I have a challenge coin somewhere with a skull on its face, along with the Latin phrase Memento mori, which translates, roughly, to “Remember to die” or “Remember you must die.”

It’s a macabre reminder of life’s ultimate inevitability and, perhaps, the ultimate irony. As if we have a choice.

I know it’s a weird thing to keep. But even though I can’t put my hand on it right away, I take comfort in knowing I have it somewhere. I think of it often, which is the point.

The concept dates back to Roman times, first appearing in a text by Tertullian describing an attendant’s reminder to a triumphant Roman general: “Respice post te! Hominem te memento!” — “Look behind you; remember you are a man!”

The Stoics — Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus — were Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers who held the concept close in their own core beliefs. And while memento mori and the Stoics may be unfamiliar to many, the reminder has appeared nearly everywhere through centuries as a major theme in art and literature, often depicted symbolically as skulls, hourglasses, wilted flowers and rotting fruit, and extinguished candles.

I tend to see it from another perspective, not as a reminder of death, but as a sort of guide for perseverance, an unconscious, gentle impetus to live a life of kindness, generosity, and empathy, while having a bit of fun along the way.

Dolly Parton’s death last week brought all this to mind. I didn’t know her, but I knew her public persona, which embodied character traits to which we should all aspire. I am sad she’s no longer on this plane, but happy she was here.

Like most of us, I have known a lot of death, and have often felt that something must be wrong with me in that I just take it in stride.

Yet despite the certainty that it will touch us all, and take us all, I struggle for the words to say to the mourning when the time comes. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I try to go funerals when I can — not just to honor the memory of the dead, but in support of their loved ones who are grieving deeply and may not even remember I was in attendance. My own final wishes eschew traditional funereal proceedings. I’ll be cremated, ashes tucked in an urn, and then laissez les bons temps rouler at a reception where people can feel comfortable, have a good time, and perhaps recall me with a funny story and a smile. If there be music, let it be Lucia Micarelli’s “Ave Maria,” Viktor Krauss’s version of “Big Log” with ethereal guitarist Bill Frisell and Viktor’s sister Alison’s angelic vocals, Bobby Weir’s “Days Between,” and a random assortment of 70s rock. Oh, and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings, Opus 11.”

I recently learned of the death of Lynn Summersett, a girl who grew up near me and went all through school with me. I’d lost track of her for years, then reconnected when Facebook entered the picture, and I took great pleasure in being reacquainted with her joyful approach to life and its often-bumpy paths. I keep remembering little vignettes throughout the years in which Lynn, her mischievous grin ever-present, presided over some sort of ridiculous shenanigans. Whenever we crossed paths on social media, she’d remind me of her love for the Grateful Dead. She was my kind of people, and while I haven’t seen her since high school, I will miss her.

Still, I wouldn’t know what to say to those she left behind. Perhaps the best sentiment is expressed in Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s song, “He’s Gone” — “Nothin’ left to do but smile, smile, smile.”

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I knew this man named Jack years ago. He and his wife had three kids, the youngest of whom was a year or two older than me. His wife was a dear friend, and we spent a lot of time at their house. Bettye and I would visit with Mary Sue, drink coffee or cognac and laugh for hours while Jack would be doing who knows what.

I considered Jack a friend, but I never knew him well. He was a loner, and was completely content to spend all day alone, isolated from others. One Saturday, I had an assignment to drive to Opp and cover the Rattlesnake Rodeo. Surprisingly, Jack wanted to go with me. I had an old Chevrolet from the late 70s, with a big eight-cylinder motor that smelled of gas and averaged about 8 miles per gallon.

Having a passenger in tow brought some unexpected anxiety: I fretted about whether the automobile would continue to function for a drive to Opp and back, and I laid awake the night before wondering what we would talk about. The mild worry was unnecessary; the Little Rusted Malibu That Could made it’s way to the rodeo and back, and Jack talked non-stop the entire time, mostly about his serial postings as a member of the military diplomatic service. We had a good time. At least I did; with Jack, you never knew.

After his wife died, I was surprised to see him out and about, usually with a group of older men who also lost their wives, sitting around a table somewhere drinking coffee and swapping tales. He seemed rudderless, bereft. He’d spent decades isolating himself by choice. With the house empty, the solitude apparently lost its appeal.

It didn’t take long for him to move back to his home state of West Virginia, where he had kinfolks near a mountain that bore his family name. (His wife confided to us that it was really more of a hill).

I’ve thought about Jack time and again through the years. He was an unusual man who, unbeknownst to me, had an identical twin brother, John. Once John was visiting when Mary Sue had planned a gathering of our regular movie group, and after an hour or so, I was hopelessly confounded. I pulled Bettye aside and asked, “Why the hell does Jack keep changing clothes? Every time I see him, he’s wearing a different sweater and slacks!”

That’s how I found out about John The Doppelgänger. Everyone had assumed I knew him, or at least knew of him. I had no idea, and don’t recall ever having been introduced to him.

Since my formal work life came to an abrupt end last year, I have heard a lot of talk about isolation — how it can be a bad thing, this lack of social interaction, and how it can affect self-esteem, mental stability, even physical health.

But for almost half a century I have been a writer, and along with it comes long stretches of isolation, because that’s the main ingredient to clear thought.

Most people get more than their share of interaction in the workplace, but when it was time for those who worked from home in the COVID months to return to the office, only a handful returned to my workplace. Eventually it was me and three others who were in and out. Our workspace was large with several private offices, so even when all four of us were in-house, it was as though each of us was alone.

I never minded this. In fact, I preferred it and still do. It’s hard to get lost in thought when other people are around. People tend to find such disconnection rude, and I cannot disagree.

This line of thinking always brings me to a question: Why is it so difficult to make new friends in the autumn of our lives? I have always had the good fortune of making friends organically. If I meet someone with whom I share interests, and who I find engaging and funny, I tend to want to spend more time around them. It usually works out.

However, when your world has grown smaller, such opportunities become fewer and farther between. I’ve found it’s something one has to work at, and frankly, I find it a lot more difficult than it once was.

But I try. Last night, Bettye and I, along with our friend Leah, went to dinner after one of our reading groups. I saw two people I knew and one I should know. I wound up getting up from the table and introducing myself to the guy I should know, telling him what our connection was. The second guy I had known since childhood, and we spent a good while catching up. The third guy left before I got over to him.

Next week, I am meeting a longtime reader for lunch. Despite myriad threads connecting my life to his, we’ve never actually met. I’m looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, however, I still need a healthy amount of solitude. That’s where the magic happens.

But when I’m not writing, wanna have lunch?

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Twenty-five years ago, late August presented itself in ordinary ways.

A tragedy was in the news — singer/actress Aaliyah and eight others perished in a plane crash August 25 on takeoff in the Bahamas. At 22, Aaliyah’s star was on the rise; her untimely death severed what might have been an extraordinary arc of success. Violence in the Middle East had escalated sharply, with Israel bombing Palestinian outposts in Gaza. There was concern over the shrinking federal budget surplus (imagine that), and the political story that just wouldn’t quit centered on missing Federal Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy, who had been involved in an illicit relationship with a California state assemblyman, Gary Condit; the ensuing scandal became a national obsession which abruptly ended when the ghastly events of September 11 knocked the Condit Affair off the front pages.

Looking back, things seemed rosy in a way we think we will never see again. But there were little glimmers of hope all along, mostly realized in hindsight.

Several such moments took place in a far-flung community in Newfoundland. Gander was the home of a large airport that had served as a refueling stop for overseas flights before aircraft evolved to complete transatlantic journeys without interruption. That left a once-busy facility with almost no air traffic, and Gander officials had planned to tear it all down, but never got around to it.

That was a stroke of luck on September 11, when the terrorist attacks in the New York, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, led to the immediate closure of U.S. airspace, which lasted several days.

Thirty-eight passenger planes from all over the world and four military aircraft were told to land at that near-deserted Gander airport, presenting a Herculean challenge for the residents of the small Newfoundland town. Almost 7,000 passengers would double its population. They’d need to be housed, clothed, fed, and — perhaps most importantly — informed, consoled, and reassured.

Years ago, we saw a show on Broadway, “Come From Away,” about those days in Gander. It was remarkable, so much so that when we heard that Birmingham’s Red Mountain Theatre was staging the show, we bought tickets.

In the years since we saw the Broadway show, I’d forgotten most of it, except that it was among the best stage presentations I’ve seen.

Most of the scenes are true stories, or are based on actual events. As a former journalist, I was particularly struck by the character of a young woman who reported for her first day as a television reporter on the morning of September 11. She was the lone reporter in Gander, and was soon so overwhelmed by the constant interviews with town officials that she questioned her career choice. Then she saw a school bus ferrying passengers and realized that the real story was that of the “plane people,” who’d come from away.

I cannot recommend this show more highly, particularly the Birmingham production staged by local thespians whose efforts are up to Broadway standards. Buy the tickets, book a room, and leave enough travel time for the inevitable I-65 gridlock between Clanton and Alabaster.

If you love seafood, try the Fish Market Restaurant nearby at 22nd Ave. South and 6th Avenue. The guy who fires the cannon each afternoon at the Grand Hotel on Mobile Bay told us about it, and waxed poetic about Dino’s baked oysters. He wasn’t exaggerating.

These days are sweltering and ordinary, but this outing will remind you of the resilience of the human spirit and kindness shown to strangers who come from away. We all need that more than we care to admit.

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I recently finished listening to the audiobook version of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, and I have to admit that after the last word of the epilogue, I was left wondering why the novel had received the accolades it’s accumulated since its 1961 publication.

The story is set in then-contemporary New Orleans, and is told from the point of view of Binx Bolling, a 29-year-old stockbroker who spends a lot of his free time going to movies, preferring out-of-the-way, suburban theaters to screens in the city proper. The storyline seems to lack a plot, yet it moves along at a nice pace, and the characters are well-developed. Still I wondered what set it apart to the degree that it bested Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zoey for the National Book Award in 1962. A little research reveals it was the story’s structure, a first-person, present-tense delivery that ushered in a new style of novel. Without a broad knowledge of publishing history, this is lost on the casual reader.

The book was this month’s fodder for a small reading group put together with the idea that we would select readings ripe for a deep dive into themes, structure, subtext, context, and any other notion that might cross our minds. We’ve tackled an eclectic mix of works, mostly titles many of us would never have considered in the absence of the group.

Despite thinking I didn’t quite get what Percy was trying to convey, our discussion of the book was quite robust, and I was cheered to discover that some threads I had considered, even though they seemed a bit of a reach, had crossed the mind of at least one other participant.

My thoughts evolved from a consideration of Binx, the main character. He seemed free of want, enjoyed his movies and his ability to make money easily, but seemed not to care much about anything else. He talks about his search, but it’s not clear what he’s looking for. Spiritual fulfillment? Intellectual stimulation? Love? Purpose?

I remarked that I found Binx to be an empty vessel, a hedonist, and possibly even a sociopath without empathy or concern for others. He speaks frequently of malaise, the everydayness of life; perhaps his quest is an escape from monotony.

It made me consider how many of the titles we’ve tackled seem to contain a common thread of alienation among the protagonists. I saw parallels between Binx and Tara Setler, the central character in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Book 1. Tara finds herself stuck in a time loop in which every day is November 18, unfolding in a pattern that repeats every 24 hours, leading her to hide in the house from her husband, likely so she doesn’t have to explain each 24-hour period why she was home instead of in Paris, where she’d gone to purchase an antiquarian book and returned early, into this swirling terminal eddy of time. Tara was trapped in everydayness; Binx chose it.

Our reading group has grown into one of my favorite things, not because I’ve enjoyed every book — I haven’t; at least one, Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibovitz, I deemed unreadable, perhaps because of my lack of patience — but because our discussions are lively and multifaceted, usually sending each of us away with a head full of new ideas about the text we’ve just considered.

Next up is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which upon first glance seems to track with our unintended alienation theme. It leaves me to wonder: is alienation less a thread in fiction and more an integral part of the fabric of life?

I wonder.

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POINT CLEAR — Is it just me, or have our summers gotten hotter? I’m not ready to jump headlong into a scientific debate over global warming with people who don’t understand all the variables any more than I do, but I am convinced, through my own experiences and addled memory, that the days are hotter than they once were.

For instance, in the last few years we’ve started exploring cooler places where we can decamp for a few days in August just to get a bit of relief. A few years ago, we drove up to Asheville, North Carolina, and while it wasn’t much cooler, we had a good time.

This year, I aimed farther north, only to find that even Canada was getting blistered this time of year. I looked into the Northwest — we could get a train in Vancouver and choo-choo over to Banff. I’ve always wanted to see Lake Louise and stay in that monstrous hotel overlooking the emerald expanse in the valley. Apparently that’s a hot ticket; there wasn’t a booking to be found and upon further examination, I found that people ordinarily start nailing down those places a year or more in advance.

Even Europe is burning — figuratively and literally.

We finally decided that if we were going to be hot anyway, we might as well be hot somewhere else. And if you ask me, there’s no better “somewhere else” than the Grand Hotel in Point Clear.

We tossed some clothes in suitcases, dusted off the cooler (for fresh seafood), gassed up the Honda and headed south, where temperatures promised to be at least as hot as they’d be at home.

It was as hot as expected, but that didn’t diminish the effect of the place. As soon as you turn off Highway 98 ALT and pull up to the guard gate, you can feel the stress melt away. After the attendant welcomes you and waves you in, you proceed at 6 mph beneath a canopy of live oaks that have sheltered the grounds since well before the War of Northern Aggression. They were already there when Union Admiral David Farragut uttered the famous cry, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” after advancing Union ironclads slowed following a torpedo strike that hobbled the USS Tecumseh.

I imagine it was mighty hot then, too.

The Grand Hotel, too, was already there, transformed into a hospital in the war years. There is a great deal of violent history beneath that tranquil oasis, but you wouldn’t know it from the peace that washes over visitors when they enter the main lodge with its octagonal cypress great room and stone fireplace. In recent years, Marriott renovated a lot of old-world charm out of the place, and among the first things I missed was the uniformed bellman on patrol with a special rake to straighten the fringe on countless handmade rugs in the common areas.

Alas; progress.

I was cheered to find a flock of old friends still in residence. Ducks have the run of the grounds, as do a group of docile cats. A stop at the front desk will yield a sack of cracked-corn “duck food” free for the asking, and I like to think the fowl recognize my footfalls and eagerly await my outstretched palm.

A brief trip outside to visit the birds is about all the outdoor activity I’m interested in, although I took a swimsuit just in case. I’m just as happy to stay indoors, where the air is in the low 70s and there’s no sense of urgency, only emerging for delicious fresh seafood and a trip to The Pig or Page and Palette.

I haven’t completely discarded the idea of taking a train to Lake Louise. However, it’s hard to beat a few days at Point Clear overlooking Mobile Bay. I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than that, at least for a while, you will have forgotten about the heat. Well, almost.

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I try my best to avoid what is fobbed off on us as “the news” these days. After a long career plying my trade within the confines of what I was taught about journalism — objectivity, truth, timeliness — it pains me to admit that what once was fact is fiction, or at least fact parsed and winnowed to fit a particular narrative or shore up an outlandish opinion.

However, just as I might occasionally step in a fresh pile of dog droppings, I’ll be hit head-on by “the news” before I can duck.

This week I was struck by a headline, “Flight canceled after child refuses to sit down and buckle seatbelt.”

I thought it was satire. I was wrong.

From the New York Times:

“A flight from British Columbia to Toronto was canceled on Thursday after a child would not sit down and buckle a seatbelt before takeoff, the airline said.

Porter Airlines flight PD444 had left the terminal at Victoria International Airport in British Columbia and was headed for the runway when crew members saw a young child who was ‘standing in their seat and would not secure their seatbelt,’ the airline said in a statement.

‘Attempts by the accompanying parent and crew to address this were unsuccessful,’ according to the company, which did not provide the age of the child.”

It’s difficult for me to put that in context. The only flying I did as a child was jumping off the roof with a beach towel to see if flight were possible, or slipping out of a swing when it reached the apex of its arc.

But I do have a context for not doing as one is told.

Imagine I were that kid, circa 1965, on Flight PD444. Neither of my parents would have had patience for that stunt. After a couple of stern yet futile commands, they’d have snatched my little feet out from under me so that I sat down hard in the seat. Then they’d have buckled the seat belt and pull it way too tight around me. They’d have thought the problem was solved. They’d be wrong. As they apologized profusely to the flight attendants, I would be unbuckling the seatbelt and standing up in the seat again. I’d then be snatched up by the arm, dragged to the bathroom and, behind the closed door, they’d beat my stubborn little heinie like a rented mule.

If it were 2026, when we emerged, officers would escort us off the flight. My parents would be jailed and we’d all be on the no-fly list.

Those among the younger set might be alarmed by this seemingly barbaric approach to parenting.

But my parents’ reaction wouldn’t have tipped the needle into the red, not by a long shot.

Kids today are coddled, circled constantly by helicopter parents and showered with participation trophies for simply signing up.

Parents approach discipline through reason, expecting the child to understand complex logic from moms and dads whose own frontal cortexes have not yet reached maturity.

My parents, bless them, have both departed this earth, and won’t have to shudder at the thought of prison time for snapping a thin woody tendril off a shrub and “putting the switch” to our little bare misbehaving legs.

It gets worse, and were my mother still alive, she’d be greatly disturbed by another headline from this week: “Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?”

Again, from the New York Times:

“In recent years, in places like Baldwin City, Kansas, and Silver Springs, Maryland, parents have been investigated — or even arrested — for letting their children walk to the store, play in the park, or ride their bicycles unsupervised. Proponents of childhood independence say it’s beneficial for kids to have autonomy; others see this approach as potentially dangerous. And vague child-neglect laws force law enforcement to make difficult judgment calls regarding whether a child is in legitimate danger.

“But as the stories of well-meaning parents have gained attention, the way lawmakers think about child independence is starting to change: All told, 13 states have either created new, less restrictive child-neglect laws or amended existing ones. A bipartisan federal bill, the Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act, was introduced in the House of Representatives in May.

“Despite the shift, some parents are still finding themselves in the government’s cross hairs.

“… It’s not that parents are oblivious to the benefits of giving their kids autonomy. According to a 2023 poll by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 84 percent of parents of children from 9 to 11 said kids benefit from having free time without adult supervision. But in that same poll, only 50 percent of parents said their child would go to find an item in a store when the parent is in a different aisle.

“‘There is no way for a child to feel capable and competent without being given space to make survivable mistakes,’ Dr. Pressman said. ‘You want the child to stretch and bend, but not break. That’s the premise of healthy child development.’”

Had my parents not given me the freedom to roam the great outdoors without supervision, I doubt I’d have developed into a proper person. Getting oneself into hairy predicaments and having to work one’s own way out helps build positive character traits.

One has to wonder about the logic involved in canceling a flight and inconveniencing more than a hundred passengers rather than snatching a knot in an incorrigible child.

What sort of character emerges when kids misbehave without facing consequences?

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A friend sent me a meme recently, a send-up of Bojangles fast-food chicken and biscuits and an unlikely association with the lingering remains of the punk rock movement. I meant to explore it further, as I appreciated the punk rock scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, so much so that I had floated the idea of skipping my older sister’s wedding to see The Plasmatics at The Agora Ballroom in Atlanta. That was an unpopular suggestion at home, where wedding prep tensions were running at full tilt.

What blocked that line of research was the drawing associated with the meme, which featured a young tattooed woman in the sort of punk attire that was de rigueur at the height of the movement. I looked into her face and recognized her immediately.

Veronica Lodge. I’d have known her anywhere.

Veronica represented one edge of the love triangle in the Archie comic books I devoured as a kid. Archie Andrews was smitten with Veronica, the dark-tressed teen seductress daughter of Riverdale’s richest family. The third leg was Betty Cooper, a honey-blond girl-next-door from the Andrews’ same socioeconomic class who was over the moon for Archie, who failed to see his destiny right in front of him.

I spent hours cross-legged on the floor of countless Sav-A-Minit, Zippy Mart, and PDQ convenience stores reading the latest Archie comic and its various spin-offs until the clerk ran me off. Then I’d ride my bike across the street to the IGA and pick up where I left off. This was a regular routine for most of my childhood, as well as that of many of my cohorts. However, while I was transported to Riverdale, the other kids hanging around the magazine rack were riveted by other universes peopled by Superman, Batman, Green Hornet, and other fantastical creations that I had no interest in.

I was drawn to the storylines of Archie and his pals because the characters were archetypes of real, ordinary people. Archie might get angry, but he never turned green and swole like the Incredible Hulk. Archie faced the everyday challenges of life with the tools he had on hand — his wits, his witlessness, and his inevitable failings.

The Archie-Betty-Veronica love triangle is a multifaceted trope that has permeated works of fiction (and fact) throughout history. We saw it again on Gilligan’s Island — rich, famous, sex kitten Ginger or cute-as-a-button Mary Ann?

Oddly enough, I never identified with Archie, the archetypical Every Boy, although truth be known, I was more Archie than sidekick Jughead Jones, moronic athlete Moose Monroe, or the villainous well-to-do Reggie Mantle. I, too, had crushes on girls who had no interest in me, and was oblivious to those who may have. Had they existed, I was unaware.

In recent years, those superhero comics have found new audiences as feature-length blockbuster films. Archie, I hear, has an updated treatment in a television series on a channel I apparently don’t get. I don’t really have any interest in anyone else’s idea of the Riverdale crew as real live characters. I imagine it would be as inauthentic as Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher.

As I fondly peek back to a time when I’d sit for hours on a cool, nasty tile floor and read comic books off the rack instead of shelling out a dime to take them home, I realize how the storylines of this unheralded comic world helped shape the person I would become. My interest is in real stories, not those tales that cannot possibly take place. Clark Kent can’t fly simply because he put on a costume. A real person would never be able to change clothes easily in a phone booth, assuming they could find one. Bruce Wayne can surely afford all that Bat stuff and a dedicated lair, but putting on a rubber suit and driving a cool car just makes you a cosplayer.

Give me Archie, Jughead, the jalopy, and the antics of hapless teenagers any day. If I’m ever in peril, those are the folks I’d want to depend on to pull me from the quicksand. Even punk-rock Veronica.

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Recently I have started volunteering at the Respite Care Ministry program at First Methodist Church in Dothan, and I have found that spending time with and offering assistance to those struggling with mental decline in the autumn of their lives has been rewarding to me in many unexpected ways. Aptly named, the program gives a break to caregivers of those suffering from various stages of dementia. For four hours each day, four days a week, they have an opportunity to run errands, see a movie, visit friends or otherwise enjoy their “respite” from the responsibilities of caring for a loved one experiencing these insidious changes in their very being.

Perhaps the most unexpected of these “rewards” is the opportunity to explore what I’ve always believed to be the most misunderstood state of the human condition — happiness.

Last Tuesday, my weekly gathering of codgers chewed on the notion of happiness for a while after breakfast. We drew no conclusions — we rarely, if ever, do — but left our conclave with the idea that efforts to apply some sort of scientific analysis to the concept may well be futile.

In my own limited intellect, I pigeonhole it under “It is what you make it.”

I well recognize that I am entering the season of reflection, from those indeterminable years that stretch out beyond the point at which you became invisible to those of younger generations to the cusp of realization that many more productive miles stretch out ahead. It’s time to look back, assess, reassess and make adjustments, all while keeping in mind the words “memento mori” — “Remember you will die” — a central obsession of The Stoics.

So what is happiness? Is it good health? Is it a flush bank account? Perhaps. But there are terminally ill people facing death as happy as can be, and those who may not know where their next meal will come from but find joy in life nonetheless.

As The Codgers acknowledged last week, any attempt to measure this elusive quality is flawed beyond repair. Those who completed scientific surveys on rainy days report a lower level of happiness than is reported when the sun is shining.

How many of us have convinced ourselves that if we only had a dog, a pony, a Tesla, a facelift, that we’d be happy, only to find that the acquisition of choice failed to make the expected difference?

Perhaps we should consider that we, ourselves, have no idea what will make us happy, and that instead of seeing it as a state to be achieved, it’s instead an achievement that finds us when we aren’t actively seeking it.

That takes me back into the classroom spaces of First Methodist’s Respite Care Ministry. I walked into the room with my friend Sister, a longtime volunteer, and took a seat at a table with a few acquaintances and others I would meet for the first time. Everyone was there because they wanted to be there. No one talked about what was in it for them. Shortly the participants — “our friends” — arrived, dropped off beneath the portico by caregivers and loved ones. Every face held a smile as we paired off, friend and volunteer, and made our way into the rooms where we’d tackle puzzles and games, sing songs, play with a dog, hear piano recitals, take in a brief lesson from biblical teachings, eat a hearty lunch, and engage in a rousing game of volleyball with pool noodles and balloons.

I had fully expected the possibility of a grim experience, encountering personalities once razor-sharp now dulled by an affliction we don’t fully understand. I expected to leave in a dark mood after one day, and not return.

Instead, I was surprisingly buoyant, uplifted by the brightness that friends and volunteers alike brought into the rooms to create an exceedingly positive experience.

I don’t know that science will ever succeed in defining happiness. But when it happens, I’ll bet it looks a lot like a Respite Care ministry.

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If someone asks what sort of music I like, I’ll usually hesitate because it’s not an easy question to answer. There’s not an obvious superficial connection, so it’s difficult to categorize. I’m a longtime fan of the Grateful Dead and most of its offshoots and cover bands, such as Dark Star Orchestra, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, and Dogs in a Pile – a catalog of songs that defy categorization themselves. I like a lot of jazz, bluegrass, ska, reggae, and whatnot. In its time, I despised what was generally referred to as “disco,” but I’ve come to appreciate the Bee Gees, Abba, and that Gloria Gaynor song. I grew up on radio, so I have a fondness for Three Dog Night, the Beatles, Steely Dan, and countless others. John Prine. Ferlin Husky. Jon Batiste. John Legend. Andrea Bocelli. Alison Krauss.

I suppose the thread is the artists’ extraordinary mastery of their craft, and it should come as no surprise that in the wild, wild west of the internet, such peerless talent often languishes in unexpected places.

It’s probably been a decade or so since I stumbled across something called Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox. It’s less a band than a collective, with artists who move in and out of the organization, lending their skills to particular projects undertaken by the whole. It’s offbeat, often whimsical, like the clip of Puddles’ Pity Party, a 6-foot, 8-inch sad clown performing Lorde’s “Royals” in a cabaret style in front of a small combo.

A couple of years ago, we made a short getaway to the mountains, and I noticed that Postmodern Jukebox was scheduled to appear in a venue in Asheville while we were there. I booked tickets, but wasn’t really sure what to expect. One thing I did expect was that we would have seats, but the afternoon of the evening performance, I discovered the venue was “standing room only,” but I could upgrade our tickets to a seated section for a nominal fee. Although I have stood without complaint for more concerts than I can count, I’m not 20 anymore, so of course I ponied up the premium for a chance to sit down.

It’s hard to describe what these folks do, but it’s clear that each of them has such a profound understanding of musical theory that they’re able to pull it off in such a way that leaves the audience astonished. Imagine contemporary songs re-scored in styles from the ‘30s or ‘40s and singers, male and female, who possess the sort of vocal range that made Freddie Mercury a superstar.

It was a mesmerizing experience, and as enthralling as the musical performers were, I was particularly taken by a tap dancer who hopped up on a plywood platform directly in front of us. She was a little wisp of a girl who might’ve weighed 85 pounds, and with her first tap, her feet disappeared into a blur and her thin legs became Grey’s Anatomy personified. She stomped that board like it owed her money, and when she finished, I thought surely she was spent. But she returned time and again and with percussive precision to rival the most skillful drummer.

It was an evening filled with the unexpected. The emcee wasn’t just a skillful master of ceremonies, he’s quite a crooner. And I certainly didn’t expect the drummer to have a spectacular voice as well.

I still can’t find an appropriate description for what we experienced there. But we appreciated their interpretation of contemporary music so much that I talked my sisters and their spouses into joining us to see PMJ again in December.

My family doesn’t share my broad, eclectic taste in music, so I hope they’ll find the same spark. But we do all love a good meal, so at least we’ll have had a nice dinner.

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I read a book recently called “The Correspondent,” about a woman who has been a lifelong letter-writer. The book is written in epistolary form as a series of letters and replies, and is far more interesting than it sounds. (If you have Audible, I suggest listening instead of reading. Multiple narrators help keep all the players straight.)

I have always loved mail, so much so that I often think I’d have made a good postal carrier. I could have one of those big leather pouches, a vehicle with the steering wheel on the wrong side, and a day off every holiday.

There are some jobs in which, no matter what they do, workers are unappreciated and unfairly criticized by the people they serve. After decades of working for the newspaper, I’ve long been accustomed to that, but I knew what I was in for. When I was a kid delivering the daily news, I would have to collect the $3.18 monthly fee from subscribers on my route. Most people mailed me a check, but those who required a personal visit would usually complain about “The Ruptured Duck” while handing me a fistful of coins and a crumpled bill or two, or worse, complain and then tell me to come back the next day, when they’d complain again.

It wasn’t just me. At The Birmingham News/al.com, Carol Robinson posts something she calls “Fan Mail Friday” on her social media at the end of each week, and shares the worst of the hate mail she receives constantly for what has to be the best crime reporting in the southeast United States. Carol, bless her heart, takes it all in stride, as she should.

However, postal workers have it worse. Years ago, I spent a day with a postal carrier, Mr. Metcalf, and I learned quickly that there’s far more to it than a leisurely walk through the neighborhoods each day. For every dime they earn, they deserve a quarter.

I would get my own daily dose of mail-wrangling each morning when I opened my work email interface. There I would find a couple hundred unread messages, and then spend more time than I should going through them to decide which two or three I actually need to see.

Now I only have my personal email to deal with, and there are currently more than 80,000 unread messages. Most are junk. Some are spam. A few are merchandising from places I’ve done business. I always open Col. Littleton’s Leather Emporium messages in case some expensive bison bag I covet has been marked down 80 percent. It hasn’t yet, and I’m not holding my breath. In fact, the price seems to have gone up about 20 percent.

I get a daily aggregation from an outfit called 1440, a digest from the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, a short reading from Daily Stoic, and another called Delanceyplace.com. Among my favorites is Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in building their vocabulary, and The Marginalian, which makes me think of things I’ve never thunk before.

The emails that I find the most interesting are the hoaxes; they keep me abreast of the latest trends in scammery.

I know my Paypal account has not been frozen. Nobody’s done anything with my Amazon account, Netflix, or any of a half-dozen other accounts I don’t have.

But one I got the other day broke new ground for me. I got an email from some guy named Jason, who said he had taken over my computer and threatened to expose me with some embarrassing find unless I paid up.

From the way he wrote, it seemed unlikely that he was a native English speaker. There was something about the syntax that didn’t ring true, even when he referred to me as “mate” and used other idioms with the hope of sounding British or Australian. The tone of his prose bounced from profane to formal and back, and he eventually got to the point: Send him 1,014 Bitcoin or he’d send the video to everyone in my contact list.

It makes you wonder if such a scam is possible. Are there people out there who get caught doing embarrassing things by a hijacked webcam and then extorted with them? People surely engage in activity they’d rather not broadcast, and I suppose taking over a webcam is child’s play for a crafty hacker, but I’m not aware of any instances of this.

However, we recently watched an episode of “Black Mirror” in which some nefarious hacker manipulated people into doing horrible things by threatening to expose their secrets.

As for my own would-be extortionist’s demands, he should attenuate his expectations. I did a quick calculation based on the day’s valuation of Bitcoin: $63,805,047.54, up a million or so from the day before. Like I or anyone else has that lying around.

But the joke’s on him; had he really attempted to “take over my computer,” he’d know my webcam doesn’t work – it’s covered by a Chiquita banana sticker.

By the end of “The Correspondent,” I’d formed a dim view of Sybil, the main character, so much so that I’d cheerfully read a sequel in which she engages in terse correspondence with Jason, the hapless scammer. Now that would be a real page-turner.

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I got a new camera a couple of weeks ago. Actually, it’s pre-owned, and I traded for it — a couple of cameras I had on hand, along with some accessories swapped into a single camera, an upgrade.

It seems like I’ve always had several cameras around, but for decades my primary tool was a Nikon F3 Bettye gave me as a birthday gift, the year my previous Nikon died mid-shoot. Ironically, I was photographing Doug Snellgrove, a brilliant shooter who worked in black & white. Doug was a reluctant subject; “I’m so ugly I’m liable to break your camera.”

I had taken a couple of images when the device ceased to function. It was a hilarious moment when we all realized that the camera was indeed broken. The F3, on the other hand, is virtually indestructible, and would shoot a roll of film in short order if I could find some film, which you really have to look for these days.

There were several cameras around the house when I was growing up, most notably an Argus C3 rangefinder that belonged to my father. His mother had been fascinated with photography, and would always have her Kodak box camera; as a result, we have a wealth of family photos from that side of the family.

When my dad shipped out for military service, MawMaw told him to take lots of pictures. He spent his tour in Europe as a radio operator, and just before he processed out at the end of his enlistment, he bought the Argus and got a buddy to go around on a whirlwind sight-seeing tour to snap pictures to take home to his mother. MawMaw was thrilled, and deftly ignored that my dad and his pal were wearing the same clothes in every shot. She called the stack of scallop-edged black-and-white prints The “Lenny and Me” collection based on my father’s travelogue — “Lenny and me at the Eiffel Tower”; “Lenny and me on the Champs-Élysées”; “Lenny and me at the Moulin Rouge.”

The Argus never got much use after that. Mother had a variety of Kodaks over the years, and that’s where most of our family photos originated. I don’t remember being tempted by any of them. But at one point, I came into the possession of a Polaroid Swinger, and when I could scrape up enough money, I would ride my bike to Eckerd’s and buy a package of black-and-white film, then race home for a photo binge — if you can call 10 pictures a binge. The draw of the Swinger is that it used Polaroid’s instant film. You’d take a photo, and the camera would spit out a thick rectangle. You’d wait a prescribed around of time, and then peel the photograph away from the backing. Voila! — a picture.

I came across a few of those Polaroids recently. They didn’t hold up well. Most are hard to make out. There’s one of a Corvette in the intersection of Main and Oates streets, a couple of our family dog, Poochie, and one I assume to be Daffodil, a neighbor’s dog, because the animal is barking at me. Daffy was always barking at me.

When I was in college, I took a photojournalism class. Each of us was assigned a Pentax K-1000 single-lens reflex camera to use during the term. It was a bit more complicated than I was used to. The Swinger required only that you turn a knob until the word YES illuminated, and then you’d press the shutter button. The Pentax had dials and numbers, and we had to learn how different settings controlled light and time, and I wondered if I would ever get a photograph.

Once it all fell into place, I began to enjoy taking photographs. I sold my bicycle, bought a Nikon, and shot a million rolls of film. When I got a job as a newspaper photographer, I shot a million more. Much of the film I used outside of work was color negative film and the occasional Kodachrome, but I loved black-and-white film. Much of my personal black-and-white film was developed by Frank Gaines.

I was dismayed when Frank died. I’d known him most of my life, starting with Boy Scout Troop 109 at Calvary Baptist Church. Years later, when I needed some black-and-white film developed, I would drop it off at his shop. Much of his business was commercial photography, so finding him there was a crapshoot. When he was there, he was always ready to talk about cameras, films, photography in general, or Dothan history. Frank amassed a tremendous collection of photographs of Dothan and the surrounding area, and was the go-to guy for anyone who had a question about the past. Frank would, more often than not, answer a question with an image. And it was always exactly what the inquirer would be looking for.

I’ve thought a lot about Frank in the last few days. His family and friends mourn him, of course. But from the perspective of our area’s pictorial archive, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of our area, Frank’s passing left a tremendous void yet to be realized.

It leads me to wonder about how we’ll chronicle images in the future. I still have film equipment, but haven’t used it in years. Film is nearly impossible to find, and developers are scarce. Like most everyone else, I take photographs with my cell phone, and those images are to the Polaroid black-and-whites what a Maserati is to Fred Flintstone’s Yabba-Dabba-Do-mobile. They’re also intangible and ethereal; you won’t find an iPhone photo in a desk drawer in 50 years.

I’m still feeling my way around the digital camera world. They look deceptively simple, but there’s a steep learning curve to be conquered before it becomes an extension of my body as the F3 was for so many years.

I have the “Lenny and Me” Argus C3 somewhere; the Polaroid is lost to time. But it made me remember a barking Daffodil and a $19.95 song — “Meet the Swinger, order a Swinger …”

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Composite Image by Perplexity

I trudged across a field at Landmark Park yesterday for the dedication of Chapel in the Oaks, a project brainstormed by my friend Mark Shertzer and executed by a number of volunteers and artists who’ve worked relentlessly over the last year or so.

Gathered in the shade of an awning was a sea of faces, many of which I knew and many more I should know but couldn’t place. It’s been a while since I was in a random crowd such as this.

My friends Julia and Sarah turned up, and we admired the artwork, and the remarks of Landmark Foundation board members and Mark, who explained his vision and thanked those who brought it to fruition.

Then the inevitable happened, and people started talking to one another. My anxiety rose as I tried to put names to faces.

Fortunately, I wasn’t alone.

“See that blonde over there?” Sarah asked. “I’m supposed to know her and can’t place her.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen her before,” I said.

“Oh, yes you have,” Sarah assured me. “Her husband … well, I don’t remember what her husband does.”

A cheerful man turned toward me later and said he thought he was supposed to know me. He introduced himself, as did I. And yes, we probably should have known each other but didn’t.

The whole scene reminded me of a discussion I had with a couple of guys recently, and we were recalling some other fellows we hadn’t seen in a while. Or perhaps I should say that we were attempting to recall.

“Oh, yeah, you remember the guy,” I said. “Don or Dan or something. He kinda looked like this.” I made a grimacing expression, hoping for a reasonable version of the guy’s resting-face glare.

“I know exactly who you mean,” one fellow said. “Can’t remember his name.”

“He looked mean as all get-out, but he was nice,” I continued. “His wife now – she was the mean one of that bunch.”

The third fellow in this conversation is a good 40 years younger, and he watched the exchange as if we old dogs were performing magic tricks. But these dialogues are more and more common among my cohort these days, and we muddled through as if it were perfectly normal – because any more, it is.

An hour later, it came to me, and I took out my phone and texted the name to my fellow mis-rememberer.

“Yes!” he replied.

There’s an old yarn that I’ve enjoyed for years, in which a couple of guys are talking without being able to remember the names of people or places they were talking about. One guy was trying to think of the name of a restaurant when suddenly he asked the other: “What do you call that flower with the stickers on the stem? You know, the one that smells good?”

The other guy thought for a minute, then replied, “A rose?”

“Yes, yes, that’s it!” the first guy exclaimed. The he turns toward the kitchen and calls out to his wife: “Hey, Rose, what was the name of that restaurant…?”

Try as I might, I can’t deny that the gradual creep of time is taking a toll on me. On a Zoom call a few months ago, I had leaned back in my chair in such a way that I had slipped mostly out of the camera’s field of view. When I noticed my window on the screen, the image showing only from the eyebrows up, I saw my grandfather’s pate, with its wisps of gray hair and smattering of age spots.

I have no interest in looking young, but I try to keep my mind sharp by reading, doing puzzles, and watching shows like Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, and I will feel a little too smug when I get a question right, particularly when the contestants don’t.

We’ve set up our Tivo recorder to capture every episode of Jeopardy! and will usually watch one at lunch.

“Constantinople!” I’ll shout. “Jean Shrimpton!” “Longinus!” “Aglet!”

And then there are days like last Thursday, when play after play went by without me knowing a single answer. For what it’s worth, neither did the contestants; by the first commercial break, all three were deep in the hole.

If I’m being honest, I’ll confess that I am in awe of these Jeopardy! contestants, particularly those with lightning-fast recall of even the most arcane or picayune tidbits of information. There is a young woman – early 20s, I’d say – who had one of the more impressive runs in recent memory. She’s what I’d call a flibbertigibbet – chatty, giggly, lots of nervous energy and hand-waving. But her mind is impressive; I can’t imagine she’d ever have to wait several hours for someone’s name to bubble to the surface.

I like to blame it all on the birthdays that have collected behind me and those like me, and it’s good to spend time with people who toil in the same beanfields – those who, like me, wind up out in public with stray patches of whiskers missed by the razor and overlooked by presbyopic eyes. We swap advice on home remedies for gout and consult each other on technological conundrums when what we really need is someone’s grandchild. But mostly we encourage each other in ways that aren’t overtly supportive.

I have a friend with whom I have corresponded for many years, and usually, she signs off any missive with a five-word phrase: “Keep passing the open windows.”

It began as an inside joke. We’re both fans of the writer John Irving, and the phrase comes from his novel Hotel New Hampshire, in which one character kills herself by self-defenestration, prompting family members to continually remind each other to avoid the same fate.

I think we all need that reminder every now and then – perhaps not specifically, but if it applies, it’s good advice at any age. And don’t sweat forgetting someone’s name; they probably don’t remember yours, either.

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I’m almost ashamed to admit that I take great pleasure in reading about the annual Darwin Awards. Every year there’s a new crop of stories detailing some poor yokel’s death by miscalculation. There’s even a category for survivors.

What draws me to these stories is the affinity I have to the poor schmucks, bless their hearts. I read once with great interest about a couple of fellows who blew a fuse in a pickup truck. Having no spare fuses handy, they replaced it with a .22-caliber bullet. I nodded as I read, thinking, “That makes sense; they’re about the same size.” The inevitable happened — the round heated up and fired, killing one of the men — and the story ends with a Darwin Award.

While it’s not something I aspire to, I fully expect to be among a group of Darwin winners eventually.

One of my earliest memories involves peanut butter and pain and set the stage for a lifetime of misadventure. I was a toddler, I believe, and had toddled my way into the kitchen, grabbed a jar of Jif from the cabinet and climbed a shelf to reach into the silverware drawer and fish around for a utensil, winding up with one of Mother’s good forks. As I sat on the kitchen floor raking peanut butter on my tongue, I noticed that about a foot up the pine-paneled wall was an off-white rectangle with two sets of two vertical slots. I scooted over to investigate and poked at one of the slots with my greasy fork.

What came next is a blur. There was pain, crying, and my hysterical mother. Some might call it a teaching moment, but I apparently didn’t learn anything except that sticking a piece of metal into an electrical outlet is a bad idea. I would reprise this electrifying discovery some years later while dissecting a bedside alarm clock. Having disconnected the power cord, I wondered what would happen if I plugged it in and then touched the two bare wires together. I came to on the other side of the room with numb, burned hands.

It wasn’t until I got together with other kids that the real fun began. I grew up as the middle child and only boy in the family, but I had a friend with two older brothers in an adjacent neighborhood. Their milieu was a wonderland of potential doom, and our mischief was limited only by our imaginations.

It’s a true miracle that any of us survived to adulthood. We fashioned zip guns out of bicycle spokes, birdshot, and kitchen matches, and fired them at each other. Someone strung a metal cable across the backyard from about two stories up an ancient tree, and we’d climb to dizzying heights and hook an old pair of bicycle handlebars over the cable and jump, sliding down at the speed of light before slamming into the ground. We’d play along the railroad tracks and throw half-pound chunks of granite railroad rocks at each other with the velocity of a minor league pitcher. One of the brothers flung a railroad rock at a mockingbird on a telephone wire one day and hit the bird so hard it disintegrated into a cloud of feathers.

Surprisingly, my only injury from those afternoons of misadventure came from one of the reedy weeds that covered the vacant field behind the Fullers’ Dixie Dandy store. I was running through the field — probably to evade a volley of granite from the older brothers — when one of the reeds stuck into my leg and broke off about an inch into the flesh. That story ended in the General Hospital emergency room with stitches and mercurochrome, but what I remember most is that they shaved my whole leg.

While these episodes don’t rise to the level of a top-shelf boneheadedness competition, they honed my skill in preparation for what would have been my greatest shot at Darwindom.

Some years later, I was working with a group of guys in a warehouse when some of us were sent to a recently purchased property outside of town. It was farmland where we would eventually plant an orchard of trees, but first there was some cleaning and clearing to do. We were going through an outbuilding filled with various junk, and I wound up in a wooden loft, clearing out boxes. The last box, back in the corner, was reinforced waxed cardboard covered in dust. There was some writing on it, but it was dark and I could not read it. It was heavy and we’d be throwing it away, so instead of trying to carry it down a ladder, I pushed the box to the edge of the loft and dropped it to the ground. Then I climbed down, picked it up, and took it outside where the other guys were resting.

“Hey, check this out,” I said, holding up the 50-pound box. The bottom half was covered with what looked like granulated salt. One of the guys’ eyes grew to the size of saucers. His voice went high and the blue string of profanity roughly translated to, “Be careful with that!” The fellows scattered like a live hand grenade had been tossed among them.

Everything I knew about dynamite, I’d seen in Wile E. Coyote cartoons. A case of dynamite was supposed to be a wooden crate with big red DANGER words written on it. And Wile E. Coyote never explained the nuances of volatility, and how improperly stored dynamite will degrade, and nitroglycerin can leach out and crystallize, becoming unstable and sensitive to friction or shock. A little jostle and ka-BOOM.

But I had no reason to know any of this, or that the box in my hands was indeed an old cardboard case of degraded dynamite, so when the guys started running, I dropped the box and started running, too.

There was no ka-boom, but you already know that; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. I missed my shot at a Darwin Award, at least so far. However, my recent work on the patio keeps me in the running: I grabbed a live wire after having turned off the wrong electrical breaker.

There’s always next year.

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There’s a word that I have heard used frequently throughout my life, and even now I hear it multiple times each week, perhaps even daily. No, it’s not one of those among George Carlin’s infamous Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television, although I inevitably hear those, too.

This particular word would offend no one, although there are surely some people who dread its implications.

The word is “hustle” — a versatile collection of consonants and letters that can convey various meanings:

— You’ve overslept; you’d better hustle if you’re going to make your flight.

— You’re on a sports team and aren’t performing at your best, and your red-faced coach is screaming from the sidelines, “HUSTLE!” perhaps accompanied by a few George Carlin modifiers.

— You have a job and live beyond your means, so you’re always on the lookout for a side hustle.

— You shoot pool with the skill of a professional, but lure strangers into a wager with poor play, hustling them out of their money.

— It’s 1975, you’re in a polyester jumpsuit, moving oddly to a pounding rhythm beneath a mirrored ball while a man named Van McCoy implores you to “Do the Hustle.”

— There’s frenetic energy afoot, “hustle and bustle,” some would say, occasionally truncated to the latter, which shouldn’t alarm you if it’s happening in your hedgerow, as it’s likely just a spring clean for the May queen.

Presented as an aspect of personality, it’s something I admire greatly and I see it often, and in the most unlikely places.

I was in a village in rural Cambodia once with a group of American journalists. We were looking for a woman to ask about her medication, and the villagers had seen us walking up the trail to their compound and were ready when we got there. One man squatted over a swept bit of earth where he presented three sticks, two rocks of interesting shape, and a length of red string. I bought the string for a dollar, and he beamed broadly with satisfaction. A colleague was making a fuss over an unidentifiable branch with nodules on it being hawked by a woman farther up the path. She bought the small bough with a five-dollar bill, and the woman wept with joy.

The Cambodian “merchants,” of course, were simply trying to survive, as was the kid in a tuk-tuk who drove me to a convenience store about a mile from the hotel compound. He was earning money so he and his brother could go to an American school. He asked for a dollar, but I gave him a five. Another colleague later told me that overpaying the tuk-tuk boy would disrupt the economy, but I didn’t care. I felt I was rewarding an ambition and work ethic that seems woefully lacking today here at home.

This is why I will always stop whenever I see a makeshift stand at the side of the road manned by kids often too young to be lingering near traffic. On their table may be Kool-aid, lemonade, brownies, cookies, or whatever else they believe they can hawk. It doesn’t matter to me what they’re selling; if they’re out there, I’m going to turn the car around and go back, and I’m going to buy what they’re selling and pay them more than they’re asking.

Some would call me a fool, saying that I’m an idiot to be hustled out of a few bucks for a two-ounce styrofoam cup of lukewarm sugary lemon water. But what I see is hustle with a different meaning, and I admire it greatly. I see young people who, for whatever reason, hope to generate a bit of income. Instead of getting money from their parents, they created a small business and, under the watchful eye of a parent or some other responsible adult lingering nearby, they’re learning from interaction with strangers they hope will be convinced to buy whatever it is they’re selling.

Last week, I was driving home at the end of the day when I passed such an enterprise on a residential street. Two kids — siblings, I assume — were next to a stand, on high alert for potential customers. The boy, perhaps 6 years old, noticed me turn around and was waiting at the curb when I pulled up. He stepped up to my passenger window and greeted me. “Hello, sir, would you be interested in a cup of lemonade? It’s only a dollar,” he said. I told him I would love a cup, but he continued to stand there, and I realized he was waiting for the money. Savvy kid.

“I only want one cup, but I’m giving you two dollars, one for you and one for your little sister.” An adult had helped the girl, perhaps 4, pour a cup for me. She was walking up with it when her brother and I completed the transaction.

I drove away bursting with pride for those kids. They were absolute strangers to me, but for two dollars, I got the satisfaction of participating in important life lessons for both. I had kind thoughts of their parents, who had obviously instilled gracious manners in their children, and built a foundation for navigating the tricky interaction with the random public while inviting both warmth and keen caution.

It was the third cup I’d bought this month from unknown children on the side of the road. Each cup was concocted by the same recipe — one part sugar, one part lemon, and 10 parts hustle, topped off with water and a lemon slice, and every sip brought the sweet taste of ambition.

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Photo by Jing Bo Wang

I had a friend growing up named Buddy, who was a bit different from other kids I knew. Buddy’s hair was a bit longer than the other kids’, and he wore shorts and hunting boots almost exclusively. He was quiet — not necessarily shy, but a fellow who didn’t have a lot to say. He had older siblings who each marched to their own soundtracks, and in a crowd like that, he likely didn’t have a lot of opportunity to voice his thoughts.

Buddy was a thinker. He was smart and made good grades. And his interests diverged from the mainstream.

We became friends just after high school. I’d been hired by my friend Frank’s father to build projects in his woodworking shop, and in addition to Frank’s dad, the crew consisted of Frank, Buddy, and me.

Buddy didn’t participate much in the woodshop banter, but listened intently with a bemused expression. Word got out somehow that he often played soccer in the afternoons, which was virtually unheard of at the time.

Early in our shift one day, I made an attempt to draw Buddy into conversation by asking him the name of his team.

“It’s The Nads,” he said, and went on about his business. I assumed it was an acronym and spent the afternoon trying to figure it out. After the workday ended, we’d cleaned up and were waiting for our rides.

“OK, Buddy,” I said. “I give up. I can’t figure out the acronym — something something Dothan Soccer?”

“Nope,” he said. “Just The Nads.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“We decided to call ourselves The Nads so the people in the stands would cheer, “Go, Nads! Go, Nads!”

We both cracked up. Buddy had played the long game with that one, waiting patiently to deliver the punchline.

Years would pass before I heard more rumblings about soccer. At some point it began to catch on, and soon the city recreation department added soccer to its array of team sports.

Colleges began offering scholarships to outstanding players; one of Bettye’s great-nieces got a full ride at Ole Miss and played professionally for a time after graduation.

I even discovered that a lifelong acquaintance who works as a nurse maintains her shift work around when she can catch her favorite team, Madrid, on television.

Today Dothan has its own semiprofessional soccer team, Dothan Dragons, which has a respectable following. I give the Dragons bonus points for their signature fireworks show after games.

I know virtually nothing about soccer, and the home team name, Dragons, always makes me think of Hong Kong. I spent several weeks there decades ago, and was exposed to another game, one that consumed the local Chinese people. Mahjong intrigued me from the get-go. People would play anywhere they could find a flat surface, particularly on the hoods of parked cars in the alleys that crisscross the island. The games were noisy, with tiles being slapped down rapidly while money changed hands. I couldn’t make sense of it, and not just because the tiles were etched with Chinese symbols in different colors.

Years later, we were on a cruise along the Yangtze River, and one of the activities onboard was a mahjong lesson. Bettye and I joined several other Westerners for an hour or two while a Chinese woman rushed us through the basics of a game that, at least for me, remains opaque.

Apparently seeing through the veil to understand the game is possible for Westerners. Throughout our town, groups gather in social settings in peoples’ homes huddled around a mahjong game. There’s even a storefront mahjong parlor downtown where more serious players meet.

At least with mahjong, there’s no real threat of injury, unless you’re in a Hong Kong alley playing with shady characters passing currency back and forth as if they were at a cockfight.

Another emerging pastime that’s growing in popularity is pickleball, which seems to be a mashup of ping-pong and tennis, and is apparently rich with opportunity for bodily harm.

I was having lunch with some guys recently when talk turned to pickleball. I was the only one at the table who doesn’t play, and I don’t have any desire to. However, I was curious about the high incidence of injury, so I asked the others why they think so many people get hurt.

“A lot of people get out there to play when they haven’t been physically active,” one of the guys said. “That’s when you can hurt yourself.”

I saw on television that Dothan just opened a $6 million pickleball facility to meet the growing demand for courts to play on and to lure tournaments, which would bolster the local economy.

I would add, “and increase traffic in emergency rooms.”

I’ve been thinking about pursuing a pastime that will keep my mind agile while saving my hamstrings, and I keep coming back to chess. I have played off and on through the years, and while I have forgotten most of the particulars of the game, I am hopeful that it’ll come back to me.

I need a clever team name that’s a sneaky double entendre but, alas, I don’t expect there will be stands from which to cheer or onlookers who’d stumble into the joke.

Anyone want to help me relearn chess?

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Sister Kathy and I get our fix

To this day I have a Pavlovian response to certain music-box style tunes. If I hear “Baby Elephant Walk,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Camptown Races,” or some other old-timey public domain melody — particularly if it’s faint, warbly, and repetitive — salivary glands at the base of my jaw activate, and I start looking around for a slow-moving boxy vehicle with a speaker on the roof, and dig a hand into my pocket for loose change.

Throughout my formative years, the sound heralded the imminent appearance of the ice cream man, who slowly cruised residential streets to sell frozen treats to dirty-faced street urchins. Long before I’d ever heard the term “Doppler effect,” I recognized what it described and could determine whether the vendor was coming toward me or moving away, and the adrenaline surge adjusted accordingly.

I am a charter member of the Pinky Dinky nation, having mastered the art of separating a dime from my mother and pedaling my tricycle like a demon to answer the siren call. Then came the dilemma — the back of the truck was a cornucopia of frozen delights, and the man was waiting. The Pinky Dinky man was thin, sweaty and grumpy. Despite the load of frozen cargo, the driver compartment was not air-conditioned, and the driver’s slight frame suggested he wasn’t sampling his own goods.

My taste buds were fickle; my favorite of all time changed weekly, from cherry popsicles to ice cream sandwiches to Nutty Buddy to orange Push-ups. If the driver was particularly grumpy, I’d order a Fudgesicle or Dreamsicle rather than keep him waiting.

Talk about gateway drugs — that experience hooked me for life, and I’ve been on a constant search ever since. Whenever I’d go to the Boy’s Club, I’d head straight for the vending machine that sold ice cream sandwiches. At home, my mother would occasionally bring home a carton of something called vanilla “ice milk” — sort of ice cream-ish, but not quite. It was nothing like the ice cream I would always find in Grandmother’s freezer. While our vanilla ice milk was white, Grandmother’s carton of vanilla was rich, creamy, and almost egg-yolk yellow. I can’t say I’ve had anything like it since, and I have had a lot of ice cream.

You might even say I’ve become a sort of snob when it comes to such frozen delicacies. Much of what passes as ice cream today seems to be something else entirely. My friend Mr. Sunshine tells the tale of a half-gallon of ice cream that would not melt. I’m not so opposed to soft-serve that I won’t eat it, but it’s not ice cream. Don’t even get me started on the abomination called Dippin’ Dots.

We’ve been fortunate to have found a relatively inexpensive source of international travel, and keep an eye out for bargain junkets to places away. I love Italy, and have some favorite spots for gelato. A food tour guide gave us a valuable tip for our quest for the perfect gelato. If someone is offering pistachio gelato that’s green in color, take a pass on it. Real artisanal pistachio gelato isn’t green, and if there’s green pistachio in the case, one might consider the whole line suspect.

But even the worst gelato I’ve had in Italy beats most of the other bowls, cups, or cones I’ve had anywhere else. With one exception.

It was a crisp May day in St. Petersburg, Russia, and we were walking along Nevsky Prospect toward the Winter Palace. We’d taken a public bus from our hotel on the Bay of Finland, and the bus was so crowded I couldn’t get off at the right stop, so we had a bit of a walk back toward the Palace.

St. Petersburg is odd in that you don’t see many people out and about, buses not withstanding. In Moscow, we’d seen people lining walkways to stop strangers with offers to sell various goods — a skillet, a sewing kit, a puppy — only to hide their wares in their coats when someone spied an authority figure.

But on this chilly day in St. Petersburg, we encountered one person on a side street standing in front of a push wagon. He beckoned us over, and we went. He was selling ice cream, and despite the weather, we each bought a cup. It may well be the best ice cream ever made, thanks to its high butterfat content. Thirty years later, we still talk about it.

Mel Brooks, or maybe it was Joe Torre, once said sex was like pizza, that even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.

The same could be said for ice cream, particularly if it’s accompanied by a hurdy-gurdy old-timey tune. Doo-dah, doo-dah, all the livelong day.

Please buy me an ice cream cone

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On Saturday night, there was a special event downtown. We hadn’t expected to go, although several of our friends had invited us to join them there earlier in the day. They’d planned to tailgate throughout the day until the Big Event — a drone show, featuring some 300 small, unmanned quadracopters affixed with lights and programmed to create words and images in the night sky. It was an enticing offer — I’d never seen such — but temperatures had been high all week and once you’re inside with the air-conditioning blowing and your feet propped up, it’s going to take a lot to lure you back into the great outdoors.

By 8 p.m., curiosity had gotten the better of us, so we put on some shoes and got in the car headed into the general direction of downtown. We’d set out to join our friends, but I didn’t know how to navigate to the location where they’d be. I had only a vague idea of where this event would take place, so I just meandered through the streets until I found a spot to pull over that afforded us a reasonably unobstructed view of the sky over the Dothan Civic Center. It was eight-thirty, and the drones were scheduled for 9 p.m. I found a patriotic music playlist and put it on, and we settled back to people-watch, occasionally asking each other if we were crazy to leave the comfort of home to sit on the side of the road waiting for something about which we knew very little.

Soon people started arriving at their cars around us, and we wondered why they might leave right before the day’s culmination. But they weren’t leaving; they had apparently noticed our particular stance and decided it might be best to point their vehicles in the same direction, and wait in their air-conditioned cars.

Suddenly four large red rectangles began to rise quickly in the eastern sky, and I felt a surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline. It seemed like a page from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “War of the Worlds,” and it took me by surprise.

It was an interesting performance. The rectangles went dark and rearranged themselves to spell out a message instructing us to tune our radios to a particular station, and then over the next 15 minutes or so, the drones moved silently in the darkness, their barely perceptible silhouettes undulating like a murmuration before their lights and movements created messages, images unique to our area, and several nods to the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation.

When it concluded, I slipped the car into drive, turned up an alley and within 10 minutes was pulling into the driveway, home in time to see fireworks on television.

We might have missed a real treat had our curiosity not won out. The drones told us that the Mike Schmitz family made the show possible. I appreciate his generosity in bringing this sky oddity to our attention.

On Sunday morning, I found myself trolling Amazon for consumer-grade drones. Then I remembered Christmas 1972, when I got a Major Matt Mason Space Crawler by Mattel, which I’d seen in commercials between Saturday morning cartoons, and thought I’d just die if Santa didn’t leave one for me beneath our tree. Before lunch, I’d torn it up. By nightfall, it was in the bottom of my closet with all the other things that had failed to live up to my expectations.

I was only slightly disappointed that the last message hadn’t read “BURMA SHAVE” before the quadracopters rearranged themselves into red rectangles and slowly dropped out of sight.

I set aside my drone dreams and soon fell asleep, slightly concerned that I’d be visited in the night by little green men.

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As the story goes, Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Continental Congress one day in 1787 when a lady stopped him and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin answered succinctly: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

It’s pithy and appropriate, and its origin is hazy if it were ever uttered at all. The tale comes from delegate James McHenry, relating a conversation between Franklin and a Philadelphia socialite, Elizabeth Willing Powel.

Like the children’s game “Telephone Line,” later retellings add a response from Powel — “And why not keep it?” — to which Franklin is said to have replied that the people, “on tasting the dish, are always disposed to eat more of it that does them good.”

No truer words can describe what has transpired with our republic over the past 250 years, regardless of the dubious veracity of the quip’s provenance.

I imagine the Founders getting a glimpse of snapshots from over two and a half centuries and mounting loud protests. But their experiment is nothing if not resilient; generations later, we still have our republic despite near constant efforts to unravel it.

But I doubt that’s what’s on most Americans’ minds today. Given the decline in civics and government instruction over the years, with the exception of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” most people these days know little about how our nation came to be, and really don’t care to know more.

The Fourth of July means a day off from work, big sales in the marketplace, baseball, hot dogs, burgers, fireworks, and for too many, a bit too much firewater.

As a kid, I developed an interest in the writings of George Plimpton, a journalist who seemed cut from the same cloth as Walter Mitty and Forrest Gump. I was fascinated by Plimpton’s ability to tell richly woven narratives about interesting endeavors most of us would never experience. It would be years later before I realized I was drawn to storytelling and those who tell them well more than the content of the stories themselves. Plimpton soon settled into the upper ranks of my esteem.

In 2002, I heard him speak at the Alabama Writers Symposium in Monroeville, and had an opportunity to visit with him afterward. I had a few of his books that I asked him to sign, and was greatly pleased to have said something to him that literally made him double over with laughter.

Every year about this time, I remember Plimpton. It’s the fireworks — Plimpton loved fireworks, and pyrotechnics remain a common theme in many of the best anecdotes in Plimpton lore.

I, too, love fireworks, and would have blown off two or three fingers for the opportunity to burn through a couple of crates of explosives with him. There are scores of such stories collected from more than 200 friends, family members, colleagues and even some detractors in “George Being George: George Plimpton’s Life.”

Novelist William Styron recalled a time Plimpton invited him and his wife Rose to join him in a parade through Manhattan celebrating the Bicentennial of the City of New York. When the Styrons arrived, Plimpton welcomed them to his horse-drawn carriage outfitted with a large sign that read: “Fireworks Commissioner City of New York.”

Rose Styron tells of a gathering at the home of John Marquand several days before the Fourth of July, and how Plimpton smuggled a large cache of illegal fireworks into Martha’s Vineyard so he and his friends could set them off on Marquand’s beach. Apparently someone alerted nearby Otis Air Force Base about rockets, bombs, and missiles over the Vineyard, because soon military aircraft appeared overhead. Plimpton quickly gathered the felonious contraband and left the island.

My own experiences pale in comparison. In our neighborhood, we started out with the most pedestrian of pyrotechnics, the sedate sparkler. As I got older, I graduated to firecrackers, then M-80s or cherry bombs, which had the added cachet of being “outlawed.” Occasionally I’d get my hands on a Roman candle, but even those were fairly boring unless you had someone to point it at.

But nothing was as intriguing as the humble bottle rocket. It was a marvel of simplicity with unlimited possibility. Used as intended, an ignited bottle rocket would fly 10 to 20 yards into the air before exploding as a firecracker might. There were no splashes of color or corkscrew offshoots. It was simply “whoosh-bang!” Because they weren’t fancy, they were relatively economical compared to the more high-toned fireworks. The bottle rocket was nothing more than a thin stick attached to a tightly wrapped capsule of gunpowder. In addition to holding the ignitable part off the ground, the stick gave the projectile a small measure of stability.

Ingenious! And cheap! A few bucks would buy a sack full, which would provide a group of mischievous teenagers with an afternoon of mayhem.

I can’t count the times my friends and I would stake out positions in front of my buddy Anton’s house on Burdeshaw Street for the bottle-rocket wars. Rather than fire the missiles into the air, we would fire them at each other. It was tremendous fun for everyone except Judy, the family dog, who had enough sense to hide after the first explosion. Anton’s younger siblings and their friends would also disappear.

One day a couple of clean-cut kids in black slacks and white shirts — Latter-day Saints youth on their summer mission — rode up on their bicycles and wanted to talk about Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon. Instead, someone aimed a bottle rocket so that it exploded just over their heads. That shot over the bow was all it took; someone handed the missionaries a couple of Bic lighters and a package of bottle rockets and the battle expanded. It was an excellent respite for those guys; after all, they were kids, too.

The whiz-bang of a bottle rocket is a lingua franca among the young at heart everywhere. An exhilarating outing with fireworks transcends cultural barriers like little else. Several years ago, I was in a group on a Rotary International Study Exchange to Hong Kong, and after several weeks in Hong Kong, a Chinese Rotarian took us into mainland China to visit a lychee farm.

Along the way, we had an overnight at a rural compound, which in itself was a leap of faith. We had no idea where we were, or in what sort of place we had been put up. The rooms were austere, almost as if they weren’t designed for lodging. And there was nothing to do except sleep before we hit the road again the next day.

As I lay on my cot looking at the ceiling, I heard some popping sounds nearby, and went outside to investigate. I found three Chinese kids along the roadway puffing on cigars. When they saw me, they weren’t sure what to make of a 6-foot, 2-inch Caucasian. Clearly they’d never seen a Westerner. But they waved me over anyway. On the dirt road was a telltale crumpled brown paper sack just like the ones we used to clutch when we’d leave the roadside fireworks stand on the outskirts of New Brockton, and I knew what was going on: these boys had some illicit Chinese fireworks. One of them handed me a cigar-like stick with a burning ember on the end, and then gave me a package of rockets. I was in my mid-30s, but in that moment I was 16 again, giddily touching the dim red glow of my cigar to fuse after fuse and watching stuff blow up. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone approaching — a severe-looking man in a military-style uniform. Clearly he was some sort of authority figure. The Chinese boys and I froze, and in that moment I wondered if they were thinking the same thing I was — that we were headed for a jail cell, or worse.

The air grew tense as the guard held out his hand as if to confiscate. One of the boys meekly offered the sack. The guard waved him off, and pointed to a cigar. The boy handed him the cigar and the guard took a package of fireworks from the bag and began launching his own fusillade, grinning broadly as the rockets flew away and exploded.

I’m reminded of a time when authority figures interrupted one of Plimpton’s pyrotechnic interludes. He was once again blasting fireworks in Martha’s Vineyard, where the pedigreed New England bluebloods play, and this time he had some high-profile guests, including U.S. Sen. Teddy Kennedy. That didn’t stop the police from manhandling Plimpton into cuffs and then into the back of a squad car, whisking him off to the pokey. Kennedy had an attorney with him, and sent the lawyer off to bail Plimpton out.

He should have considered handing the officers cigars and packages of bottle rockets. The story might’ve had a different ending.

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I’ve heard people say that swimming is like riding a bicycle — once you learn how, you never forget. That may be true, but I wouldn’t know; I haven’t been in a pool in years.

I once loved the water. We spent many summer days playing with the hose, mainly as a means to cool off in the stifling heat of summer. But there were greater thrills in the water department that I was unaware of — lakes, streams, oceans, and, even better, municipal swimming pools.

In the spring before my sixth birthday, my mother signed me up for swimming lessons. I was elated, yet apprehensive. And that apprehension grew over the weeks leading up to the big day. By the time I got into my swimsuit and flip-flops, I was clinging to my towel for comfort. It was a short drive, and before I knew it, I was lined up with other terrified kids at the edge of what seemed to be a vast ocean inside the chain link fence at Dothan Recreation Center, facing my imminent demise with stoicism.

The problem wasn’t so much the water. We were was at the shallow end of the pool, a large rectangle with three-foot depths at the ends. The pool floor had a slight angle, dipping to a five-foot depth in the center of the pool. Even that was manageable.

The problem was The Well, a square extension off one of the long sides to accommodate the diving boards, one low and one high, soaring some 10 feet above the water line. There was a ladder to the top that doubled one’s anxiety with each rung. Stepping out to the business end conjured thoughts of walking the plank on a pirate ship.

The water in The Well was bluer than the rest and appeared bottomless, or at least as deep as the Mariana Trench, although in reality it couldn’t have been more than 12 feet deep.

It didn’t take long for the whispers to start. First came the unwelcome news that to pass the course, each kid had to get from one side of the The Abyss to the other, and I was already sure I’d fail to survive traversing the 20-odd-foot span. Whispers continued: “One kid dove in and never resurfaced.” “They keep giant eels in there; they live on the bottom.”

Older kids from the neighborhood were the swimming coaches — and the likely source of the whisper terror campaign — which did little to instill confidence. Kids teaching kids — what could go wrong?

Each day for a week, we learned to float, kick, and stroke with our arms. We were taught how to be comfortable with our faces in the water, although for some of us, that lesson never took.

At the end of the class on the last day, we were all taken to the edge of The Deep Part, and one by one, we were to jump in and swim to the other side. When my turn came, I wouldn’t get in the water.

I flunked out. I didn’t get a Red Cross Beginner Swimmer patch to be sewn on my swim trunks, and I would not be attending Intermediate Swimmer classes the next summer.

I was perfectly fine with that. “It’s OK, you’ll get it next summer,” Mother said, announcing that she’d already signed me up for next season’s beginner class. “You’ll give it another try,” she said. “You’re no quitter.”

Has she even met me?

So I went the next summer, and the next. The result was the same; I’d gotten competent with the basics, but my fear of the diving well disqualified me from moving forward.

The fourth summer was the charm. I finally got my Beginner Swimmer patch. And I was done, or so I thought. I later completed classes to earn the Lifesaving patch, although that Deep Blue Chasm haunts to this day.

I haven’t been in a pool in for at least 25 years. I doubt I can swim a stroke. I still don’t like the deep end, although I can bob and loll in the shallow part with the best of them.

That’s not to say I am averse to everything deep. We have a monthly book club created to take “a deep dive” into whatever text we’re reading. I’ve attended four online courses from Stanford University to learn more about the Grateful Dead, its culture, its music, and its undeniable influence on modern society. In that regard, I spend a great deal of time in The Deep End.

One last whisper: “If you ever cross The Well, you’ll never be the same.”

As it turns out, that one is true. Victors emerge from the depths with bolstered confidence. As the water evaporates from your body, much of the fear and apprehension evaporates with it.

If I ever get the urge to swim again — and I seriously doubt I will — perhaps I’ll begin from atop the high dive, staring into the gaping watery maw beneath me, just to get it out of the way.

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The big toe on my left foot is a bit wonky. I blame the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, in which many of us spent every minute of every day wandering the earth with bare feet, like George of the Jungle.

I never gave a thought to the danger that lurked with every step. If I stepped on a nail, or sliced my foot open on a broken beer bottle while catching tadpoles in one of the numerous open ditches in the neighborhood, I’d just rub some dirt on it and get back to business. I never got ringworm or any exotic malady because of the ever-present open sores on my feet; thanks to copious amounts of hydrogen peroxide and Merthiolate — the original formula with mercury, now banned — I don’t recall a foot infection.

My first shoe

The Great Toecastrophy was another story. I was riding my bike, a hand-me-down single-speed machine that I hadn’t yet grown into, and had great faith in the chunky rubber pedals. I have these long, prehensile toes that could grip the pedals much like a monkey foot can grip a vine.

But on that afternoon, our street had been freshly paved, and I’d cranked that bike up to Mach 1 and was intent on going faster, faster, faster! I stood up on the pedals, out of the seat, to put the full weight of my body into the effort, and as I did so, my grippy chimp toes lost their purchase and my foot slipped to the ground. Almost immediately the crank, powered by the chain, slammed against the back of my calf, pinning my leg so that my foot was wedged against the ground. Unfortunately, the ground was still moving beneath me at roughly 20 mph, and my toes were essentially pressed into a grindstone of fresh asphalt. I steered toward the curb and wrecked my bike into the front yard of some childless neighbors I did not know. I attempted to examine my injured foot, but there was too much blood. It was impossible to discern exactly where it hurt, because my whole foot was throbbing and burning. I picked up my bike and limped home.

Mother was horrified, and marched me straight to the bathtub, where she rinsed then washed my foot to assess the damage. My lesser piggies were fine, having had the wisdom to fold themselves out of the way of the grinding pavement.

My big toe, however, was a mess. Several layers of skin were missing, as was the toenail. Mother used a whole bottle of hydrogen peroxide as a lavage until it stopped foaming when she applied it. Then she slathered on the Merthiolate as best she could with the little glass wand applicator affixed to the cap. Then came yards of gauze and adhesive tape wrapped and taped until my big toe looked like a baseball.

In time, it healed, but now it leans hard left. When the toenail returned, it did so with the right-angle shape of folded sheet metal, which it retains to this day. Clipping that toenail will forever be an exercise in frustration.

That was the end of my barefoot days. Now it’s shoes and socks outside, house shoes and socks indoors.

As embattled as my bare feet had been, my shoes get it even worse. As a teenager, I kept a tube of Shoe Goo in my closet; it’s a rubber gel that you smear on the soles of sneakers to repair worn spots. My skateboarding shoes developed holes in the soles before the tops looked even slightly worn.

For years I had one pair of dress shoes and a variety of sneakers. I favored the Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star low-tops, and had pairs in numerous colors, all kicked under the bed when I took them off. On several occasions, I’d notice about midday that after oversleeping and scrambling to get dressed and gone, I had grabbed two sneakers from under the bed that were different colors.

One summer, I’d spied a pair of sandals in a magazine called “Levis for Feet.” With thick leather straps, brass hardware, and rubber soles that appeared to be made of auto tire treads, they were just about the coolest shoes I’d ever seen. Of course they were pricey, about twice the cost of the Chucks, but when I accumulated enough cash, I bought them.

A friend and I were attempting to leave the house that evening when we encountered my father, who’d just come in from work. I don’t know what drew his attention to my feet, but he eyed my hippie footwear with derision.

“What’d you pay for those, boy?”

I didn’t want to answer because I knew how he’d react. But I told him.

“Boy, you are a dumbass!” he said. He pointed to the dress shoes on his feet — plain black wingtips he’d picked up at a discount store.

“I paid eleven dollars for these, and they have tops.”

My friend, who’d been standing out of sight behind the oven, was doubled over in a conniption of laughter while trying not to make any noise. I feared that “Boy, you are a dumbass” had entered his lexicon of insults, and I was right.

I didn’t wear the sandals much after that. The thrill was gone.

I don’t want to know how many shoes I have now. Despite this, I find a pair that are comfortable and then wear them constantly until they get too grubby and bunged-up to go on. My solution has been to keep buying the same shoes. I feel like Jeff Goldblum’s character in “The Fly,” an odd fellow who had multiples of the same shoes, pants, and shirts in his closet.

Now I’ve discovered with great dismay that by the time I decide I like a certain shoe and want to get another pair, they’ve been discontinued. I’ve burned through four pairs of a particular Merrell slide, but they’re no longer available. Ditto a pair of Skechers I like. I checked the company’s website and they aren’t there. I went to the Skechers store, and they looked at the shoes as if they’d never seen such. One clerk told me that the company discontinues models and introduces new styles every few months. That’s great for the young, fashion-conscious pups, but for us old dogs with aversion to change, it’s catastrophic.

They still make the Chucks, but because they’re back in vogue, their price has far outpaced the inflation rate over time. And they’re simply canvas and rubber with no arch support, something a kid cares nothing about.

I long for those barefoot days, but I don’t dare try it now. My soles are as tender as a baby’s butt, and I’d have blisters, cuts, scrapes, or worse by nightfall.

Maybe I should coat the bottoms of my feet with Shoe Goo. That may well be the answer.

I’m sure Polymarket bets would soar.

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