DEAR SEAN:

I’m not sure what to do. My teenage son died in an accident three years ago… A few months ago one of his good friends started hanging out at our house...

We’ve become really close. He doesn’t have a very present mother. And I find myself wanting to love this boy in pretty much the same way we loved our son.

But every time I let myself feel love for this boy, I feel so guilty and stupid for feeling like that. He’s got a mother and family already. And he is not MY son, and he will never be MY son. I guess I just needed to vent. I don’t know.

My question to you is this: Should I invite him over for Thanksgiving this year? Or is that too much?

Thanks,
HOPELESS-IN-SAN-ANTONIO

DEAR SAN-ANTONIO:

I was five years old. Standing in my aunt’s bathroom. My aunt had one of those toilet-seat covers made of carpet. I wonder who decided those were a good invention.

My aunt’s bathroom was a nondescript, old-lady bathroom that smelled like bath powder. And

on the wall was a framed, embroidered piece of artwork that stands out in my memory.

My aunt had a lot of embroidery in the house.

Most of this embroidery was framed, featuring religious phrases such as, “The wages of sin is death.” And, “All liars shall have their part in the Lake of Fire.”

And the one in my uncle's room: “If you don’t love Jesus, and you don’t root for ‘Bama, you’ll Au-Burn.”

But the particular piece of embroidery I’m talking about said: “The meaning of life is found in friendship.”

And I’ve always loved this phrase.

I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child. But I know that after you lose someone, something inside your brain shifts. You’re not even remotely the person you were before the trauma.

Everything is different. Tastes…

JACKSONVILLE—A car accident. A crushed car, sideways in the median. Years ago. She saw the car and pulled over

She jogged toward it. It was instinct. She opened the door. The man wasn’t breathing.

She had been working part-time at a pre-school. Pre-schools have mandatory CPR certification classes. Only a few days earlier, she had practiced resuscitating dummies in a church fellowship hall.

She pulled the man out of the battered vehicle. She found his breastbone. Thirty compressions. Two rescue breaths. “YOU’RE GONNA MAKE IT!” she shouted.

“YOU’RE GONNA MAKE IT!”

He’s alive today. A father of four. He keeps in touch.

ATHENS, Ga.—Nineteen-year-old Billy didn’t want to get into a fistfight. He’d never been in a fight before. He saw a younger kid being beaten by two large boys. He couldn’t stay out of it.

Billy, who’d never thrown a punch in his life, pushed himself into the conflict. He fended off the two attackers, but not without being beaten-up.

Billy took the kid to the emergency room. They became fast friends. He brought the kid home to meet his parents.

The boy told them he’d been living with his uncle—who neglected him.

Billy’s parents invited the kid to live with them. They fixed the guest bedroom. They bought him a Playstation. They fed him. They made him one of their own.

When Billy got married, the kid was his best man. When Billy had his first son, the kid became a godfather.

When the kid wore a cap and gown to receive a diploma, seven people stood and clapped for him.

HOOVER, Ala.—Leigh Ann was your classic shut-in. She was too old and feeble to go anywhere.

Most days, she sat in a recliner watching her stories on TV. Sometimes she forgot to feed herself. She had nobody. She’d been lonely ever since her husband passed. Leigh Ann had no children.

One day, a young man who lived…

Pub Day, it’s called. That’s what the publishers call it when your book gets published. They call it Pub Day.

This is the day when the book you’ve been working on for the past year finally hits shelves. The day when your words go out into the world. The day when it all becomes real.

This is the day when you cannot resist, no matter how cool you pretend to be, walking into a random Barnes and Noble just to see your book on a shelf.

Your book. With your name on the jacket.

And when you see it, sitting there among the others, you feel something. Something huge. You dust off the jacket and make sure your book looks nice and crisp. You flip through the pages just to make sure everything is in working order.

When the employee finds you and asks if you need help, you touch your own book and say, “No, I’m just browsing.”

And the employee who—according to book-store dress code—has multiple piercings, pink mohawk, and many tattoos, stares at you. “Why are you

touching that book?”

“Because I know the author,” you say.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really.”

Pub Day is a big deal. Not to anyone else but you. Hardly anyone in the great wide world actually cares whether your novel is published.

Fewer care that you’ve spent the greater part of a year working with fictional people, in a fictional setting, who do fictional things.

But you care.

Because you still remember what brought you here. You remember your father’s untimely end. And how he made the front page of the newspaper the day before his fate, because he lost his mind and tried to kill his own family.

And you remember how you felt when the sheriff deputies told you that he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And how they had to use his dental records to identify him.

You remember…

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…