The Gulf of Mexico is green. The sky is a pink sunset. I’m walking the shore. I have been stuck at a beach resort for two days, held against my will.

Today is the first day I’ve left my room in 48 hours because I’ve had a nice little cold. And a man can only drink so much NyQuil before he needs fresh air.

There are about 40 people on the beach. All dressed up. The attire is what I’d call TJMaxx formal. No shoes. Untucked shirts. Sundresses for the gals.

They all sit in folding chairs erected on the sand. Sixty chairs to be exact. One aisle. Five rows of six on each side.

The altar is driftwood, and looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. The altar is adorned with high quality Kmart flowers. Positioned beside the altar is a neon traffic cone which reads—seriously—“WEDDING IN PROGRESS.” As though this ceremony might be mistaken for, say, a real estate closing.

I am crashing the wedding with a few other onlookers from the resort, standing

behind the back rows.

My fellow crashers come from all over. Stillwater, Minnesota; Middletown, Delaware; Tulsa; Fayetteville. We’re all watching things go down.

Randy and Karen, the giant chalkboard says. That’s the bride’s and groom's names. And I like them already. I grew up with Karens and Randys. Nobody names their kid Karen anymore.

Karen is a great name, viciously abused by the Internet people. Randy is a sturdy name—you’d buy a car from a guy named Randy.

Randy and Karen are not kids. Randy’s hair is salt-and-pepper. His chin patch is white. He is not small, but he’s not tall either. He looks like he could be a construction guy, or nightclub security. There is a tattoo of a skull on his neck.

Karen is mid-fifties. Her hair is more purple than red. Her dress is sleeveless. She wears a flower in her…

It’s early evening. We are waiting for a table. My wife and I are standing in a long line of people who all had the same brilliant idea—to take the interstate exit and visit Cracker Barrel.

Behind me is a Baptist youth group. Mostly boys. I saw their vans in the parking lot. There must be 50 of them, and they all smell like hormones.

Ahead of me: an elderly couple. She’s pretty, wearing a floral shirt. He is two feet higher than she is, with wide bony shoulders. He is wearing a ball cap and holding her arm.

His hands are trembling. His head bobs back and forth. He doesn’t seem to have any control over his movements.

The hostess calls them.

The woman says into the man’s hearing aid, “Table’s ready.”

He smiles. It’s a nice smile. I wish my smile was half as inviting as Old Blue Eyes.

I see them in the dining room. The man keeps his shaky hands in his lap, but it doesn’t stop him from moving. He looks uncomfortable in his own

body.

She is playing the wood triangle game. I’ve never been very good at this novelty test. And apparently, neither has she.

No sooner has the waitress delivered their plates of food than the old woman takes a seat beside Old Blue Eyes. She tucks a napkin into his collar. She spoon-feeds him. His shoulders start to toss violently. His head jerks to the side. He’s making a mess. I’m thinking M.S. Or perhaps Parkinson’s.

She stops feeding and waits.

The shaking gets so bad that he starts rocking in different directions. It’s not hard for her to watch. She talks to him like nothing is wrong. And even though he flails, even though the eyes of the restaurant are watching, she’s unaffected.

Finally, he calms down. She feeds him again. She dabs his chin with a napkin. She touches…

He was loading my grocery bags. I’ll call him Michael. He was early twenties, wearing an apron. He has Down syndrome.

“How are you today?” he said.

“Pretty good,” said I.

“So am I!” he said. “I’m doing pretty good, too!”

I smiled. “How about that.”

The cashier was dutifully scanning my groceries, sliding them into the bagging area. Michael was loading my plastic bag slowly. And I mean extremely slowly.

One. Item. At. A. Time.

He was an artist. He packed my first bag like it was going into the Smithsonian.

“I’m trying to load it just right,” Michael said. “I’m supposed to take my time bagging. My manager said not to hurry. I used to rush it. But now I don’t rush it anymore. I go slow. Really slow. Like this.”

He placed a box of Cheez-Its into a bag so gently he might as well have been handling a live grenade.

Eventually, we were standing around waiting on him to finish bagging. I had already paid, but Michael was still packing my first bag, moving at about the same

pace as law school.

The bagging area was still brimming with groceries and there was a long line of customers accumulating in the checkout lane behind us, wearing aggravated looks on their pinched and sour faces.

There are two kinds of people in this world, those who slow down when they see a yellow light, and those who speed up. These customers were the latter.

The cashier asked Michael if he wanted help bagging to speed things up.

“No, thank you,” he said, placing toothpaste into the bag carefully. “I’m good.”

“But people are waiting,” the cashier said.

So Michael took a moment to smile and wave at everyone.

After what seemed like a long time he finished loading my first bag. He placed the bag into my cart. “There!” he announced, dusting his hands.

One bag down.…

“I know what I saw,” said William.

Mister William was old when I interviewed him years ago. Ancient, actually. Mid-nineties. Bent and pale.

A television was playing in the background of his nursing home apartment. Old people like to have televisions playing in the background. It’s like having company.

“It was World War II,” William began. “I was in Italy…”

Young William was walking along a rural Italian road. His uniform was tattered and stained with blood. He was not far from a battle zone. And he had just been through combat hell.

His unit had been overtaken by an ambush. Almost all of them died. Shells everywhere. Young men were slaughtered. The nucleus of his team disintegrated. It was every man for himself. Hardly any survived. Except William.

But here he was. In enemy territory. He was on his way back to his auxiliary unit operational base on foot. And he was praying—praying out loud—that no German Kübelsitzwagens came cruising down this highway to find him walking, or he was a dead man.

He heard an engine. A loud engine.

William leapt into a ditch.

The

vehicle stopped.

William cocked his weapon.

From his hiding place he saw a Ford GP. The door flew open. “William, is that you?” a familiar voice came calling.

William didn’t know what to think. This must have been a hallucination. Had to be. How could anyone know to be looking for him? He was just a doughboy private.

He came shyly from the bushes. He recognized the driver. It was and old friend. From Detroit. The guy’s name was Danny. He grew up with Danny. He had no idea Danny was even in the Army. Let alone on Italian soil.

“Danny?”

“Willy!”

They embraced.

“How’s your sister?”

“She’s good. How’s your mom and dad?”

“They’re good. Haven’t seen them since I shipped out.”

William and Danny were schoolmates. They weren’t tight friends, but…

Boaz is a town about as big as your average water heater closet. It was a quiet night. The sun had set. Houses were lit from the insides.

The Bevill Center was packed. The parking lot was slammed. Families of all kinds gathered in the auditorium for this upcoming Veterans Day, to watch their fifth-graders put on a concert.

Demographically, the audience was all over the map. The place was full of pre-concert chatter. A happy, bubbly sound that filled the room.

Kids were horsing around. Babies were crying. Dads were shaking hands and slapping each other’s shoulders to prove that they were good shoulder slappers. Mothers were catching up on local gossip. Teens were forming respective clots.

Then the curtain lifted.

Onstage, the Boaz fifth-graders were all wearing red, white, and blue T-shirts. Organized to form a living flag.

Mrs. Richey took the stage.

“She’s been directing choir here since I was a kid,” said one woman in the audience. “Most of the people in this room had Mrs. Richey for choir.”

Mrs. Richey

had the troops in good shape. The fifth-graders occupied the risers in order according to height. Little kids below deck. Tall kids topside.

I noticed they were wearing looks of nervousness. The kind you see at all school programs. I could see one boy’s hands were quivering. Another girl was bouncing her legs in her chair.

My first thought at school concerts is always: “Why do we do this to our kids?”

I remember doing these same concerts from when I was a kid. I was so nervous on that stag I might as well have been naked. I remember thinking: “Why are the adults making us do this?”

After all, not everyone wants to be a singer. Not everyone wants to be on a stage before a trillion people. Even fewer will sign up for public-speaking electives in high school.

Fact: Public speaking is…

The transmission of her car has given out. Every day, she hitches a ride to work because she is broke.

She works hard. Too hard. And when she’s not cooking in the kitchen of the medical rehab, delivering trays to patients, she’s a full-time single mother.

Sometimes, her kids visit her at work. They get thirty minutes for supper. Her breaks are never long enough.

The strain of day-to-day living is wearing her thin. She is overworked, underpaid, vehicle-less.

One day, she meets a patient. An old man.

In the three months he’s been in rehab, nobody has seen him move or speak. Most days, he faces the window with his jaw slung open. Empty eyes.

She’s delivering food to his room. Her emotions get the best of her. She collapses on a chair and has a meltdown.

She bawls because life is unfair. Because a busted car sits in her driveway and she can’t afford to have a mechanic look at it.

The old man stirs in his wheelchair.

His facial muscles move. And in a few moments, he looks like a man who’s

never suffered a traumatic brain injury.

He stares straight at her. His eyes sparkle.

And in a voice as clear as a bell he says, “God sees you.”

Then.

His face goes slack. His eyes become hollow. His mouth falls open, he begins to drool again.

All day, she thinks about him and his words. In fact, she thinks about it so much she can’t sleep.

The next day, she’s delivering food again. She speaks to him.

He doesn’t answer. He is completely unalert. So, she tells a few knock-knock jokes.

His face cracks a slight grin.

It moves her so much that she hugs him until she is crying into his chest. She tells more jokes.

She eventually gets a strained laugh out of him.

Then, he surprises her. He hugs her with rigid…

Thank you. That is the​ purpose of this column. I want to say “thanks.” I don't know you, but I believe in the good you do. Thanksgiving Day is approaching and you deserve your share of thanks.

In public, I see you sometimes and think to myself: "I wish someone would thank them." But I never do because if I did, you’d think I was a complete nut job.

Maybe I am a nut job. But I’m allowed to be that way. After all, I am a columnist—sort of—and that means I am missing some crayons.

Long ago, I used to deliver newspapers with my mother. We used to deliver to a fella who would answer the door in pajamas. He had messy hair and a bushy white beard. He always gave me a five-dollar tip.

He was generous. If he wasn’t home one day, he would pay me ten bucks the next day. He was a columnist, my mother told me. And that’s why he was such a weirdo in weird pajamas. Even his

house smelled weird.

I suppose I ought to thank him while I am at it.

Also, thanks to the man I saw in the Florida gas station who bought a lottery scratch-off ticket. Who won thirty bucks, then turned around and gave the cash to a woman behind him in line. What a guy.

The woman thanked him in a language that sounded like Russian, but he didn't seem to understand, so he answered: “Alright.”

Thank you, Cindy—the woman who translated one of my speeches in American Sign Language for the front row​. She told me I talked very fast and now she has problems with her rotator cuff.

She also taught me how to cuss in sign language.

Thank you to the seventy-year-old man who went back to school to get his GED. And his forty-six-year-old daughter, who tutored him.

And you. You deserve…

Dear Connor and Leslie Ann,

Congratulations on the day of your wedding. I wish to impart some advice to you two. You should know, however, this is not my advice, necessarily. I have garnered these tidbits from several older married couples whom I interviewed, strictly for the purposes of this column.

Gary and Delores have been married for 54 years. Gary says: “My grandson asked what it’s like to be married, so I told him to ‘LEAVE ME ALONE!’ When he did, I asked why he was ignoring me.”

Simon and Anne have been married 60 years. They were married the same year Kennedy was shot. “You can either be happy or you can be right. But you can’t be both.”

Lydia and Eddie, 48 years: “Nobody tells you that you don’t fall in love before you’re married. It takes years and years to fall in love. A little more every day.”

Pamela and James have been married 49 years. Pam says: “Don’t go to bed mad. Stay up all night and fight.”

Pearl

and Jacob say: “If you are wondering whether you can survive on love, you can. You’ll just be really skinny.”

Dan and Kristie say: “Don’t ever use absolutes such as, ‘You never,’ or ‘You always.’ They never work, and you always end up sounding like an absolute idiot.”

Karen and Dale have been married for 41 years: “I once gave my wife the silent treatment for about a week, and at the end of the week she said, ‘Hey, we’re getting along pretty good, lately, aren’t we?’”

Linda and David: “My wife and I got together when she was 15, which was good for me because my wife never knew what she was missing.”

Kevin and Rachel: “Don’t ever point out your husband’s weaknesses during an argument. Wait until the next morning.”

Ron and Tiffany have been married for 32 years. “I told my nephew that…

Once upon a time there lived a small girl. Quite small. When she was a newborn, you could practically put her in your pocket and carry her around.

Her birthmother was drunk. The inebriated woman staggered into the hospital, had a baby and two days later she disappeared.

The nurses called the child Thumbelina. So that’s what we’ll call her, too.

Thumbelina’s little face looked perfectly scrunched up. Her hands were itty-bitty and looked like doll hands. All the maternity nurses said they wanted to eat her up.

But Thumbelina’s size did not work in her favor. It was the reason nobody wanted to adopt her. At the group home, she was often glanced over with disapproving stares, for she appeared to be underweight. The runt of the litter.

People associate small size with sickness. And not everyone adopting has room for a sickly child.

So Thumbelina began her life alone. She lived in many group homes throughout the 1950s. She moved in and out of foster care. She learned what it feels like

to be a pinball.

She was a quiet child, it seemed as though she was unable to speak. Maybe she was going deaf? Perhaps she was mute? They had her tested. No hearing troubles, the doc said. No vocal problems. She was just a natural stoic.

This, too, worked against Thumbelina. Nobody wants to adopt a sullen child who has about as much to say as a municipal fire hydrant.

One of Thumb’s great talents was art. She loved to draw. You could put Thumb in a corner with a pencil and a notebook and she would draw for many hours.

Mostly, she liked to draw countrysides, with pretty flowers. Places she wanted to visit someday. Distant lands where people were nice, and everyone loved orphan girls, even if they were smaller than the rest.

Also poems. Little Thumb loved poems. There was a time in…

We left Italy before sunrise. Our plane touched down in Birmingham at 7:08 p.m. We had been in the air longer than it takes many people to complete a PhD.

Our seats were located beside the bathrooms. Midway through the flight, the bathroom door jammed. Passengers had no choice but to keep using the john with the door slung open.

By the time we landed, many of us were plugging our noses.

We deboarded, then got our bags from the luggage merry-go-round. Our friend Amy drove us home. We were jet-lagged zombies. Hungry. Barely coherent. I fumbled with my keys to open the front door. We collapsed in our bed fully clothed.

The next morning I awoke early, and had no idea where I was.

I stepped onto the porch and watched the sunrise over Magic City. The sky was pink and gold. The air was as crisp as supermarket lettuce. Birmingham was smiling back at me.

I checked my watch. I wasn’t quite sure what time it was. The jet lag was playing with

my mind. My body said it was suppertime. The wristwatch said it was morning.

I watched the morning from my porch. The garbage truck came by. A lady was out walking her dog. A jogger was out for his pre-sunrise bout of masochism. A masochist is someone who likes a cold shower in the morning so he takes a hot one.

The jogger waved and said, “Welcome home. What’d you guys do in Italy?”

“Carbs,” I said.

I drove into town to buy a newspaper. You can’t just go buy newspapers anymore. You have to know where to find them. They’re getting more rare by the day.

So I walked into my usual gas station. The bell dinged. I purchased one paper and one cup of bathwater coffee. I sat in the parking lot sipping the world’s worst cup of Joe, wearing a smile.

Namely,…