Early morning—it's sleepy here in Brewton. A chill is in the air. The middle school is just off Highway 31, tucked in the woods of South Alabama.

Kids walk the halls, wearing Roll-Tide hoodies and War-Eagle sweatshirts. There are children of every size. Some eighth-graders are tall enough to qualify for the SEC. Some fifth-graders weigh fifty pounds—soaking wet.

The walls are lined with art. A drawing of Harriet Tubman. A cardboard cutout of Mark Twain. A painting of Nick Saban riding an elephant.

Mrs. Cave tells me, “Art's important here, we value creativity. We even have a piano lab. I mean, our kids actually get free piano lessons...”

Lucky kids.

Down the hall, the cafeteria is quiet. Miss Betty, Miss Leola, and Miss Diane work the kitchen shift. Miss Leola is renowned for her sweet tea—the same kind your granny used to make. It's sugary enough to break your jaw.

I ask Miss Leola what ingredients make her tea so special.

“Don't know,” she says. “Sugar'n water, I reckon.”

I reckon.

She's an old-fashioned cook who knows

what she's doing. They tell me that sometimes families visit school to eat. They rave about the fare.

That's because this is not ordinary food. And this is no average school. It's an institution run by mothers, Sunday school leaders, and small-town saints.

I'm talking salt-of-the-earth people like Mrs. Gray, Mrs. Hart, and Miss Leah. People who don't just work here, but who offer shoulders for crying.

A girl hugs her math teacher during class and says, "Love you, Miss McKenzie."

Her teacher says the same thing.

You don't see that much anymore.

“We're lucky,” says the guidance counselor. “I've heard of schools where kids fight, and teachers hate their jobs. That's not us. We love our babies.”

This is unlike the modern academic world. A universe where children have become numbers, where deputies pat them down, waving metal-detectors. Some public school…

I used to attend night college classes. My history class was in a trailer that had coffee machines in back, ashtrays out front, and a bathroom roughly the size of a luxury coffin.

The room had people from all walks of life. Men in camouflage caps, stay-at-home mothers, teenagers, middle-agers, active military, lawn-maintenance professionals, a peace officer, a Hooter's waitress.

And one deaf boy.

The deaf kid was twentyish, tall, skinny. His mother came to every class with him. Each night, she wore the same green Publix uniform. Each night, she brought glazed donuts.

Each night, she sat beside her son, translating the professor's words into sign-language.

They were pleasant folks. He smiled often. She spoke with an accent that sounded like a Georgia hayfield.

At the end of the semester, students were assigned to write essays about our ancestry, then read them aloud. And if you've ever had the privilege of watching thirty adults stand at a podium, reading with as much sincerity as it takes to scratch one's own ass, you understand

torture.

One student wrote about his father's high-school football career. Another discussed her Dutch heritage. I almost slipped into a donut-induced coma.

The last to speak was the deaf boy. He walked to the front. His hands were shaking.

He spoke slow, with labored moans. He told us about himself, about his siblings, about how his father abandoned his mother when doctors discovered he was deaf. And when he started talking about his mother, he had to quit reading.

If you've never heard a deaf boy cry, you don't know what you're missing.

Before he finished, thirty caffeinated blue-collars rose and faced the back of the room. We applauded the woman until her face turned red. Even the teacher clapped.

Then his mother came forward to take the pulpit.

It was pure impulse. And even though she wasn't a student, she told her own story—signing her…

I found her in the bathroom. She wore tin foil in her hair, rubber gloves, and a pair of safety glasses. She leaned close to the mirror, squirting what looked like molasses into her hair.

“What're you doing?” I asked.

"I'm coloring my gray hairs." Then she slapped me silly with a L'Oréal box and warned me never to tell a soul what I saw.

God help me.

The first thing you should know about my wife: she will gut me like a fish and let me bleed on the kitchen floor after reading this.

Second: her hair is not gray. Not even slightly. This silver hair she's worried about is actually a faint streak—visible only to government calibrated nuclear nanoscopes.

And truth be told, I love the streak.

But then, I love gray hair. The same way I like crow's feet, love-handles, beer-guts, muffin-tops, cracked heels, and—I'm being serious—unwanted upper-lip hair.

Look, I don't know when TV experts decided that we needed to get plucked, augmented, or painted. But these experts deserve to be herded into the

town square and dipped in a bucket of L'Oréal Natural Midnight.

Who said gray was bad? And who said round bodies, lanky legs, big feet, hawk noses, wide hips, flat backsides, small chests, reading glasses, and turkey necks were bad?

Bull manure.

You want to know something? The smartest woman I ever met had cotton hair and wrinkled skin. And just before we closed her casket, I got to touch that dandelion-fuzz one last time.

She was the same lady who once said, "The greatest thing any child can grow up to be is themselves."

Themselves.

Well, not that it matters what I think, but I wish our children knew more about themselves; less about calorie counting. I wish they learned more about swatting gnats; less about European swimsuit models.

I know a girl who got made fun of during school. They…

I'm with two girls. My wife is riding shotgun. My coonhound is between us. One girl smells like lavender shampoo. The other smells like blue cheese.

The stereo is blaring something political. Two radio personalities discuss individualistic views on America.

"I'm CONCERNED about America, Ron."

"Me too, Jerry. I'm SO CONCERNED, I wish I WEREN'T an American."

"That's a concern of mine, too, Ron."

"Isn't it all so concerning?"

"It is as far as I'm concerned."

My wife changes the station to something with more pedal steel guitar.

She lands on a Ford Motor advertisement. This makes me grin because the men in my family have supported Henry Ford since the earth cooled.

My father was a boot-wearing Union man. I spent entire childhoods in Ford half-tons with patriotic stickers on bumpers. Folks from our walk of life plastered flags on anything that wasn't alive. Barn walls, beer coolers, job-sites.

Once, I accompanied my father to a construction-site. A tower crane stood above an iron-frame structure the size of a city block. There, I met men with sooty faces, welding helmets,

and battle-ship tattoos.

They were carrying a crate the size of a casket.

"What's in the box?" I asked Daddy.

He didn't answer.

Inside the container were red and white stripes the width of sidewalks. The men attached the colors to a wire dangling from the crane. Then, someone fired the engine—a noise louder than most NASCAR fleets.

And when the banner lifted upward, several hundred roughnecks stepped backward to get a better view of Old Glory.

Air hammers quit. Front-end loaders shut down. Gas torches stopped. Men removed helmets. Some placed hands over hearts, others saluted.

A gust of wind caught the flag. Colors flung outward, covering the sun. It was poetry.

Men applauded. Several hundred Ford-lovers hollered loud enough to wake the Unknown Soldier.

My father kept his palm over his chest.

Yeah, I know. You won't…

I got to the funeral home early. I was there to pay respects to a man whose wife I once worked with. He died in a nursing home, God rest his soul.

As it happens, there were two visitations going on that day. And since I have the intelligence of a ripe summer squash, I found myself in the wrong place.

I knew this because the service was poorly attended. Which is also why I stayed.

The widow was mid-forties. She had tough skin, like someone had left her in the weather too long. Her kids were with her—one girl, one boy. Her face was waterlogged.

There was no casket. Only a table with photographs.

People in line said things like, “Time heals all wounds, honey.”

And this irks me.

Folks don't mean to use such ridiculous sentences at funerals. It's accidental. But they fire off corny phrases like buckshot just the same.

As a boy, my mama and I received a line of visitors just like this one. It was a morbid ordeal that

lasted for hours, days, years. It never seemed to end.

In fact, sometimes I wonder if my adult life is nothing but a daydream some twelve-year-old boy's having in a funeral parlor. I wonder if maybe one day I'll awake, shaking hands with some fella pointing out how time can heal all wounds.

Anyway, I finally made it to the widow. She smiled, but not with her eyes, then she thanked me for coming. I smelled cigarettes on her breath. She didn't know me from Adam's beer-fridge, but she pretended to.

I hugged her scrawny body. Then, I told her something I've been waiting to say to a woman in her situation for a long time.

“You're stronger than you think you are, ma'am."

I didn't mean to tear up. But mid-sentence, I realized I was saying something just as ridiculous as the others.

She…

She tells me her father was a hard man. And he'd earned the right to be. He'd survived one Depression, one World War, and he was a dirt farmer. He'd forgotten how to cry.

And when it came to the subject of God, he once told his daughter, "If God's real, he's a heartless sumbitch, honey."

His words, not mine.

Anyway, it happened one sunny day, while she and her brothers were in the woods. She saw smoke in the distance. Black smoke. The bad kind. They ran home.

Only, there was no home. Just flames.

Her mother stood covered in soot. Her baby sister screamed. Her daddy was coughing in the yard.

They salvaged what they could from the dust. A few skillets. A potbelly stove. Their clothes were gone, photo albums, beds, food.

That night, the family slept in the barn. She said it was the first time she'd seen her daddy look rattled. She expected him to cry.

He didn't. He only cussed the sky.

The next morning, a man came to visit. He was

dressed in his Sunday best. He placed a handful of cash in her father's hand.

"We talked about you in church today," the man said. "And I wanna help."

Not long after, another couple came. It was the neighbors, with a wagon full of lumber.

Next, she remembers her mother hollering, "They took up an offering at church! Look! Six hundred dollars!"

Before the day ended, one hundred thirty-two people had visited the rural plot, each offering help.

One hundred thirty-two.

Over the following days, she says men showed up to frame the home. Even local clergy swung hammers. Sunup to sundown, they worked.

You might think this sounds like a fairytale. Only this is no bedtime story. This was South Alabama.

She tells me they ran out of lumber. But it didn't slow them. Men took apart their own barns and…

I'm in Dothan, Alabama, eating at Annie Pearl's Home Cooking Restaurant. They tell me this is the only spot in town where you can get a decent liver covered in respectable gravy.

They were right.

I'm in a good mood. Not just because of the liver. But because earlier today, an eighty-six-year-old woman with Parkinson's hugged my neck. She said in a weak voice, "Your daddy sure is proud of you, young man."

It unsettled me.

Daddy's been dead for two thirds of my life. Nobody's ever told me that.

Let alone a stranger.

So we went out for smother-fried liver. I've already eaten fifty pounds of the stuff. Also: butter beans, turnip greens, and enough biscuits to qualify as a misdemeanor.

This restaurant is empty, except for a few camouflage hats and their wives.

Our waitress is Kendall. She's a breath of fresh air. She visits every table, speaking to customers as friendly you'd talk to your cousins.

I overhear her say things like: "How's your sister doin' after her divorce?” Or: “Lordy, girl, did you see

So-And-So's engagement ring?”

Or: “Congratulations, Dalene, I heard your nephew made bail last week.”

People say sweet things in this town.

It's not a small place—this is the New York City of lower Alabama. But it's rural.

There's a Feed and Seed next to the Piggly Wiggly, muddy trucks in the movie-theater parking lot. At gas stations: old men in ten-gallon hats who can't figure out pump card-readers.

I spoke at the Houston County Library today. It was a small crowd. I met good people. Men like Fletcher Moore—an old man who talks so loud it makes you grin.

I got introduced to white-haired women who grew up barefoot, who still remember handpumps on kitchen sinks. I met ladies with antique names like Delphinia, Eugenia, Thomisina, Betty Sue, and Viola Ann.

I shook hands with a man in a neon orange cap…

You find her hiding in a closet. She's crying, behind the hanging clothes. She's still wearing her black velvet dress. A hair ribbon. Shiny shoes.

You don't blame her for hiding. After all, your house is full of visitors dressed in the same shade of funeral-black. They congregate around food, talking in quiet voices.

Hiding doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

“What're you doing in the closet?” you ask.

"Nothing."

"Are you crying?"

"Yeah."

So, you step inside. You sit beside her. Without saying anything, she crawls into your lap and rests her head against your chest.

"Is Daddy really dead?" she asks.

"He is."

She's not in the mood to talk, which is unlike her. This girl could chat the bark off a tree. But, not today. She's had a busy afternoon.

Funeral visitations are endurance sports. She stood beside you while you pumped nine hundred hands. Folks who cried so hard they couldn't keep their eyes open.

You heard things like, “Your daddy's in a better place, son." You got embraces. Kisses. Preachers reminded you that suicide

is not an unforgivable sin.

When it's over, it feels like someone beat you with a rolling pin.

And now your sister is asleep, drooling on your shirt, and you start wondering. You wonder who will braid her hair, tie her shoes, or help her navigate grade-school. You wonder who will teach her to drive.

So, you talk to God. Man to boy. You tell him that even though you're an inadequate little cuss, you're volunteering for the job.

You make promises to fix breakfasts, do laundry, tell bedtime stories. You swear to attend swim-meets, to cheer so hard your voice breaks. To treat her friends to ice cream.

And when she gets her first job, it will be you who visits Chick-Fil-A, unannounced, to snap a photo.

It will be you who walks her down the aisle.

And when…