Lake Erie looks good this morning. The sun is rising over the shoreline. There is a heavy mist on the surface of America’s fourth-largest Great Lake. And it’s so cold in Ottawa County, Ohio, that Starbucks is serving coffee on a stick. And it’s June.

“Hi there,” one passerby says to me. “Cold enough fer ya?”

Legend says, the ancient natives believed this cold lake was filled with good fortune. One such myth states that Lake Erie is so full of luck that lucky stones wash ashore. The stones still wash onto the shore each day. The stones have the letter “L” embedded in them. I’m hoping to find one.

“The rocks are actually the ear bones of freshwater drumfish,” says the local. “They are very lucky if you find one.”

Fingers crossed.

I’m in town with my friend Bobby Horton. Bobby is doing a history lecture and musical performance in the town of Lakeside. I’m playing with him.

Bobby is my father’s age. We have music in common, which is how we first met. Whereupon he took

me under his wing. He lets me hang out at his house on holidays. He comes to my gigs, along with his wife, and he claps for me harder than anyone else. He’s among my closest of pals.

Since arriving in Ohio, wherever we go, Bobby introduces me as his “godson,” and I introduce him as “the Godfather,” even though—and I mean this sincerely—Bobby weighs considerably less than Marlon Brando.

“Shake hands with my godson,” he tells everyone, happily.

And when the strangers in the theater shake my hand, they look at me as though I truly belong to someone. Which isn’t a bad feeling.

This morning, America’s shallowest Great Lake is tinted with oceanic colors, and smells like a giant fish rectum. I’m wearing a jacket even though it's mid-June, plugging my nose, wandering the shore, hunting for lucky rocks.

“Find…

Hi there. This is that Little Voice inside your head speaking. Yeah, I know. It’s been a while. But how are you? How’s life? How’s the fam? You still doing keto?

Listen, I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but technically, that’s not my fault. You probably don’t remember this, but you quit listening to your inner voice just as soon as you hit the fourth stage of puberty.

The moment you developed armpit hair, you became a lot more concerned with getting a driver’s license, French kissing, and eradicating zits.

So over time that voice inside you got quieter. Oh, sure, every now and then you’d hear me droning in the background like Charlie Brown’s teacher. But you never actually listened.

Although there were a few times...

Remember that rude waiter a few weeks ago? When the meal was over, you almost stiffed him with the tip. But then, you dug into your wallet and gave him a ridiculously generous gratuity.

Did you ever stop to wonder why you did this? Well, I’ll tell you

why. Because the teeny, tiny voice reminded you that being generous was not just kind, it was right. That Little Voice was me.

There was that other time, when you gave a ride to two Mexican young women who didn’t speak English. Their car broke down in the Walmart parking lot, and they were crying. You helped them out because that faint voice would not shut up.

Also me.

And let’s not forget about the time you almost got into that fatal car wreck.

No, wait. You never knew about that one. You never did know how close you came to the end. Because the Little Voice told you to pull off the interstate immediately before the disaster happened. And you actually listened. In a few seconds there was a ten-car pile up on I-65, and four people were killed.

Still, most…

I drove four hours to meet the editor of a big-city newspaper. I walked into a large office wearing my nicest necktie. I was young. Wide-eyed.

She told me I had five minutes. I handed her a pathetic resume so tiny it needed a magnifying glass.

“You’re not even a journalism major?” she remarked.

“No ma’am.”

“You’re still in community college?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re wasting my time. I’ve got journalists lining up around the block. Find me a good story, and maybe we’ll talk.”

A good story.

The next day, I stopped at a nursing home. I walked inside and asked if there were any storytellers in the bunch.

The woman at the desk gave me a look. “They’re ALL storytellers, sweetie.”

She introduced me to a ninety-four-year-old man. We sat in the cafeteria. I asked to hear about his life. He said, “You with the IRS or something?”

He talked, and he was eighteen again. A rural boy who’d never set foot in a schoolhouse. His father used a wheelchair. His mother was dead.

Then, he met her. She’d moved to town to teach

school. When he saw her at church, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He approached her with an idea.

“I played on her sympathy,” he said. “Was my only hope, she was too pretty to be seen with me.”

He asked her to teach him to read. She agreed. He made fast progress—which was no surprise. He would’ve rather died than disappoint a pretty girl.

They married. She taught, he farmed. During those years, he remembers how they sat together in the evenings, watching evening take hold of the world. Love can be simple.

She died before age forty.

It was crippling. He gave up living. His fields went to weed. He lost his farm. He lost himself. He checked into a room at the motor-inn.

“I had nothing left,” he said. “I sat…

“Just Married.” That’s what’s written on the back of a ratty tailgate in white shoe polish. The plates are North Carolina. The old Ford Ranger has seen better days.

I’m a younger man. I’m at a gas station when I see the truck. The windows are rolled down. The vehicle is empty. The young couple is inside the convenience store, paying for gas.

I am at the pump, filling my tank.

My friend is nosy. He is inspecting the small Matrimony Wagon. He peeks into the truck bed.

“They sure don’t travel light,” he says. “There must be ten pink suitcases in there.”

Welcome to marriage.

My friend and I are on our way home after playing music in Mobile. It was a pathetic venue, but the music wasn’t bad. And besides, I’ve been playing pathetic gigs since I turned eighteen. What’s one more?

I’ve played some doozies. Bingo parlors, bowling alleys, rundown bars, a shoe store clearance, and the dreaded all-you-can-eat seafood joint.

A girl exits the store, walking toward the vehicle.

My nosy friend is almost caught red handed.

He trots away from the truck. He lights a cigarette and pretends to be inspecting my tires.

The girl reaches through the window and grabs her purse. She counts a few dollars, then steals handfuls of change from her ashtray. She counts quarters in her palm. She darts inside.

Money. It’s hard to come by when you’re a newlywed.

My friend tells a story: at his wedding, twenty-five years ago, his sister placed a money tree on the cake table. People clipped dollar bills to the branches to fund the couple’s honeymoon.

“We had ninety bucks on that tree,” he tells me. “We needed that money for our honeymoon, we were flat broke.”

My honeymoon was no lavish affair, either. We went to Charleston on a shoestring budget. I’d hocked a guitar to help fund the trip. We rolled…

The world’s most remarkable human? Easy. Meet Paige Perry. She is 33 years young. She is a caregiver to multiple persons.

You’d like Paige. Everyone does. She is sweet. Brunette. Pretty. She has a personality so pleasant she makes Santa Claus look like a jerk.

Paige lives in Adamsville, Alabama (pop. 22). And although she has every right to be disgruntled with the universe, she isn’t.

Paige’s whole life consists of caregiving. From sunup to sundown. Caregiving. She eats, sleeps, and breathes caregiving. If you were to look up the word “caregiver” in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, you would see a picture of Paige, waving at you.

And yet somehow, every time you meet her, she is always in a great mood. To be around her is to be happy. She is always cracking jokes. Always smiling. Always laughing.

She listens more than she talks. She hugs often. Dogs and children follow her around.

In short, Paige has a great personality.

And like my mother used to say: “If you want to get ahead in this

world, Sean—” My mother always called me Sean. “In this life, Sean, you must be extremely smart or you must have an extremely pleasant personality.”

Well, that’s exactly what Paige is. She is pleasant.

Heaven knows she has every right not to be. Namely, because her primary role in life is taking care of her father, who has dementia, and her older brother, C.C. who has cerebral palsy. Before that, she was a caregiver to her mother.

Paige is like every caregiver you’ve ever known. She cooks, she cleans, lifts, strains, carries, transports, schedules doctors appointments, wipes backsides, bathes, grooms, changes soiled sheets, pays the bills, and does the grocery shopping.

Oh, and somehow she manages to tie down a full-time job.

That’s right. I don’t know how she does it, but she does. Paige is a full-time hospice nurse. She spends her weeks…

I’m driving. The Tennessee mountains tower in the distance. The hills are so green they appear blue. The sky is so sunny it hurts your eyes.

I am listening to WSM 650 AM, traveling 55 mph on backroads. They’re playing old country. “Whispering” Bill Anderson is singing “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking.” My father loved this tune.

Last night, I sang on the Grand Ole Opry. Before my performance, 85-year-old Bill Anderson performed. He was exiting the stage as I was entering. Before they announced me, I shook his hand and I was quivering. I told him I grew up listening to his music alongside my father. I almost started to cry.

He said, “Thank you, son. Is your daddy here tonight?”

I looked into the rafters of the theater. “Yessir. I’d like to believe he is.”

He just smiled.

And right now, I’m thinking about all this while driving on this winding highway. I’m winding through thickets of black gums, live oaks, sycamores, and conflagrations of other Tennessean trees.

Tennessee trees don’t grow the same as in other states. These trees

don’t just grow straight up and down. They grow sideways, downways, upways, rightways, wrongways, and everywhichways. They swallow everything, growing so close together they resemble a head of giant broccoli.

I see a barbecue-shack-slash-beer-joint in the distance. I pull over. The door dings upon my entrance. A radio is playing.

It’s not yet noon, but there is an old man at the bar, getting an early start on his day. An army of empty Budweiser bottles sits at his elbow. He is playing scratch-offs, trying his level best to make Cooter Brown look like an amateur.

His words are rounded on the corners when he speaks.

“Where you from?” he asks.

“Alabama.”

“First time in Tennessee?”

“No, sir.”

He nods and goes back to his scratch-offs. “What brings you here?”

“Work.”

“What kinda work you do?”

“I play…

I was a kid. The “Grand Ole Opry” had recently moved to Opryland. My old man was working in Spring Hill, Tennessee, building the GM plant. We were living nearby. It was a July evening and my father was young. Younger than I am now.

My father came home from work one evening, covered in soot and sweat. His red hair was a mess from wearing a welding helmet all day. He had raccoon eyes and the artificial sunburn that come from wearing goggles and holding an oxyacetylene torch.

He announced that we were going to the Opry. Just me and him. To see Ernest Tubb.

Mama dressed me in red Dennis-the-Menace overalls, a Willie Nelson T-shirt, and teeny Converse Chuck Taylors. Then she combed my hair with one of those black nylon hairbrushes that shredded your scalp and gave you a subdural hematoma.

We piled into my father’s truck. It was an F-100, forest green, with a welding-machine trailer attached to the back.

It was a 40-minute drive into Nashville

proper. We entered the city. It was magnificent. The lights. The people wearing cowboy hats. The scent of French fries and pork fat in the air.

My father took me to get ice cream before the show. We sat outside on the curb and I spilled my vanilla on my Willie shirt. So he took my shirt off. I was bare chested beneath my little red overalls.

We pulled into the Opryland parking lot before showtime. We were walking into the building when a man approached my father. He had white hair. He was dressed in rags. He asked my father for money.

My old man never carried much money, for his own protection. Not protection against thieves, but protection against himself. “If I have money I’ll spend it,” he always said.

So he never carried much more than a few tens. He was a notorious tightwad. He was…

You never expect it’s going to happen to you, but it does happen eventually. It’s inevitable. Life changes quickly.

One minute you’re a normal guy. You’re doing normal things. You have normal friends. The next minute, you’re in your kitchen, drinking “panda dung” tea.

At least that’s what I’m doing right now. My wife and I are staring at a cup of brown, hot water.

“You go first,” my wife says.

“No, you.”

“I’m not drinking that stuff.”

“Is it really made out of panda…?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not drinking it.”

“You have to drink it,” she said, “it’s good for you.”

“I don’t care if it’s 40-mule-team Borax, I’m not drinking it.”

This rare and expensive herbal tea was sent to me by a reader named Arlene, from Winchester, Virginia. The unique tea contains innumerable health benefits and costs approximately $300 per cup.

Arlene sent it because my wife is still recovering from cataract surgery, wherein doctors used tiny, microscopic knives on her eyeball to help her see more clearly. The operation worked. The moment my wife got out of surgery she stared at me as if seeing

me for the first time.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I thought you’d be nicer-looking.”

So Arlene firmly believes this expensive tea helped her recover after retinal surgery.

“The reason panda dung tea is so good for you,” Arlene writes, “is because pandas only absorb 30 percent of the nutrients they eat, which means the remaining 70 percent of their dietary nutrients are passed through their excrement!!!”

Arelene used three exclamation points as though she were announcing, say, an upcoming wedding.

Then she added, “Your friends have your back, Sean!!!”

Well, call me old-fashioned, but I was resistant to trying this tea. Namely, because I come from the school of thinking that states: “I don’t care if Chinese pandas are…

It was 7:34 a.m. when I arrived in Alabaster for the annual Shelby County Senior Adults Picnic. The parking lot of Thompson High School was already swarmed with cars.

“Why are all these people here so early?” I asked one of the volunteers at the check-in booth, who was holding back the throngs of senior citizens.

The volunteer looked at me and said flatly, “You know how punctual senior citizens can be.”

It’s true. I don’t mean to generalize here, but the older generations are far more punctual than the younger ones.

Take my mother. Whenever we schedule lunch at a restaurant, I choose a reasonable time. Say, noon. I usually arrive a little early and tell the hostess I’m meeting someone. The hostess will inevitably point to a lone older woman in the corner. My mother will already be sitting there, finishing her lunch alone.

“How long has she been here?” I’ll ask the hostess.

“Since we opened,” she will reply.

So the picnic-going seniors were raring to go. They were ravenously ready for lunch, even

though—technically—it wasn’t yet breakfast.

“We woulda been here earlier,” said one senior woman in line, who was carrying a lawn chair. “But Harold wanted to change the oil in the truck.”

When the gates opened, it was like one of those old Beatles movies. The people flooded the grounds of the high school in a frenzy.

The entertainment was soon underway. Onstage, a local country band named Rose Colored Glasses played classic country from the golden era. Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, Hank Senior, Don Gibson. The whole place turned into the 1950s. The only thing missing were the “I Like Ike” stickers.

Nearly 1,000 elderly picnic goers meandered to and fro, laughing and carrying on. I mingled among them and made lots of friends.

Sometimes I’m afraid that our younger generations have forgotten our elders. I’m on a mission to change all that…

A side-of-the-road restaurant. Way out in the sticks. The young boy was seated at the table with his mother and father.

His mother had green hair. His father was bald, with tattoos on his face and on his scalp. The little boy was using a wheelchair.

I was eating lunch in Small Town, Alabama, USA. It was a crowded meat-and-three. I had just finished making a morning speech for a convention, and I needed to meet my saturated fat quota for the day.

I found this restaurant by chance. I pulled over because the sign advertised field peas.

I am a field-pea enthusiast. I would crawl across a sewage plant on my lips to eat a good field pea.

I appreciate field peas in much the same way I love, for example, mullet haircuts. I am a big fan of mullets, which were popular during my heyday.

The horrendous hairstyle has made a stylistic comeback among America’s youth. These days, I see all sorts of kids wearing “Tennessee Tophats,” “Camaro Cuts,” “Neck Warmers” and

“Achy-Breaky-Big-Mistakys.” And I think it’s wonderful. Why should my generation be the only generation who looked like dorks?

Anyway, field peas. I like them almost as much as I like homegrown tomatoes. Both of which were served at my wedding.

The heirloom tomatoes at my wedding came from my mother-in-law’s garden, and were served on a giant plate. Everyone in the wedding party ate slices. The best man received the highest honor by drinking the tomato water.

When it comes to field peas, I like them all: Crowder peas, purple hulls, lady peas, zipper peas, big red zippers, turkey craws, Hercules peas, Double-Ds, whippoorwills, rattlesnakes, slap-yo-mamas, homewreckers, foot-tappers, and tailshakers.

But getting back to the young boy I saw.

He was using surgical prosthetic implants to help him hear. His mom and dad both ordered the field peas and the fried chicken. So did the boy.