Virginia. Inova Fairfax hospital. Not so long ago. Decent weather. Just another day in old Virginny.

Taylor Givens and Collin Kobelja were young. Two practical strangers. A couple of kids. Both awaiting cardiac transplants, lying in their hospital beds, about to be wheeled into the OR.

Not their best day ever.

Taylor. Seventeen years old. Pretty. Redhead. Viral cardiomyopathy. She would miss graduation. Centreville High School would give her an impromptu ceremony in her hospital room.

Collin. Your all-American guy. Good personality. Liked goofing off with friends. Probably a big fan of flatulent noises. Congenital heart defect. This was his second transplant. He had his first at 17 months.

They would both receive transplants on the same day.

Which is actually pretty unique. In America, there are about 3,800 heart transplants annually. Sometimes, patients wait years for a new heart. Some never get one.

But today, two organs had arrived in ice-filled coolers. And the dormant hearts would soon be beating again.

Taylor and Collin would undergo identical surgeries. Same doctors. Same hospital floor.

Same crappy cafeteria Jello. Same nurses, installing similar catheters, using the same gentle touch of professional wrestlers.

They had met each other before at cardiologist appointments. But there were never any romantic notions. After all, they had more important things to think about. Such as, for example, living.

But this fateful day in surgery represented a new beginning. Both operations were a success. The Jello was exquisite.

After that, they went about their lives. They never thought about each other. Until five years later. Casual Facebook messages were sent about doctors. A conversation was struck. A relationship was in the making.

Then, one day Collin visited Taylor in the hospital after a procedure. Just to be nice. This time, there were sparks. Big ones.

Taylor remembers that there was ​“a really strong connection that I don’t think either one of us was expecting.”

They started dating.…

We weren’t friends per se. But I knew him.

I don’t know how it started. I’d wake up in the mornings, hop in the truck, and drive to a nearby gas station. I’d buy a newspaper. A weak cup of joe.

The old guy was usually there. Waiting outside the gas station, smoking a cigarette.

He looked ancient. Bushy gray beard—stained orange from tobacco. His face was painted with a thousand wrinkles. His shoes were falling apart.

He carried a backpack the size of a Buick, which usually sat at his feet. He had a little dog with him named Rufus.

“Rufus is a purebred,” he’d always say. “Heinz 57 breed.”

“In the afternoon,” said the gas-station cashier, “he always asked customers for handouts, but never in the mornings. I don’t know why he didn't ask for handouts in the mornings.”

I do. Because he was hungover.

“Either way, someone always bought him a cup of coffee,” the cashier went on. “And if someone didn’t, we’d let him have as much free coffee as he wanted.”

His name changed each time we talked. Once, he was

Jerry. Another time, he was Ron. He’d been Apollo, James, Ricky, you name it. Who knows what his name was.

He’d talk about anything. He’d cuss politicians. Talk about this current generation’s selfish ways. He’d talk of Vietnam. Then, inevitably, he’d usually talk about God.

God was one of his go-to subjects. I guess you get to know God pretty well when you’re homeless.

Sometimes, he’d preach a little. And his sermons always came off flat because of the gin on his breath. Still, I’d give him plenty of Amens, and then I’d wish him a good day. And he’d always—always—God bless me.

Whereupon he’d heft his backpack onto his frail back, and set off for heaven only knows where.

Sometimes I’d see him on the side of the road, walking steadily onward. Through…

Three days after the Twin Towers collapsed, Bob Beckwith showed up in Manhattan to look for survivors in the rubble. He had no business being there.

Nobody thought it was a good idea. Bob was a retired fireman. He was a little long in the tooth to be doing search and rescue work. His family begged him not to go.

“They said you’re 69, you’re too old.”

“But you don’t stop being a firefighter,” an old firefighter once told me. “It’s like being a dad. It’s not a job. It’s who you are.”

Bob Beckwith. A slender man. Loose built. Broad shoulders. Face creased with age. A New York voice—a little defiant, a little in-your-face.

Directly after the 9/11 attacks, Bob heard one of his colleague’s sons was unaccounted for, among hundreds of other missing firefighters.

Bob hopped in the car and drove to Lower Manhattan. Uninvited. Unannounced. He lied his way through the National Guard checkpoints.

He used his official voice. He wore a leatherhead helmet to complete the picture. He acted like he belonged there. Because, of

course, he did.

“I cut in between the cones, and I drove over to Williamsburg Bridge.”

Bob jumped out of his car and got straight to work.

“I go start digging with the guys in the North Tower, and we come across a pumper with a 76 Engine. And we’re working because we’re looking for survivors and we’re looking for people, and we’re hoping they found an air pocket or something.”

Ground Zero was a mosaic of emergency workers. Fire-medics. Police. Volunteers. Search and rescue dogs. Paramedics. Mohawk ironworkers. You name it.

They were all digging through ash and steel until hands bled and fingernails popped off.

What happened to Bob next was pure chance. If you believe in chance.

“We found the [charred] pumper, a fire engine, so I jumped up on it. And a guy comes over to me…

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 your head was “unnaturally big for his body”?

A: Maybe.

Q: Did this tweet get thousands of responses from random strangers who agreed that your head was, indeed, prodigiously large?

A: Perhaps.

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 Alabama. But I am from the Florida Panhandle, which is a unique region we natives lovingly refer to as L.A.

“Lower Alabama.”

Simply put, every truck in the neighborhoods of my youth had either an Auburn University bumper sticker or a tag for The University of Alabama. Also, I actually own a pair of camouflage underpants.

Q: Really?

A: They were a 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…

I have here an email which reads:

“Sean, you often write of angels and miracles, and today, of Heaven. But if Heaven and angels are real, which I do believe, then Hell and demons must also be real. I guess writing about those is less fun? People don’t like to think about those ideas. But presenting only one side of the spiritual realm is perhaps misleading?”

After reading the above letter, I realized something important. I have never written about hell. Over the years I’ve written about angels, miracles, cancer survivors, dogs, play-off games, small towns, and eyebrow hair. But never hell.

To verify that this was true, I had my research department, Jamie Martin Dietrich, comb through a decade’s worth of columns. The research department determined that—unless you count columns on the NCAA National Championship—I have never written about hell.

Thus, I am going to tell you a true anecdote about hell, a place which, I can assure you, is real. I know this because I visited hell a few months

ago when I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to register a boat trailer.

No sooner had I entered the DMV than the clerk said, “Take a number and get in line!” And I knew I was in purgatory.

So there I was, standing in a line of tormented souls, all waiting for our numbers to be called. This line was longer than the line to the men’s room at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

I was alongside people who were unshaven and disheveled, gnashing their teeth, and surviving on vending machine food. I met an elderly man who had been standing in line to register his Ford Station Wagon since 1954.

After 40 days and 40 nights of waiting, I was finally invited to approach a teller window.

I told the clerk I wanted to register my boat trailer.

She managed to say her next sentence in one, eye-rolling…

Becca and I walked inside Waffle House. The air was surgically cold. It smelled like cured pork. I have had a lifelong love affair with Waffle House. If you have to ask why, you might be from Iowa.

We selected a corner booth. Becca is 11. She is also blind. The waitress asked what we wanted to drink.

“Sweet tea,” said Becca.

“I’ll have the same.”

Becca and I talked about everything and nothing. Of life. Of love. Of boogers. You never know what an 11-year-old is going to talk about.

She had just gotten out of school. She was energetic and gabby. I learned about her friends, Paisley, and Brinley, and Nora, and Bryce, and so forth.

Also, I learned that, The Powers That Be do indeed manufacture fidget spinners that one can wear on one’s wrist. Spinners which not only spin, but also light up.

Becca had three such spinners in her purse.

Yes. A purse. Becca has recently started carrying a purse. She wears it across her torso. She looks very grown-up. It’s a large

purse. Floral print. Like the kind your mom used to carry.

My mother’s purse contained half the contents of the known solar system. She carried everything in there.

If you told Mama you were hungry, for example, she would give you something from her purse. A Kit Kat, or a sleeve of saltines, or a ketchup packet.

No matter what Mama gave you, it usually tasted like expired makeup and purse dirt. But you ate it, by dog, because there were starving people in China.

So anyway, Becca is probably my best friend. I don’t know how this happened. I didn’t know grown-ups could become best friends with children. But there you are.

I have discovered that I prefer Becca’s company. I made a promise to myself early on, that I would never speak to her like she was a child.

So…

Newspapers have a smell. If you’re lucky enough to find a newspaper in our digital world, you’ll notice the smell first. Fresh newsprint paper. SoySeal ink. Still warm. It’s a unique scent.

I grew up throwing newspapers. Not on a bicycle. My mother and I threw newspapers, riding in her beat up Nissan. We threw papers every day of the week. Weekends. Holidays. Rainy weather. Snow. Thanksgiving. Christmas Eve.

Our mornings went as such:

We awoke at 2:30 a.m. We arrived at West Marine at 3. Whereupon a delivery truck would pull up, carrying a pallet of the “Northwest Florida Daily News.” The pallet was about the size of an average Hardee’s.

Then, Mama and I would hole up in her car, wrapping newspapers while eating breakfast. Usually, Pop Tarts, or ham sandwiches.

Wrapping was the hardest part. You had to roll each paper into a tight tube. Then you shoved the paper into a tubular plastic sleeve which was about the same circumference as a No. 2 pencil.

Once a newspaper was wrapped, you

tossed it into the backseat, where your kid sister sat. She had pigtails. She was busily wrapping newspapers of her own.

Your hands would look like a coal miner’s.

There’s not much on the radio at 3 in the morning. But if you didn’t mind AM, you could listen to classic reruns of Paul Harvey. We were big Paul Harvey fans.

When we finished, the backseat was so weighted with newspapers, the rear axel sagged against the pavement, shooting sparks into the night at full speed.

My sister rode in back, buried in rolled-up newspapers. I rode up front, reciting the current list of subscribers.

And this is where the real work began. We all had roles. Mama was pilot. Kid Sister was munitions. I was tail gunner.

I would crank down the window and throw newspapers across Northwest Florida. We delivered several hundred billion…

We were newlyweds. Our apartment was cozy. Cozy in a nuclear-fallout sort of way.

We’re talking 600 square feet. Our bathroom was barely big enough to shower in without sustaining a subdural hematoma.

The tenants below us had a flea infestation. Which meant the whole building had fleas. Which meant that I was always pausing mid-conversation to scratch my scalp.

Our lives were otherwise pretty good. My wife taught preschool. Which is code for, “wiping tiny butts.” Ironically, when my wife first interviewed with the school, she flatly told the preschool director, “I’ll do anything but wipe butts.”

The director simply laughed. Within 24 hours on the job, my wife had already wiped eight.

Meantime, my job was working with a friend, hanging commercial gutter. I hated it.

I was the kind of guy you’d bring to a nice cocktail party, and whenever someone asked, “So, what do you do?” I’d answer, “My life is in the gutter.” Whereupon cocktail party guests would ask me to refill their drinks.

But we were happy. And that’s the

thing about newlyweds. They’re nonsensically happy. My wife and I were always exhausted, overworked, underpaid, and just generally pooped from trying to make ends meet. We lived on ramen noodles, or if we were feeling especially lavish, Stouffer's lasagna.

But we were happy.

On the night of my wife’s birthday, however, she wanted to go out to eat, and we couldn’t afford it. We had $27.39 in our bank account. It had been a hard month.

Heck, it had been a hard last few years.

At work that day, I was feeling terrible, thinking about how poor we were. I almost asked one of my friends whether I could borrow money for a nice birthday dinner, but I was not raised to ask for money.

The people I come from would rather live in a refrigerator carton than beg.

So that night, I got…

“I used to be a beauty queen,” said the waitress.

We were in Southern Mississippi. The waitress was older. Maybe in her 70s. Which is getting younger every year.

The woman brought my breakfast and my coffee. The food was hot. The coffee was the temperature of three-day-old bathwater.

“A beauty queen?” I said.

“Yeah,” the waitress said. “Won a local beauty contest when I was 24, I thought I was going to die of shock. Hadn’t never won nothing in my whole life.”

She had no confidence as a young woman. She grew up on a farm with six brothers. The only girl in a family of nine.

“My brothers were always trying to steal my food.”

She learned to work hard, how to bale hay, and how to handle large animals. You can always tell someone who has handled large animals. They don’t make sudden movements.

As a girl, she never thought she was pretty. She grew up in overalls and bare feet. Her mother cut her hair, and her daddy said she’d make a fine farmer’s wife.

“Then my aunt Jeannie came along,” she said. “My aunt said I should enter this beauty contest. And I was like, ‘What? Me? I’m ugly.’”

But her aunt insisted.

Her aunt took her into town to get her hair did. The older ladies in the salon wore helmet hair and pink nylon capes. They swarmed her like bees.

“They put so much hairspray on me I think I was an environmental hazard.”

The ladies did her makeup. They plucked her eyebrows. They did her eyelashes. They applied powder, rouge, and a gallon of base.

“I didn’t even recognize myself.”

The contest was a foreign experience. She felt like a fish out of the pond.

“My aunt told me to walk like Marilyn Monroe, and to speak on the microphone like Queen Elizabeth.”

The young woman won the contest. It was…