This is my fourth week with a flip phone. My “unintelligent” cellular phone is manufactured by Nokia, and the phone’s primary selling feature is that it sucks.

Service is spotty. The screen is the size of a Cheez-It. But there is one plus. The phone has an FM radio feature. You can listen to the radio, but only if you hold the phone to your ear like you’re making a call.

Oftentimes, my wife will find me with phone pressed against my ear, wearing an urgent look on my face, and she’ll ask in a whisper, “Who are you talking to?” Whereupon I’ll cover the mouthpiece and say, “I’m listening to talk radio.”

It is technically possible to send texts with this “dumb” phone, but this is such a painfully tedious process that, frankly, you’d be better off using Western Union.

Usually, texting is such a pain in the astronomy that I end up calling the individual. Which sometimes takes people by surprise. Apparently voice calls aren’t common anymore, inasmuch as whenever

I call someone people assume something is wrong.

“Omigod,” the person will answer the phone. “Is everything okay?”

“Sorry, my phone won’t text. Surely you don’t mind me calling.”

“Not at all. And don’t call me Shirley.”

Of course, this is only a sample conversation provided someone actually ANSWERS their phone. Which they usually don’t. Probably because whenever I call they don’t know it’s me. This is due to the fact that my name now shows up on caller ID as “Rene Birdfield.”

I don’t know who Rene Birdfield is. I don’t know if she is a real person. But somehow ever since switching phones my service provider has transitioned to identifying me as Rene.

The following is a verbatim transcript of an actual phone conversation with our plumber:

ME: Hi, I was calling about our appointment to look at…

Anna and her four young daughters were on a trip to England on the SS Ville du Havre. It was a French steamship. All iron. Built like a tank. Except, of course, tanks weren’t around yet. This was 1873. 

The girls were excited to be on a ship. They were running on deck, playing TAG in the companionways, seeing what happened when they spit overboard at high altitude. 

The ship was loaded deep with mostly first-class passengers. It was November, the weather was cold. Everyone was wearing coats and mittens. 

They were bound for Havre de Grâce, Seine-Inférieure, France. Anna and her daughters were Americans, on their way to England to help with church revivals. 

In a few days, the Havre was midway across the icy Atlantic when the ship collided with a Scottish clipper vessel. The collision was so loud, it sounded like an explosion. People were thrown from their beds. Some were injured. 

Within seconds, the ship had taken on major water. Third class was already evacuated from below deck.

People were screaming. Children crying. Some were panicking and jumping overboard. 

The crew was furiously trying to deploy lifeboats, but it was all happening too fast. The ship was tilted upright, you had to fight against gravity just to move around. 

Anna hurriedly brought her four children to the foredeck. She knelt there with her children and prayed that God would spare them, or to help them endure whatever awaited them. The girls were sobbing. “I’m so scared, Mama.” 

Twelve minutes later, while they were still on their knees praying, the Ville du Harve plunged beneath the Atlantic; 226 passengers died. Including all four of Anna’s children.

Just before daybreak, a sailor rowing a small skiff located Anna floating on a piece of the wreckage. She was still alive. But barely. She was almost catatonic. 

Nine days later, Anna was in Wales, where she wired her husband in…

He was a good kid. You could just tell.

He was maybe 11. Twelve at the most. He was in the supermarket. He had his little sister balanced on his hip. You don’t often see boys carrying toddlers out in public.

The kid was filling a shopping buggy. He was reaching for a bag of tortilla chips on the top shelf. I saw one of the older ladies in our aisle reach upward and remove a bag of Tostitos for him.

They were Tostitos Scoops. The greatest invention by the chip industry, and perhaps the finest human achievement of the last century with the possible exception of penicillin.

“Thanks,” the boy said.

His buggy was nearly full. He had lots of adultish items in his basket. Coffee. Vegetables. Diapers.

The older lady asked where the boy’s mother was. She asked this in a concerned, parental tone. Her concern, of course, is understandable in our modern day. You don’t often see kids wandering around by themselves anymore.

During my youth, however, shortly after the close of World War I, kids almost never had parental supervision.

We walked to school. Our mothers sent us to the store on errands. We hung out at the mall without supervision. We rode bikes into the woods, built campfires, constructed deathtrap treehouses, and made serious attempts at discovering new ways to break our own legs. We were feral.

“Where are your parents?” said the older woman.

“My mom’s waiting in the car,” he said.

The woman’s brow furrowed. “She let you come in here by YOURSELF?”

He nodded, then readjusted Little Sister on his hip. Little Sister had a snot bubble the size of a Canadian territory.

“You’re GROCERY shopping?” the woman said.

Nod.

The lady was aghast. She wore the patented look of disapproval. “You shouldn’t be in here without an…

“Dear Sean,” the letter began, “there’s a dog in my neighborhood who was lost and followed me home.

“We think he is an Irish Setter. Mom says I can have him but that I should ask you because its a lot of responsibility for a 10-year-old to have a dog.”

The letter was signed Ellen.

Dear Ellen, first off, your mother is right. Having a dog is a huge responsibility. I should know. I have three huge responsibilities.

My dogs are: Thelma Lou (bloodhound) and Otis Campbell (alleged Labrador). My third dog is Marigold, the blind coonhound who is 60 pounds. They are all curled at my feet right now as I write this column.

A typical day with dogs goes like this: You wake up. You feed your dogs. Then you let them all outside to go pee. Then you let them back inside. Then outside again. Then in. Out. In.

After which you will attempt to go about your day. You will get maybe 3 minutes into

your work routine before there is a violent scratching at your back door, which is the sound of a 90-pound responsibility alerting you that you need to open the door and let your responsibility out to go pee again.

So, even though there is a doggy door installed in this door, a door which took roughly eight hours to install because the instructions were printed in French, Swahili, and Pig Latin, your dog still wants YOU to open the door because, by in large, some dogs have the intelligence of—I am not being negative here—Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

This scratching will not stop until you open the door. The scratching never stops. After they bury you, you will hear scratching on your tombstone.

Dogs can be strange creatures. One of my dogs, for example, loves cattle bones. So we give her lots of cattle femurs which can be purchased from your local…

In a few weeks my wife and I will be walking 500 miles unless we die before we finish.

We will be walking the Camino de Santiago, a medieval religious pathway across Spain. We will be on foot. With backpacks. And we shall not be called “hikers,” but in the ancient Spanish tongue: “Locos Americanos con mochilas.”

The preparations are underway. Jamie and I have been walking A LOT lately.

We must walk. Got to get in shape. Because in Spain, we will be walking 14 miles per day in hopes of finishing the route before my 103rd birthday.

We have been training every day. A lot of people see me trudging along in downtown Birmingham, wearing a large backpack, wearing a general countenance of misery, standing on a street corner, waiting for a red light, and these people usually give me pocket change.

The most common question I am asked is, “Why?” People want to know why two middle-aged taxpayers are

spending their hard earned cash to travel to Spain for the privilege of living like homeless persons for upwards of two months.

The answer is simple. Because my wife said so.

No, I’m only kidding! (Sort of!) The honest answer is—and this is the truth—I can’t put my finger on why.

What I CAN put my finger on is that I am the same age my father was when he died. And this has really affected me this year.

My dad was a good man whose life was half lived. He was a responsible homeowner, a hard worker, and he diligently changed the oil every 11 miles. But I never saw him live. Really live. I never saw him take care of his own human spirit.

And so the main reason I am walking the Camino, and I don’t mean to reach for melodrama here, is to find…

Last night our band played historical music.

We were in a small theater. I played fife. The snare played military cadences. My friend and boyhood idol, Bobby Horton, was beside me. He was dazzling the crowd by playing all the music he recorded for the Ken Burns documentaries.

We selected songs from the American Revolution. “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Irishman’s Epistle.”

The lyrics were antiquated. The melodies, ancient. But the meaning came through.

These were songs colonist soldiers would have played during the heat of battle. The tunes the fife and drummer would have been playing as their brothers were falling.

I told stories between songs. Stories from history. Tales you might have heard in Valley Forge, and Lexington, or Fort Ticonderoga. Then we all sang melodies you would have heard in colonial taverns. In colonist living rooms.

I was having fun on that stage, yes. But meanwhile, deep inside, I was feeling something. Something I have never

felt before.

It was a deep-in-the-bone feeling. A sensation in my gut that swept over me. Like warm water.

The feeling was connectedness. With people I’ve never met. With colonists. With my ancestors. Whose names I don’t know. Whose biographies were never written.

I felt kinship with bygone farmers, coopers, woodrights, cabinetmakers, brickmakers, tailors, bookbinders, joiners, and millers who came before me. Men and women and children, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the madness of King George.

Thirteen colonies who should not have had a chance in hell at winning a war waged against the greatest military in the world.

And for a few moments, I was sort of on that battlefield. I was one of the teenagers, marching into a hornet’s nest, alongside my fellow villagers.

I was standing alongside ghosts. Minute men. Common men. And I could see that these people were not fables. They…

I am not complaining. So help me, I’m not.

Idiots complain. And I’m not a complete idiot. Idiocy is all about percentages. I’m only 40 percent idiot, the other 75 percent of me is bad at math.

But this morning I was logging into one of my personal accounts, entering my password, which is a long complicated password that is at least eight characters long, contains one capital letter, one symbol, one article of punctuation, and the blood of a sacrificial goat.

And I got to thinking.

Did you know that the average American has an average of 168 passwords across personal accounts, with another 87 passwords for work accounts? Meaning that the ordinary American has an average of 255 passwords.

Then I found myself wondering how we got here. Have you ever stopped and thought about all the analog things that have disappeared from our daily lives?

For example, where did coin-operated horses outside supermarkets go? Why did we get

rid of those?

How about gumball machines? Did my childhood dentist, who resembled Fred Mertz after a long night, confiscate them all?

What about prizes in cereal boxes? What happened to the free nautical whistle in Cap’n Crunch?

Missing-person photos on milk cartons? The black plastic thingies on the bottom of two-liter bottles? Shirley Jones?

How about playgrounds? Where are the playgrounds? One study found that playgrounds in the US have decreased by nearly 40 percent. Many schools are tearing down swing sets and monkey bars.

Speaking of kids. Where are all the tiny bicycles? Where is the army of young people pedaling through my neighborhood, unsupervised?

And why did laundry detergent commercials stop advertising how their products remove grass stains from children’s clothing?

What about tree-climbing? One study found that three quarters of American kids have never climbed a tree.

Also, what happened to…

Columbus, Georgia. I was eating at a barbecue joint not far from the state line.

My cousin, John, insisted that this joint serves the best barbecue in the state of  Georgia. He made me promise to try it.

I ordered the ribs.

I ate them without sauce. The true test of ribs is to eat them dry. Barbecue sauce is like a beautiful woman. If she’s too sweet, she’s hiding something. If she’s too spicy, you’re going to be sorry in the morning.

Behind me was a young couple, eating. Early 20s. Maybe late teens. I could hear their conversation.

“Has your mom texted yet?” said the young man quietly. They were eating a massive plate of smoked meat.

“No,” said the young woman. “Not yet.”

“Do you think she’ll text you?”

“Don’t know. She’s definitely mad.”

“Bad mad?”

“Yes.”

“You think she’ll ever forgive us?”

The girl spoke with a mouthful. “I don’t know. She doesn’t like what we did.” 

“You mean that we snuck off to get married?”

“It’s called eloping.’ I think that’s what they call it when you run away to get married.”

“She doesn’t like that we

‘loped.”

“EE-loped.”

“I can’t believe we’re really married.”

“I know.”

I ate my ribs and listened. I have my mother in me. I can eavesdrop with the best of them.

The boy was chewing as he talked. “I think lots of people’s grandparents ee-loped. My grandparents went to Donaldsonville to get married. You could get married in Donaldsonville back then, without your parents’ permission.”

“So how can it be so wrong if our grandparents did it?”

Shrug. “I know. And my grandparents are super old, too. My grandma is almost 60.”

I turned around to sneak a glance at them. She was pretty. He was so skinny, God love him. He would’ve had to stand up five times just to make a shadow. They were sitting on the…

I get a lot of comments about grammar. And after having studied the subject for years—mainly by reading thousands of critically acclaimed cereal boxes—I’ve decided to answer questions from readers who inquire about various errors in my work.

Let’s git started:

Q: Sean! You NEVER start a sentence with “however”. I saw this in your essay and was disappointed.

A: It is a common literary misconception that beginning a sentence with “however” is not permissible. However, according to the Associated Press Stylebook, it is completely acceptable as long as you: (1) follow “however” with a comma, and (2) get a life.

Q: Hi Sean, it’s not “butt naked,” it’s “buck naked.” Please use colloquialisms correctly.

A: I’m sorry, those are both wrong. Here in Alabama, it’s “nekkid.”

Q: When you use “irregardless,” I hope you know that you’re using nonsense. It’s not a word.

A: Two things:

First thing: Actually,“irregardless” is a real word, and while this may not be a word you enjoy, or a word that you would use when the bank forecloses on your home, it

has been in use for over 200 years, employed by a large number of educated people, published authors, and many of us trailer-park residents

Secondly: Don’t make me get butt nekkid over hear.

Q: You often end sentences with prepositions. The English teacher in me wants to scream, “Study your own language!” If you ever have a doubt about a preposition, just remember, a preposition is anything a rabbit can do to a log.

A: That’s inappropriate and uncalled for.

Q: There are typos in your work. Yesterday I found two mistakes in your column.

A: You get a free toaster.

Q: I believe in a recent column you misused “there” when you meant “their.” I am not normally put off by bad grammar, but this particular mistake gets my goat.

A: Remember, anything a goat can do…

It is my third week without a smartphone. Twenty-one days ago, I purchased a Japanese “dumb” phone with the same high-tech functionality of coleslaw.

The weirdest part about not having a smartphone is that I keep experiencing random phone vibrations in my back pocket, indicating that I’m receiving texts from my old smartphone, even though my old phone is powered off and locked in a safe.

I can only assume that for the last umpteen years there has been a vibrating device in my back pocket and my brain currently doesn’t know what to do now that it’s gone.

So I have a constant vibration coming from my intergluteal cleft, even though there is nothing in my pocket.

I actually went to the doctor to ask about this. I thought I might be having some sort of nerve trouble.

The doctor replied, “Hold on, let me finish this text.”

Without a smartphone, I now routinely venture into the real world without a phone at all. I am re-learning to navigate unfamiliar regions

without GPS, using only maps and verbal expletives.

Also, I don’t have a phone camera anymore. So if there’s something I want to take a picture of, I just look at it real hard.

Technically, my “idiot” phone is capable of receiving text messages, but I can’t read them because the screen is about the size of a lone Skittle. So, for the most part, I am phoneless.

Yesterday, my flip phone battery died and I actually used a payphone to call my wife. I didn’t even know they HAD payphones anymore.

WIFE: Hello?

ME: It’s me.

WIFE: What’s wrong? I don’t recognize this number.

ME: I’m calling from a payphone.

HER: A payphone? Omigod. What is it?

ME: It’s a coin-operated public telephone located in high-traffic areas, but that’s not important right now.

One…