Dear American School Kid, I don’t know what your name is, but I’m sorry. I am deeply, wholeheartedly, and emphatically sorry.

As I write this, at least four were killed and nine were injured in Barrow County, Georgia this morning. Apalachee High School was having a normal day when a person with a gun stalked the halls, taking lives.

Although to call the suspect a gunman is inaccurate. It was a gun-kid. The suspected shooter was 14 years old.

But this occurrence isn’t anything terribly shocking to you. You’ve seen shootings on TV before. Robb Elementary, Sandy Hook, Uvalde. The shooters, I can only assume, want their name in print. They want to be on TV. Why else would they do it?

Consequently, school kids now practice lockdown drills. Sometimes on the same days they do fire drills, or tornado drills.

I wish you knew how much times have changed, kid. When I was a child, sometime after the close of the Civil War, we

didn’t have lockdown drills. Namely, because we didn’t have school shootings.

We were, after all, just kids. When at school, we did kid things. We had kid interests. Our biggest problem of the day was whether we were going to be served chicken-like nuggets or whether the meatloaf was made of actual meat.

We passed notes in class. We cared deeply about who was “going out” with whom. The worst thing our teachers had to contend with was whether the boys were passing around the latest edition of M.A.D. Magazine during homeroom.

But now you worry about bullets.

We failed you. Therefore I am sorry you have to grow up in an age where you must face the real possibility that an unstable person will harm you while in a classroom.

I’m also sorry that a recent study said that most school kids worry about shootings…

My first concept of robots came from watching The Jetsons before school in my underpants. My boyhood morning routine consisted of sitting on the sofa in my tighty-whities, eating Cap’n Crunch, watching television, and listening to my mother say, “Get those underpants off my couch!”

Rosie the robot was the Jetsons’ fun housemaid who skated from room to room, wearing an apron, completing important daily tasks such as vacuuming, cooking, and using her mechanical claws to forcibly administer baths to Elroy.

I liked Rosie. In fact, I think Rosie was one of my favorite cartoon characters with the exceptions of Yogi Bear and Farrah Fawcett.

Back in those days robots were a faroff idea. They were sci-fi. This was pre-internet. Pre-cellular phone. The only computers anyone ever heard of were the size of an average Chuck E. Cheese.

Robots weren’t real back then. They were imaginary concepts. Like the Tooth Fairy, or the Department of Agriculture.

Which is why, yesterday, I was stunned to

have an actual conversation with a robot.

This all started when my brother-in-law downloaded an app called ChatGPT onto my phone.

Now, I’ve heard of ChatGPT before. I have even used this program when doing research for a piece I wrote on AI. During my research, I remember asking ChatGPT to produce a well-written 500-word column, and to do it in the style of the writer, “Sean Dietrich.”

In seconds—this is an astonishing display of intelligence—ChatGPT replied: “I thought you wanted something well-written.”

But now they’ve taken things to a new level. When my brother-in-law told me you could have a realistic, vocal conversation with ChatGPT, I had to experience this for myself. So I downloaded the app.

When you first set up the app, you must select a voice. They offer a male voice, female voice, and a voice that sounds like a real teenager except…

“I started choking,” said Jennifer Yakubesan.

It was a typical evening, some years ago. The family was eating supper before church, somewhere in the wilds of Michigan. It was spaghetti. The flagship food of happy families.

“I looked at my husband and my son, and I started to make this kind of patting on my chest.”

Enter her son, Andrew. He was 13. A Scout.

Jennifer was about to lose consciousness when she felt her son’s arms wrap around her. He wedged his fist below her sternum. He squeezed.

The Heimlich maneuver is not simple. It requires strength. The Heimlich didn’t work. So Andrew slapped his mother’s back. Someone taught him to do that.

Andrew was given the National Merit Award by the Scouts.

Which leads me to my next story, approximately six states away. Scout Troop 1299, of Allen, Texas, was on a bus trip to Wyoming.

They had a few days to kill in Yellowstone National Park.

“We were on our way to lunch,” said Brian, an adult volunteer. “We

were passing by these falls, and we were like, ‘Let’s just stop real quick and let the adults take some pictures,’”

They parked. Deboarded. Everyone’s dad stretched his respective lumbar region. A stranger ran up to the group and frantically asked if there was a doctor on the bus.

A doctor, no. Scouts, yes.

In moments, scouters found a woman having an emergency on the trail. She was lying in the dirt. It was cardiac arrest. An off-duty nurse was already performing chest compressions.

The Scouts fetched the automated external defibrillator (AED) from the bus.

Why did a bunch of average kids from Texas have a piece of expensive portable medical equipment on their bus? The answer is: Because they were Scouts.

Today, the woman is alive and well.

Here’s another. In Claiborne County, Tennessee, Crystal Thacker took meds and had an allergic…

The unofficial last day of summer is here. And here, on the last day of summer, I start remembering things. The memories get so thick you have to swat them away like gnats.

My favorite thing about summer is tomato sandwiches. I can still remember my first tomato sandwich. I was young, just out of diapers, maybe 14 years old.

No, I’m only kidding. I think I was three or four. I remember my mother used to buy her tomatoes at a farm stand on the county line. Way out in the sticks.

The farmstand was in a barnyard that smelled of mud and dirt and horses. There were bales of hay everywhere. Goats walking around, unknowingly dropping pellets from their backends.

There were vegetables of every kind. Bright colors galore. Collards, yellow squash, ginormous zucchinis, piles of corn, onions the size of regulation volleyballs. And there was a huge vat of tomatoes.

I was drawn to the tomatoes first. I can’t explain

why. Some things are just meant to be.

Maybe it was their brilliant red color. Or maybe it was their R-rated shapes. Or maybe it was that the tomatoes came in all dimensions, all shades, all varieties. A vivid palette of reds, pinks, yellows, oranges, purples, and zebra-striped greens. Misshapen, exploded-looking things, with prickly stems, and blemished skin.

There was the marvelous smell of tomato vines. Grassy and green, like fresh lawn clippings. Sweet and peppery.

My mother bought several pounds of heirlooms in a brown paper bag. Then, she walked to the station wagon, carrying the bag in one arm and me in the other.

There were groceries in the car, cooking in the backseat of the old Ford. The ice cream had melted. The butter had gone to be with Jesus. And right then, right there, she prepared a tomato sandwich.

Wonderbread. Duke’s Mayonnaise. Salt and…

Paul William Bryant was born in the late summer of 1913 in a Cleveland County, Arkansas, backwater. His hometown of Moro Bottom wasn’t even a town, technically. Only seven families lived there.

Paul was a large infant. Feet like rowboats. Hands like ball gloves. A stern, righteous face that looked like he helped write the Ten Commandments.

He was the eleventh of twelve births. His boyhood friends said he was fearless. And when I say “fearless,” I mean that Paul once wrestled a bear in a traveling circus sideshow tent. The animal nearly ripped off his ear, earning him the nickname “Bear.”

Paul’s generation grew up during a toilsome time. It’s hard to imagine just how difficult things were in America. But make no mistake, they were hard.

The War in Europe was killing 20 million. The Spanish Flu was taking another 50 million. Then came a Great Depression. Bankers leapt off tall ledges. Dust storms killed the Heartland. Sharecroppers were migrating across the US to keep from starving. Another

day; another global war.

As a kid, Paul’s father was sickly. His mother had too many children to manage. She couldn’t afford to feed his big-kid appetite. So Paul went to live with his grandfather in the nearby crossroads of Fordyce.

And it was there that football history would be written deep within the Arkansas mud. He had just turned 13.

Paul remembered it like this:

“One day, I was walking past the field where the high school team was practicing football. I was in the eighth grade, and I ain’t never even seen a football before.

“The coach naturally noticed a great big ole boy like me and he asked if I wanted to play.

“I said, ‘Yessir, I guess I do. How do you play?’

“Coach said, ‘Well, son, you see that fella catching the ball down there? Well, whenever he catches it, you…

I have here a letter from Greg, who recently got a gig writing for the local newspaper. “I don’t know how to produce a column,” Greg writes. “Do you have any advice for someone who is suddenly a real writer?”

Greg, yes. The first rule of being a real writer is: Stay Focused. Do not allow yourself to get distracted. Distractions are the bane of all writers.

Here is how the typical morning of a columnist goes. You sit down at the computer. And before you write, you begin by asking yourself the age-old question, “Why should anyone care what I have to say?”

This is the driving question all writers must ask themselves.

Immediately after you ask this question, the honest, humbling answer comes flying back: “You were supposed to empty the dishwasher.”

Ah, yes. The dishwasher. Your wife asked you to empty the dishwasher this morning. But you always forget. Wives are always asking columnists to empty dishwashers. Nobody knows why.

As a columnist, emptying

the dishwasher just doesn’t make good sense. Namely, because the Dishwashing System at your house has always worked the same way. You put your dirty dishes in the sink and—snap!—magically, the next day the dishes are neatly stacked in the cupboards. Sort of like the Magic Laundry System.

Even so, your wife insists the dishwasher needs emptying, in much the same way she is always insisting, for example, that you pay the health insurance.

But it’s hard to do tedious tasks like this when you’re a columnist, trying to conjure something to write.

After all, literary ideas just don’t happen. Literary ideas are like fermented dairy products. The columnist is the cow.

First, a cow’s udders must be warmed, then yanked aggressively, until finally the cow produces valuable milk which will eventually be transformed into Limburger or—if the cow is lucky—Government Cheese.

But…

The old timers in my childhood used a word I never understood. The word was “Providence.” The old timers couldn’t give me an exact definition of this word. Probably because it had more than two syllables.

To be fair, Providence truly is a difficult word to define. Even now, when researching this column I couldn’t find a concrete definition.

One dictionary called the word “archaic.” Which is true. Today the term is so outdated that, if you’re a younger reader, I’ve probably already lost you.

So I’ll explain Providence by telling you how the word was invoked by the rural people of my youth.

Okay. Let’s say there was no rain, the world was dry, farmers were losing money. It wasn’t “bad luck.” It was Providence. And when the rain finally began to fall; also Providence.

When two people fell in love? Providence. If someone got cancer and died, people prayed for the family to receive solace in Providence.

Job promotion? Providence. Finding $20 in your coat pocket? Big-time Providence.

My people, you see,

did not believe in good luck, coincidences, or even flashy miracles. There were no mistakes. There were no accidents. It was all Providence.

To my people, life was a trapeze act. Mankind was always swinging recklessly from trapezes, back and forth. Sometimes man fell, sometimes he didn’t. Either way, there was a divine reason for everything—good and bad. You weren’t supposed to know the reason. That’s Providence.

The thing is, nothing makes sense in life. Not a single thing. I’ve been trying to figure the world out since I was a kid but I’ve never been able to.

I went through a period of sad living, when I believed this universe was against me. I lost faith in everything: in people, in goodness, in miracles. For a while I quit believing in God. I told him this often.

But the big merciful sky…

Yesterday, I was digging through boxes in the garage. The boxes were covered in dust. I found important things I didn’t even know I owned. A fondue pot, for instance.

I found our wedding photos, too. I had to sit down to look at them.

In one photo, I’m wearing a tux. I’m cutting a cake while the woman on my arm is laughing, holding her belly. Young Me is watching her.

I remember exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking the same thing I’m thinking now: “I like making this woman laugh.”

Easier said than done. She doesn’t know how to fake laugh. It’s not in her. In fact, she doesn’t laugh unless the joke is worth doubling over. Whereupon she’ll hold her stomach like she’s going to have an accident. It’s great.

I also found a certificate in one of the boxes. The thing was covered in plastic, with my name written on it. My college degree.

I was a grown man when I went to college. It took me 11

years to finish. The only reason I completed was because this woman believed I could.

Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m her sidekick or if she is mine.

Either way, she is a woman who does too much. She works too hard, she loves harder. She has quirks, too. And nobody knows them like me.

For example: she cannot fall asleep without an assortment of machinery.

In her arsenal is a foam wedge (for her lower back); a heating pad (for her cold nature); a mouthguard (she grinds her teeth); a sound machine (apparently I snore); earplugs (apparently I am not an amateur snorer); an eye mask (to shield her face from my professional snoring); and a woven synthetic blanket (for suffocating husbands).

More about her: she writes thank-you notes for every occasion including the onset of daylight saving time. She likes her coffee…

One of the greatest joys in my life is receiving questions and remarks from readers via email. Here are a few recent ones:

Q: Hi Sean, I recently read your column on Taylor Swift and I lamented. You aren’t a Taylor Swift fan, are you? I might have to stop reading you if you are.

A: I would not recognize one Taylor Swift song.

Q: Seriously, Sean? You wrote about Taylor Swift? If you think she promotes kindness and benevolence you need to read up.

A: Except “Shake it Off.” I’d recognize that song. Everyone knows that one.

Q: I was dispirited to read that you encouraged interest in Taylor Swift. Don’t you watch the news? She’s not good for this country.

A: Also “Love Story.” But only the first and second verses, I swear.

Q: I read that you were urging young girls to be “Swifties.” Taylor Swift goes against the Bible, she is not a role model for young women, she dresses like a [deleted],

she is a thief and a liar and an adulterer, and you know where these kinds of sinners end up, don’t you?

A: On church committees.

Q: You did NOT just write about Taylor Swift! She is not a good example for our children. I will not allow Taylor Swift music in my daughter’s life. Have you HEARD what she says about Christians? She basically came out and called us hypocrites!

A: Clearly, she was mistaken.

Q: I wish you’d do your homework before you spout off lies regarding a topic you know nothing about! Taylor Swift is involved in witchcraft! She glorifies Satan and is influencing her fans to practice witchcraft!

A: I’ll bet they call you the “fun mom.”

Q: Taylor Swift’s music is not welcome in my household, or in my girls’ lives! She is stealing the innocence of…

I awoke early and went for a walk with my dog. The sun wasn’t up, I let my eyes adjust to the darkness of Birmingham.

The locals call Birmingham the “greatest city in the world.” Which is sort of silly if you think about it. I mean, it’s a great city. But, the whole world?

Come on.

Even so, it’s a nice town. The cashiers at the supermarket know my name. The guys working the local taverns know which variety of Ovaltine I always order. The people here are great.

Once upon a time, Birmingham’s primary employer was steel. Now it’s healthcare. We have hospitals out the wazoo. This city saves more helpless souls than Oral Roberts and Doctor Ruth combined.

It’s early morning. A dog barks. A distant train sounds. A cop car passes me at slow speed.

Not long ago, newspaper carriers would have been out at this hour, throwing papers. But those days are gone. Birmingham has no physical newspaper anymore. Neither do many American cities. For the

last few years, America has been losing two newspapers per day.

Readers in Birmingham now get their daily columns from no-name writers on the internet. Take, for example, this no-name writer. .

On my walk, I passed a few joggers. They were running at breakneck paces, covered in sweat.

“Morning,” they wheezed.

“Good morning,” said I.

Those poor souls. Personally, my most vigorous form of exercise this year comes from serving as pallbearer for my deceased friend who exercised regularly.

When I arrived at the local park, the sun was above the treeline. The foothills of the Appalachians were kissed with purple and gold. My dog sniffed every blade of grass until she finally urinated in the same spot she has used for the last 3,298 consecutive mornings.

I saw a few people in medical scrubs, power walking in the park. They stopped to greet my…