“Dear Sean, I’m writing for advice,” the message began. 

“I lost the whole lower right side of my face [due to cancer] before having it rebuilt. My surgeon was a genius. 

“...I’m five years without cancer, but my 12-year-old constantly worries about me, and is afraid my cancer will come back. We’ve been through a lot. I tell her that I’m okay, but it doesn’t always help. What do I do?”

Dear friend, you’re asking the wrong guy for advice.

I have no children. The closest I ever came to having a child was when my wife got me a goldfish for Christmas. His name was Gary. 

I travel for a living, so I took Gary with me everywhere since Gary would have starved at home alone because, sadly, Gary never learned to cook. 

So I carried Gary in a Mason jar when I traveled. He rode in the passenger seat. Late one night in Texas, I was checking into a hotel. I plopped Gary’s jar on the counter and started digging through my wallet. 

The teenage clerk

stared at Gary and said, “Is that a fish?”

“Yes.” 

The clerk blinked, then replied—and I’m not making this up—“So I guess you want to upgrade your room to two kings?”

So anyway, eventually Gary died of natural causes. And by “natural causes,” I am, of course, referring here to our cat Cuddles.  

So I am not qualified to raise a goldfish. Let alone give kid advice.

Still, I have this theory. And I realize this is going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me. My theory is that every human is a 12-year-old, waiting for his or her life to begin. 

When I was a 12-year-old, I underwent a lot of trauma and tragedy. My father died by suicide and our world was upended. 

Ever since, the one feeling I craved was security. Security was missing in my life.

Our plane touched down, mid-afternoon. The flight attendant said, “Careful opening overhead compartments because shift happens.” 

We deboarded, got our luggage from the carousel, leapt into our rental car, and we aimed the front bumper toward the wilds of Pennsylvania. 

I like Pennsylvania. They’re nice here. They say “yous” and “yinz” and “soda pop.” They have Appalachian manners, a steelman’s work ethic, and potholes big enough to swallow Peterbilts. 

Soon, we were driving back roads beneath an impossibly blue sky, dodging potholes like playing a video game. But after we got out of the congested areas, the landscape changed considerably. 

The potholes disappeared. So did the billboards, warehouses, blast furnace smokestacks, along with all the Dick’s Sporting Goods, Outback Steakhouses, Ultas, Best Buys, Red Lobsters, and other American franchises that make each American town look just like every other American town.   

Soon, we were weaving through the rearmost byways of Pennsylvania, past the hinterlands of Appalachia. Riding two-lanes without yellow lines, where motorists are nice enough to stay in their own lane using

the honor system. 

Our tires bumped over the occasional patch job on the antique pavement. We whipped past hundreds of unnamed offshot dirt roads, top dressed, leading heaven only knows where.  

Gracious farmland, dotted hillsides. Scalped pastures of fescue and alfalfa, golden brown, peppered with little red barns, timber fences, and millions of parked RVs. Goodness, Pennsylvania seems to love their RVs. 

We passed cattle, standing near fence rails, all huddled together, watching intermittent cars go by, moving their heads in unison to follow your vehicle as though they were watching a tennis match. 

The roads were lined with heaps of residual snow, akin to giant tufts of dirty cotton. The faroff hillsides were blue, with Purple Mountains Majesty standing behind them. 

Smoke rose from distant chimneys attached to imperfectly white farmhouses, two-stories, big porches, no frills, manicured yards.  

We passed a young man driving a John…

Bryan was walking the Arkansas highway shoulder with only the moon to guide him. Backpack slung over his shoulder. Blisteringly cold.

He was 23 years young. This was not a friendly evening, weather-wise. Tonight it was colder than a brass toilet seat in Nova Scotia. 

His homelife was a wreck. He had decided, tonight on this walk, that he was going to end it all. He didn’t have the details worked out, but he’d made up his mind.

A pickup truck practically materialized out of nowhere. The headlights were blinding. The vehicle pulled over.

Inside was an older woman. The heater was blaring.

“Get in,” said the lady.

And she didn’t say it as a question.

Bryan piled into the bench seat. The heat felt good on his wet body. 

“Where you headin’?” she said.

Her hair was gray and messy, like it hadn’t been combed since the Crimean War. Her eyes were wild.

“Don’t know,” said Bryan. 

She just looked at him.

“Are you an angel?” she said.

He laughed. “What?”

“Tell me the truth.”

He wasn’t sure if this old woman was pulling his leg.

“I’m no angel,” he said.

She stared at

him like she was boring a hole through limestone.

“I can take you as far as Little Rock,” she said. “That’s where I’m going, I’m meeting my granddaughter tonight.”

“Little Rock would be great.”

In a few moments, they were careening down the highway. The interior of her truck was plastered in religious paraphernalia. A Jesus air freshener. A dashboard compass that said, “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life.” Crucifix gear shifter.

The old woman broke the silence first.

“My granddaughter’s in labor. She’s having her baby tonight.”

“Really?”

“Yep. You’re looking at an honest-to-goodness great-grandmother.”

“Congratulations.”

She stared again. Longer this time. “Did God send you?”

“Nobody sent me.”

“Then what were you doing on the side…

Mount Airy. The Earle Theater was crowded, the room smelled of popcorn, and I was onstage shaking my butt. 

I don’t mean to say I was shaking my hindparts metaphorically. But worse, I was actually shaking them.

Namely, because derriere-shaking is an important element in the one-man trainwreck I perform in theaters around the country. 

So anyway, there I was, gyrating my natiform before an audience, when I had a moment of supernatural awareness. 

How did I get here? What career path led me to this moment? Why am I onstage, before several hundred, shaking my fundaments? 

Laughs, baby. That’s why. 

I will do anything for laughs. I would do a lot worse than shake my culet if it guaranteed a laugh. I would probably run around the theater in nothing but my socks. This is because I am in show business. 

Moreover, I genuinely LOVE the sound of people laughing. I gravitate toward laughter. Laughter is what gets me out of bed in the morning. Laughter is everything to me. 

I fell into the field

of comedy by accident. My career started over a decade ago when I was asked to speak to a local Rotary club. The Rotarians were so hard up for entertainment they called a fledgling local author. Moi.

The prestigious meeting took place in a steakhouse/catfish buffet. I ate enough fried catfish to alarm a cardiologist. I was trembling when I delivered a speech that had about as much warmth and charm as the Berlin Wall. 

One elderly man—this is true—had a gaseous expulsion during my speech. But it worked out because, as it happened, he received a more enthusiastic audience reaction than I did. 

The next speech I delivered—also true—a woman in the back row had a diabetic event. The paramedics were called.

When EMTs loaded the elderly woman into an ambulance, I overheard the lady’s daughter ask, “Are you in pain, Mama?”

The original holiday was called Lupercalia. An ancient Roman festival. A real scream. 

Picture this. The Roman town square was crowded. Everyone was buck naked. Even the old people, whose bodies were ravaged by gravity. 

Young women would line up, men would swat them with the hides of sacrificed animals. This supposedly made them fertile. It goes without saying that beer was involved.  

Women then put their names into a big jar. Whereupon, each guy would select a name. Then, everyone would go off together and, um, read the Bible. 

No. Wait. The Bible hadn’t been invented yet. So I’m sure they were all doing something else. Maybe playing Twister. 

Fast forward about 300 years after the death of Jesus. Rome was a cesspool. If you were a Christian, you were—how do I put it?—screwed. Christians were mass hated. Why were they hated? 

Politics, baby. Nothing arouses hate like politics. 

So you basically had two different groups in Rome. You had those who thought the emperor was a spiritual genius, sent by God—actually, they

thought HE WAS A GOD. And you had the other crowd who listened to talk radio.   

Christians didn’t fit into either group. They simply wouldn’t play the game. They met underground. They refused to worship Caesar. Not only because he was a tyrant, but because he made a crappy salad. 

Why was this such a big deal? Because to Romans, religion was a social and public thing. Refusing to sacrifice a goat to a Roman god was like disrespecting the flag. The role of a priest was a public office. Not playing the politics game meant you were unpatriotic. 

And this is why they started killing Christians. They had all kinds of ways to kill you. 

They would wrap you in the carcass of an animal and let dogs attack you. They’d put you into barrels with protruding spikes and roll you down hills. They…

I miss glass bottles. I come from a generation of glass.

And therein lies a fundamental difference between my generation and the current one.

Glass bottles were everywhere. Glass packaging contained everything from mayonnaise to Bayer aspirin. You walked into a restaurant, and there were glass Heinz ketchup bottles sitting on tables. You had to fracture your palm to get the stuff out.

We had no space-age plastic polymers. Just glass. It was reusable. It was substantial. Eco-friendly. And glass, somehow, just made us happier. It kept crime down. It made us American. 

Which reminds me, I was at a ball game when the national anthem was played. Everyone stood. But do you know what? Almost nobody sang. It was weird. 

The singer was a recording artist from Nashville with three Grammys. She performed two minutes of vocal gymnastics so that it sounded like she was undergoing an unanesthetized colonoscopy. The boy in the seat next to me leaned over to his mom and said, “When is this going to be over?”

When I was a kid, everyone sang the “Star Spangled Banner” at games. We sang it all the time. We sang it in SCHOOL. My veteran grandfather didn’t let Nashville recording artists outsing him at ballgames. 

Something else about my generation. We were not required to leave tips for every single blessed financial transaction completed.

Yes, we tipped. We tipped restaurant servers, barbers, bartenders, and talented professional dancers. But we did not tip our McDonald’s drive-thru attendant. 

Know what else? There were no video ads at our gas-station pumps, blaring 24-hour headlines at a volume loud enough to make your gums bleed, advertising everything from potato chips to marital aids.

Other things were different, too. People still held the doors for each other. Children were actually skilled conversationalists.

Music, movies, and TV were not streamed, they were shared, communal experiences, so everyone had something to talk about. 

I bought a flip phone.

One without a camera or a touchscreen. Without AI, facial recognition, video chatting, GPS, or the ability to flush my toilet from the other room.

It’s a “stupid” phone. A device with the same level of intelligence as a member of Congress.

Namely, because I’m addicted to my smartphone. The first thing I do each morning is check my phone. The last thing I do before bed is check my phone.

In fact, I checked my phone four times during writing these last few paragraphs, answered two texts, ordered cat food on Amazon, paid a bill, and what the heck was I writing about again?

I had an analog childhood. The only phone my family had was in the kitchen. The cord was nine miles long and the receiver was heavy enough to be used as a murder weapon.

As a kid, our only communication with other kids was riding a bike to a friend’s house, ditching

our bike in their yard, asking their mom if the friend could come outside and play, then dealing with the bitterness of rejection when their mom said no because our friend was at piano lessons.

We climbed trees, built campfires, and played kissing games with girls wherein girls would draw a circle on the floor and make a boy stand in the center. Girls could either kiss the boy or pay a fine. I once made $21.34.

Before my smartphone, I read books, used Rand McNally maps, listened to radios, engaged in face-to-face interaction, and memorized hundreds of phone numbers.

But now all I do is use a phone.

And I’m not alone. Yesterday I almost had a car wreck when a Toyota ran me off the highway.

When the Camry sped past, the motorist was holding his phone in his right hand, and with the other hand…

The math teacher and I went for a five-hour walk through town while wearing huge backpacks and yet we are not Marines. We are just middle-aged married people. 

This was our weekly “training walk.” That’s what hikers call them. Training walks. Namely, because it would sound weird to call these walks “walking for five hours while wearing backpacks the size of Whirlpool appliances.”  

“How are you doing back there?” the math teacher called out to me as we walked. 

“Yay,” I said in earnest. 

The math teacher and I must exercise like this because, in April, we are travelling to Spain to walk El Camino de Santiago—from one end of Spain to the other.  

Training walks are important before hiking the Camino. You would not want to walk upwards of 500 miles across the breadth of Iberia, traversing the Pyrenees Mountains, when the most intensive workout you have done previously consists of using your teeth to open a Butterfinger. 

On our walk, members of the general public gave us odd looks. Joggers weaved around us on sidewalks, giving

us lots of room, avoiding eye contact, clenching their pepper spray canisters. 

We felt ridiculous wearing large backpacks in public. But this is how you train for a pilgrimage. 

When we reached the corner grocery store, my wife went inside to get an energy bar. I waited on the curb, sitting on the pavement, dusty and forlorn, hair askew, sweaty, clasping my heavy backpack. Massaging my feet. 

An older woman with a little boy approached me. The woman looked concerned. She said, “How are you today?” 

“I’ve had better days,” I said. 

“Are you able to keep warm?” she said with a frown face.

“I guess.”  

“Is there anything you need right now, sir?” 

“I could really use a beer.”

The woman grasped her son by the hand and hurried away. 

When my wife got back outside (beerless) she found me half-sleeping…

I shouldn’t be braiding hair. But there I was. Giving it my best shot. 

We were in a hotel lobby. The 19-year-old sat with her back facing me. Her violent red hair in my hands. 

Hotel guests were staring at me, the middle-aged dork, unintentionally tying a young woman’s hair into knots.  

“I don’t really braid,” I explained. 

“You’re doing fine,” she said.  

Morgan cannot braid her own hair because she is paralyzed on her left side. Usually someone in her dorm braids her hair. But she’s not in a dorm. 

This weekend, she’s been trapped in a van with old people who still sing along with Brooks and Dunn.

I undid the lopsided braid. “This is a bad idea.” 

“It doesn’t have to be perfect.” 

The thing is, I used to be an okay hair-braider. This is because I had a kid sister who believed it necessary to wear her hair in a braid or else my mother would cut it off. 

My mother was obsessed with cutting hair. She owned a pair of scissors not sharpened since the Coolidge

administration, which was why my sister’s hairdo looked like she had fallen into a disagreement with a wood chipper. 

My own boyhood haircuts were even worse. My mother cut my hair by placing a mixing bowl over my head and making a series of abortive scissor cuts before finally saying, “Heck with it,” then using World-War-II-era clippers to shave me bald. My fellow Boy Scouts called me Uncle Fester. 

I unfurled the braid again. “I’m not doing a very good job.” 

“You’re doing great,” she said.  

Morgan has been a good sport this weekend. We have dragged her all over Tennessee and half of Georgia. She has let me write columns about her, even though she is painfully shy. 

We’ve spent most of our time in the van where she has been forced to participate in uninteresting old-person conversation,…

You never know how truly short life is until a 19-year-old girl, who is preceptive and sweet, and of exceptional intellect, a girl who made the university president’s list, stares at you sincerely, with warmth in her eyes, and with all her heart, calls you an “old person.” 

“I’m not old,” you almost reply. 

But she is 19, and she would not believe you. Because to this young woman, the definition of “ancient” is any person or object old enough to predate the iPhone 3G. 

Today, we went to the Tennessee Aquarium together. Three of us walked through the exhibit; the 19-year-old, my wife and my wife’s elderly husband who carried everyone’s purses.

And I watched the 19-year-old, who was genuinely impressed by the gargantuas and leviathans in the water.

We were in a room of glass. Eight hundred species swam over our heads, and another few thousand below us. 

Kids were running around everywhere. Parents were pushing strollers. Babies crying. It was your typical tourist attraction.  

But I was busy watching

the 19-year-old, walking with ease through the aquarium passageways. She admired the tropical fish, she posed for pictures on giant fiberglass turtle eggs, she fearlessly shoved her hand into the water to pet the stingrays. 

You would have never known that this girl has spent most of last year in the hospital, in critical care. 

You would never look at this red-haired marvel and notice that she is paralyzed on her left side. Not unless you saw her clutching my arm as we used the escalator. You would never know this girl is on a TPN feeding tube, which is a form of life support. 

You would only see a brilliant young woman, living her life. Living this life so fully, so everlastingly, that it almost makes you feel ashamed of yourself. 

For she knows how to live with a whole heart. She knows how to find…