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…

The email came yesterday.

“Dear Sean, I am an atheist, I do not believe in God… Your God cannot be omnipotent and concomitantly allow evil, you can’t have it both ways… Remember the recent floods in Texas, where was your God then?

“...Sorry Sean, would love to believe in a higher power like the rest of you small-brains, but my heart and brain both say ‘HELL NO.’”

Dear Friend,

I’m no theologian. I’m not even a church guy, either—not unless it’s a pennant race. No, I’m more of a Pabst Blue Ribbon enthusiast.

Moreover, you’ve written to an uneducated man. I had to look up the word “concomitantly.” I’m still not sure how to use this adverb.

So I’m not exactly the person you should be sending these emails to. You’re much sharper than I am. Any response I write will make me look like I am full of bovine byproduct.

There is, however, one thing I know.

I once met a woman from Illinois who was born blind and deaf. Just like Helen Keller. She was remarkable. You would have

liked her.

The percentage of deaf-blind cases in America is low. So you’re looking at a population of about 11,000 in the U.S.

Moreover, 90 percent of deaf-blind people also have medical, physical, or cognitive disabilities. Back in the olden days, many parents put deaf-blind children up for adoption. They were sent off to state facilities until someone adopted them. Which—surprise—people rarely did.

That’s what happened to this deaf-blind girl. As a kid, she was tossed around. She didn’t learn how to truly communicate with other humans until her late teens.

Take a moment and think about that.

Her life was a long, arduous road. For her first half of existence, she had no concept of our world. She lived in darkness and perpetual silence. She did not know, for example, who her caregivers were. Heck, for that matter,…

Yavapai County, Arizona, is a lot of dirt, rocks, and heat. I spent a few weeks outside Prescott once. The heat index was 140. It was so hot the Prescott Daily Courier reported that local chickens were laying omelettes.

Jerome lies to the northeast, an old copper mining town. Farther east is beautiful Sedona, which features Earth’s largest natural collection of Range Rover Defenders.

In the topmost northern section of the county is Seligman (population 446). There isn’t much in Seligman. You’re looking at a few abandoned gas stations, a couple Route 66 tourist shops, old motels, and people whose front yards are dirt.

It was in this setting that a 2-year-old boy named Boden Allen got lost. Boden is adventurous kid, a typical towheaded toddler. He was playing outside while his father was working on the roof. His mother was tending to their 1-year-old.

Two-year-olds can be sneaky. Boden just slipped out of the yard, and that was that.

The kid was nowhere to be found. His parents sounded the alarm.

Yavapai Search and Rescue took to the desert on a manhunt. Or a “boy” hunt, as it were.

The search turned up nothing. One hour turned into two. Two turned into 10. Ten turned into 16. It was like looking for hay in a haystack.

Night fell. Still no Boden.

His mother, Sarah said, “I looked at his empty bed in the middle of the night, and I’m like, ‘This isn’t real, he’s not — how is he not here? How is he out by himself somewhere in the dark?’”

Boden’s odds of survival were not good. The overnight temperatures sink down into the 20s. Not to mention the natural predators that wander the desert. You could get bit by a rattlesnake, fall into a canyon, or attacked by a coyote.

Enter Buford.

Burford is a fluffy 160-pound Anatolian Pyrenese, a working ranch dog with paws the size…

She was 10 years old. She got kicked in the leg, during P.E. class. No big deal. Happens all the time. But her leg started doing weird things. Something was definitely wrong.

“My leg started swelling, almost the size of a baseball,” she remembers.

Her name is Coraliz. They took her to the doctor. Did some tests. It was osteosarcoma. Bone cancer. Not good.

She was referred to St. Jude to receive treatment. When Coraliz’s family carried her through the doors of the massive hospital, it was like entering a warzone, mentally.

The fear was overwhelming. A heavy, black terror rested on her shoulders. A burden no 10-year-old should have to bear. And yet each year, about 16,000 kids diagnosed with pediatric cancer will bear this weight.

They showed Coraliz to her room. For the next nine months of chemotherapy, she would live right here. This was home now.

Not long thereafter, Coraliz had surgery to amputate one of her legs. Her family stayed by her side. There was a lot of crying involved.

When a child loses a piece of his or her body, everyone goes into grieving mode. Psychologists say, losing a piece of your body can sometimes be similar to losing a loved one. You’re losing a living thing.

She started doing a lot of artwork. Landscapes, flowers, symbolic artwork. One of her paintings features a network of hands, reaching out, decorated with different designs.

“This piece represents healing hands everywhere,” she says. “The support we receive from friends, family and those who care.”

Perhaps, the hand painting represents something else, too. Namely, one of Coraliz’s nurses. A particular nurse that Coraliz will never forget.

One night, the nurse entered her room. The woman went through the usual nightly nursing duties. Coraliz was watching carefully as the nurse changed intravenous lines, gave injections, drew blood, checked stats, and performed her routine with ease.

The woman was an…