I am sitting at my airline gate. I have been waiting here since the Peloponnesian Wars. I am people-watching because there is nothing else to do while I wait for my plane.

The main person I am watching is a guy in the seating area. He is maybe mid-80s. With him are six children. He appears to be the sole adult in their company. There are no other grownups with him.

These are all little kids, too. Really little. Kindergarteners, I’d guess. The kids wear oversized backpacks and sneakers. And they have been blessed with energy.

The kids call this man “Bill.” Not Granddaddy, Uncle, or anything like that. Just Bill. They are shouting his name over and again. Bill this. Bill that.

I’m wondering what Bill’s story is. And more importantly, I’m wondering whether Bill has called for reinforcements.

The kids are getting more rambunctious with each minute. They are constantly running around, falling down, roughhousing, and asking Bill important questions at the tops of their voices.

“Bill!” the kids are saying. “Do people

ever die in bathtubs?” “Bill! Why are my underpants white?” “Bill! How do mommies get pregnant?”

God bless Bill.

Bill finally gets the kids to stop running around by telling them to sit down and start coloring in their little coloring books. I can tell that Bill is a patient man. I never hear him raise his voice. He never once loses his smile. Lesser men would have already had a cardiac infarction.

Soon, the kids are coloring, and all is well. Mostly. Because while it is true that the kids ARE behaving—technically— they are also making a lot of noise by laughing loudly.

Other people glare at the laughing kids. Grumpy adults nearby give the kids looks of parental disapproval, just to let the kids know laughter is not appreciated. This is an airport, dangit. You’re not supposed to laugh in airports. You’re supposed…

Morning. I am driving two-lane highways in the backcountry of Missouri. I have been sharing the highway with mostly rusty pickups and Massey Ferguson farm implements. Also deer.

Missouri. The place where the western prairie meets the southern cotton patches. It’s a foreign land to me.

You’d never know I was born in Missouri. You’d never guess my father died in Missouri.

We lived in Kansas for a short time. A place where Missouri and Kansas were indistinguishable from one another. And that’s where our lives went to hell.

Daddy ended his earthly career here, by his own hand. I come back to town on a pilgrimage every few years.

It’s weird, because I don’t know anyone here. I don’t have any friends. People listen to me talk, they smile, and they immediately ask where my accent is from.

“Alamaba,” I reply.

Then they nod and edge away from me.

I spent the morning driving around Kansas and Missouri, the place where it all happened. The bad stuff. My father did not simply kill himself. On his last

night alive, he tried to kill us too. My mom. My sister. Me.

But it wasn’t actually him doing the bad stuff. Not really. He lost his mind. And when someone loses their mind they lose their wholeself.

Before sunrise, I went to the creek where I was the day he died. I had been catching mudbugs that day. Playing. Splashing. When the shot rang out.

I haven’t been to the creek in over 30 years. Never wanted to go. But today I felt like going.

So, I parked on the shoulder of an old gravel road. I hiked through the suffocating woods to the spot. The same creek where my mother once ran barefoot, in her nightgown, as my father chased her with a pistol. I remember all the shouting and the wailing.

This morning, I looked into the treetops. All…

Kansas City International Airport. I was standing in a long, LONG line, waiting to board my plane. We were like cattle, clogging up the chute. Nobody was happy.

Namely, because yesterday the whole world underwent a historic global internet outage, which delayed and canceled nearly 3,000 American flights. And on this particular historic day in human civilization, I happened to be flying.

You could see boiling anger and frustration on every face in the airport.

The young man in line ahead of me was with his mother. He was maybe 15. He had Down syndrome. He was shouting hellos to people in line. He was a natural comedian. He was Mister Personality.

And you couldn’t help but smile when the kid landed his miracle gaze on you.

“Hello!” the boy shouted to a businessman in line. “How are you today?!”

The business guy was on the phone, having a heated conversation at the time.

“Uh, I don’t know,” the guy says.

Then the boy hugged the man. “Does this help!?” he said.

The businessman tentatively hugged back. Until, finally, he broke

a smile, ended up terminating the phone call, and he said to the boy, midhug, “I guess I’m good, how are you?”

“It’s not ‘good,’” the boy said. “You never say ‘I’m good,’ it’s bad grammar. It’s WELL. You should have told me, you’re doing WELL!”

Everyone laughed at that. All the people in line, in foul moods, some of whom had been living in KCI for the past 20 hours, surviving on vending machine food, actually began chuckling.

The businessman was laughing too, when he said, “Okay, then I am doing WELL, and how are you today?”

“I’m good,” the boy said.

More laughter.

Then the boy addressed another woman in line. She was playing on her phone. She was mid-forties. She looked like she’d just sucked a lemon.

“Hi,” the kid said.

She looked up from her…

I have written a lot of stories about pediatric cancer. Hundreds, actually.

When I started writing for newspapers, I visited lots of children’s hospitals. I sat in lots of waiting rooms. I conducted lots of bedside interviews.

I embraced too many weeping parents, skeleton-thin from stress. I fell in love with too many bald children.

There was Benny, who vomited throughout most of our interview. He was crying while vomit trickled down his chin, saying, “Help me, Jesus.” He died two weeks later.

I wrote about Lydia. She was a middle-schooler. Glioblastoma took her from this world. We played Rook at her bedside. She lasted another year.

So when they found cancer on my 12-year-old goddaughter’s ear, I was a wreck.

All I could think about were those waiting rooms. Those emaciated parents. And the words spoken to me by the mother of a child who died of kidney cancer.

“My life is split into two parts,” the mother explained. “BC and AD; Before Cancer, and After Death.”

Our Becca. Precious Becca. The same Becca

who was born to drug-addicted parents. The same Becca who’d been shuffled around foster care until being adopted by two loving parents. The same Becca who went blind. Who has lost some of her hearing. The same Becca who did me the honor of becoming my godchild.

The same Becca who has been my best good friend. My constituent in crime. The same Becca who sends me text messages every 8 to 10 minutes. The same Becca who used to crawl into my lap so I could hold her like a baby.

That Becca.

The worst part has been watching sadness overtake her. She would never admit to being sad, of course. She NEVER tells anyone she’s sad. But you could just tell.

There have been few smiles. Fewer laughs. She doesn’t even laugh when I make poot noises with my hands. That’s how bad.

It was late. I was leaving South Carolina, where I’d just made a speech in Columbia. I had an all-night drive ahead of me.

I stopped at a gas station off the side of the road. Middle of Nowhere. There was nothing around for miles except a few shotgun houses with couches on front porches. The frogs were singing a nightly chorus.

I walked inside. The bell over the door rang. I was buying vittles for the ride home.

I tossed a few bags of Chili Cheese Fritos on the counter.

The girl behind the register was pretty. She was tatted up. Rings in her nose. Rings on her lip. Her hair was a shade of purple not found in nature. Her name was Angela. I know this because her nametag said so.

She was crying. She used a hand to mop the tears from her face. She approached the cash register. She scanned my bags of Fritos and said, “I love these chips.”

“Me too,” I replied.

“I could freakin’ live on these things,” she said, sniffing her nose.

“Some of

us do.”

Her makeup was smeared.

I knew it was none of my business, but I just had to ask. “Ma’am, are you okay?”

She smiled. It was a pretty smile. She could have been a homecoming queen. A very purple homecoming queen.

“Can I show you something?” she asked.

We were alone in the old convenience store. Nothing but the hum of old coolers working overtime. This was not the question I expected her to ask.

“You want to show me something?” I said.

She nodded. “That okay?”

“Depends,” I said. “Is it something that will send either of us to prison?”

She reached into her pocket and showed me a picture on her phone. “Do you know what this is?” she said.

“Yes. It’s a phone.”

She smiled. “No, on the screen.”

The girl pinch-zoomed on…

Q: Sean!!! Are you going to write anything about how poorly Ingrid Andress sang our national anthem at the Home Run Derby? It’s an attack on our country!!! If you stay silent on this you are a complete wuss!!!!

A:

Q: My dad let me read one of your books, I finished it and gave it a one-star review on Amazon... It was so hard to get through such a weird mess... I left you a bad review and, believe me, I don’t enjoy leaving bad reviews.

A: I can see how hard this is for you.

Q: How do you write something new everyday? Or the better question is, WHY do you write everyday when nobody *#$%ing cares what you have to say? Who even are you?

A: I think you meant “every day.” Maybe you should turn autocorrekt of

Q: Sean, your a fool. You wrote that you believed God rescued you from a traffic accident. If that were true, then God chose NOT to save millions of other people who have met tragic ends, such as

the passengers on the Titanic?

A: It’s you’re, not “your.”

Q: I saw your band playing on Facebook, and you guys really suck.

A: You should see us when we drink.

Q: I don’t know how I stumbled on one of this author’s books… But I wish I had those three hours of my life back.

A: Just think. You could’ve been watching “Titanic.”

Q: You are fond of saying how much you love America, I wonder if you realize how screwed up this &*$# country is? How can you still love something so $%&*ing dysfunctional?

A: You should meet my family sometime.

Q: I just have one word of criticism: Your work is all the same. Someone told me you were a columnist, but I disagree. A columnist finds something new to talk about. All you do is repeat yourself…

God bless the Great Smoky Mountains, so majestic their beauty could kill you. God bless the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevadas at sundown.

The same goes for the Tetons, the Blue Ridge, the Bighorns, the Elks, the Adirondacks, and the Appalachians, which were carved by the pocketknife of God.

And the Missouri River, seen from 34,000 feet above, moving like liquid silver across a green patchwork. The Mississippi, the Rio Grande, the meandering Columbia, the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Tennessee, the Colorado.

God bless the Gulf of Mexico at dusk. The Chesapeake Bay. God bless the geese overhead, on any Great Lake. Or any body of water for that matter.

And Ellis Island. If you visit Ellis, you begin to visualize the hundreds of thousands of congregated souls, dressed in drab rags, holding tight to their entire lives, crammed into duffle bags.

And it all makes sense, why your old man was such a tightwad when it came to buying your Little League uniform.

And Savannah. On Oglethorpe Avenue, where

the home of Juliette Gordon Low stands. Low, a girl who was deaf in both ears, who founded a humble youth organization for girls in 1915. And although they were laughed at by high-society, these Girl Scouts would predate the American woman’s right to vote.

Mount Vernon, Virginia, overlooking the whitewater. And Moab, Utah, within the mysterious Arches National Park, where ancient remnants of time stand like archaic ruins.

God bless each Waffle House, where many of the waitresses just seem to know how to make you smile.

Bless the south rim of the Grand Canyon, staring at an itty-bitty, mercury-like river, miles beneath you, just before a 12-year-old tourist almost knocks you over the edge because he is playing tag with his sister.

And the serenity of the Great Plains of Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The remains of North…

The cardboard sign on the highway said “Hot Bulled Pee-Nuts.”

I pulled over out of pure instinct. For there are few things I love more than a pee-nut that has been properly bulled.

I parked. I stepped out of my truck and walked toward the smell of steaming Cajun spices. The man boiling peanuts was older, seated beneath an Auburn University tent.

He was dressed in Levis and square-toes. He wore a belt buckle the size of a hubcap. He used a canoe paddle to stir a kettle seated atop a roaring blue propane flame.

Beside him was a 50-pound bag of Sam’s Club salt. He removed handfuls of salt and tossed them into the boiling water like fairy dust. Then he licked his fingers for show.

And the line grew longer.

Soon, there were six of us standing there, on the side of a rural Alabamian highway at noon. We were sweating in the violent heat until our clothes were translucent and our hair was matted.

“He does good peanuts,” said a guy in line.

The man looked as though he had come directly from work. He wore a necktie. His shoes cost more than my truck.

“They’re worth it,” said another woman balancing a baby on her hip. “My husband says his spicy peanuts are the best he’s ever had.”

So we waited. And waited.

And waited.

Now and then the old man would remove a hot goober pea, crack it open, and sample it. Then he’d spit it out, shake his head, and announce that they weren’t ready yet.

A few kids on BMX bikes showed up. They ditched their cycles and joined the line. And we became 8.

Then a truck with Florida tags stopped. A man and his wife got out and assumed a place in line. And then we were 11.

“First time I ever had a boiled peanut,” said a guy in line,…

Four guys. Four ordinary guys. Our band arrived at the Oxford Performing Arts Center theater early for soundcheck.

The theater production crew was waiting for us. The soundmen were huddled onstage for a pre-show briefing. The ushers were looking over seating charts. The ladies in the ticket booth were smiling. The beverage vendors were icing down the Mick Ultra.

The first band members to arrive were me and Aaron. We arrived in a 20-year-old Ford. Our instruments, in the bed of the truck.

We must have looked like quite a pair. I wore flip flops, carried a banjo, and a plastic tumbler of iced tea. Aaron carried a fiddle and a spit cup.

We knocked on the backstage door. The stage manager gave us an appraising look and said, “You sure you two are in the right place?”

“Yessir,” I replied.

Aaron spit.

The rest of our little band arrived. We had a guitar (GEE-tarr), an upright bass (doghouse fiddle), a violin (fiddle), and a five-string banjo (birth control).

We all played around a single microphone,

like they did in the old days. Four guys. Four painfully average middle-aged males.

Four guys, having a good time. Four guys who—hard as this is to believe—played at the Grand Ole Opry together.

Four regular guys who once congregated in an Opry dressing room, a few doors down from Ricky Skaggs and the boys, and kept saying things to each other like, “Are you nervous? Because I’m not.”

Four guys with families from wide-spot-in-the-road townships. Towns with names like Chelsea, Slocomb, and Freeport. Four normal guys, four dads and uncles, four guys with mortgages, guys who never quite figured out how to operate the revolving door in their Nashville hotel lobby.

Showtime.

We took the stage in Oxford. Aaron and I played twin fiddles. Each man took a solo by stepping toward the old-fashioned microphone.

When any man played particularly well, we all…