The old man answered the phone.

“Is this Herschel?” I asked him.

I heard a loud TV playing in the background. A dog was barking.

“This is Herschel. Who’s this?”

I recited my name, rank, and credentials, each of which are so unimpressive they qualify as a punchline. But when I told the old man I was a writer working on a story for Jackie Robinson Day, which is today, it was enough to get him talking.

And talk he did.

“Jackie Robinson Day?” he began with a laugh. “Shoot, man. Didn’t know there was such a thing. Sure, I’ll tell you about Jackie Robinson.”

Herschel was just a kid when he first saw Jack Roosevelt Robinson play. He was living in Chicago. One afternoon, Herschel’s parents took him to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs square off against the Brooklyn Dodgers in a matchup that drew 47,000 people in attendance.

His whole family was excited to see the famed Number 42. And by “excited,” I mean Herschel’s father bought everyone new dressy outfits for the occasion.

I asked whether

Herschel’s father was a big Jackie Robinson fan. The old man’s answer was an emphatic, “Shoot, man.”

Which apparently means “yes.”

“Everyone in my whole neighborhood was a Jackie fan,” the old timer went on. “Our preacher even announced the game on Sunday. Whole church showed up to the park just to cheer him on.”

Herschel’s family walked several miles to the ballpark to save the price of a streetcar fare. When they arrived, Herschel’s six-foot-five father was drenched in perspiration, sweating through his hatband, there were blisters on his feet, and he looked like he’d just discovered teeth.

“My dad felt the same way about baseball as Abe Lincoln felt about education.”

The throng waiting at Wrigley’s entrance was downright biblical. They stood in line for hours and paid a small fortune to get past the baffle gate. Herschel’s…

The Cracker Barrel is slammed. And loud. Inside, there isn’t much in the way of elbow room. There are heaps of people eating dangerous amounts of biscuits. And I am trying to master the wooden Triangle Peg game.

The object of this game, of course, is simple. Leave the fewest pegs remaining on the triangle as possible.

Let’s say, for instance, you finish a game and only one peg is left. This means you are a NASA-level genius. Two pegs; you are moderately clever. Four pegs; your parents are first cousins.

I love it at Cracker Barrel. But then, I have a long history with this institution. I’ve eaten at Cracker Barrels from Beaverton, Oregon, to Prattville, Alabama. I’ve eaten here on Thanksgiving, the day I graduated college, the morning after my wedding, and the day after my father died. The food suits me.

The overhead music always has steel guitar in it. The people in the giftshop always ask how you’re doing. And if you’re bored, you can always embarrass your wife by

buying a Davy Crockett hat and wearing it into the dining room.

Today, an elderly couple is sitting next to me as I fiddle with the peg game. The old man is skinny. She is frail. They are shoulder to shoulder. The man is wearing a hospital bracelet. His entire lower leg is in a medical brace. His face is bruised purple. There is dried blood on his forearms. He is resting his head onto the old woman’s shoulder because it looks like he’s been through hell itself.

She is helping him drink his Coke with a straw.

“I love you, Judy,” he says between sips.

She just pats his head.

On the other side of the dining room is a table of paramedics. They are young, wearing buzz cuts, clad in cargo pants, with radios mounted on their shoulders. Their eyes are drooping, and the…

I’m 5 years old. On Mama’s stove is a steaming stock pot, filling the world with the essence of chicken and dumplings.

I’m watching her use her fists to mercilessly beat a lump of flour that will become dumplings. She punches the dough, making loud grunts, striking terror into the heart of childhood.

“What’re you making?” I ask her.

“Hush now,” she says.

For many years I sincerely believed that chicken and dumplings were called Hush Now. We ate a lot of Hush Now in my house.

Mama then tells me to “Go outside and play.”

Such was the fate of little boys. Any time you opened your mouth to ask a question, you were sent outside to “go play.” God help the child who told Mama he was bored.

“BORED!?” she’d shout. “I’ll show you bored!”

Then Mama’s eyes would fill with holy fire and she would wave her rolling pin around, sermonizing about idle hands. Frankly, you’d be safer telling my mother you were a communist.

So I walk outside to ride my bike.

Back then we all had bikes.

Every last one of us. Bikes were everything. A kid in the saddle was limitless.

Sometimes we would be gone for hours on our Schwinns. Nobody worried about us because there wasn’t much to worry about. Our parents weren’t like today’s parents. We didn’t carpool to soccer practice in hybrid vehicles while buckled in FDA-approved car seats, staring at the opiate glow of our iPads.

Our parents drove big-bodied vehicles with names like Lincoln Continentals, Custom Cruisers, and Ford Country Squires. We had no seatbelts except Mama’s right arm. Moreover, we didn’t know what soccer was.

So there I am, riding bikes with my pals. We pull over at a friend’s house. We dismount, midair, while traveling upwards of 89 mph.

We sprint to our friend’s doorstep to ring the doorbell. We are breathless and rosy-faced from exertion.

The cable guy came by today. He was installing equipment. He waltzed inside to test our cable box. He wore boots and a tool belt and had prodigious tattoos on his forearms.

He removed my new remote from the plastic package. The television flickered to life.

The first thing we saw was a news channel. The text on the screen read: MASS SHOOTING.

The TV showed a subway platform filled with weeping New Yorkers. Some were limping. Some were crying. Others were bleeding. Police officers were everywhere.

Flashing blue lights. Sirens. Ambulances. Screaming. Badges. Stretchers. Crime-scene barricades. News cameras.

The news anchor appeared on the screen and spoke in an adrenal primetime voice:

“...In Brooklyn, a gunman in a gas mask and construction vest set off a smoke canister on a rush-hour subway train and then opened fire, shooting at least 10 people, at least 29 are believed to be injured or wounded… ”

The cable guy and I watched the madness within America’s most famous borough, happening 965.4 miles away from us.

The cable

guy said, “My sister lives in Brooklyn, man.”

His mood changed completely. He quickly removed his phone and fired off a few texts. He told me he was texting his sister to see if she was okay. I told him I understood.

He waited for her text-responses, but none came.

He was anxious. The kid was supposed to be demonstrating the capabilities of my new cable box, but clearly his head wasn’t in it. And frankly, neither was mine.

“Are you from New York?” I asked.

“New Jersey,” he said. “But I have family and friends in Brooklyn.”

He kept scrolling channels. He landed on another news station. The correspondent was reporting from Ukraine. She was wearing a bullet proof vest.

“...Many, many bodies have been exhumed from the rubble on the outskirts of Kyiv, among the bodies was a Ukrainian soldier. Many others of…

I thought I saw you today. I was walking through a crowded place. A Trader Joe’s, if you can imagine. You bumped into my shoulder. Then you walked past me.

It was you. I was momentarily stunned. I thought to myself, “Hey, that looked like my…”

But no. It couldn’t be. There’s no way.

So I followed you through the store. I pushed my buggy around, skulking behind aisles, pretending to read labels on ridiculous products that no sane person would ever buy. Such as, a package of gluten free barbecue-flavored seaweed.

I stole glimpses of you. I peeked around corners. I stalked. And well, you turned out to be—big surprise—someone else.

As it happened, you were just some random shopper filling their cart with cheap wine and obscene quantities of cheese.

When you walked past me again, I felt like a Grade-A fool when I said, “Hi.”

The person who looked like you sort of glared at me like I was Kathy Bates from the 1990 movie “Misery.”

Writing this now, I know I was foolish to follow some poor

sap around a supermarket like an Amway representative. But sometimes you can’t help yourself. Sometimes the memory of the dead is so precious that you’ll do anything to keep it alive.

You’ve been dead for a long time. You’re Up There. I’m down here. And I still grieve you, although you’ve probably forgotten all about me.

I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting me. Life on earth isn’t nearly as memorable as what you’re doing. You’re probably happily taking in the sights, playing bingo at Heaven’s Community Center, drinking fruity drinks festooned with ginormous chunks of pineapple, umbrellas and live parrots.

You’re attending huge potlucks beside the River of Life, making new friends, eating potato salad alongside Henry Ford, Don Knotts, Abraham Lincoln, Bud Abbot, Lou Costello, Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle.

But I still think of you. And whenever…

When I got my first writing gig for a tiny local newspaper with a circulation of 2.3 people, one of the veteran writers on staff told me, “Just remember, haters are gon’ hate.”

Then he added, “So whatever you do, don’t read the negative mail.”

It was sound wisdom. The only problem with this advice is that negative mail looks just like positive mail before you open it. How do you tell the two apart? At first glance, there is no way to differentiate between a friend and a hater by looking at an envelope or an email.

After all, nobody writes in bold letters on the outside of their envelope: THIS IS HATE MAIL. Neither do people fill out the subject line of an email with the words: WARNING, THIS MESSAGE IS GOING TO RUIN YOUR DAY.

So you never know whether a message is going to be positive or negative until you actually open the thing and read a few sentences:

“Dear Sean, I just wanted to take a minute

to tell you, from the bottom of my heart, that you are a greasy, disgusting, faux-deep-thinking, chauvinistic pig…”

Thus, my philosophy has always been to ignore negative messages. And mostly, I’ve kept pretty true to this idea. Although I do occasionally respond to unusually ugly correspondence.

Such as the time a guy recently told me to “go to hell.” I wrote to him, saying in all honesty, that I had already visited Hell, Michigan, and frankly, I’d rather spend everlasting eternity in Detroit.

And a few months ago, I received a critical letter from a literature professor from an extremely well-known university with a world-famously bad football team. He told me I was partially responsible for the “dumbing down” of the American literary mind by “writing for likes.”

That hurt.

Still, on the infrequent occasion that I respond to nasty messages publicly, I usually try to keep things…

Somewhere in North Carolina. Morningtime. I heard loud salsa music in our hotel hallway. I could hear it through the walls, rattling all 12 of my molars. I exited our room to see a girl outside one of the open rooms. She was maybe 11 or 12. Bronze skin, eyes the color of Folgers. She wore ratty clothes and her shoes were old. She was vacuuming, singing with the music.

“Morning,” she said as I walked by.

“Hi,” I said, speaking over the din of the Tijuana Brass.

Inside the open room was another maid, older, wearing a gray hotel uniform. The woman barked something at the child in Español. I had no idea what the woman was saying, but I know the tone of an aggravated mom when I hear one.

“Turn it down!” the woman finally said in broken English.

The girl ignored her mother and turned to me. “Do you have everything you need, sir?”

I nodded. “I’m good, thank you.”

“Is the music too loud?” the mother asked me point-blankly.

The girl looked

at me. The mother looked at me.

I felt like was about to be be executed.

“No,” I lied. “It’s not loud.”

I bid them goodbye as they argued in rapid-fire Spanish behind me.

I walked through the hotel hallway, on my way to peruse the dregs on the continental breakfast buffet. I was hoping to find at least one strip of bacon that wasn’t the same grit and texture of a Goodyear all-season tire.

On my way, I passed the hotel’s laundry facility. I could feel the humid heat blasting from an open doorway. The industrial machinery was churning loudly. Latino music was blaring from this room also.

Inside the laundry room were four or five young maids, cramming a few metric tons’ worth of bedsheets into washing machines. Two of the women were dancing while working. Others were singing along.

“Y…

Nobody knows when it started. But it did. The first jar of pickles to appear on Aunt Bee’s grave in Siler City, North Carolina, showed up in in 1989, the year she died. Legend states that the pickles were probably homemade. Although some claim they were store pickles.

Since that fateful day, nobody has found a good reason to stop leaving pickles. Pickles show up by the hundreds. Maybe even thousands. From all over the United States.

“I think it’s just a form of respect,” says Billy, age 73, from Bentonville, Arkansas.

Billy traveled 840 miles to Siler City in his 2007 Ford Ranger, which is more rust-colored than green, to deliver a single jar of Kosher Dill Snack’mms to the grave of Frances Bavier, the actress who played Aunt Bee on “The Andy Griffith Show.”

“She was America’s mom,” says Billy. “She was my whole childhood.”

The pickles are a salute to season two, episode 11, “The Pickle Story.” In the episode, Aunt Bee makes pickles that taste so bad they could

take the paint off navy ships. “Kerosene cucumbers” they were called in the episode.

“That’s my favorite episode,” says Billy.

“Mine, too,” says Billy’s brother, Roger, who is busy taking Billy’s picture with his phone camera. Roger is 80 this year. He is vaping. His flavor du jour is tropical cherry, and he is puffing so frequently that we are all able to enjoy this flavor with him.

“Best show ever,” says Roger between puffs. “Period.”

Billy and Roger have visited this cemetery twice before. And they say that each time they come, there are multiple pickle jars sitting on the gravemarker.

“Sometimes there are ten or twenty of’em,” says Billy. “Depending on if it’s tourist season or not.”

The Oakwood Cemetery is a nondescript burial place, nestled within the black gums and post oaks of the Old North State, with headstones stretching back toward the horizon.…

The sun is lowering over the trees on the horizon, and the sky is lit orange here in Birmingham. The world is filled with daylight. The birds are chattering.

Opening Day of Major League baseball is here. Hallelujah. Tonight, the Atlanta Braves will face off against the Cincinnati Reds. But right now, I am catching a game between two Little League teams in the park near my house.

It’s an unofficial matchup. These kids are young, they’re just practicing, and they’re still unclear on the rules of the game. But they’re trying. God love them.

A child hits a ground ball.

“RUN!” the parents in the bleachers cheer.

The kid drops the bat. He sprints straight toward the pitcher, runs over the mound, leaps over second base, and keeps going until he collides with the centerfielder. And I love it.

When I was a boy, my father and I listened to ball games on his Philco radio, or watched them on an old Zenith television. Almost every night of the summer we kept a scorecard

beside the wooden radio and a bag of parched peanuts nearby.

When we weren’t following baseball, we were playing catch. When we weren’t doing that, we were at Little League games, like this one. When we weren’t doing that, we were in church daydreaming about Glenn Hubbard.

Of course, my childhood baseball career was cut short. My father died in a terrible way. It was the kind of death that makes everyone in a small town gasp when they read it in the papers. It was though someone had erased the sun.

And something else bad happened on the same day of his passing. And I mean the ACTUAL DAY of his death.

It was an announcement on the national news. The commissioner of Major League Baseball stood at a podium and proclaimed that there would be no World Series that year.

It was the…

The letter came via snail mail. The author is 39 years old. I will call her “Ashley” because that is her name.

“Sean, I have a book that I want to write, but I don’t know how to get started or what I’m even doing. What’s wrong with me? When will writing get easier? I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to branch out and be a writer someday, but I don’t know how to get off the ground. My writing sucks. I suck. Help me.”

Let me start by saying that I don’t normally answer writing questions here, for two very important reasons: (1) when you write a column about the professional craft of writing, your credibility can be utterly destroyed if you have so much as one typo, and (2) i’m not grate with speling

Furthermore, I too suck at writing.

To my knowledge, I have never read anything I’ve written and said to myself, “Wow, that doesn’t suck.” Normally I read my own work, wad up the page and I say, “Make mine a double

on the rocks, please.”

But I have some very good news for you. There is a secret I’ve learned in my time as a fledgling professional writer, and this little tidbit has helped me immensely:

Everyone else sucks, too.

SSSSSSHHHH! Don’t tell anyone!

The professionals really don’t want you to know they suck. Many writers spend a lot of time, energy and money trying to convince people they don’t suck. But them’s the facts, ma’am.

And the fact is, everyone sucks equally. Because we’re human beings. Sucking is what we do. We’re experts at sucking. Sure, occasionally one of us humans might accidentally crank out “War and Peace.” But eventually, we’ll go back to sucking again. We always do.

Even many classic works of literature suck, going by the general consensus. If you don’t believe me, just ask an auditorium of…