Dearest Becca, I’m praying.

Surgeons are going to cut off your ear tomorrow. They found cancer in your ear, and they’re going to cut it off.

Sadly, I won’t be in town because I’ll be in Ohio, performing my one-man trainwreck on Lake Erie.

But oh, I wish I were here.

If I were in town, Becca, I’d be there in the hospital with you. Sitting beside you. Holding your hand. Because you’re my best buddy.

I don’t know how a middle-aged fool became best buds with a 12-year-old girl, but there you are.

I’d be hanging in the hospital room alongside your parents, eating vending machine food, playing card games with your dad, horsing around with your family. Trying to keep everyone in a positive mood.

Regretfully, I’ll be in a rental car. On my way to Seventeenth State. But I want you to know, you’ll be on my mind the whole time.

You claim you’re “not scared” about the surgery. And I totally believe you. Because even though you’re only 12, you’ve had lots of surgeries before. Fifty or sixty, I

think. More than anyone I know.

You were born to a mother with substance abuse problems. You were in foster care until your parents adopted you. Your life has been lived out in hospitals.

One surgery took away your lymph nodes. Another took away your ability to hear clearly in one ear. Another surgical operation removed your vision.

There have been too many operations to count. So this is nothing. I get it.

Even so, I know the procedure is weighing on you. I know you’re worried this won’t be the last operation. I know you’re worried they might have to do more treatments, or whatever it takes to remove the cancer.

You wear a brave face. You smile a lot. But I know you’re thinking about it.

I know this because when we talk, you give…

I’m in an airport. My wife and I are camped out at airline concourse B with other stranded airline passengers.

We were all booted off our flight because the plane was overbooked. I believe I was booted off, however, because I was the only passenger openly carrying a banjo.

Thankfully, the airline offered us cash to get off the flight. Whereas passengers ahead of us were just told to get off.

Even so, I’m sure the airline has a really good reason for overbooking their own flight. I’m sure their intentions were honorable.

The airline was probably trying to earn money so they could donate excess cash to cancer research, or eradicating starvation, or rehabilitating endangered purple frogs.

Or maybe the overbooking was purely an accident. Maybe the airline, although having been leaders in the airline industry since 1925, still hasn’t figured out the tricky business of calculating passenger-to-cargo-weight ratios.

To be fair, it’s very difficult to predict how many passengers will actually be on your plane even though each passenger has paid a small

fortune for their ticket several months in advance, and each passenger has checked in via computer, phone app, and agent-operated kiosk, multiple times, before physically arriving at the effectual airline gate.

Either way, my fellow booted-off passengers are not happy because many don’t feel they were treated fairly. Some were given money to evacuate. Some were given vouchers. Some were given the shaft.

Aggravated passengers are calling family members, venting to loved ones on phones, talking loudly about what, precisely, they wish would happen to wealthy airline executives as the executives eat their Cornish hens at supper tonight.

In the interest of anonymity, I won’t tell you which airline left us stranded, because I don’t think Delta Airlines would want that.

But anyway, here we are. Stuck in an airport. Again. Second time this month.

My instruments are scattered around us. One fiddle. One banjo.…

I knew something was wrong when we walked into our hotel room. Namely, because our toilet had blinking lights.

I called the front desk.

“Hello. There’s something wrong with my toilet.”

“What’s wrong, sir?”

“There are lights on it.”

“No, sir. It’s an AI toilet.”

“Come again?”

“It’s the toilet of the future.”

“I want a present-day toilet.”

She laughed. “Sorry. None of our rooms have the old, outdated toilets, sir.”

I don’t like where this country is heading.

My wife and I just stood there, looking at the robotic john. The receptacle looks like nothing you’ve ever seen. It is sleek, it plugs into a standard 15-amp outlet, and it is designed to resemble a giant marital aid.

“You gonfirst,” I said to my wife.

“I’m not sitting on that thing,” she said. “It might bite me.”

The Toto WASHLET is the world’s first artificially intelligent toilet featuring (I’m not making this up) intelligent high-pressure bidet, automatic lid, self-cleaning wand, heated seat, LED lights, and—remember I am still not making this up—electric AIR-IN WONDER-WAVE rectal cavity blow dryer.

I visited Toto’s website and looked up

the WASHLET. On the frontpage of the website is an attractive brunette wearing tight shorts, hanging out in a bathroom. She is wearing a wistful smile, sort of like Vanna White. Except, she is smiling at a toilet.

Here is what the website said:

“Today, millions of people across North America have shifted their daily ritual from wiping to washing with WASHLET. Far superior to the paper alternative, consumers now experience a new kind of clean…”

This is exactly the problem with America. When did our “daily ritual” suddenly need a “shift”? Moreover, when did Americans find themselves needing a toilet “paper alternative”? The Mobile Press-Register always worked just fine for my granddaddy.

The first flushing toilet was designed by Sir John Harrington in 1596, and for the last 400-odd years, that’s the toilet…

I have here a letter from 19-year-old Erin, who lives in Bristol, Virginia.

“Dear Sean,” she begins, “I want to be happy, but I’m not…

“My family is stressing me out, big-time. Especially my mom. My therapist actually recommended that I write to you, seeing if you have any insightful thoughts about happiness.”

Hi, Erin. My first insightful thought is: Fire your therapist. If he or she is recommending that you reach out to me, your life is in serious trouble.

If you want to see pure happiness, however, you should visit the guest laundry facility at my hotel. Which is where I am right now.

It’s a room about the size of a residential bathroom. I am trapped in this room with an all-boy soccer team.

There must be 841 little boys crammed in this space. They are loud. They are unbelievably happy. Testosterone waves are crashing against the walls, compromising the structural integrity of the Hampton Inn & Suites.

I have no idea what a soccer team is doing in the middle of North

Carolina. But then, I don’t know anything about soccer.

Namely, because we did not have soccer when I was a kid. During childhood, we only had two choices athletics-wise: (1) baseball, and (2) First Methodist choir.

Naturally, we boys gravitated toward baseball. Although some of us—and I’m not naming names—participated in baseball AND choir because Anna Peterson sang soprano and we thought she was hotter than an oven mitt.

I loved baseball. Baseball made me happy. I played first base. I wasn’t great, but I wasn’t bad, either.

I don’t mean to toot my own kazoo, but I set a few Little League records. For example: I still hold the record, for example, for eating an entire birthday cake in under two minutes.

But that’s the kind of everyday happiness we experienced as kids. Just like the soccer players in this laundry room, who…

I found a brown paper bag full of tomatoes on my doorstep, along with homemade tomato chutney. I don’t know where the stuff came from, but the tomatoes were homegrown.

If there is a pleasure more marvelous than homegrown tomatoes, it’s probably illegal. And I don’t want to know about it since I come from Baptists who don’t do illegal things because it could lead to a life of secular music.

But I was reared on homegrown tomatoes. And there will be tomatoes at my funeral. I’m serious. Funeral guests will be encouraged to place tomato products into my casket.

Any tomato product will do, as long as it’s not tomato aspic. I would rather have a colonoscopy in a Third-World nation than eat tomato aspic.

When I was a kid, there was a woman in our church named Lida Ann who always made tomato aspic. She peppered her aspic with mature green olives, capers, and little gray canned shrimp. She placed her dish on the buffet table and it looked like a giant, R-rated donut.

My mother would force me to eat it because, “Lida Ann is a sweet old woman, and she went to all that trouble.”

“I don’t care if she’s Forty-Mule-Team Borax,” I would say, “I don’t wanna eat it.”

Then my mother would pinch me until I cried. So I would shuffle toward the potluck line, use a butter knife, and smear the tomato-flavored hell onto a cracker.

Miss Lida Ann would kiss my cheek and say, “Why don’t you take the rest home, since you’re the only one who eats it.”

Miss Lida Ann would wrap it in aluminum foil and send it with me. And for the rest of the week, my mother would leave it on the counter. The stuff was so bad that all the flies pitched in to get the screen door fixed.

My mother was an avid tomato gardener.…

Willie Howard Mays’ died at the age of 93. There’s a story about Willie.

The Say Hey Kid’s first season in the bigs was shaping up to be an awful one. He’d gotten no hits. He was a rookie with the worst record in the league. Period. After 26 plate appearances he’d hit the ball only once.

Once.

Mays’ batting average was hovering above zero.

One day, after a crushing defeat, young Willie marched off to the showers and cried. He was ready to quit the game. That’s what he told his manager. Too much pressure. Too many expectations. You could almost hear the proverbial fat lady warming up.

His manager found him crying, face in hands. Willie begged the manager to send him back down.

“It’s too hard,” Willie cried. “I don’t belong in the majors, send me back to the minors.”

But the manager refused. The skipper used all the clichéd inspirational coaching phrases. “There ain’t no I in team.” “Can’t never could.” “Life’s a sewer, you get out what you put in.”

But the pep-talk wasn’t working. So the manager

gave Willie some practical advice. The words just came out of the old man’s mouth.

“You’ll get two hits tomorrow, Willie. If you’ll just pull up your pants.”

Willie just looked at him.

“Pull up my WHAT?”

“Pull up your pants, kid. Pull’em all the way up.”

The next day, when Willie approached the dish the manager was giving the signal. The coach was in the dugout, pulling up his pants like a clown.

And so it was that several thousand Giants fans watched the young rookie grab his belt, and make a big production out of hoisting the waistline of his pants toward his nipples, á la Fred Mertz.

Willie got two hits.

The Giants beat the pirates, 14-3. The next afternoon, Willie pulled up his pants above his belly button. He got the only hit…

An airplane. Crowded with people. There is a young woman on my right. She is Mennonite. She wears a long dress. A haube sits atop her shock of red hair.

She’s hard to miss because she is the only person not playing on a phone.

She’s very nice. Very chatty. She rarely takes a breath between sentences.

Her name is Eva. She is 24. Eva has already made friends with everyone in our section.

People like Charles, 62. He’s an introvert. But Eva gets him talking. Charles has diabetes. Life has been hard for him recently because his disease is still new.

“I became diabetic last year,” he said. “I think the stress of my job got to me. The doctor said stress can make you sick.” Charles looks very distraught over this. Like he’s about to cry.

Eva touches his hand and says, “I want you to know that I’ll be praying for you.”

And somehow you just know she will be.

Seated on Eva’s other side is an older woman named Marteen. Who is on her way

to South Carolina to meet her estranged sister. They’ve been estranged for 34 years. They hated each other. But they’re ready to extend the olive branch of peace.

Marteen says with a laugh, “I hope my sister recognizes me now that I’m fat.”

Eva smiles. “I’ll pray your reunion is an experience of forgiveness.”

Eva says it just like that.

Across the aisle from Eva is a kid named Cal. He’s on his way to basic training. The flight attendants on the plane make a big deal about this. All the attendants have written Cal letters, or given him cards. They give him gift baskets, snacks, and homemade chocolate-chip cookies the size of tractor tires.

Cal is embarrassed, he tells Eva. Nobody has ever made a fuss over him.

He tells Eva he was raised in foster homes. He ran away…

A gas station. Rural east Texas. A young man sits in front of the ice machine, and he’s babbling nonsense. He is shirtless. He is dirty. People pass him as they walk into the convenience store.

But one old man doesn’t.

Because this old man has been homeless before. He knows what’s going on. The old man knows that about 30 percent of homeless persons are mentally ill. He knows that 30 percent are addicted. He knows this kid is probably blitzed out of his gourd on a substance.

The old man knows all this because he was once that guy.

The old man makes a few calls. In a few minutes an Episcopal priest and a few other church members are standing before the young shirtless man. They are asking him if he has anywhere to spend the night. They’re offering him a hand.

The young man sees the priest’s collar and he starts to cry.

“Please help me,” the kid sobs. “I don’t want to live like this anymore.”

Within minutes,

the kid is taken to the hospital. An anonymous donor pays for him to visit rehab. The kid is clean within a month. That was 15 years ago.

Today, the kid is an employee at the same rehab that saved him.

Cincinnati. Her family moved to this town for work. After a year, she learned her husband was having an affair. Her competition was a 22-year-old. She caught them in the act. And she almost had a nervous breakdown.

After the divorce, she never thought she would love again. So she raised kids on her own. She got a job working at K-Mart. She disappeared into the throngs of working-class Americans.

Until she met Ron. Ron was a widower with three kids of his own. He worked in the stock room. He was cute. One day, he worked up the nerve to ask her out. He asked…

I am backstage, about to tell stories onstage. A man with a name tag and a clipboard announces, “Ten minutes to showtime.”

I am tuning my guitar, hoping I won’t stink tonight.

This is what all performers think about before they go onstage. They say silent prayers that all go, more or less, the same way.

“Dear God, don’t let me suck.”

It’s easy to stink at storytelling because there is no school for such things, so you don’t know if you’re getting it right.

I am still unclear on how I started telling stories for a living. The only education I have in storytelling came from elderly men who wore Velcro shoes and wore their slacks up to their armpits.

I have always had a soft spot for old men. From childhood, I believed that I was an old man trapped inside a kid’s body. I never fit in with peers, and I never wanted to. This was only made worse by the fact that I was raised as a tee-totalling fundamentalist who was forbidden from

touching NyQuil.

As a young man, I would find myself in a crowd of teenagers who were smoking cigarettes, sipping longnecks, far from parental eyes, and for some reason, nobody ever offered me any real chances at sinning.

I would have appreciated the opportunity, but they viewed me as different.

I was blacklisted from social situations because I was the old man of the group. During social scenarios, I would generally hang in the corner, drinking prune juice, adjusting my Velcro footwear, holding everyone’s car keys.

People called me “D.B.,” which was short for “Designated Baptist.”

Ah, but my truest friends were elderly men. What I liked about them most was that they had already gotten their petty teenageness out of the way. They were more interested in major sins. For example, Biloxi.

After my father died, I looked for anyone with white…

In my front yard is something beautiful. Something living. Something that sometimes reminds me of my mother.

It is a tree, about eighty feet tall, with a gnarled trunk, long limbs, and thick waxy leaves.

When we were building our little home, some twenty years ago, a hapless workman with a chainsaw tried to cut this tree down. I rushed to its rescue and stood between his chainsaw and the tree, shouting, “Turn that thing off!”

Later that day I tied a nylon ribbon around the trunk, reminding all workmen not to harm this beautiful thing.

On cool mornings I would often sit beneath the branches, reading, sipping coffee. This softwood is home to many local creatures like neighborhood cats, squirrels, lizards, butterflies, ladybugs, moths, and 52,349 birds who twitter above me and occasionally drop air-to-surface poop artillery onto my hair.

Don’t get me wrong, this tree is not exceptionally good looking. Actually, it’s average as trees go. Its bark is peppered with scars, knots, and blotchy steel-colored freckles.

It’s

not especially old, either. This particular tree is pushing 50 years old, although the one in my backyard is closer to 120. Still, many of these tough trees have endured droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the devastation of real estate development.

The older ones have lived through eras of war, stock-market crashes, the ragtime age, the jazz age, the disco age, and these trees will survive the veritable hell that is the pop country age.

When I look at my tree I am fascinated by its tenacity. I’m told that these things are hard to kill.

There are about 210 varieties of this particular tree, they are the oldest known flowering species on planet earth. There are fossils of these flowers dating back 100 million years.

This means these plants were alive back when the Tyrannosaurus rex was calling the shots. They also predate honey bees. Which is why this tree…