I heard it on the radio last night. I was driving. When the announcer said it, I pulled over.

The radio voice explained that a shooting had happened at UAB Highlands Hospital in Birmingham. One woman dead. A young man injured. The shooter did himself in.

UAB Highlands. The same hospital my wife has visited. The same building, same waiting rooms, same vending machines, the same weak coffee.

Nancy Swift died. She was 63. 28-year-old Tim Isley was the other victim.

While I write this, Tim isn’t doing well.

I’ve never met Nancy or Tim. And their stories are none of my business—there’s a lot that isn’t my business. But, I want to say something, if I may.

Dear Lord:

You have no reason to listen to me. I know that billions of other messages are filling your inbox while you read this. And I know you’re very busy.

I’ll make this quick.

If there’s any real magic in you, like the preachers say, use it. Send it to the families who need

some.

That’s what I ask.

Do your thing. Do it big. Throw your weight around. Help the grieving feel strong. Make Tim Isley all better. Give the families of the victims all sorts of things to believe in.

It’s hard to believe in anything this day and age, God. I don’t know if you know this. After all, you’re not human like we are. We’re frail. We lose hope too easily.

So that family needs you to do something. Make some miracles in the sky, give them special dreams, do something incredible. Let them see beauty. Let them feel something other-worldly.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud here. You’re the one with all the ideas.

Anyway, remind them to eat. It’s easy to forget food during a time like this. And help them get plenty…

“You’re fat.” That’s what a classmate told freshman, Cassidy Torres, in P.E. class. A boy said it. And it’s too bad he didn’t get his hindparts worn out.

It all happened in a gymnasium. Students were standing in a single-file line. They were doing body-mass-index calculations with calipers and measuring tapes.

Cassidy’s numbers were higher than the recommended baseline. You can only imagine the laughs and animal sounds that followed.

The aforementioned boy made a comment. Cassidy was in tears.

Amd you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking. Which is: “Great, just what every insecure freshman needs. Calipers.”

Well, not that it matters what I think—because it doesn’t—but I don’t think measuring the bellies of high-schoolers qualifies as gym class.

What ever happened to good old-fashioned P.E.? I’m talking sadistic American games like dodgeball, unsupervised rope-climbing, and of course, lawn darts.

But measuring body fat in public? I wouldn’t wish that experience on even the worst IRS agent—let alone a shy freshman.

Anyway, to dig up more answers on this matter, I interviewed noted expert, and acclaimed commentator on

adolescent issues—my friend’s daughter, Kayleigh.

Kayleigh is your typical sophomore. She’s in chorus, math club, and on a volleyball team. She likes Dr. Pepper, Cheese Nips, rap, Labradors, and she thinks she’s fat.

I asked Kayleigh why she thought this. She had a lot to say on the matter. Her answer:

“‘Cause.”

My guest today has been Kayleigh Williamson.

The thing is, Kayleigh is as lean as they come. And she can bench press her bodyweight. Her mother has a theory.

Her mother points to the magazines on Kayleigh’s nightstand and says, “Those dumb magazines are messing with her mind.”

Kayleigh shows me one such beauty magazine. The cover model features a young woman who weighs less than a rice cake in a water shortage, with abs sharp enough to grate parmesan.

She reads the Bible every morning. She also smokes off-brand cigarettes. To a lifelong Methodist like her, the two go hand in hand.

She’s eighty-four and frail. She digs a cigarette from a carton, her daughter lights it. The doctor says she shouldn’t smoke, but the Good Lord understands.

She tells a story.

“After my husband left us,” she begins, “I was raising my kids, doing all I could to survive. He left me with eighteen bucks in our bank account—no lie.”

Then, the worst. One day, she walked into work and her boss fired her.

Instead of crying, she lost her temper. She attacked him. She threw a lunch bucket at him. She landed several good slaps to his face. Her friends pulled her away.

This woman is a regular barrel of gunpowder.

That night, she loaded her children into a station wagon and drove straight for her sister’s in South Carolina. Radio blasting. Cigarettes burning.

“I was crying,” she says. “And worried about everything, I was sick.”

Her car broke down somewhere outside Athens, Georgia. Two in the morning. An empty highway. Not a soul for miles.

Her station wagon sat in a ditch. Her children were in the backseat, asleep. She leaned against her steering wheel and the tears came.

This was rock bottom.

Her sobbing was interrupted by the sound of transfer truck brakes. A big rig pulled behind her. Earth-shaking engine. Headlights blaring.

A man stepped out of the cab and walked toward her.

“I was scared,” she says. “Here I was, a young woman, middle of nowhere, and this man comes walking up.”

He was tall. She remembers this very clearly. And older.

He asked if she needed help. She told him what had happened, using a nervous voice.

His smile put her at ease. He said, “Pop the hood, ma’am. Lemme…

Sunset in Alabama. The woods of Butler County are something else tonight. The crickets are out.

I’m chewing the fat with men who know a thing or two about these woods. They’re sipping beer, eating pulled pork, swatting gnats.

These men are peace officers. This party is being thrown in honor of Sheriff Joe Sanders. The sheriff has been dead a long time.

But he’s not dead tonight. At least, not when they retell his stories.

People form a semi-circle. Former deputies, family, in-laws, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They tell tales they’ve been retelling for decades. Good stories about an even-tempered man who once watched over Butler County.

There’s the story about the sheriff handling an armadillo problem for a local farmer. Or the time he bought snuff for a woman he was carrying to jail.

They talk about how he used to sleepwalk in his skivvies; how he’d been married for fifty-three years; or how he always ate lunch at the Chicken Shack.

But those stories are only warm-ups. Everybody

here knows the best story. It’s about when the sheriff was held hostage.

I’ll hit the highlights:

Thirty years ago. A Monday. A gunman walks into Butler County courthouse and takes a courtroom hostage. The sheriff uses his natural charm to negotiate.

“If you let these folks go,” says the sheriff, “you can hold ME hostage.”

It’s a gutsy move. The gunman lets the people free. The sheriff is his bargaining chip. Things are going fine until a struggle erupts and shots are fired by the gunman. Sheriff Joe takes a bullet.

Things go from bad to worse. The gunman holds the sheriff at gunpoint. The sheriff is losing blood. A six-hour standoff ensues.

We’re talking FBI, out-of-town cops, Alabama Bureau of Investigation, snipers, and national-news choppers.

Greenville is the epicenter of the world.

One former deputy remembers: “It…

The first thing I ever wanted to do was be on the radio. I decided this when I was seven. I went to see the Grand Ole Opry with my father. The lights. The steel guitars. The cowboy hats.

I didn’t want to sing on the radio. I wanted to introduce the bands, shake hands with folks in rhinestones. I wanted to hug Minnie Pearl’s neck.

My father said it was a good dream, especially the part about Minnie Pearl.

“Anything’s possible,” Daddy once told me.

Anything.

By fifth grade, I’d expanded career interests, since ANYTHING was possible. I wanted to be a writer. Maybe even a journalist.

But fifth grade was when life fell apart. I flunked school, which did a number on my mind.

Kids who flunked were doomed to live in vans and visit KFC’s just to lick other people’s fingers.

In seventh grade, things got worse. My father died. I dropped out of school altogether. I never attended high school. It’s not something I’m

proud of.

I played a lot of music during that period. By fifteen, I was playing weddings, church socials, feed-store openings, and shoe-store clearances. I played a lot of funerals, too.

Once, I played a Pentecostal funeral. A woman spoke in tongues while I picked “Peace in the Valley.”

I’d never heard such.

The preacher told me to nod and shout “Thank you JEE-ZUSSSSS” when I heard the thus-saith-the-Lords.

In my twenties, I worked construction and played music in the evenings. I played in establishments my mother would have preferred I hadn’t.

I also played piano for a Baptist church on Sundays. That didn’t last long. But that’s a long story I don’t have room for. I will, however, simply say that some Baptists object to playing in beer joints.

Which is no surprise. The Baptists I grew up…

The band was all right. They played to a crowded joint of people who’d clocked out for the weekend. Folks who needed something greasy to eat and cold to drink.

Band members had gray hair, Western-style shirts, hats, boots. The whole nine yards.

“They’re here every Friday,” said the bartender. “Aren’t they awesome?”

The jury’s still out on “awesome.” But their hearts were in the right places.

“At least they play REAL country,” the bartender went on.

We can agree on that much. They played classics. And classic country is a dying art. You can’t look at a superstar who wears $1400 boots and eyeliner and call him country.

The men on this stage looked like they knew how to operate nail guns.

A kid was bussing tables. He was early twenties. He set his tub beside me and watched the band.

I introduced myself.

He said he likes old-fashioned country music. His brother is the one who taught him to like antique songs about cheating hearts, boys named Sue, and wooden Indians.

He tells me

he started listening to records a lot when he was diagnosed with cancer.

“That’s why I got this puffy face,” he explains. “All the pills I’ve taken make me like this.”

The chemo hasn’t helped either.

He was in the hospital for a month, once. He was fighting infection upon infection. His brother bought a portable record player. Together, they listened to classics.

Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Merle Haggard. Music.

“I dunno,” he told me. “Those songs just make me feel good all over.”

In the hospital, he started taking guitar lessons from his brother. He liked guitar better than playing games on his phone, or watching daytime TV.

“Plus, I didn’t know if I was gonna die or not,” he added. “I was doing bucket-list stuff, I guess.”

I guess.

His parents…

I stopped to buy a lottery ticket at a joint on the Florida-Alabama line.

Yeah, I know the lottery is a fool’s game, but I have a longstanding tradition of doing foolish things.

The man at the counter was sipping from a red SOLO cup, chewing ice. On the radio, Loretta Lynn sang. I bought three Powerball tickets and a Coke.

The man said, “Powerball’s up to three forty-eight.”

That’s 348 million bucks. And even though I’m no mathematician, I’ve been thinking about what I’d do if the universe ever gave me that much money.

That’s what writers do, you see. We stare into space, thinking long and hard about things that will never happen just in case they do. If you do it right, people think you’re working.

First: I would buy a farm. A big one. Not for livestock. This would be sprawling countryside, live oaks, and ponds.

Then, I would build hundreds—no thousands of cabins. Little ones, with porch swings, and scenic views. I would call

this operation, “Ellie Mae Farms,” since it will need a name, and my coonhound, Ellie Mae, is sleeping on my feet while I write this.

Yes, here at Ellie Mae Farms, we believe in three things. Foster kids, foster dogs, and saturated fat. Every summer, we’ll welcome kids without parents, who don’t think anyone gives a cuss about them.

We give lots of cusses at Ellie Mae Farms.

We’ll have colossal breakfasts. Any dish you can think of. Bacon, eggs, Conecuh sausage, omelettes, ten-foot-tall glasses of orange juice.

They will send out the local news choppers just to cover our breakfasts.

Our staff will be school teachers. We’ll pay them triple—no ten-times what teachers get paid today. Not only will they teach, they’ll receive five months paid vacations, benefits, complimentary massages, and monthly beer allowances.

And don’t forget our…

It was nice weather. I was on a boat with a friend, hoping to catch a few bream. The fish, of course, knew this and conspired to avoid me.

My friend was sipping beer. Willie Nelson serenaded us from a battery-powered pocket radio. We saw a bass boat in the distance.

It was a nice boat. The kind that costs an arm and a liver.

Four people were onboard. Two men, one boy, and a woman. They were dressed in Sunday clothes. The woman held what looked like a vase. She emptied it overboard. Dust fell into the water.

The boy’s face was in his hands. I’ll never forget him.

My friend bowed his head. I turned off the pocket radio. We were quiet. And I was decades backward in a memory.

In this particular memory, I’m thirteen. I’m in the mountains. The air is thin. My mouth is dry. I am cold.

I’m not my normal happy boyish self. But then, I hadn’t been happy since my father

died.

Dead. He was dead, I kept telling myself. I couldn’t believe it.

On the day we got Daddy from the funeral home, he came packaged in a cardboard box. He didn’t believe in urns. He was a tight-wad, even for his own funeral.

His brown box sat on a counter. The funeral director had my mother sign a dotted line. And that was that.

A man’s entire life, stuffed into a box. Once, he was a tall, slender man who taught me how to gut fish.

Now he was UPS parcel.

We kept his ashes in the shed since nobody wanted his remains indoors. My mother said his spirit needed to escape. I sat with him a lot.

One year later, we found ourselves on the mountain I told you about. We overlooked the whole world. My uncle sliced…