An old gas station. They have the old pumps with spinning numbers. There is a handwritten sign on the front door: “No dogs in the bathrooms.”

I wonder how that sign came to be.

There are men sitting in chairs out front. One man holds a plastic Coke bottle full of brown spit. The other men are relaxing on the axis of the wheel of life.

There are two Auburn University caps, one Roll Tide, and a cowboy hat. A dog sleeps beside them.

“Howdy,” says one man. “How ya din today?”

It’s been a long time since anyone asked me how I was “din.”

My answer is pure reflex. One I can’t lose.

“Middlin’,” I say. That’s what old timers in my youth said. Phrases like that were used at feed stores, covered-dish socials, and in hardware store aisles, while weighing a pound of nails.

“How ‘bout y’all?” I ask.

One man spits. “If I’s din any better, wouldn’t be able to stand myself.”

I pump gas. When the pump reaches seventy dollars it shuts off. Seventy big ones. It feels like highway robbery.

Long ago, my daddy thought paying ninety-six cents per gallon gas was disgusting. He would mumble colorful words, then say: “When I was a kid, gas was only TWENTY-FIVE cents.”

My granddaddy would say the exact same thing. Only he would add: “I remember when gas was a DIME a gallon.”

And so it went. I come from a long line of old men who reminisce about the price of crude oil.

These were old-world gentlemen who carved pine sticks with pocket knives. Every day, a few more of these men disappear, and I miss them. When they’re gone, who’s going to complain about the price of gasoline?

Before the War, my grandfather pumped gas at a country store. He wore a ball…

“People are flowers,” an elderly church lady named Miss Rebecca once told me.

She was a white-haired sweetheart who made poundcake that was good enough to make strict Baptists take the name of Andy Griffith in vain.

Anyway, there are a lot of ideas on life. Some folks think life is a journey. Like hiking a mountain with the Boy Scouts—who usually smell like the backend of a filthy goat.

Everyone has their own ideas, but if you ask me, we’re flowers, like Miss Rebecca said.

Bear with me here.

Flowers are pretty. And that’s what you are. Pretty. You make life pretty, just by being alive. You might not feel pretty right now, but maybe that’s because it’s not your season.

We can’t all bloom in April. Some of us have to wait until July. But you will bloom. Soon. I promise.

Maybe you’ll turn into a purple violet. Maybe you’ll be a red tulip, or a rose. Maybe you’re a magnolia. Or maybe you’re like me.

I am

a common dandelion.

I know being a dandelion doesn’t sound like much to get excited about. And believe me, it took me a LONG TIME to be happy about being one. But this is only because most folks call dandelions “weeds.”

For many years, that’s how I thought of myself. And that’s why I’m writing this to you.

Dandelions aren’t weeds. They might be overlooked, unwanted, uncared for, and sprayed with pesticides, but they are flowers.

Yes sir. Dandelions are strong, and bright, and yellow. We open every morning to the sun. We close at night. We have the longest flowering season of ANY dadgum plant out there.

Roses might be breathtaking, but we are long lasting. And if we’re lucky, after we die, some grade-school kid will blow our fuzz into the wind.

Our seeds can travel…

Clark was a cool kid. He had a bald head, brown eyes, and a nice smile. Clark was not his real name. But they said he liked Superman. So “Clark Kent” it is.

Before Clark lost his hair, he had a head of blue-black, just like the superhero.

When his parents found out he was sick, it nearly knocked the life out of them. But they say Clark didn’t get bothered by it. Nobody knows why. Maybe he was too young to be afraid.

Maybe he was made of steel.

Anyway, I don’t know much about pediatric oncology, but his diagnosis was bad. His mother called it a “death sentence.” His doctors were not hopeful.

But that’s not the story here.

One afternoon, on their way home from a medical appointment Clark saw a man walking the shoulder of the highway. He was near an overpass.

The man was dark-skinned, with white hair, holding the waist of his blue jeans to keep them from falling.

“Stop

Mom!” said Clark.

His mother stopped the car. Clark rolled the window down and asked the man why he was holding his pants like that.

“Lost my belt,” the man said. “And these pants are too big.”

Then, the man asked Clark’s mother for money. That’s where she drew the line. She refused to give cash to a stranger. She rolled up the windows and drove.

“We can’t just leave him,” said Clark. “He needs our help.”

Clark begged his mother to give money. Her only response was “no.”

Her son finally convinced her to stop at Walmart. They bought a belt, some sweatpants, and a few T-shirts. Then, they bought a sandwich from Subway.

They found the man beneath the overpass again. Clark gave him a plastic bag full of goodies. The man was overcome.

So days turned into…

Flowers. Buy them. Today. Give them to her for no reason.

It’s simple. You wrote me for advice, so here it is. You’re seventeen years old and you want her to notice you. Flowers.

Here’s the way I see it:

You want to stand out from a herd of average Joes, right? So, let’s have a look at this flock of seventeen-year-old Joes closely—don’t forget to plug your nose, some Joes haven’t learned about Speed Stick yet.

So here we are. Can you see them? Do you notice anything?

I do. Many have cellphones in their hands. They aren’t even LOOKING at each other. They’re staring at electronics.

Sure, these boys might be more handsome, more athletic, or more popular than you are. Their families might be wealthy. Their fathers might own golf clubs that are more expensive than the average human liver.

So what? I’ll bet you five bucks those boys don’t buy flowers.

And that’s not an opinion, it’s a statistic. Studies show that American boys don’t buy flowers like they used

to. I don’t want to get into the numbers here, but let’s just say that floral purchases among young males are down. Way down.

Boys quit buying flowers right around the time Andy Griffith went off the air. Somewhere along the way, text messages and Snapchat took over the world. And if you ask me—which you didn’t—that’s a crying shame.

Just the other night, for instance, I saw two teenagers in a pizza joint. They were sitting on opposite sides of a booth.

The young woman was drumming her fingers on the table, staring into the distance. Bored. The young man was on his phone.

Then, without warning, the young man stood. He slid into the seat beside the girl. He pressed his shoulders against hers. They smiled. He held his phone outward. Selfie time.

He spent…

When I drive in the rain, I usually have to pull over. This is because my truck tires are almost bald, they slip in heavy rain.

You might not care about this, but I bought these tires just before a road trip to Savannah, Georgia. And at the time, they were all I could afford.

I was about to take a job, writing for a small magazine, right after I graduated college—I was a thirty-year-old man when I graduated.

It was a big deal for me. A big, big deal. I could hardly afford the trip, but I wanted to be a writer, so:

“Look out, Savannah.”

I paid two hundred bucks for tires that were supposed to get me there. They were missing most of their treads, but the price was right. I bought them at a secondhand tire shop. The owner was Russian.

He said: “These be very okay tires, but you no drive in rain or you die.”

Die. Right.

So on the

way to Savannah, I pulled over at a Citgo station when it started raining.

A man stood beneath the awning, smoking a cigarette. He had wrinkled skin, he wore denim and boots. He was a carbon copy of the people I come from. Steelworking men who dangle from iron beams with little more in their hearts than family and cuss words.

There was a little girl with him, nine or ten, maybe. She was watching the rain. The girl was his granddaughter.

She was out of school for a doctor’s appointment. Her parents couldn’t get off work, so he drove three hours from Nashville to take her.

Three hours.

“When this rain lets up,” he said. “I’m dropping her off and heading back to Nashville for work. I’m working overtime tonight.”

Age sixty-seven. Still working overtime. Driving six hours, roundtrip,
in one…

A dim-lit bar with greasy burgers and three choices of beer—two are Budweiser variations. A jukebox is playing George Jones.

Heaven, I am convinced, is a place with a jukebox.

It’s quiet tonight. The folks here are mostly out-of-towners. Take me, for instance, I’m an out-of-towner.

The woman sitting beside me is from Atlanta. She lost her husband a few years ago to a work accident. She starts talking about Heaven.

This is not typical barroom conversation. She’s had a little too much to drink. The server has to call her a cab.

She asks if I believe in an afterlife. Before I can answer, the bartender answers:

“Honey, nobody wants to hear about Heaven,” the bartender says. “Why don’t you go wait outside for your cab.”

But it’s too late. We are talking about the afterlife in a saloon. The conversational train cannot be stopped.

The man beside me is a mechanic for factory equipment. He repairs the things that make things.

“Yeah, I believe in it,” he says. “I think going on to Glory

is different for everyone.”

Glory.

A waitress speaks. She’s late-forties. I understand she has a bachelor’s in literature. The money in food service is better.

“Heaven’s real,” she says. “I just know it. I’ve seen it. When I was a little girl, I had an experience, I almost died. I saw things.

“Heaven’s all around us, all the time. Our dead loved ones are in the room with us right now. We just can’t see’em.”

Hi, Daddy.

She lost her mother to lung cancer. Her mother was sixty-one.

Everyone has lost somebody.

The busboy-slash-dishwasher enters the room. He’s early twenties. His brother joined the Marines a few years ago. His father abandoned him when he was a teenager. He and his brother practically raised each other.

“I WANT Heaven to be real,” he says.…

My childhood friend, Danny, was a dog-person.

I remember once, we were painting a house together. The house was old. Four of us boys were painting it because the owner was too old to do it himself.

We took several days to finish—earning twenty bucks per boy. We painted the clapboards flat white and the shutters green. We drank well over our legal limit of Coca-Colas.

And one sunny day, a dog trotted into the yard while we painted. It walked with a limp. It hobbled toward the house and crawled beneath the porch.

Danny was the first to crawl in after the dog. Dog-people, you see, do strange things like that.

We could see the dog was in bad shape. There was dark, shiny blood on its stomach. It growled if anyone got too close.

“He’s hurt,” said Danny. “I think he’s needs our help.”

The first thing we did was name the animal “Blackie”—an original name, I know. Then, all four of us laid on

our stomachs beneath a sagging shotgun house, in the dirt, talking in high-pitched voices to Old Black.

“Hey boy,” we said. “Who’s a good boy?”

“Here Blackie, here Blackie.”

But it did no good. Blackie a nervous wreck. He panted so hard it looked like his chest was going to explode.

Danny came up with an idea. He suggested we read books to Blackie.

“Read to him?” I remarked.

Danny reasoned that whenever his own mother read stories to him before bedtime it calmed him, lowered his blood pressure, and made him an all-around amiable human being.

So, we worked in shifts. Three boys would paint the house; one would stay beneath the porch with a book and a flashlight.

We did this for a day.

Blackie started to trust Danny. Whenever Danny was nearby, the dog seemed relaxed. Whenever…

I’m warning you beforehand, what I’m about to say is going to seem utterly ridiculous:

My mother once told me that I could conquer the world if I ate a decent breakfast. The whole world. All because of breakfast.

See? I tried to warn you.

Anyway, to this very day I’m still not sure how this meal can make conquering the world possible, but my mother never lies.

I remember the day she told me, I was having a devastating morning. I was about to take an entrance exam into the sixth grade. And this was a big deal because earlier that year, I’d failed fifth-grade—which drained my confidence.

But back to breakfast.

Mama made the greasiest meal. Three eggs, cooked in fat from a Maxwell House can, bacon, potatoes, grits, and toast hearty enough to sand the hull of a battleship.

I passed my test. I made it to the next grade. And eventually, my confidence began to improve. Thusly—and I’ve always wanted to use that word—I can

only assume that breakfast played an important role.

Since then, I’ve always believed in the first daily meal. I ate a good breakfast the day I got married. A big one. That day, the waitress kept bringing me plates of pancakes.

“You must be starving, honey,” she said.

I smiled. “Thusly,” said I.

But I was only nervous-eating. Truth told, they weren’t even good pancakes—the blueberries tasted like freeze-dried goat pellets.

I also ate a big breakfast the day I got fired. My boss called me into his office and chewed me a new nose-hole. He said things so hateful I can still remember them. I quietly walked out of his office before he finished speaking.

I went to eat breakfast. I read the paper, I watched the sunrise. I had one of the best mornings I’ve had in years.

Birmingham, Alabama—I’m eating a hamburger at a bar. The men on stools beside me are shouting over each other. There are seven of them, all wearing nice suits.

They are from New Jersey.

Our bartender’s name is Mandy. The New Jersey men are asking Mandy about various Southern expressions.

Mandy knows a thing or two about regional dialect. She has a thick accent, deep lines on her face, and she’s got more country expressions than Carter has liver pills.

Mandy comes from Sylacauga, which is home to such American treasures as: Jim Nabors (Gomer Pyle); Bill Todd (world’s lowest gospel-singing bass voice); and Ann Hodges (first woman in U.S. history to be struck by a nine-pound meteorite while taking a nap).

“Is it true?” New Jersey asks Mandy. “That you Southerners say ‘bless your heart’ to stupid people?”

Well, yes and no.

“Bless your heart” was once a common phrase uttered by anyone from Granny to Andy Griffith. But somewhere along life’s way, it got ruined by People Magazine, chain-email jokes, and Paula Deen.

“Yeah, we say it,” Mandy points out. “But most of the time, I’d rather say something like: ‘Ain’t he precious?’”

Which, when translated literally, means: “That poor man must’ve been exposed to lead paint during infancy.”

Many expressions in the South involve the weather. Here, we hold deep affection for the heat index.

One New Jersey man shouts: “I know a country expression about the weather: ‘SWEATING LIKE A HOG IN CHURCH!’”

Mandy rolls her eyes.

“Nope,” Mandy points out. “That ain’t how it goes. It goes: ‘Sweat’n like a WHORE in church.”

The New Jerseyans laugh hysterically.

Thus, Mandy teaches these men various regional expressions, free of charge. They listen and marvel at how many different ways a Sylacaugian like her can say something as simple as: “It’s hot outside.”

—“It’s hotter’n Hades.” A…