You don’t find places like this anymore. You just don’t.

Brenda’s Kitchen sits off Highway 45 in Chester County, Tennessee. It’s a tiny restaurant, located next to the Tractor Supply. The kind of under-the-radar joint that serves country food. Not “country-style” food. Not “home-style” food. But real-people food.

It’s an average Wednesday. Lunch rush. The parking lot is full of muddy Fords and Chevys. Which is a good sign. You couldn’t fit a bicycle in this parking lot edgewise.

I walk inside. Paneled walls. Vinyl tablecloths. The place is adorned in Chester County High School colors of blue and white. Go Eagles.

Most customers either have white hair or none at all. There are several pairs of Velcro shoes. You see a lot of camouflage. Boots galore. I count six pairs of overalls in this joint.

Six.

This room smells like coffee and bacon and chocolate cake. Pie coolers hum. A TV plays the news. Old men in the corner are dog cussing politicians. There is a sign on the wall which reads, “No profanity.”

Miss Brenda

is seated at a table, sipping tea, watching it all. She is lean, with cotton hair and an easy smile. Whenever a customer enters, she greets them only with her eyes.

This is a little town. Everybody knows everybody. The servers know what customers want before they enter. Because that’s the thing about towns like this. In a small town, whenever you don’t know what you’re doing, everyone else does.

Brenda’s Kitchen has been around for 17 years. She started this place after she retired. She had always wanted to have a restaurant.“Guess I just like to feed people,” she says. “Or maybe I’m a glutton for punishment.”

The menu is elegant, but uncomplicated. All the classics are here. Today Brenda is serving pot roast with potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Greens. Black eyed peas. She even has chess pie.

You have to drive a…

My favorite hymn is the one about leaning on everlasting arms. I got to thinking about this song today when I was sitting on the porch with my sister. We were both singing.

“Leaning, leaning,
“Safe and secure, from all alarms…”

My sister is a 33-year-old woman. She is beautiful. Funny. And she’s got a way about her. She’s meek. And you can just tell that she’s been humbled in her life.

I know a thing or two about being humbled. Which is a very different thing than simply “being a humble person.”

Being a humble person, for example, means that you don’t cut in line, take the last biscuit, or sing karaoke.

But being “humbled” (past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb) is a thing that is done to you. Usually, without your consent. Being humbled is an experience that feels a lot like getting your head shaved.

I have been humbled a lot throughout life. In fact, I will be humbled as soon as I submit this very column when a reader with an English

degree writes to me and says there is no such thing as a “past-tense non-restrictive intransitive verb.”

My sister has been humbled too many times for anyone’s good.

It all started when my father died in a traumatic way, an event I’ve written about enough. When this horrible thing happened to my family, my sister and I both quit going to school.

At the time, I was 11, and had no use for sentence diagrams dealing with worthless concepts, such as, to pick a concept at random, intransitive verbs. My sister, however, was in kindergarten when she quit school.

As a result, my sister didn’t learn how to read until she was 20 years old. She became highly skilled at hiding this. Some people never knew she couldn’t read.

When you get older, it gets harder to learn how to read. And once you miss…

DEAR SEAN:

I have tickets to see you at The Ritz Theater in Talladega in September. I was so excited to see you were coming that I secured five tickets. I’ve since broken the news to my husband who is now obligated to attend instead of fishing. I am also bringing my sister, and her boyfriend.

That leaves one ticket.

That fifth ticket is the one I want to ask you about.

The fifth ticket is for my son. Our one and only son is a beautiful, brutally honest, extremely complex, soon-to-be 13-year-old. His name is Owen.

I had Owen when I was 28. Little did we know what the next 13 years held. I first knew something wasn’t right when he had feeding issues in the hospital. His doctors wrote us off as naive first-time parents.

We weren’t. We had no idea, but at some point Owen had a hemorrhagic stroke. His stroke caused left unilateral obstructive hydrocephalus, which is spinal fluid inside the brain. I had to force feed him—holding

his jaw shut so he’d latch onto bottles.

For four weeks I took him to the pediatrician to voice my concerns, only to be brushed off as an anxious mother.

I finally broke down and did what doctors hate, I consulted with Doctor Google. I told the doctors, “It’s hydrocephalus.” The doctors thought I was crazy. Until they measured his head, which had grown two inches in four weeks. His brain was under so much pressure that the CT scan looked like a big black hole.

Owen’s first brain surgery was at 4 weeks old. Suddenly, I was transformed into not just a mom but a mom to a medically complex child.

His second brain surgery was at 5 months. Then came physical, occupational and speech therapies. Owen has right sided hemiplegic cerebral palsy. He can hardly use the right side of his body. He also has central…

I have a friend who was recently asked by his employer to use a different name in his workplace. My friend’s nickname is “Tater Log.” But mostly, we just call him “Tater,” “Tater Bug,” or “Sweet Tater Pie.”

Tater’s employer, however, felt this name was unprofessional to use when dealing with high-level clients. He said it sounded, quote, “hillbilly.” (“Hello, ma’am. Your loan officer today is “Sweet Tater Nugget.”)

Sadly, Tater has had to start using his legal name, which is Marian. So you can see why this is so tragic.

When Marian was a boy, we used to give him a hard time about his legal name. He hated the name Marian. Any time the name was invoked, you had to run because in a few seconds a glass object would be hurled in your general direction.

Well, all this got my dander up because forcing someone to change their name is discriminatory. Moreover, it raises important ethical questions:

Such as (1) why, exactly, is “Tater” less fit for the workplace than

other names such as, for example, Hubert or Archibald? And (2) what precisely does it mean to get one’s “dander up”?

Furthermore, in this part of the world we have a cherished tradition of nicknames. I don’t know how other regions such as, say, Ohio, approach nicknames, but to us a good nickname expresses lovable personality traits and characteristics. Nicknames are often given by family members and friends. They are terms of endearment.

When I was growing up, for example, I had several nicknames. My initials are S.P.D. So my Little League coach called me “Speedy.” Which I did not care for because “Speedy” is what is known as a “reverse nickname.”

A reverse nickname expresses the opposite of the truth about its titleholder. It’s like calling a big person “Tiny,” a bald person “Curly,” or saying a Congressperson “has strong family values.”

If you would have…

I was a kid. I was riding in Daddy’s F-100. Forest green. Rusted fenders. Oxygen canisters on the back. Welding hoses, dangling. He was a young man. It was nighttime.

It was Saturday evening. We were leaving prayer meeting. We were often at church on Saturday nights because sometimes Daddy sang in the choir for prayer meetings.

And each week, on the ride home, after our Baptist congregation had prayed thoroughly enough to severely constipate themselves, we listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio.

That night, the Oak Ridge Boys were singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Daddy’s favorite. I remember my father turning it up. I remember those flimsy radio speakers distorting.

Then, the truck made a noise. A loud noise. A tire had blown out. Daddy gripped the wheel with both hands and guided the truck to the shoulder of the rural two-lane.

He left the doors open and the radio playing. He removed his church-shirt so that his scrawny, pale, bird-like torso was bare. And as his beloved

hymn played, he taught me how to change my first tire. He let me do all the easy parts.

Afterward, we sat together on the truck bed. The stars were above us. Minnie Pearl was telling jokes.

She told the one about the little boy who once said a cuss word in front of his mother. His mother was aghast.

“I’m going to give you a whippin’!” his mother said. After the mother administered corporal punishment, the boy looked at his bare hindparts in the mirror. “Look what you did, Mama!” he said, “you cracked it.”

I remember the pleasant feeling of being together with my father that evening. And I always think of him just that way. Young. Shirtless. Skinny. With the Opry playing.

It wasn’t long thereafter that one day the preacher visited our house. He was wearing a necktie, although it wasn’t Sunday. And…

I saw him when I got to Chattanooga. He was an old man, in the restaurant, seated in the booth directly across from mine. He was just sitting there, drinking coffee. His clothes were crumpled. He was unshaven. He wore a ratty cap.

When I am an old man, I will wear a ratty cap.

The waitress stopped by and asked if he needed anything. He said no, he was waiting for his daughter to arrive. But she was running a little late, he explained.

“You want some more coffee?” the waitress asked.

“Yes, please, darling.”

When I am an old man, I will call waitresses “darling.”

The waitress topped off his cup and scooted into the booth beside him. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanaion why she’s running so late.”

“Like maybe she’s stuck in traffic?” he said.

“Exactly.”

“Or maybe she’s in trouble. Maybe she’s had an accident.”

“I hope that’s not the case,” said the waitress.

The old man reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone. He was checking for any missed text messages. There were none.

The waitress just smiled

at him. “She’s just running late, that’s all. Lots of people run late.”

The old man smiled weakly. “We agreed on a time and a place for lunch. She said she’d be here. She always forgets me. Crime in Italy.”

When I am an old man, I will say crime in Italy.

“Just give her a few more minutes,” the waitress said. “Your daughter would not forget you.”

“Yeah.”

My lunch break ended. An hour passed. I was watching the old man as he played Wordle on his phone. Hell hath no greater torture than Wordle.

And when I was finished, paying our server, I could see the old man was still seated at the table. Waiting.

The waitress came by his table again.

“Are you sure you don’t want to order lunch while…

The letter came via email. And in the interest of keeping the identity of the writer anonymous, I have decided not to tell you that his name is David Eriksson, of Omaha, Nebraska, zip code 68104.

“Dear Sean,” the email began, “I recently read that you love Milo’s tea and drink it all day. Well, I have been to Alabama and eaten at a Milo’s. And I just wanted to say that Milo’s, like Alabama, is terrible. Milo’s tea is too sweet. I prefer iced tea from McDonald’s and I’ll take my response off the air.”

Dear Anonymous Person Named David, I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to send me your opinion on iced tea. I must, however, respectfully disagree.

For starters, one thing you learn as an op-ed columnist is that all opinions are subjective. After all, who among us is qualified to say that one thing is better than another?

The answer is me. I am qualified. And McDonald’s tea is awful. I wouldn’t use McDonald’s tea to scrub oil stains

off my driveway.

In all fairness, you are from Nebraska. So you are probably not an iced tea aficionado. I have traveled through Nebraska. I have tasted the tea, which tastes much like sulfuric acid only with less sugar content.

“Ma’am,” I said to the waitress, “there is something wrong with my tea.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t need an insulin injection.”

And one time, I spent the night in Nebraska after I made a speech in Osceola, Iowa. And let me tell you, it wasn’t easy finding a place to stay in rural Nebraska. Nobody could understand my accent.

Plus, it took us hours to find a hotel because, apparently, the power was out, and Eastern Nebraska’s computers were down. It was a region-wide outage that was tragic. Reportedly, 43 University of Nebraska-Omaha students were stuck on an escalator for six…

Dear Myra, on your first day of seventh grade, I wanted to sit down and write you a letter. Namely, I wanted to remind you not to be anxious about starting a new school.

So do not be nervous.

But then, of course, whenever someone tells you NOT to do something, your brain ends up doing it even worse. It’s human nature.

An example of this would be if I were to tell you NOT to envision your little brother, Jason, going poop. Immediately, you would envision little Jason, sitting on the toilet, waiting for the spirit to move, shouting at you, and saying, “THERE’S SOMEONE IN HERE!”

Which is what all people shout in bathroom stalls when people try to barge in on them. We use these words verbatim. I don’t know why we all shout these exact words in public bathrooms. Whenever a bathroom stall is locked, there is obviously someone in there. There is no need to shout about it.

This is why, whenever someone tries to barge in on me

in a public restroom, I start singing. Usually, I sing something from the catalog of James Brown. Such as, “I Feel Good,” or “Let a Man Come in and Do the Popcorn.” Because that is the kind of world I want to live in.

But what I am getting at is that you shouldn’t be nervous today, Myra, because you have nothing to be nervous about.

I know your parents are both recently deceased from a car accident. I also know you and your brother are living in foster care with Miss Pamela, whom you barely know.

Your life is upside down. And now it’s time to start a new school. You have anxiety. You have panic attacks. You’re nervous. But the truth is, you don’t need to be worried. And I’m going to tell you why.

Because today is no ordinary day, Myra. Oh, it…

There is a lot of talk in the writing community about how artificial intelligence chatbots are going to replace authors someday. The fear is that AI will take real writing jobs and we writers will eventually be forced to live in refrigerator cartons beneath an overpass.

This does not scare me because, as an English major, I know from experience that if you choose the right overpass, it’s not so bad.

To further investigate the matter of AI, I signed up for ChatGPT, which is a robot developed by OpenAI. This language-based bot can, without doing any legwork or actual research, piece together fragments of quasi-true information gleaned from the internet and write incredibly crappy essays. Exactly like us writers.

What frightens us writers, however, is that you can ask ChatGPT to write in the style of ANY author, and the computer will mimic an author’s unique prose and voice.

I decided to test this. I logged in and asked the chatbot a few questions. First I asked the chatbot if it

had feelings.

“No, I am not sentient. I am a machine learning model called GPT-3.5, designed to generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I lack consciousness, self-awareness, and true understanding. My responses are generated based on patterns and information from data I was trained on.”

Next, I asked ChatGPT to write 50 words in the style of Sean Dietrich. Which is me. This is where things got scary. Here is what the chatbot wrote:

“Let me tell y’all a little somethin’ ‘bout a Southern breeze on a lazy afternoon. It's like Grandma's sweet tea, cool and a’comfortin’. Makes you forget your worries and sets your soul a’dancin’. So sit for a spell, listen close, and let that breeze a’carry you to simpler times.”

I had to laugh. Because, for starters, we did not call my grandmother “Grandma,” she was always “Granny.” And Granny’s sweet tea…

“WAHOO! WELCOME TO THE WAHOOS STADIUM!” That’s what he’d always say.

Josh Parr’s wheelchair sat parked at the top of the stairs where he greeted all ticket holders with a high-five and a corny joke. He was the first person you saw when you entered Blue Wahoo ballpark.

“He was our front gate guy,” said his employer, Donna Kirby. “He was the guy who always shouted “WAHOO! WELCOME TO THE WAHOOS!”

“Josh was a people magnet,” said another friend. “He was made for this job.”

For the unbaptized, the Pensacola Blue Wahoos are a Minor League team. They’re a good ball club, consistently at the top of the Southern League.

This year, for example, the Wahoos outrank the Biloxi Shuckers, the Montgomery Biscuits, and the poor Mississippi Braves who are—God love them—sucking pond water.

Josh was an ardent Blue Wahoos fan. When he got a job at Blue Wahoos Stadium, it was like winning the lottery for him.

And he was good at his job.

“Not just anyone can be a greeter,” said Josh’s supervisor, Mike Fitzpatrick. “It

takes real personality to do what he did. He was a master.”

“Everyone wanted their selfie with him,” said another coworker. “The fans all stood in line to talk to him.”

On game nights, there he’d be. Sitting at the gate. Rolling his chair to and fro. Dolling out belly laughs and hugs and corny jokes.

One coworker remembers: “The first time I heard him say, ‘WAHOO! WELCOME TO THE WAHOOS!’ I just smiled all over. Because he made this job really fun.”

Josh Aidan Parr. Twenty-one years young. He was born with cerebral palsy. His mother had addictions while he was in the womb, which interrupted his brain development and led to lifelong muscular difficulties.

His youth was not easy. Throughout boyhood, his mother was unstable. Times were hard. Money did not grow on trees. His mother died by suicide when…