesome?”

The jury’s still out on “awesome.” But their hearts were in the right places.

“At least they play REAL country,” the bartender went on.

We can agree on that much. They played classics. And classic country is a dying art. You can’t look at a superstar who wears $1400 boots and eyeliner and call him country.

The men on this stage looked like they knew how to operate nail guns.

A kid was bussing tables. He was early twenties. He set his tub beside me and watched the band.

I introduced myself.

He said he likes old-fashioned country music. His brother is the one who taught him to like antique songs about cheating hearts, boys named Sue, and wooden Indians.

He tells me

he started listening to records a lot when he was diagnosed with cancer.

“That’s why I got this puffy face,” he explains. “All the pills I’ve taken make me like this.”

The chemo hasn’t helped either.

He was in the hospital for a month, once. He was fighting infection upon infection. His brother bought a portable record player. Together, they listened to classics.

Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Merle Haggard. Music.

“I dunno,” he told me. “Those songs just make me feel good all over.”

In the hospital, he started taking guitar lessons from his brother. He liked guitar better than playing games on his phone, or watching daytime TV.

“Plus, I didn’t know if I was gonna die or not,” he added. “I was doing bucket-list stuff, I guess.”

I guess.

His parents…

I stopped to buy a lottery ticket at a joint on the Florida-Alabama line.

Yeah, I know the lottery is a fool’s game, but I have a longstanding tradition of doing foolish things.

The man at the counter was sipping from a red SOLO cup, chewing ice. On the radio, Loretta Lynn sang. I bought three Powerball tickets and a Coke.

The man said, “Powerball’s up to three forty-eight.”

That’s 348 million bucks. And even though I’m no mathematician, I’ve been thinking about what I’d do if the universe ever gave me that much money.

That’s what writers do, you see. We stare into space, thinking long and hard about things that will never happen just in case they do. If you do it right, people think you’re working.

First: I would buy a farm. A big one. Not for livestock. This would be sprawling countryside, live oaks, and ponds.

Then, I would build hundreds—no thousands of cabins. Little ones, with porch swings, and scenic views. I would call

this operation, “Ellie Mae Farms,” since it will need a name, and my coonhound, Ellie Mae, is sleeping on my feet while I write this.

Yes, here at Ellie Mae Farms, we believe in three things. Foster kids, foster dogs, and saturated fat. Every summer, we’ll welcome kids without parents, who don’t think anyone gives a cuss about them.

We give lots of cusses at Ellie Mae Farms.

We’ll have colossal breakfasts. Any dish you can think of. Bacon, eggs, Conecuh sausage, omelettes, ten-foot-tall glasses of orange juice.

They will send out the local news choppers just to cover our breakfasts.

Our staff will be school teachers. We’ll pay them triple—no ten-times what teachers get paid today. Not only will they teach, they’ll receive five months paid vacations, benefits, complimentary massages, and monthly beer allowances.

And don’t forget our…

It was nice weather. I was on a boat with a friend, hoping to catch a few bream. The fish, of course, knew this and conspired to avoid me.

My friend was sipping beer. Willie Nelson serenaded us from a battery-powered pocket radio. We saw a bass boat in the distance.

It was a nice boat. The kind that costs an arm and a liver.

Four people were onboard. Two men, one boy, and a woman. They were dressed in Sunday clothes. The woman held what looked like a vase. She emptied it overboard. Dust fell into the water.

The boy’s face was in his hands. I’ll never forget him.

My friend bowed his head. I turned off the pocket radio. We were quiet. And I was decades backward in a memory.

In this particular memory, I’m thirteen. I’m in the mountains. The air is thin. My mouth is dry. I am cold.

I’m not my normal happy boyish self. But then, I hadn’t been happy since my father

died.

Dead. He was dead, I kept telling myself. I couldn’t believe it.

On the day we got Daddy from the funeral home, he came packaged in a cardboard box. He didn’t believe in urns. He was a tight-wad, even for his own funeral.

His brown box sat on a counter. The funeral director had my mother sign a dotted line. And that was that.

A man’s entire life, stuffed into a box. Once, he was a tall, slender man who taught me how to gut fish.

Now he was UPS parcel.

We kept his ashes in the shed since nobody wanted his remains indoors. My mother said his spirit needed to escape. I sat with him a lot.

One year later, we found ourselves on the mountain I told you about. We overlooked the whole world. My uncle sliced…

She’s older. Her skin is weathered, but her eyes are still sharp. She says that for most of her life she thought she was trash.

“Growing up, I never thought much of myself,” she said. “Guess when your daddy says you ain’t nothing, you believe it.”

Yeah.

Her parents were poor. Her father was bad to drink. Her mother was bitter. Life was no cakewalk.

She had her first boyfriend as a sophomore. He was a real winner. He degraded her, called her names. She got pregnant as a junior. He disappeared. She dropped out.

By nineteen, she was pregnant again by another man who treated her even worse—who also left her.

But her life didn’t stay as sad as it sounds. No sir. In fact, that’s why I’m writing this.

During her mid-twenties, fate smiled on her. She got married to a good man who thought she hung the moon. He had two kids; she had two kids. They shoved their families together and manufactured happiness

by the bucketful.

He laid concrete. She worked in a restaurant.

They were barely making enough to survive, but money’s not everything. Some things are more important. Like happiness, family, and whether you like your own reflection.

“But I was tired of feeling beneath everyone else,” she said. “I had no confidence, and I had no idea how to make things better.”

One day after work, she got her answer. She was picking up her children from the Methodist church’s after-school program.

In the parking lot, she met a woman who was like her. Same callused hands. Same smoking habit. They hit it off. They talked about things, about their kids, their husbands, about everything.

The woman said she was graduating college that same week.

“It’s taken me ten years to graduate,” the woman admitted. “Had to take classes little by little.…

God put me together funny. My arms are too long. My legs come to my neck. My feet are the size of waterskis. This makes it hard to shop for things like, say, clothes.

I’m getting a sport jacket for a wedding. The man taking my measurements is named Moe. I know this because it’s on his nametag. He is sturdy-built, caramel skin, middle-aged.

He tells me to hold my arms outward while he pays close attention to how uniquely disproportionate I am.

I’ve met Moe once before. He remembers me.

He recalls that I am an Alabama football fan. He remembers that the last time I visited this store, I was buying clothes for a funeral in South Georgia. He remembers that I always have dog hair on me.

“I got a good memory,” he says. “I was a fire-medic. We had to remember everything ‘cause we couldn’t take notes.”

A fireman-paramedic. A soul who is as equally at home in a yellow NOMEX suit as he is EMT work blues. A man who has removed nine-year-olds

from burning mobile homes. Who has resuscitated ninety-year-olds.

A cotton-picking hero.

“I worked in Greene County, Georgia,” he says. “I’d still be doing it if my family hadn't needed me here. I miss it.”

Georgia credentials don’t count within Florida state lines. The state won’t let him work without a brand new certificate—which requires more schooling. Florida wants its pound of cash.

“Costs ten grand to get certified,” he said. “I can’t afford to start school all over again. Gotta earn a living.”

So he’s fitting people for suits. The same hands that once saved a drowning girl, or a boy with a gut-shot, are now patting my shoulders to make sure I have enough room.

“Can still remember the first time someone died in my arms,” he tells me. “I remember the smells, my surroundings, the way I felt… It never leaves…

I saw her in a parking lot. Her kids were fussing. She had a toddler in a stroller who was howling.

Her attention was on the screaming baby, she didn’t notice her shopping buggy rolling downhill.

I did. So I jogged after it and caught the cart before it smacked the side of a very white, very shiny, very BMW.

She gave me a quick smile and a frantic “Ohmygodthankyousomuch.”

Then, she buckled her three kids into an economy car—a vehicle with rust around the wheel-wells. When she did, she spilled her purse.

God love her.

She threw her head into her hands. She stayed like that a little while. I don’t know whether she was crying, but she sure as hell deserved to.

It wasn’t long ago, I knew a woman like her. A woman who raised two kids on a shoestring, and struggled for every nickel.

The same woman who taught me how to spell my name. And how to say “yes ma’am" and “yessir” to elders.

She once met a Mexican woman at Bible study. The woman

was single, she had a partially deaf son, she lived in a dilapidated apartment, she worked three jobs. She had no car.

Mama carried her to and from Bible study. They made fast friends.

One spring morning, my mother took me for a drive. We rode dirt roads until we landed in an automobile graveyard. At the end of a long driveway were miles of broken vehicles surrounded by weeds and barbed-wire fences.

A man in overalls greeted Mama. He led us to a barn where he kept a ‘68 Ford Bronco—with rust on the wheel-wells and a cracked windshield.

She handed him a wad of cash.

He handed her keys. “Gott’er running,” he said. “Good truck if you ain’t going far.”

We weren't going far. Mama drove the thing home and parked it in our driveway.

That night, Mama…

A television is playing in a Pensacola bar. The talking head is shouting politics. Most folks in this joint are below thirty, and aren't even watching TV. They're transfixed to glowing smartphones.

The bartender looks thirteen. He stares at the screen and says something under his breath. Something awful.

“This country sucks, man.”

I know he probably doesn’t mean it, but it stings just the same, and I wish he wouldn't say such things.

Even so, it’s not his fault. I don't know what his story is, but perhaps this boy has missed a few blessings in his accumulated years of harrowed wisdom.

Maybe he's never seen things like big azaleas—bright enough to give you trouble breathing.

Those don't suck.

Neither do the Waffle Houses lining the Interstates. I’ve never had a bad meal at such an establishment, nor bad service. And no matter which time of year I visit one, it is always cold enough inside to hang meat.

The Everglades at sunrise, no sucking there. The Suwannee. The fat-bottomed cypress trees. Spanish moss. My bartender needs to

see these things.

And he ought to eat supper with men who plant peanuts and cotton. Fellas who live in trailers parked on a thousand acres. Who raise red Angus, and Herefords. Who still use cattle dogs for herding. Real people. Real callouses.

If you ask me, the boy needs to ride a riverboat, watch shrimp trawlers, or hear stories from men who farm oyster beds.

And he needs hog ribs from Kendall’s Barbecue, in Georgiana. Food that comes out of that tin shack is worth crying over.

County fairs, livestock exhibitions, and kids with prize-winning show hogs.

String bands. Gospel music with Hammond organs. Or music from the the bayou played by men with white hair.

Jazz.

He deserves a trip to Defuniak Springs, Florala, Kinston, Brantley, or Luverne. And for just one afternoon, I’d like to show him a…

She was a short woman, big as a minute. And each Sunday, she used to hug my neck hard enough to suffocate me.

She had fuzzy white hair, and she wore the same shoes, every week. Red Converse.

She cut hair. Her beauty parlor was a double-wide trailer which she also lived in. Once per month, she lowered my ears and told me Bible stories while she snipped. There, I learned about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Baalam's ass, and Zacchaeus.

The last time I saw her, she was hugging unsuspecting Baptists after church service. She hugged too much, too many, and too often.

I knew what those stiff Baptists thought of her. They thought she was “touched.”

A few mushrooms short of a rice casserole.

Maybe she was, Lord knows she was different. But I liked her. She cut good hair, she told nice stories, and the neighborhood dogs followed her.

Her father had been a Holiness preacher. He beat his kids. Like many Pentecostals, she'd grown her hair waist-length as a girl. But by her teenage years,

she'd wandered astray.

She started listening to Elvis. She stayed out. She took up cigarettes.

She cut her hair off.

Her father kicked her out. He wouldn't even let her take clothes with her. Sixteen years old; on her own.

She never darkened the doors of a Pentecostal congregation thereafter. And I understand she hardly ever spoke to her family.

That's all I know about her.

Except that she often claimed she was too loud to be a good Baptist; too quiet to be a good Pentecostal.

Her husband was neither. He fixed cars for a living. He wasn’t religious, but he attended for her.

After service, he’d smoke cigarettes on the church stoop. He’d roll his sleeves and show us younger sanctified brethren the pinup-girl tattoos on his scrawny biceps. I liked to hear him talk. His voice sounded like a bass…