I get a lot of mail in the form of letters, texts, emails, and subpoenas. Many of these messages are questions, which I am not always able to answer. So I’ve answered some here by compiling the most commonly asked questions. Let’s get started.

Q: Do you receive hate mail?

A: This is the Age of the Internet. Everyone gets critical mail. I get it all the time.

Q: Really? What do these people say?

A: I don’t want to talk about it.

Q: Did someone once Tweet about how you were a stupid hick with a head that was “unnaturally big for his body”?

A: Maybe.

Q: How did that make you feel?

A: I measured my head in the bathroom mirror.

Q: So I thought you lived in Alabama, and then I read that you lived in Florida. Which state is it?

A: I live in the Florida Panhandle, which is a unique region we natives lovingly refer to as L.A. “Lower Alabama.” My house is a few minutes from an Alabama town called Florala, if that tells you

anything.

Simply put, every truck in my neighborhood has either an Auburn-University bumper sticker or a University-of-Alabama tag. Also, I actually own a pair of camouflage underpants.

Q: Really?

A: They were a birthday gift.

Q: So which team do you root for, Alabama or Auburn?

A: I may or may not have a tattoo of Nick Saban beneath my camo skivvies.

Q: You have frequently written that you don't like calling yourself a writer. Why?

A: Being a writer in America is one of those occupational categories nobody understands.

You know how when you’re a kid and your teacher asks what you want to be when you grow up? If you were gutsy enough to tell this teacher you wanted to be a writer, chances are she stared at you as though you had said, “I want to…

My phone rang. Unknown number. I answered and expected to hear a robo-recording about important information regarding my automotive warranty. But it was a young man who I am going to call Bobby.

“Hello, is this Sean?”

“Yes.”

Bobby had a story he wanted to share, and apparently I was the guy he was going to share it with. He was adamant about this.

“Do you have a pen?” were his first words.

“How’d you get this number?” I said.

“Your wife gave it to me.”

“Ah.”

“I’m on my lunch break,” Bobby went on. “I’m kinda in a hurry. I don’t have long. You’re gonna wanna take notes. I got a lotta cool stuff to tell you.”

Only, it bears mentioning, Bobby never actually used the word “stuff.” Bobby prefers another famous word beginning with the letter S. This word, I quickly learned, is one of Bobby’s favorite expletives. But since this is a family column, I will use “stuff.”

In the background I could I hear factory sounds and industrial noises. “Where are you?” I asked. “I can hardly hear

you.”

“I work at a mill.”

I got my pen ready. “Go ahead,” I said.

Bobby said he was coming home late from work one night six years ago. He was speeding when a vehicle pulled in front of him on the wet pavement.

He slammed his brakes. He fishtailed on the rural highway. He doesn’t totally remember what happened, but he remembers the sound of the tires screaming.

He was thrown from the car, then pinned against a tree by the same vehicle he was driving. The odds of this happening are almost five trillion to one. Even the emergency workers couldn’t explain how this had occurred.

“It was some really whacked out stuff, man.”

Bobby was alone in the middle of the woods, trapped against a tree by his own bumper. And did I mention he…

My interview was scheduled for noon. It’s not every day you are a keynote speaker for Miss Bernice’s fourth-grade class career day, via video call. I wore a necktie.

Miss Bernice’s class has been interviewing a lot of people lately about their careers by using video calls. She has been introducing the kids to people with different occupations from all over the U.S.

So far, her class has welcomed guests from all fields. The class has interviewed PhDs, celebrated journalists, famous musicians, chefs, well-known songwriters, people who work in finance, pro fishermen, doctors, and anyone else who drives a Range Rover.

I was scheduled to go on after the decorated navy pilot.

While the fighter pilot gave his presentation, I started to feel like a an idiot. I looked at the little camera image of myself on my laptop screen and cringed. My red hair was disheveled, my face looked tired. The bags beneath my eyes could have been used for a Samsonite ad.

Captain America wowed his audience, and I was trying to remember when

and why I became a writer in the first place.

Truthfully, I don’t know when exactly I first wanted to be a writer. I can’t remember ever NOT wanting to be one.

Still, I think it must have happened officially for me in the fourth grade. That was the year our teacher read “Where the Red Fern Grows.”

She would read aloud to us after lunch period, every weekday for an hour. And she did all the voices.

It takes real talent to do the character voices right.

That beautiful woman with the cat-eye glasses and the coiffed hair possessed such talent. I can never forget that period of my life.

We would file into the classroom after gorging ourselves in the cafeteria. She would turn off the lights, sit by the window, and read to us.

Students would gather around her like disciples…

Yesterday, I jumped on the trampoline with my cousin’s kids. We hopped around for hours until I ruptured L4, L5, and S1. It was great.

I remember when my old man bought a trampoline for me and my kid sister before he died. Trampolines were a big deal in Kid World. My family had never known such shameless expenditures. A trampoline was a novelty such as had never been seen before by our kind.

The view of my people was that trampolines were for rich folks. They were luxury items for the well-off.

Moreover, my old man was tighter than a duck’s hindparts. We never expected him to splurge on a piece of equipment intended for something as unproductive and wanton as acrobatic play.

I come from a modest family of humble fundamentalists. We bought our bread from the day-old bread store. We saved our newspapers. We donated our used teabags to missionaries.

We never left lightbulbs on in rooms unless we were physically inside the aforementioned room.

My father inherited his frugality from

his grandfather. When my great-grandfather was on his deathbed, half blind from diabetes, he squinted into the darkness and said, “Is everyone here?”

“Yes, Daddy,” the family said. “We’re all here, gathered around your bed.”

“But, if you’re all here,” he said, “then why in the name of God are the lights still on downstairs?”

I remember the afternoon my father put the trampoline together in the backyard. It became the hottest news to ever hit the Kid Telegraph. One boy came all the way from Greensboro just to see it.

Within the span of one day, my backyard became the most popular place in six counties. After that, on any given weekend you could see a single-file line of runny noses stretching from our trampoline into the street.

We kids jumped for twenty-six hours per day until we either fell from exhaustion or sustained a…

Remember when you were little? Remember how whenever you were sick your mother made chicken soup? Remember what culinary pageantry this was?

Your mother would go to great lengths to boil poultry in a giant stockpot, filling the kitchen with steam so that the wallpaper started to peel. And she did this for you.

And even though you were as sick as a cup of warmed over manure, remember how wonderful that felt?

Remember how whenever you were scared, your beautiful mother would cradle you and tell you everything was going to be okay?

Remember how you would always ask her, “But how do you know it’s all gonna be okay, Mama?”

Then, remember how she would answer by pinching your little nose and singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” until your tears evaporated?

Of course you remember all this. And so do I. We never forget the people who made us feel protected. We were helpless kids with perpetually runny noses and unclean underwear, living in a dangerous world. But within Mama’s

embrace we were safe.

“He’s got you and me brother, in his hands…” she would sing, rocking you gently.

How about your teenage years? Remember those? Remember how you thought you were a tough little cuss? Nothing could harm you because you were Billy the Butt Kicker.

But inevitably something unpleasant would happen to you because that’s how life works. Someone would break your heart. Some hapless kid would call you stupid, ugly, or, God forbid, chubby. Your tough-guy façade would shatter, and you ran crying to Mama.

Because deep down you just needed to be held. You needed Mama to wrap her two wondrously soft, non-health-club arms around you and tell you that it was all going to be okay. Maybe even hum a song into your ear while swaying back and forth.

But then you got older.

Suddenly you weren’t a baby…

Here’s what I want you to do. Go outside and open your car doors. Now gather all your earthly possessions and shove them into your backseat. After that, strap the rest of your belongings to the roof, including your dishwasher, La-Z-Boy, lawn tractor, and all three of your children.

Now you know how my wife travels.

The only major difference is that we don’t have children, so our lawn tractor usually rides shotgun.

Packing the car is always a major challenge for us inasmuch as my wife does not travel lightly. My wife’s idea of travel is to bring everything but our window treatments.

Thus, whenever I prepare our vehicle for vacation mode, I painstakingly pack our car so that no space is wasted. When I’m finished packing, our automobile interior usually resembles the jigsaw puzzle from hell.

Even so, it never fails to amaze me, once our trip is finished we can never manage to fit everything back inside the car.

This often means that before we travel back home, my wife has

to make the difficult decision of leaving certain things behind, such as, for example, me.

This morning we awoke early to leave Birmingham after vacation. We have been staying in Alabama for a few weeks in a small rental cottage. We had a long drive ahead of us. But before we could hit the highway we had to pack our car.

(Cue Hitchcock music.)

As it turned out, the biggest challenge wasn’t physically loading the car. The worst issue was The Hill.

Birmingham is a hilly city in north-cental Alabama, nestled beneath the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Most residents have to use rappelling equipment to check the mailbox.

Our rental house was located on the summit of a steep hill which the locals loosely refer to as Mount Concussion. There were approximately 43,118 concrete steps leading from the curb to our porch. You could actually…

The old man saw her on the interstate. It was a dog, seated in the median of the busy highway. The old girl was frightened and unmoving.

The highway was screaming with traffic. On each side of the median were rivers of speeding headlamps. The road was too busy to cross. So the dog sat in the grass.

When the old man saw her, he flipped on his hazards. He eased to a stop on the shoulder and leapt into the tall weeds, bounding for her.

As the old man made his way through the grass, he was simultaneously removing his belt to use as a makeshift leash. Which caused his pants to fall down. Which revealed his bare backside to all eastbound motorists on I-10 that evening.

“I don’t wear underwear,” the old man told me during our interview. “Too constricting.”

When he reached the dog, she looked at him with pleading eyes. She was nervously panting.

“I spoke Spanish to her,” said the old man. “My mom was from Mexico City, she believed

that dogs listened to Spanish better than English. Dogs always listened to my mom.”

He looped the belt around the animal’s head then led her to his car. He noticed she was limping and whimpering.

“She was hurt worse than I’d thought,” he said. “She was bleeding all over my backseat.”

I’ll spare you the gory details and simply tell you that it was an ugly wound. A life-threatening one. She needed medical attention. And fast.

So our hero used his smartphone to search for emergency veterinary doctors.

The old man was on his way to Texas that night to visit his daughters. He was a foreigner in a foreign land. And he must have been quite a sight, too.

A confused old man, standing on the shoulder, in the middle of the night, looking at his phone, with a portion of his bare white…

Lord have mercy. Betty White is dead. She inherited her Eternal Reward today on New Year’s Eve, at age 99. Less than 24 hours before the New Year.

It’s been quite a year.

She was the last Golden Girl to go. Her co-star, Estelle Getty (Sophia), died in 2008 at 84 from dementia. Bea Arthur (Dorothy) died of cancer at 86 in 2009. Rue McClanahan (Blanche) died at 76 in 2010 from a stroke. And now Betty.

Lord have mercy.

Most people, of course, will forever remember Betty as her character, Rose Nylund, the giddy Golden Girl from Saint Olaf, Minnesota. But, for some reason, I will always remember her character from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

When I was a boy, our local channel would play Mary Tyler Moore reruns before I caught the schoolbus. I would sit before a screen and laugh whenever Betty White appeared. She cracked immodest jokes, which I somehow knew were inappropriate for freckled Baptist boys. I liked her right then.

But then, so did the rest

of the nation. She was America’s grandmother. And she was funny, as evidenced in few of Betty’s words:

“Facebook just sounds like a drag. In my day, seeing pictures of peoples’ vacations was considered punishment.”

“Vodka is kind of a hobby.”

And my personal favorite:

“The older you get, the better you get. Unless you’re a banana.”

This morning, my neighbor received her current copy of “People” magazine. I saw the glossy issue poking out of the old woman’s mailbox. The cover featured a photo of Betty White with a bold headline that read: “Betty White Turns 100!”

Betty died just seventeen days shy of her 100th birthday. Talk about black irony.

We lose beautiful things every day. Every morning, it seems like something wonderful breathes its last. This year I’ve lost too many friends and too many family members.

In 2021 I attended more funerals than…

The day before New Year’s Eve. I was stuck in Birmingham rush hour. A ten-mile line of standstill traffic stretched before me. It looked like I wouldn’t be getting home until sometime around the next papal installation.

The Dodge truck beside me towed a gooseneck horse trailer. Inside was a white horse, staring at me from her open window, chewing a mouthful of alfalfa.

You might not care about this, but as a boy I was obsessed with horses. I grew up around horse people. I rode some; I wasn’t any good.

Even so, I was always thinking about horses, drawing pictures of quarterhorses in notebooks, reading novels like “National Velvet” and “My Friend Flicka.”

“The Black Stallion” was perhaps one of the greatest horse movies ever made.

All these memories came back to me while looking at that horse. She ate her dinner of legume hay, sniffing the Alabamian breeze, cheerfully watching the passing eighteen-wheelers, the UPS trucks, the public transit busses, the Porsches, and the giant SUVs which were roughly the size of rural school

districts.

And I fell in love with her right there.

The horse had other admirers in traffic, too. There were teenagers in the Nissan ahead of me, rolling down their windows to greet her.

“HEY, HORSEY!” they howled.

Soon, everyone in traffic was staring at these obnoxious teenagers who tried wildly to get the horse’s attention.

After watching the teenagers for a few minutes, I decided that I had never seen behavior so ridiculous and immature in all my life, and I wanted to be part of it.

So I cranked down my window and joined them.

And do you know what? No sooner had I rolled down my window than I discovered other adult motorists were doing the same thing I was doing.

An older man in a nice suit, driving a Land Rover Defender, was speaking to the horse.

A young…

My phone vibrated. The first birthday text of the day came from the old man who coached my Little League team after my father died. He made a real impact on me during a time when I was most vulnerable.

“Happy birthday, Samuel!” he texted.

I was so moved. And although, technically, my name is not Samuel (it’s Sean), it is still nice to be remembered.

The next email I received was from a guy in Mayfield, Kentucky. He’s busy helping with the relief efforts after the devastation from the tornadoes.

“Happy birthday, Sean…” the man’s letter began. “I love you.”

I could not believe that in the midst of a veritable ground zero, this man took the time to wish me a happy birthday. This time, I cried.

Later, my phone vibrated again. An old friend who is currently undergoing cancer treatment in California messaged.

“Happy birthday, Sean…” was the gist of the email she sent during her chemo treatment.

This woman who is undergoing the worst trial of her lifetime paused to wish me well.

My cup runneth all over the place.

Throughout the day, the phone rattled in my pocket nonstop. My mother texted. My sister. Old coworkers. My cousins. My uncles. My old employers. Someone with important information about my vehicle warranty.

And I got a text from my pal, Guillermo.

Ah, Guillermo. I met Guillermo in a Walmart parking lot many years ago. My heap-of-junk Buick had broken down. Guillermo saw me from across the lot, struggling. He fixed my engine although he did not speak a lick of Norte-Americano.

That night, I figured out that Guillermo was living in his car in the Walmart parking lot. He was camped there until he got enough money to fix his Honda’s transmission.

And since I speak fluent hand gestures, I asked him if he wanted to come live with me and my wife.

I will never…