You will be 13 in six days. And I can already see you growing up. Stop it.

You’re taller. You wear snazzier clothes. You use a sort of adultish voice now, and use grown-up-female words like “absolutely” and “amazing” and—God help us all—“See? I told you so!”

Also, you’re not interested in toys like you once were. I noticed this when we were at the store yesterday. You were picking out a gift for your birthday, and we were in the toy aisle. You were yawning while I made suggestions.

Finally, you told me you were more interested in having a purse.

“A purse?” I said.

“Yes, a purse for my phone.”

So we went to the women’s section and you picked out an actual purse. Then we walked through Walmart while you wore your soon-to-be purse around your shoulder, clutching the strap like you were on your way to an important PTA meeting.

Later that night, we had your birthday supper. The

celebration went well. We celebrated with cheesesteaks and French fries. But I could see some subtle differences in your table etiquette.

For starters, not once did I see you lick your fingers. Neither did you drag your sleeve through any ketchup, or spill food in your lap. You kept your napkin on your knees, pausing now and then to primly dab your face.

Consequently, for the first time in a long time, you didn’t need help finding your food on the plate. Ever since you went blind, eating became a challenge for you. But not anymore.

I still remember times when I helped feed you out in public, so you wouldn’t spill food on your nice dress. I remember hoisting you up to the men’s bathroom sink to scrub stains from your clothes while bathroom guests gave me odd glares.

But you do not need help…

My phone finally arrives in the mail. It’s small. Ugly. It’s “dumb.” And it looks like it was invented during the Herbert Hoover administration.

This phone is incapable of performing any task greater than making phone calls or serving as a doorstop. Hopefully, this will help cure my smartphone addiction.

I leave the house to run errands. Armed with the most advanced technology 1989 had to offer. I am meeting a friend for lunch.

With no GPS, I soon realize that I’m completely lost downtown. I have NO idea where I’m going once I exit familiar neighborhoods.

No problem. This is embarrassing, yes, but I pull over to ask directions.

I tell the gas-station clerk I am looking for Broadway Street and ask how to get there. The clerk tells me he doesn’t know the names of any streets inasmuch as he usually just uses his phone.

So we look up directions together on his phone GPS. At some point the clerk stares at me and says,

“Don’t you have a phone?”

“Not a smart one,” I say.

“Dude,” he says, and there is real sympathy in his voice.

I arrive at the restaurant late where a waitress tells me I can find a menu by scanning a QR code.

“May I have a paper menu?” I ask.

The waitress gives a bewildered look as though I have just broken wind in an elevator. You don’t even want to know how she reacts when I pay with cash.

Next, I have an appointment at the opthamologist. I arrive early. The waiting room is empty, the staff is killing time by playing on phones.

“You’re in luck,” the young staffer says. “We had two cancellations, so we can bump your appointment up 30 minutes, you won’t have to wait.”

Then she pauses. The words seem to come out…

I am in Baltimore. Looking at the Chesapeake Bay. Cold gray water. Brown grass.

Canada geese overhead, playing follow the leader, honking in sing-songy tones as if to say, “My butt is cold!” 

I have always wanted to see the Chesapeake. My whole life, actually. 

It all started because my dad was a reader. He read books obsessively. You’d see him sitting in his chair, poking through some thick volume. 

Usually he read boring books. Such as those outlining the various stratagems of the allied forces’ offensive maneuvers within the Pacific War Theater. Or the biography of the long and complicated history of dental floss in the United States. 

He read especially before bed. I’d peek into his room to say goodnight, and he’d have a book in hand, glasses low on his nose. He’d kiss my hair and say goodnight. Then just keep reading. 

He was a blue collar steelworker, but he tried so hard to defy this image by forcing himself to do non-blue-collar things.

Things like listening to classical

music even though he hated it. Or writing down vocabulary words for himself, and trying to use these words in sentences. Words such as “loquacious,” or "munificence.”

The last book I remember him reading was “Chesapeake,” by James A. Michener. I believe my father had read all of Michener’s books. But he deemed “Chesapeake” his favorite. Not just his favorite Michener book, mind you, but his favorite book of all time. 

Years later when I was 13, I was going through a box of his things one night. Old baseball gloves. Old photos. And I found his favorite book. 

I just held it in my hands, clutching it close to my chest, as though this book had strange magic inside the pages. 

I tried to start reading it, but the language was too high-minded for a 13-year-old whose most advanced reading involved catching up on the exploits…

Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The windchill is negative four and I can no longer feel my unmentionables. I’m about to play my fiddle and tell funny stories to a room of people at the community center.

I am nervous because these are Pennsylvanians. Pennsylvanians, I’ve heard, only laugh on the inside.

As it happens, my intel is inaccurate. The crowd laughs well. Thank God.

The biggest laughter of the night, however, comes from a woman named Kris, who is from Thailand. Kris is here with her friend tonight, named Oat.

“It is pronounced like ‘OAT-meal,’” says the young woman with an air of grace and properness.

Oat is maybe four-foot-eleven. She stands next to Kris, who is perhaps a quarter inch taller.

“We drive long way to see you,” says Kris, the older of the two.

“We in car for very long time,” says Oat.

I am touched. Here I am in Pennsylvania, far from home. And these women are from the Eastern Hemisphere.

“How

do you even KNOW WHO I AM?” I ask.

“Because I love you,” is all Kris says.

Kris has something for me. A gift. She hands me a small, ornate coin purse containing two pennies.

“This is just my two cents,” Kris says. Then she bursts out laughing.

Kris does not merely laugh on the inside.

And I am moved. I don’t know why I can’t speak, but I am mute for a few moments. Maybe it’s the cold weather allergies.

I respond by speaking only a few words. I am surprised I still remember them.

“Khap kum krup,” I say.

The two women are sort of impressed to hear an awkward bearded dude who looks like the fat guy from “The Hangover” speak Thai.

“YOU SPEAK THAI?” they ask, using the same tone you would use to ask…

“Dear Sean, I’m writing for advice,” the message began. 

“I lost the whole lower right side of my face [due to cancer] before having it rebuilt. My surgeon was a genius. 

“...I’m five years without cancer, but my 12-year-old constantly worries about me, and is afraid my cancer will come back. We’ve been through a lot. I tell her that I’m okay, but it doesn’t always help. What do I do?”

Dear friend, you’re asking the wrong guy for advice.

I have no children. The closest I ever came to having a child was when my wife got me a goldfish for Christmas. His name was Gary. 

I travel for a living, so I took Gary with me everywhere since Gary would have starved at home alone because, sadly, Gary never learned to cook. 

So I carried Gary in a Mason jar when I traveled. He rode in the passenger seat. Late one night in Texas, I was checking into a hotel. I plopped Gary’s jar on the counter and started digging through my wallet. 

The teenage clerk

stared at Gary and said, “Is that a fish?”

“Yes.” 

The clerk blinked, then replied—and I’m not making this up—“So I guess you want to upgrade your room to two kings?”

So anyway, eventually Gary died of natural causes. And by “natural causes,” I am, of course, referring here to our cat Cuddles.  

So I am not qualified to raise a goldfish. Let alone give kid advice.

Still, I have this theory. And I realize this is going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me. My theory is that every human is a 12-year-old, waiting for his or her life to begin. 

When I was a 12-year-old, I underwent a lot of trauma and tragedy. My father died by suicide and our world was upended. 

Ever since, the one feeling I craved was security. Security was missing in my life.

Our plane touched down, mid-afternoon. The flight attendant said, “Careful opening overhead compartments because shift happens.” 

We deboarded, got our luggage from the carousel, leapt into our rental car, and we aimed the front bumper toward the wilds of Pennsylvania. 

I like Pennsylvania. They’re nice here. They say “yous” and “yinz” and “soda pop.” They have Appalachian manners, a steelman’s work ethic, and potholes big enough to swallow Peterbilts. 

Soon, we were driving back roads beneath an impossibly blue sky, dodging potholes like playing a video game. But after we got out of the congested areas, the landscape changed considerably. 

The potholes disappeared. So did the billboards, warehouses, blast furnace smokestacks, along with all the Dick’s Sporting Goods, Outback Steakhouses, Ultas, Best Buys, Red Lobsters, and other American franchises that make each American town look just like every other American town.   

Soon, we were weaving through the rearmost byways of Pennsylvania, past the hinterlands of Appalachia. Riding two-lanes without yellow lines, where motorists are nice enough to stay in their own lane using

the honor system. 

Our tires bumped over the occasional patch job on the antique pavement. We whipped past hundreds of unnamed offshot dirt roads, top dressed, leading heaven only knows where.  

Gracious farmland, dotted hillsides. Scalped pastures of fescue and alfalfa, golden brown, peppered with little red barns, timber fences, and millions of parked RVs. Goodness, Pennsylvania seems to love their RVs. 

We passed cattle, standing near fence rails, all huddled together, watching intermittent cars go by, moving their heads in unison to follow your vehicle as though they were watching a tennis match. 

The roads were lined with heaps of residual snow, akin to giant tufts of dirty cotton. The faroff hillsides were blue, with Purple Mountains Majesty standing behind them. 

Smoke rose from distant chimneys attached to imperfectly white farmhouses, two-stories, big porches, no frills, manicured yards.  

We passed a young man driving a John…

Bryan was walking the Arkansas highway shoulder with only the moon to guide him. Backpack slung over his shoulder. Blisteringly cold.

He was 23 years young. This was not a friendly evening, weather-wise. Tonight it was colder than a brass toilet seat in Nova Scotia. 

His homelife was a wreck. He had decided, tonight on this walk, that he was going to end it all. He didn’t have the details worked out, but he’d made up his mind.

A pickup truck practically materialized out of nowhere. The headlights were blinding. The vehicle pulled over.

Inside was an older woman. The heater was blaring.

“Get in,” said the lady.

And she didn’t say it as a question.

Bryan piled into the bench seat. The heat felt good on his wet body. 

“Where you headin’?” she said.

Her hair was gray and messy, like it hadn’t been combed since the Crimean War. Her eyes were wild.

“Don’t know,” said Bryan. 

She just looked at him.

“Are you an angel?” she said.

He laughed. “What?”

“Tell me the truth.”

He wasn’t sure if this old woman was pulling his leg.

“I’m no angel,” he said.

She stared at

him like she was boring a hole through limestone.

“I can take you as far as Little Rock,” she said. “That’s where I’m going, I’m meeting my granddaughter tonight.”

“Little Rock would be great.”

In a few moments, they were careening down the highway. The interior of her truck was plastered in religious paraphernalia. A Jesus air freshener. A dashboard compass that said, “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life.” Crucifix gear shifter.

The old woman broke the silence first.

“My granddaughter’s in labor. She’s having her baby tonight.”

“Really?”

“Yep. You’re looking at an honest-to-goodness great-grandmother.”

“Congratulations.”

She stared again. Longer this time. “Did God send you?”

“Nobody sent me.”

“Then what were you doing on the side…

Mount Airy. The Earle Theater was crowded, the room smelled of popcorn, and I was onstage shaking my butt. 

I don’t mean to say I was shaking my hindparts metaphorically. But worse, I was actually shaking them.

Namely, because derriere-shaking is an important element in the one-man trainwreck I perform in theaters around the country. 

So anyway, there I was, gyrating my natiform before an audience, when I had a moment of supernatural awareness. 

How did I get here? What career path led me to this moment? Why am I onstage, before several hundred, shaking my fundaments? 

Laughs, baby. That’s why. 

I will do anything for laughs. I would do a lot worse than shake my culet if it guaranteed a laugh. I would probably run around the theater in nothing but my socks. This is because I am in show business. 

Moreover, I genuinely LOVE the sound of people laughing. I gravitate toward laughter. Laughter is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Laughter is everything to me. 

I fell into the field

of comedy by accident. My career started over a decade ago when I was asked to speak to a local Rotary club. The Rotarians were so hard up for entertainment they called a fledgling local author. Moi.

The prestigious meeting took place in a steakhouse/catfish buffet. I ate enough fried catfish to alarm a cardiologist. I was trembling when I delivered a speech that had about as much warmth and charm as the Berlin Wall. 

One elderly man—this is true—had a gaseous expulsion during my speech. But it worked out because, as it happened, he received a more enthusiastic audience reaction than I did. 

The next speech I delivered—also true—a woman in the back row had a diabetic event. The paramedics were called.

When EMTs loaded the elderly woman into an ambulance, I overheard the lady’s daughter ask, “Are you in pain, Mama?”

The original holiday was called Lupercalia. An ancient Roman festival. A real scream. 

Picture this. The Roman town square was crowded. Everyone was buck naked. Even the old people, whose bodies were ravaged by gravity. 

Young women would line up, men would swat them with the hides of sacrificed animals. This supposedly made them fertile. It goes without saying that beer was involved.  

Women then put their names into a big jar. Whereupon, each guy would select a name. Then, everyone would go off together and, um, read the Bible. 

No. Wait. The Bible hadn’t been invented yet. So I’m sure they were all doing something else. Maybe playing Twister. 

Fast forward about 300 years after the death of Jesus. Rome was a cesspool. If you were a Christian, you were—how do I put it?—screwed. Christians were mass hated. Why were they hated? 

Politics, baby. Nothing arouses hate like politics. 

So you basically had two different groups in Rome. You had those who thought the emperor was a spiritual genius, sent by God—actually, they

thought HE WAS A GOD. And you had the other crowd who listened to talk radio.   

Christians didn’t fit into either group. They simply wouldn’t play the game. They met underground. They refused to worship Caesar. Not only because he was a tyrant, but because he made a crappy salad. 

Why was this such a big deal? Because to Romans, religion was a social and public thing. Refusing to sacrifice a goat to a Roman god was like disrespecting the flag. The role of a priest was a public office. Not playing the politics game meant you were unpatriotic. 

And this is why they started killing Christians. They had all kinds of ways to kill you. 

They would wrap you in the carcass of an animal and let dogs attack you. They’d put you into barrels with protruding spikes and roll you down hills. They…

I miss glass bottles. I come from a generation of glass.

And therein lies a fundamental difference between my generation and the current one.

Glass bottles were everywhere. Glass packaging contained everything from mayonnaise to Bayer aspirin. You walked into a restaurant, and there were glass Heinz ketchup bottles sitting on tables. You had to fracture your palm to get the stuff out.

We had no space-age plastic polymers. Just glass. It was reusable. It was substantial. Eco-friendly. And glass, somehow, just made us happier. It kept crime down. It made us American. 

Which reminds me, I was at a ball game when the national anthem was played. Everyone stood. But do you know what? Almost nobody sang. It was weird. 

The singer was a recording artist from Nashville with three Grammys. She performed two minutes of vocal gymnastics so that it sounded like she was undergoing an unanesthetized colonoscopy. The boy in the seat next to me leaned over to his mom and said, “When is this going to be over?”

When I was a kid, everyone sang the “Star Spangled Banner” at games. We sang it all the time. We sang it in SCHOOL. My veteran grandfather didn’t let Nashville recording artists outsing him at ballgames. 

Something else about my generation. We were not required to leave tips for every single blessed financial transaction completed.

Yes, we tipped. We tipped restaurant servers, barbers, bartenders, and talented professional dancers. But we did not tip our McDonald’s drive-thru attendant. 

Know what else? There were no video ads at our gas-station pumps, blaring 24-hour headlines at a volume loud enough to make your gums bleed, advertising everything from potato chips to marital aids.

Other things were different, too. People still held the doors for each other. Children were actually skilled conversationalists.

Music, movies, and TV were not streamed, they were shared, communal experiences, so everyone had something to talk about.