We are sitting on a porch overlooking the Choctawhatchee Bay on the first day of autumn. It is one of those accidental porch-sitting sessions where everyone ends up on the porch, but nobody planned it.

I am in a rocking chair, feet up. My elderly mother-in-law (Mother Mary) sits beside me doing the same thing. My wife is sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Our eighty-pound bloodhound wanders in circles, looking for something to chew, bury, or pee on.

Nobody is talking in complete sentences because there’s no need for coherent thought right now. The rules of porch-sitting are loose.

“Lord,” says Mother Mary. “Look at all these mosquitoes.”

“Yeah,” says my wife.

Yeah.

Every porch conversation in West Florida starts out with mosquitoes. It’s our tradition. But once you’ve covered mosquitoes, you can talk about anything.

You can talk about the time when a mosquito flew into your uncle’s shorts and bit him in his unmentionables, so he slapped himself in a place where a man should never swat himself.

Or you can talk about the time Mother Mary got malaria from a mosquito bite and had a high fever, then started singing Broadway songs at the dinner table.

Or you can talk about—why not?—that time Johnny Cooper dared you to eat a live lizard tail when you were in third grade.

Which is what I start talking about.

“So did you?” Mother Mary interrupts. “Did you actually EAT a lizard tail?”

“No, but I pretended to.”

“How do you pretend to eat a lizard tail?”

“I had gummy worms in my pocket, so I slipped one into my mouth and let it dangle, and I pretended to gag.”

“Gummy worms? Did you always carry gummy worms in your pocket as a boy?”

“No ma’am, but God was on my side that day.”

My lizard-eating stunt went down in history. To this day, people still think I actually ate a…

Nobody prepares you for the idea that you are not going to sleep all that well when you’re older, but eventually you find out it’s true. For years, elderly people tried to warn you that this would happen, and you never took them seriously.

After all, you were a young man. You had nothing to worry about. You slept so hard that all you ever wanted to do was sleep. Even when your mother came bursting into your room shouting, “I made spicy chicken casserole just the way you like it!”

And believe me, you would climb Mount Vesuvius for your mother’s spicy chicken casserole. Even so. You kept sleeping because you were a greasy little brat with a lightning fast metabolism and no joint pain.

When I was a young buck, I could sleep like nobody’s business. It was one of my many unusual talents—like swallowing my tongue, playing a Strauss waltz on my armpit, or commonly referring to myself as a “young buck.”

I stayed up as late as I

wanted, eating a steady diet of battery-acid-like food. And whenever I got pooped, I would just curl up and go to sleep somewhere, even if I happened to be in a place where it was kosher to sleep. Such as Jerry’s Cue Club Pool Hall.

The next morning, I’d wake up feeling refreshed and ready to eat more acidic food.

On Friday nights I used to stay up late because a local channel played Sci-Fi movie reruns from the 1950s. These were B-movies with leading male actors who used enough Brylcreem to mortar a two-story brick home. Their leading ladies were overly dramatic and often had unnaturally small waists that, anatomically speaking, looked like they didn’t contain a pancreas or spleen.

These movies were the highlight of the week. I would stay up all night watching films like:

“Them!” A 1954 black-and-white gem starring James Arness (Marshal Dillon…

It was several years ago. I was driving toward Geneva, Alabama, for two reasons. One: A funeral for my friend’s father. Two: I was going to buy a fishing boat.

You might as well kill two birds with one stone, that’s what I always say.

I arrived at the church, dressed in my decent clothes. I don’t have “nice” clothes per se. Everything I own is either halfway decent or reprehensible. The reprehensible stuff can be identified by the wrinkles, the paint blobs on the sleeves, and the coffee stains.

No man purposely stains his shirts with coffee. But when he has facial hair like me, the hair absorbs thirty percent of each coffee swig. Thusly, when the cup is removed from the mouth, the coffee drips onto the man’s chest, making him appear either senile or drunk. Sometimes both.

And ironing? I have not ironed a shirt since Theodore Roosevelt was elected.

So my clothes are not my best feature, which has been a problem in the past. I once got fired from

a church for having a wrinkled shirt. This is totally true, and it’s still hard to talk about.

I was working part-time, playing church piano. One Sunday morning, I was playing “Old Rugged Cross.” I was wearing wrinkled khakis, a moderately crumpled shirt, and sandals.

I loved sandals because at the time I worked in construction. We wore boots all day long and my feet were always cramped. As soon as I would get home, I couldn’t wait to wear sandals and let the old dogs breathe. Sandals are like a Biloxi vacation for feet.

The pastor was horrified. I received my walking papers not long thereafter. Don’t misunderstand me, I do try to dress nice, I’m just saying that I know there’s room for improvement. Also, I try to bathe regularly.

When I arrived at the chapel where the funeral was held, I told my…

Before we got married, my wife and I had to take a mandatory church marriage class. The Baptist church would not marry anyone without it.

The idea was: After eight weeks of rigorous marriage training, couples would receive an official certificate, trimmed in gold, with their names on it. And this certificate would prove to the world, without a doubt, that couples were spiritually prepared to stand at an altar and combine health insurance policies.

Keep in mind, this certificate wasn’t a marriage license. This was a “Baptist pre-marriage class certificate,” from the back of the “official Baptist marriage workbook,” purchased for $24.99.

Within the Baptist tradition, you see, you can’t do anything without first obtaining a certificate and unanimous committee approval. Even Sunday greeters are required to attend a four-week class that teaches them to properly say: “Here’s your bulletin, possible wayward reprobate sinner, sir.”

Thus, my future-wife and I arrived at the fellowship hall each week to participate in courses that prepared us for cohabitation.

These courses featured many important

games which the workbook termed “marital building exercises.” Many of which were developed by professional marriage book authors—some of whom had been married to the same person for as long as three to four years.

One such exercise was the Egg Test.

In this game, the future-bride (Jamie) balances an egg on a spoon clenched between her teeth. She wears a blindfold and walks across a room.

The future-husband (me) stands on the opposite side of the room (over by the piano). He uses ONLY his words to guide his future-wife through an obstacle course made up entirely of folding chairs which represent the confusing Maze of Life.

On the chairs are Post-It notes, labeled with various day-to-day marriage problems like: “car trouble,” “bills,” “career,” “children,” “chapter 11 bankruptcy,” “sharing the covers.”

In this exercise, the woman stumbles over chairs, spoon held in her mouth. She is thus…