Day Three of beach vacation. They awoke early. The sun wasn’t fully up, but obscured by a quiltwork of gray. It was balmy and warm. The seagulls were still asleep.

His blind 12-year-old goddaughter’s first words were “Can we go swimming in the ocean?”

“It’s not the ocean,” he explained for the 3,429th time. “It’s the Gulf of Mexico.” Then he defined the important differences once again.

She wanted eggs for breakfast. So he made eggs. She ate hers, then asked if he was going to eat his.

“I planned on it,” he replied, mid-bite.

“Well,” she said, “I can eat your eggs if you’re not hungry.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you.”

She smiled at him.

So he ate a granola bar.

After the kid polished off two plates, she said, “Can we go swimming in the ocean?”

“It’s not the ocean,” he restated. “It’s the Gulf. And isn’t it a little early for swimming?”

“What time is it?”

“Seven,” he said.

“That’s not too early for swimming in the ocean.”

“Gulf.”

“Whatever.”

So the odd couple left the rental condo. They were barefoot, carrying beach towels, wearing bathing

suits.

One dorky, pale, out-of-shape, middle-aged writer with a hairy back and oversized feet. And one 12-year-old blind girl in floral-print swimwear.

Together they walked along the unstable sand. He held her hand tightly because sand is difficult to navigate when you’re blind.

No people were on the beach that morning because it was too early. So the man and the girl had the whole Gulf of Mexico to themselves.

They eased into the green water a little after sunrise. It was bitingly cold at first. The first wave crashed around their knees and delivered a shock to the system. What an exciting way for a middle-aged man to wake up.

“Don’t worry,” said the 12-year-old, “the ocean will get warmer, you just have to get used to it.”

“Gulf,” he…

Day Two of beach vacation. It’s sunny in Florida, I’m sitting on the beach with a blind 12-year-old girl. We have sand in all major orifices including the crevices between our teeth.

The gang’s all here. My wife is reading a book. Becca, my blind goddaughter, is eating sand.

“Well, I just wanted to know how it tasted,” Becca pointed out.

Becca is eating sand, of course, because she is from a North Alabama region called Sand Mountain, and they do different things on Sand Mountain.

This is not Becca’s first time at the beach, but it’s her first time being in Florida with actual Floridians.

My wife and I grew up on the Gulf Coast and thought it would be fun to take our goddaughter with us on a beach trip so we could introduce her to some uniquely Floridian pastimes. Such as, standstill traffic, highway construction, and DR Horton subdivisions.

So far the trip has been great. Yesterday, Becca had boiled peanuts. There was a learning curve. It wasn’t easy teaching a blind child to eat

boiled peanuts, but we eventually got there.

I taught her how to open the peanuts, how to suck the Cajun-spicy juice, and most importantly, how to wipe her messy hands on the seat of her shorts so that she had little orange Cajun handprints on her rear.

“Are you sure this is how I should wipe my hands?” she asked. “It doesn’t seem very neat.”

“You’re fine,” I insisted like any guy would.

Then we pulled over to eat seafood. We stopped at a genuine Florida fish house called Boon Docks in Panama City Beach. It was the kind of authentic place with tin roofs and seagulls soliciting handouts. There was a long wait.

When we arrived, the hostess pulled me aside and said, “Did you know there are orange handprints on the seat of this little girl’s pants?”

Becca was thrilled.

Day One. The first day of beach vacation. We have been in the car for seven and a half hours. I am seeing double.

There is a 12-year-old girl in our backseat, steadily talking. She is blind, and she is our goddaughter. She is going to spend the weekend with us at the beach. And she has a lot to say.

The child has not paused to take a breath since we passed through Atlanta.

Many, many hours ago.

“...Why are there lines in the middle of the highway?” she asks happily. “Why does some cheese have holes in it but others don’t? Have you ever eaten a whole pumpkin? Why is it called Cracker Barrel when they don’t have crackers? Don’t you think it’s fun to drive? Who is Jimmy Carter…?”

Currently our vehicle is packed full of beach gear. We have so much vacation paraphernalia crammed into our van that we all have to take turns breathing so we don’t blow out the windows. There is an umbrella tip stabbing me in the rear.

Becca sits in

the backseat of this crowded vehicle, nestled in a cove of stacked luggage, swinging her legs cheerfully, wearing a starfish barrette, conducting a one-woman monologue with nobody in particular.

“...What makes thunder? Is there a difference between hail and ice cubes? How many cups in a quart? Do you know how tall you are in centimeters? What is the square root of 298?”

“Becca?” I’ll periodically say toward the backseat, glancing into the rearview mirror. “Isn’t your voice getting tired?”

“No. Is yours?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s okay, I’ll just do the talking so you can rest your voice.”

And the streak of dialogue remains uninterrupted.

We have just crossed the state line into Florida. There are advertisements for discount liquors and lottery tickets, factory-farm oranges, alligator eyeballs, and other Native Floridian touristy wonders.

We pass a sign at a little roadside…

I didn’t believe him. I thought he was pulling my leg or similar appendage. I was at the airport bar. He told me April 18 was National Columnists’ Day.

“Surely you’re joking,” I said.

“Nope,” he said. “And don’t call me Shirley.”

The bartender pulled us a couple to celebrate. Except, of course, the bartender wasn’t an actual person. Artificial intelligence now pours beer in some airport bars. These robotic bartenders are designed to reduce foam, spillage, flavor, and overall class.
Like the rest of America, everything in airports is going AI. Last week, I saw a robot cleaning up trash in Chicago. Recently, in Cincinnati, I saw a robotic waiter roving terminals, delivering hot meals.

In one airport, I saw a robot selling hotdogs to some ladies from the UK who had never tasted hotdogs before. They placed their orders. The robot dispensed the fare. The ladies looked at their buns with confused faces.

“I say,” the lady asked her friend, “which part of the dog did you get?”

So our beers

came. They were artificially perfect. We toasted our plastic glasses. We drank to AI, which experts predict will put the American columnist out of business before the end of this paragraph.

And they have a point.

Last month, an English teacher from Texas sent me a collection of essays turned in by her students, all written by chatbots. It was eerie. The grammar was slightly imperfect, like REAL high-schoolers wrote it. And there were REAL dirty pictures drawn in the margins.

The scary part was, the essays were actually pretty good.

I have another friend who edits a respected newspaper. He discovered his employees have been using ChatGPT to write news reports.

“They let ChatGPT write the rough draft, then clean it up. The whole process takes maybe three minutes.”

My friend Lindsey is a former marketing writer whose job was replaced by a chatbot this…

“Dear Sean,” the email began—people are always calling me that. “Who were your role models growing up? My father died last week… I am 14 and I don’t know who my role model will be.”

Dear friend, my role model was born the same year Ty Cobb retired. The same era The Bambino was selling Old Gold cigarettes in the back pages of “The Saturday Evening Post.”

It was a period in American history when cowboy movies were silent, radios were loud, and Charles Lindebergh was still considered to be a little off.

The boy was born to Carl and Geneva, two average North Carolinians in an average house in an average town. They lived modest lives. They lived beneath the water tower, for crying out loud.

He was their only child. He got all their attention.

“I loved my father,” he once said. “He lived to be eighty. He smoked cigarettes every minute of his life.”

His father had a notoriously wet sense of humor. He was the kind of guy who

tended to be popular in places like barbershops, feed stores and any place where old geezers play checkers.

Years later, when the boy started performing his one-man comic routine before Rotary Clubs, civic leagues, and Elks Lodges, the boy admitted that his brand of hayseed humor came from simply impersonating his old man.

His mother, Geneva, was known by her friends to be sugar sweet. She was born just over the North Carolina state line in Old Virginny.

To get to her hometown you’d have to hop on the Blue Ridge Parkway and head north from the Carolinas. After about an hour you’d arrive in the meadows of Patrick County.

If you veer onto County Highway 602 and follow it into the sticks, eventually you will find the remnants of a tiny mountain hamlet so remote they have to mail-order sunshine from the Montgomery Ward catalog.

It…

We were sitting on a plane. Awaiting takeoff. I am convinced that if you live wrongly, if you treat your fellow man poorly, if you are selfish, if you are not a good person, you will die and wake up in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

You will be condemned to find yourself in the TSA line on a major holiday weekend. Officials will compel you to remove your shoes, belt, jacket, eyeglasses, insulin pump, pacemaker, and you shall be frisked.

You will hold up your pants with one hand while a stranger who is exhibiting signs of severe occupational depression gropes your groin region. And everything will be going fine, until your wife trips the metal detector with her Swiss Army knife.

But, thankfully, we were all finished with TSA. I was bound for the Frozen North. I was sitting in my Barbie-sized airline seat, practicing good armrest etiquette.

Across the aisle was an elderly woman. She had a boy with her. He was maybe 15.

You could tell she was nervous because she looked pale. She

was sort of hyperventilating. Trembling. She looked like she was about to vomit, which worried me because I have a strong involuntary empathetic regurgitation reflex.

“Nervous?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“First time?” I said.

“No, I’ve been nervous lots of times.”

I liked this woman.

The boy held her hand tightly. He kept saying, “It’s okay.”

“I’m fine,” she kept saying. Which is what people who aren’t fine always say.

Then the boy started singing. It was only light humming at first. But then he sang slightly louder. His voice never grew loud enough to bother the passengers, but it was enough for her to hear.

She sang along. Her voice was low. They were squeezing hands. The woman’s eyes were shut tightly. She kissed the boy’s hand.

We underwent the launch sequence. It was a jarring takeoff. Lots of shaking. Lots of…

She came through the greeting line. She was a beautiful teenager. Long blond hair. Blue eyes. Cowboy boots. There were stylish holes in her jeans, a flower tattoo on her shoulder, and she wore a perpetual smile.

I was shaking hands, signing books, kissing babies. Soon, it was the young woman’s turn in line, her mother introduced her to me.

“This is my daughter.” Let’s call her Laura.

I hugged Laura’s neck.

The young woman hugged me tightly. It was not your run-of-the-mill hug. It was the kind of hug someone gives you when they really want you to know they care. I felt my ribs creak.

It was hard not to notice how lovely Laura was. She looked like a homecoming queen minus the tiara.

Sadly, I cannot relate to nice-looking teenagers. I was a teenager with a wide waistline, pale skin, buck teeth, moderate-to-severe pimple coverage, obscenely red hair, buckshot freckles, and a crippling affinity for the accordion.

“Do you remember me?” young Laura asked.

I looked at her. I tried to put it together. But nothing was coming

to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re going to have to help me remember who you are.”

“I’m Laura.”

“And I’m senile,” said I.

So the girl told me a story to help me remember.

Her story took place eight years ago. She was in the oncology ward. She was 10 years old. She had bone cancer. There wasn’t much to do in the hospital but read. So that’s what she did. She read books.

Somehow she found one author she particularly liked. He wrote short columns. He was a dork. She read his stuff in books at first. She liked him. Which only shows you how bad off she was.

Then she looked up the author online and began reading his column daily.

One summer day, her mother took a chance. The woman reached out and sent the…

“Dear Sean, are you a Christian? Sometimes I can’t tell. There is only one way to heaven, and your ‘tolerance for all,’ and ‘just be a good person’ philosophy sounds fine, but it leads to hell.

“...Hell is real, Sean. I read about your affinity for alcohol, and how you condone flagrant sinners. …As a Christian, I find your feel-good writing to be misleading and disgusting to Believers. There is only one way to heaven… and I believe you know this. I am not saying any of this in judgment, I am only saying this as your brother. Repent, friend. The time is at hand.”

Dear Friend. Gosh. First of all, your concern for my soul humbles me. I am honored. You sound like someone I could be friends with.

Thank you for taking time to write such a stirring and unsolicited email.

It’s funny, I used to know an elderly retired preacher who said that someone’s eternal soul was like their groin region. To just walk up and start talking about someone’s

groinal region is rude and downright uncalled for. But congratulations to you. You just jumped right in there.

The writer in me needs to tell you that your letter was extremely well written. Not one grammatical error. I am verry empressed. I actually counted your total words. There were 912. It takes me hours to write 900 error-free words.

Ergo, you spent at least an hour out of your day writing to me. How unselfish.

I’ll bet you spend the same amount of time worrying about children who are born to crack-addicted parents. I’ll bet, each day, you visit those drug-addicted babies in their lowly states.

I’ll bet you are also a frequent volunteer in the NICU, holding motherless and fatherless babies, so they don’t die of neglect. Kudos to you, sir. I wish I could be like you.

You probably also visit the homeless shelters and…

My sister’s family is visiting from Florida this week. It’s difficult to get any serious writing work done becausspiwjg[qi31 0409UJ15M\2
TOJLOIKN B4G=2 2309RU3O jfjwd ifjw8989898#(#(*&

Sorry. That was my 5-year-old niece, Lucy, banging away on my laptop keyboard while I’m working.

Lucy is obsessed with the things in my office. She marches in here all the time just to look around, climb on the bookshelves, go through my tax returns, or to use crayons to add some color to my walls.

But she’s particularly fascinated with my computer. Sometimes I’m afraid she’s going to bump my laptop off my desk and knock it on thFi340YYY(&#$%2 ti9u2-39tu 1203902hsb IUHW)*i23ub. &#)OOPWow 4-2t-h024h)#$)T*)UUW 283h2039))239#.

My nieces have enough energy to power an average suburban electrical grid. They arrived in our driveway last night after spending upwards of six hours in the car. By the time they got here, they were not unlike compressed atomic matter contained in a jar, just waiting to explode.

When my sister’s SUV pulled in, the doors of the vehicle were flung open and little voices screamed, “UNCLE SEAN!”

Immediately, a

duo of two-foot-tall humans leapt out of the automobile. These were towheaded girls, barefoot, wearing multi-colored tutus, their lips and tongues were stained with blue dye from eating either Kool-Aid, candy, or—and we cannot rule this out—BIC pens.

They moved so quickly they looked like a giant blur. I could hardly see them. They were blond-colored streaks, wholly invisible to the naked eye. Their location could only be determined by the distant sounds of their spontaneous singing of songs from the Disney movie “Frozen.”

“AUNT JAY JAY!” they said, throwing their arms around my wife.

They call my wife Aunt Jay Jay because at one time they could not pronounce the name Jamie. Used to, my niece Lucy couldn’t pronounce the name Sean, either. So whenever she said my name she just called me “UNCLE SSSHHH!” which…

I am not sure whether you understand English, but I’d like to think you do.

I’d like to think that you know exactly what I’m saying to you. I’d like to think I speak fluent dog.

Heaven knows, I speak to you non-stop. Because you’re blind. Because you need me to keep talking. When I talk to you, you don’t feel so disconnected. That way you’re always part of what’s going on.

So I’ve been talking a lot since I brought you home. I say anything and everything to you, so you feel involved.

I tell you when I’m going to the bathroom. When I read a book, I read aloud. When we go for walks, I describe what I’m seeing. I talk to you about the green crabgrass, the particular shade of blue in the sky.

Yeah, I know it’s silly. You probably can’t understand me. Although sometimes I’m not sure.

Sometimes I think you actually know what I’m saying. Because there are occasions when I tell you how much I love you. And when you hear this, you sort of

lean into me like you know precisely what “I love you” means.

Other times, when I tell you “It’s going to be okay,” after something frightens you, you tuck your head into my chest because I think that, on some level, you know. You know what I mean.

I can only imagine how scared you get when a loud sound occurs nearby. I can only guess at how disoriented you feel when you stumble off the curb.

I owe you an apology. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to teach a blind dog. I am learning as I go. I have so much more to learn. I’m reading books. I’m watching videos. I’m trying. I promise you, I am. But I am an inadequate trainer.

Any troublesome issues lie within me, not you. You’re doing perfectly. You have…