I have never in my life met anyone who didn’t love Dolly Parton. I can think of no one else who transcends all attempts to categorize her more than Dolly. She was so much more than a country music singer, an actress, a philanthropist, an entrepreneur, or any of the other labels anyone could choose to describe her.

In a time of great civil, cultural, and political division, Dolly is the closest thing we’ve had to a unifier. As a matter of principle—rather than a carefully calculated strategy to maximize her commercial interests—Dolly refused all efforts by politicians to claim her. She declined the Medal of Freedom twice from Donald Trump and once from Joe Biden.

She would not identify herself as a Republican or a Democrat and would not tell her fans how they should vote. But she had powerful convictions on some issues and was unafraid to speak out on topics that she surely knew would alienate many people in her fan base, particularly her views on the LGBTQ+ community.

Dolly spoke out often and forcefully as an ally, speaking out in favor of gay marriage and transgender rights while pushing back against condemnation of homosexuality on religious grounds.

“I think everybody should be treated with respect,” she once said on CNN. “I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are.”

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These are not the views of someone focused on maximum profit. She was not the least bit fearful of the repercussions on her record sales or personal reputation. She may not have been “political,” but she was honorable, principled, and outspoken throughout her long career.

She was also a well-known champion of literacy through her Imagination Library, which provided free books to schoolchildren. She launched that program in 1995 in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she was born, in honor of her father, who could not read or write.

The program provided one free book per month to children from birth through age five. It eventually grew so much—expanding to Ireland, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere-- that it became a global force for improving literacy around the world.

While other celebrities shill for insurance companies or beer manufacturers, Dolly championed literacy and human rights.

As a human being, she was what we all should aspire to be. Selfless, giving, inclusive, loving.

As a cultural icon, Dolly contained multitudes. How she is best known depends on how and when her fans came to her. The earliest ones remember that young, ebullient singer with a voice purer than Tennessee spring water who sang with Porter Wagoner on his television show way back in 1967. She had released her first album, “Hello, I’m Dolly,” but when she joined the show, her career began to take off.

She was on the show seven years and made several records with Porter Wagoner. I have a couple of them, and they are wonderful treasures. She has said that she wrote her signature hit, “I Will Always Love You” in tribute to Wagoner.

But it wasn’t until she struck out on her own that she really caught fire as the cultural force she would become, releasing hit record after hit record and then appearing in several blockbuster movies, including 9 to 5 with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Of course, she wrote and sang the title song, which became a huge hit.

She was also in “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” “Steel Magnolias,” and “Rhinestone,” which was pretty awful but partly salvaged because anything with Dolly Parton in it could not possibly be all bad. In “Rhinestone,” she tries to turn Sylvester Stallone into a country music singer. Whoever pitched that has a lot to answer for, but Dolly was never anything less than winning and watchable, even with impossible material.

Some of these movies made something of Dolly’s physical appearance—the wigs, her makeup, and of course her buxom figure, all the more emphasized by how tiny she was otherwise. She has said in interviews that she was hurt by the many predictable jokes and ugly remarks about her figure when she was younger, but as she became older and more successful, she learned how to deal with it, partly with acceptance and self-deprecating humor.

She was fine as a movie star, but most of my favorite memories of Dolly over the years were her appearances on talk shows, especially the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It was easy to see that Carson—like everybody else—genuinely liked Dolly, and their banter was always great fun, even flirtatious.

Dolly had one of the quickest wits of anyone ever, which made her guest spots on talk shows unpredictable and frequently hilarious. You never knew what she might say. You just knew it would never be at anyone’s expense other than her own.

Since news of her death began circulating less than two days ago, we have seen expressions of grief across the country that reflect the grief and mourning so many millions of people are feeling. The tip of the Empire State building was illuminated in a pink sparkle on Tuesday night. Tributes have poured in from hundreds of fellow celebrities who knew and loved her.

Even Trump issued an unusually measured statement and ordered flags be flown at half staff for a full week. Unfortunately, Republican lawmakers in Indiana and Missouri have worked to defund Dolly’s Imagination Library, and we are all surely aware of how demonizing transgender people was a central plank in Trump’s reelection campaign in 2024.

Dolly was bigger than all of this. She contained multitudes. I think we are not only mourning her, but something precious that has been lost in America. If Dolly can’t unite us, what can?

We will miss her as a cultural icon and an entertainer without peer. But we will also miss what she represented, a force for good transcending politics.

Just because your daughter is “dramatic” doesn’t mean she’ll end up on the stage one day.

When Kayden was four, she went through a phase that made us think she was experimenting with different career possibilities. Maybe she’d be a nurse, with her penchant for plastering her brother (and herself) with a patchwork of Band-Aids for injuries real or fabricated in hopes of earning sympathy from her audience.

Or maybe she’d be a veterinarian. How often did she treat our poor cat, swaddling him in blankets and confining him to bedrest in a playpen or a stroller, his eyes wild and searching for someone to come along and declare him healthy so he could dart for safety under a bed or sofa.

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Or perhaps most convincingly, she was for quite a long spell a server in a restaurant, taking elaborate orders from everyone in the room with her imaginary pad and pencil, jotting down all that we wanted well before she could actually write. Eventually, Tammy gave her an actual pad and one of those little pencils you use when you play fantasy golf.

“Yes, we do have blueberry pancakes. Bacon or sausage? How would you like your eggs?”

It was years later before we realized what she had actually been doing, which was training for a career in theater. By then, she was playing more complicated roles.

The loyal friend whose feelings weren’t REALLY hurt by not being invited to a birthday party. The brave sister reassuring her little brother that the noise outside was really nothing at all, definitely not a robber or a kidnapper. The honor student who could not possibly have scribbled “WTF” at the top of the first page of a test she didn’t quite do so well taking, or if she did, it was because she thought it meant “where turtles frolic.”

In all of these roles, she was stellar. You would not have known she was acting, which is the idea, right?

As far as I am concerned, the only questionable period in her career to this point would be her middle school years—or what I refer to as “the William Shatner years”—when every scene, every emotion, was amplified by a magnitude of ten, the era of multiple exclamation points.

“MAYONNAISE on a hot dog!!! What kind of person does that??”

“I don’t care if I EVER see her again!!!”

“This math teacher hates my guts and wants me to DIE!!!”

Of course, this wasn’t her fault. Who can be held responsible for the thoughts and feelings that bubble up in the boiling cauldron of adolescence? There is no action or event that is not amplified to an intolerable volume. What can you do when the range on the dial goes only from 9 to 10?

Even so, she had been participating in singing and dancing with a local academy and was cast in a supporting role in a Christmas play. We all agreed that she was splendid indeed, as did strangers seated around us.

Words like “charming,” “poised,” and “natural” were bandied about. Mostly by me, but I heard a few other compliments as well.

We really believed this was just the beginning of what would surely be a memorable and long talked about body of work on the stage. It was easy to imagine her cast as the lead in “The Diary of Anne Frank” or as Liesl von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” or-- ultimately-- Juliet. Bring on the Shakespeare! Especially if the actor cast as Romeo might possibly bear a striking resemblance to Anne Hathaway.

Instead, she pivoted, leaving the academy for the bright lights of the high school marching band, swapping the stage for a football field. That was ten years ago and we are still mystified that she woke up one day and thought, I want to twirl giant flags and wooden rifles with brass instruments blaring a Madonna song in my ears.

Also, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more indifferent, if not hostile, toward sports of any kind. The prospect of her attending high school football games on frosty autumn nights for four years was impossible to imagine.

There were a couple of “incidents” with those wooden rifles in the early days, and she came home from summer band-camp a time or two questioning her decision and resolve. But by her senior year, she was a co-captain and as self-assured as Meryl Streep on Broadway.

We were sorry to see it end after the band’s last competition of her senior year and figured that would be the end of her career under the lights and in front of audiences.

Then, last summer while we were vacationing at the beach, she told us she had auditioned for a part in the local community theater production of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Furthermore, she had landed a role in the ensemble, meaning that she would not have any lines per se, but would be on the stage singing, dancing, and mock-talking with other people in the ensemble in the background during parties and such.

Of course, we were there on opening night. Her mother bought her two bouquets of flowers before deciding on the way to the play—in the interest of decorum--to bestow on her only one. We put the second bouquet in a vase on our kitchen table.

We thought she was amazing, of course. Charming. Poised. So natural, reading her newspaper at a table in one scene, while in another sashaying across the stage and brushing off the boys with an adorable little flick of her wrist and rolling of her eyes. As if!

Of course, we think this is just the beginning. It may be a little late for Anne Frank, but I bet she could still pull off Liesl or Juliet. Bring it on, Shakespeare!

Bowling is fun. Why wouldn’t it be? You get to wear these red and white clown shoes that never quite fit, with those long, loopy, gun-metal gray shoestrings.

You choose a colorful ball from a long row of colorful balls, some chipped, some with holes big enough to hold corn dogs, all of them numbered by weight: 12, 14, 16, and so on. If there’s an art or science to ball selection, you don’t know anything about it, so you go by instinct. You choose a 14 that is the same shade of green as “extra holding” Dippity-do hair gel.

When you place it in the vibrating cul de sac with the other balls waiting to be bowled down the gleaming lanes--where the pins stand at attention like pear-shaped soldiers in ice cream suits--you fancy that the translucent green “pops” smartly among the sullen grays and the sad, fading reds, balls that have seen better days perhaps.

Now you get to put your name up in lights on the scoreboard for everyone to see. Everyone in the entire bowling alley can see your name…and your score, too. This evokes a history of humiliation, the display of your failures in algebra, your time in the 40-yard dash, how much you could bench press in PE class.

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But it’s still fun, because here, in this place, communal failure is not only forgiven. It is embraced. Even the league bowlers with their fancy, fingerless gloves and matching team jerseys bearing the names of their sponsors, either nod sympathetically or look away respectfully as if they just noticed a distant ship on the horizon, while your fellow non-leaguers laugh and poke at you. Because you are a confederacy of gutter-ballers, every one of you.

This is slip-on-a-banana peel fun. Screw it, you’ll get ‘em next time fun. Wah wah wah. And so on.

Jac isn’t quite sure if he’s having fun. He has a new girlfriend and this was her idea. She wanted to go bowling with him. Of course, she wins the first game and immediately puts it on her Instagram for all of her friends to see.

They bowled three games. He was pleased to win one of them. Since then, they’ve managed to incorporate bowling into most of their dates, or outings, or “hangs,” or public mergers, convergences, or whatever young folks are calling it these days.

I know little about relationships in general and nothing at all about relationships among the under-thirty crowd. Every time I have ever asked a question to either of our children about their various relationships over the years, I have come away more confused than enlightened.

Bowling alleys don’t care. They are timeless, indifferent to changing customs, utterly democratic (all of us the same, facing those pins with that green ball in our hands), ruthlessly unforgiving except on those rare occasions when the ball hits the gutter at the last second and then hops back out as if it stepped on a hot coal, knocking down the seven pin and maybe a neighbor or two.

We deserved nothing and got something.

Sometimes, it works the other way, when you bury your ball deep in the pocket just as true and pure as any league bowler, only to find the five pin still there and trembling after the other pins of have been blown in every direction with that satisfying clatter that signifies a strike.

But no. Bowling can be capricious. And when you miss the spare a moment later as your ball goes just wide, you twist the toe of one clown shoe as if putting out a cigarette.

With his girlfriend on vacation, Jac reached out to me for bowling lessons. He’s seen the row of bowling trophies in the garage, gathering dust among boxes of Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated magazines, spiralbound notebooks from college, a mildewed baseball glove, golf clubs, the fragmented remains of several generations of gaming consoles, a box of VHS tapes.

I never sought to be a prize-winning bowler in my youth. Rather, my own father opened a bowling alley in our small town and when I was in high school, I either worked in it or hung out there with my friends, playing pool, or pinball, or foosball, or Space Invaders.

When no one at all was there, I bowled games by myself. Why not? I discovered that there is something deeply satisfying, even cathartic, in bowling a perfect strike. Much like a perfect golf shot, when you don’t even feel the club face make contact with the ball.

Or a perfect kiss. Pure. Uncomplicated. Joy. In these moments, we blessed to step outside the laws and demands of time, for just a moment. But still.

On those slow afternoons while everyone was still at work, a few hours before the league bowlers would pour in and take their places on each of our six lanes, the bowling alley was empty and stone silent, except for the whir of the machines when Leo turned them all on after he oiled the lanes.

I had time to kill, and I killed it bowling game after game. One day, one of the league’s better teams was short one guy who had come down with the flu, so I was summoned to fill in and bowled well enough that another team asked me to join as a permanent member.

I was fifteen or so. One of my dad’s friends started calling me, “Magnum,” a popular brand of bowling ball. That puffed me up a little.

Before I graduated high school, left for college, and retired from “competitive bowling,” I earned trophies for high score, high average, and high set (three games combined). I was an unremarkable student and a terrible baseball player, but I was a pretty good bowler.

Because life isn’t fair, my bowling achievements were of no help to me whatsoever in my own pursuit of a girlfriend. Only middle-aged men took notice, shaking their heads now and then when I bowled another strike to steal a game from their team. It was like being in another country with the wrong currency.

But, here, now, nearly fifty years later, my son and I are putting our names up in lights, and I am showing him how to line up, the ideal arc for throwing the ball straight, and how to use the arrows on the lanes when releasing the ball.

After three games, he’s getting the hang of it. When his girlfriend gets back from vacation, she’s in for a surprise. Just you wait.

One thing about aging is that you never really know how, when, or where you will be blindsided. I was in the shower yesterday getting ready to go out with the family for the big fireworks display at Lake Junaluska, and it occurred to me that this isn’t really something I do anymore, this showering at 5 or 6 pm on a Friday before going out to do something.

Just like that, I was twenty again, back for a spell in the house I grew up in, skinny as a stick but with thickening biceps from all the barbell curls in the basement, in that olive green bathtub washing my thick and lustrous hair with a big handful of “Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific” while Kansas belted out “Carry On, My Wayward Son” on the clock radio.

“Don’t you cry no more, NO!” Guitar.

Mom is in the kitchen frying perch and making mashed potatoes. She’ll open a jar of apples fetched from the root cellar to go with it. This is my favorite meal, one notch ahead of her spaghetti, as far as I am concerned. I’ll wolf it down and then go meet Stewart in town at the gas station or the bowling alley.

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We’ll grab a twelve-pack of Michelob and some Tic Tacs and hit the road, heading maybe to Grandfather’s in Galax, or Tobacco Road, or maybe that new place down in Wilkes County. But probably Tobacco Road, especially if there’s a good band tonight, maybe Sidewinder or Avalanche or even Nantucket, who made it big enough to open for KISS with a song called “Heartbreaker.”

If it’s them, we’ll need to get there an hour early to get a table.

I can smell the fried perch even when I’m in the shower, even with the door closed. And the apples, sprinkled with cinnamon, warming on the stove. Will we be picking up Buddy or will he be riding with Shawn? Wonder if those Lane sisters from Hillsville will be there? It’s not yet clear which of them likes which of us, or the other way around. But something’s happening. We know that much.

What I don’t know yet is how absolutely precious this time is, partly because there is so much of it. Just about everybody I know and love is alive. One dead grandfather that I barely knew and hardly remember, my most vivid memory of him as he was laid out in his coffin in his own living room, his grown children filing up one at a time to see him, and then turning back.

I was startled to see my father in tears. And my grandmother, sitting at the kitchen table, stoic, composed, her eyes moist but resolute. I was nine. He was always looking for his liquor, and she was always hiding it. I found a bottle of whisky once in a basket of laundry, nestled like a rabbit.

He offered me a dollar to find it. She offered me two dollars to keep it hidden. There wasn’t much more to it than that. My other grandfather was a stern man, but he taught me how to shoot a gun and how to skin a rabbit and how to play “Wildwood Flower” on his old Martin guitar.

But he lived a long time. Too long. Well past the time when Alzheimer’s took the better part of him. I would go see him sometimes in the rest home. He didn’t know me at all. Or anybody else really. A nurse fed him little bites of fruit cocktail, which he accepted like a baby bird, his head turned up and his mouth open. There wasn’t much more left of him than that.

But I was a grown man by then, with a job and a mortgage, getting through a divorce, in therapy. By then, I knew too much. How fast this life can be, or how miserably slow. By then, I knew more about time than I really wanted to know. I could comprehend the end of it. By then, there was quite a burgeoning community of the dead.

Now here I am pondering which Medicare plan I should get on in November. All of my grandparents are long gone. My parents are gone, too. Classmates. Friends. Old roommates. About as many people on one side of the ledger as the other.

When I was in the green bathtub showering and looking forward to perch and mashed potatoes and fried apples and the thrilling array of possibilities on those endless Friday nights, time was an ocean. I knew there was another side, but I could neither see nor comprehend it.

When I was with my grandfather in the rest home, time was a lake. I could see the other side now, but not swim to it. Still so much water. You wouldn’t want to set out rowing for it.

When I went to the dentist a few months ago and we were discussing potential dental work relative to the amount of time I probably have left and whether this procedure or that one made more sense in light of the implacable facts of my own mortality, I could see that time is now a stream, one I could step across at any moment, the other side just that close, the community over there much like the one I knew as a boy, when everything seemed like it might stay just the way it was from then on. Why would I think otherwise?

God only knows what happened to those Lane sisters. Carry on, my wayward son. There’ll be peace when you are done.

I’ll get some of this wrong. Forgive me, it has been a long time. But I’ll get the important parts right, so bear with me.

There was a time when The Alleghany News was a mess. It was owned by a couple of guys who didn’t even live in the county that either didn’t know much or care much about good journalism. Eventually, the paper dwindled down to just a few pages and there were very few employees left.

I happened to be in a drifting phase just then, having dropped out of college with no clear idea what was next. My mom said I needed a job if I wanted to live at home, so I found a job as a writer for the paper.

I actually ended up doing a little of everything: writing, editing, layout, you name it. I even drove up to Boone to have the paper printed.

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Did my contributions really improve the paper? I like to think I added a certain “pizzaz,” but no, of course not. I think the most charitable thing that could be said about the paper during that time was that it was unserious.

Then some local people decided to buy the paper and invest in making it a real newspaper again. I would stay on as a writer, but they hired a managing editor/writer with actual experience. They hired an adult who would come in and completely revamp the entire enterprise from top to bottom, which would be quite a project.

I didn’t care that much. I wasn’t going to be paid any less. Maybe it would be fun to work for a paper that wasn’t a punchline. It was the new guy’s job to see to it.

That is how I met Bob Bamberg. I liked him right away. He had a big personality and a great sense of humor. He was smart and clever and eager to do well. I liked that he was both fun and serious at the same time. We were going to work hard and do things completely differently, but we were not going to do it in a dreadful working environment.

I’m not sure Bob knew he was inheriting a lanky college dropout as his only staff member, but we got along from the start and pretty soon he decided that I would primarily focus on writing sports, always a big hit in a small town.

I only stayed a year or two before realizing that there might be something to this notion of taking things more seriously, which led me back to college, but I loved my time working with Bob and getting to know him. He was a close talker, especially if he was excited about something, as he often was.

He had a contagious enthusiasm, a genuine curiosity about people and their ways, and a healthy skepticism that made him great journalist. It is fair to say that our small town—like most small towns—also had a healthy skepticism and general distrust of “outsiders” moving in and trying to change things.

But Bob wanted to change the paper, not the town, not the culture. In fact, there were many things he admired about his new town. He sought to understand, rather than change it. His politics were generally progressive, but he was far from condescending or elitist in his views. Quite the contrary. His interest in people and his desire to communicate on a real level was disarming.

The town embraced Bob, and he accomplished the new ownership’s mission of restoring the reputation of The Alleghany News. Even after I left, we remained friends and stayed in touch. He would frequently reprint columns I had written for other newspapers, and I would reach out to him when he wrote opinions or pieces that I thought were especially sharp.

A year ago, when my mother died, Bob was among the first to call me. He knew her well, not only as the proprietor of the Pizzeria, a popular local restaurant or as a volunteer for just about every organization or charity that Sparta ever produced. He informed me that she had taken a night class he had taught for the community college. He said she was his best student.

“Your mom was a great lady,” he said, his voice trembling. “She was a credit to this community.”

A few months later when my most recent book was published, Bob had pushed the paper to promote it and my appearance at the local library to read from it. He said he hoped to go but that he had been having a few difficulties that might make it hard for him to make it. In that case, he would be there in spirit.

I didn’t know he had ALS. He hadn’t mentioned it in any of our conversations. Just that he was “dealing with a few things.”

Then in October, his sweet Ruthie passed. I remember him talking about her all the time when we were getting acquainted in the beehive climate of producing a paper. I heard so many stories about her. And then I met her. Another colorful personality.

“You two must’ve been a couple of hippies or something,” I told him. “Free spirits.”

“I don’t know what we were,” he said, laughing.

I sent him a note on October 7, expressing sorrow for his loss, for the community’s loss. I told him that I remembered so fondly when the two of them breezed into our town and the great things they had done for it in all the years since.

He said that he liked the phrase “breezed into town.” Those were our last words to one another, talking about writing, as we so often did.

Word came today that Bob is gone. I regret that I did not get to say goodbye. But that is cinematic. I think he knew that he and Ruthie were loved here in this place, these outsiders who came in and found that they belonged, that this could be home.

And he taught some of us that life can be just as fun and just as serious as we choose to make it, and that one thing does not have to come at the expense of the other.

I’m going to miss that laugh. Breeze on to the next thing, Bob. They’ll love you wherever you may roam.

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I wasn’t in favor of the cowbell. Nor the megaphone, the kind that emergency workers employee to clear the area of stragglers. Not the siren either.

“You’ll embarrass the kids,” I argued. “Why can’t we just cheer them on like the other parents?”

“I want our kids to know how much we love and support them,” she said. “I want them to always remember it.”

“They’ll remember it,” I said.

“Well good then. Now you grab the cowbell and the seat cushions.”

I sometimes refer to Tammy as my “times ten” partner. Everything she does, everything she feels, everything she is. Times ten.

Sometimes, this makes life amazing for her. Sometimes it makes life excruciating. This was especially true when the kids were younger, when life could be overwhelming and we were raising our two children essentially with no one’s help.

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When I was a child, I spent countless nights with grandparents or at my aunt and uncle’s house or with a wide variety of friends. So did my siblings. It was commonplace for kids back then, and it probably still is, but Tammy and I don’t have any family nearby, so it was never an option for us.

I am sure my mom appreciated the break from time to time, but she was as steady in her way and just as committed to making sure that we had the same opportunities to do everything we wanted to do and to try everything we wanted to try. She took us everywhere in her little red Toyota Corolla. To school. To piano lessons. To scout meetings. To basketball practice.

She wasn’t a times ten mom. Almost no one is. There was no cowbell, no megaphone. But she kept every trophy, plaque, certificate, ribbon, or news account of our modest accomplishments. Not long before she passed, she gifted each of us cardboard boxes filled with these priceless tokens of our youth. I don’t think any of us realized what careful accounts she was keeping, this meticulous and loving documentation of our childhood.

As a times ten mom, Tammy has always documented everything the kids did in video clips or a dizzying array of photographs. Of course, it is much easier these days since nearly everyone carries a high-definition camera/video recorder in their pocket at all times.

My mom did her best with the technology of the 1960s and 1970s. The evidence of it can be found in the pictures, old Polaroids of birthday parties, the care she took to put up signs and streamers, to make and decorate the cake, to invite this little assembly of friends huddled around the table with wide eyes and shiny paper hats as one of us blew out the candles.

If we ever had an issue at school or a squabble with a friend, our mom would place a polite call in an attempt to work through it. She was all about diplomacy and solution-oriented problem solving. I could tell when she was engaged in a serious conversation because she would speak with a formality that almost made her sound like a different person. She meant business but would not resort to losing her temper, her sense of self.

Tammy, on the other hand, is not the mom who brings a knife to a gun fight. She brings a cannon. She brings a bomb. Mess with her children and find out. Or better yet, don’t. Because she’ll be jail, and you’ll be dead. It is better for us all that you think I am kidding.

I’ve got the stories. I’ve got the receipts.

Our children know that there is nothing Tammy will not do to support, protect, and encourage them. She has always been there, shining in the great moments, lurking in the darker ones, ready to strike, prepared to take any action for them.

There’s so much sentimentality around motherhood. And so much therapy. Imagine the pressure to make all the right decisions, even when none of the options seems to be much good.

Imagine having to wake up when you are exhausted because somebody is sick, or hurt, or afraid.

Imagine the pressure of damaging your own child’s life by something you’ve said or done in a weak moment, the shame of something your child may have said or done and how that reflects on you. Why didn’t you do something? Didn’t you know any better?

Our mothers are doing everything they can, everything they can manage, everything they can think of, to deliver their children into the world whole, and then to hold them tight until adulthood and well past, until everything is all right. And when will that be?

My mom and Tammy, the moms in my life, so vastly different and yet so much the same. Both of them there, every day, all the time, through every minute, without one thing to guide them. And still they delivered.

On our way to the airport this morning well before dawn, Tammy asked me to rate the pain on a scale from 1-10. I said it was about a seven.

We’ve been planning this little four-day getaway to Key West for weeks. I’m not about to let a little touch of excruciating pain to keep me from going. I set my alarm for 4 am and hoped to get at least a few hours of rest before our 7:30 am flight.

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I gobbled some ibuprofen and poured half the bottle into a sandwich bag for the trip. Around 2:30, I finally gave up and reached for my phone to give Wordle a go. Another four.

I checked the box scores, turning this way and that, irritating Ernest T, our ornery miniature dachshund, who also has occasional back trouble but not tonight, not tonight, although now my trouble is his trouble because I can’t be motherfucking still so he at least can get some rest. Why should we both suffer?

Sorry, but this is how dachshunds think. No point in sugarcoating it.

But he’s concerned about me, crawling up around my neck like a writhing shawl, whining for an answer for why we are both awake and unhappy at this miserable hour.

Tammy and I have developed a habit of talking to our dogs like they’re school children getting ready to go on a field trip.

“Remember what I said,” I tell him. “We’ll be gone a few nights. The house sitter will be here, the one you like. Be nice to her. We’ll be back. We always come back.”

I cannot say whether he comprehends this or not. One ear is flapped back and his lips are dry and stuck on his upper teeth. It’s one of the many faces of the dachshund that I can never resist.

My back is killing me. Might as well get up and change the sheets for the house sitter, doublecheck the suitcase, finish packing my carry-on, turn on the coffee.

Tammy saunters into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, a little panicky, the way she gets when we travel. She is always afraid that we’ve forgotten something, overlooked some crucial detail. This despite her meticulous planning, the lists, the excel spreadsheets, the detailed text messages, one checklist after the next.

The flight has been delayed. Of course it has. But only about forty-five minutes, which turns into fifty when an unkempt dude finally stumbles into view when everyone else is already seated, situated and ready ready ready to take off.

He finds his seat in the row behind us and immediately realizes something is wrong. He bolts up and approaches the flight attendant, pointing in some vague direction beyond the cabin of the plane.

Whatever he wants, the answer is ‘no,’ and then a more emphatic ‘no’ and he returns to his seat, muttering something about this being “the last damn time” before seeking solace from the guy across the aisle.

At last, we are wheels up in the gray dawn, the ride a little bumpy in the rainy weather. We are advised to keep our seatbelts on for a little while until we get above it.

Before we are out of North Carolina, he has become fast friends with the family next to him. There was a misunderstanding, maybe with his luggage. To hell with it. He’s sleeping on a buddy’s couch and they’re the same size, so clothes won’t be a problem.

The thing with going to jail? Also a total misunderstanding. He had a medical episode and couldn’t have told you what day of the week it was or who was the president, but the cops wouldn’t listen.

“See if you can guess my name,” he tells the family. “I like games. Do you?”

He guesses that the daughter’s name is Ashley, the mother is named Betty, and the father is named Stephen. No, but he does have a niece named Nicole Ashley, isn’t that something?

“Then I’m twenty-five percent right! Now guess mine.”

The daughter guesses Simon, the mother chooses Robert or Bobby, and the father guesses Peter.

“Nope,” he says. “But those are all great guesses. My name is Lucas but most people just call me Luke.”

I am pondering the error of packing my headphones in the suitcase, which is inaccessible, instead of the carry-on, which is accessible but pointless unless I want to stuff my ears with dry-roasted peanuts. If we were flying to Paris instead of Key West, I would.

Eventually, we land. The water here is spectacular, which you can see as soon as the plane drops below the cloud cover. Just gorgeous, so different from the murky, darker ocean water to which we are accustomed.

Even mister chatty behind me has paused to take it in. All this beauty. The days ahead on Duval Street. For the moment, our problems are behind us.

The war with Iran is not only a perfect metaphor for Trump’s presidency and the MAGA movement in general. It is also revealing of a basic truth that MAGA opponents can never quite seem to grasp: Trump’s supporters do not now, nor have they ever, looked to him for consistency, coherence, dignity, wisdom, or even decency.

His popularity is the result of one thing and one thing only—the failure of the two-party system and modern politics to speak to, much less address, their problems. The election of Trump in 2016 was a stunning rebuke of “politics as usual.” Trump was not just a sledgehammer elected to knock down specific walls in the structure. He was the bomb that was supposed to blow it all to hell.

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To the extent that Trump does whatever he wants, indulging every whim, saying whatever he likes, however offensive, and ranting nearly every day about his many enemies—basically everyone who is not loyal to him without exception or condition--the MAGA crowd loves him all the more, because it reinforces what they liked about him in the first place. He will not be “tamed” or controlled by anyone or anything.

This, by the way, is why there are “No Kings” marches, which infuriates the MAGA crowd because it is a reminder that the country is, after all, based on a certain set of principles enshrined in the Constitution, a document that was once much discussed in MAGA land, but not so much these days, as Trump often flirts with the idea of a third term, much to the delight of his supporters, whose grasp of the actual details in the Constitution is apparently as tenuous as right wing Evangelicals’ grasp of the details in the New Testament.

There is an element of schadenfreude to all of this as well. Right wing media has been very persuasive in blaming liberals for every single problem that people have, both real and perceived. The left wing has done a terrible job of making its case, or even having a case to make, and therein lies one huge part of the problem.

It is great fun, even cathartic, for MAGAs to see Trump blasting liberals day in and day out, since they blame liberals and not Trump for their problems, even as they confront—or refuse to confront—the reality that Trump has been a massive failure on every single campaign promise he made: no war, lower prices, and the release of the Epstein files (with prosecution of the pedophiles and justice for the victims).

In spite of this, the Democrats have trouble making any hay of it. Quite the opposite of popular perception, the party has for the most part been moving to the center or even center-right on most of the big issues for the past several decades.

Bill Clinton was certainly no liberal. Neither was Hillary, and certainly not Joe Biden. Even Barack Obama felt that he had to move toward the center to get elected. He took some heat from the left for refusing to take a strong stand on gay marriage during his first campaign, just as one example.

Even a cursory examination of their voting records on the issues would reveal that they are all centrists, more or less, on most things. Of course, Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden were all elected, and the Democrats believed they had learned an important lesson about the country—that most people are either very conservative or somewhat conservative, and that you can’t win an election without appealing to these voters and their issues.

That was the wrong lesson, but the party’s belief in it has cost them dearly. The actual lesson should have been as follows. People may identify as conservative or liberal or moderate, but what everyone wants is someone who will provide answers or direction to their problems. People want genuine reform of the system. They want campaign finance reform. They want term limits. They want to curb the corrupting influence of power. They want to be able to afford a home where they grew up. They want politicians who don’t talk down to them or make them feel stupid.

This is why the right wing’s strategy of winning elections by misdirection has been so effective. When you get people focusing on illegal immigration or transgender athletes instead of income disparity or the lack of healthcare options in America, you win by controlling the narrative. Time and time again, Democrats fail to seize the narrative because they think they have to play moderate to win. This is both a colossal failure of nerve and a terrible political miscalculation.

To win, the Democrats must understand and address the anger of these voters, of all voters. They must admit that the system has not served “we the people” for decades. They must have ideas and then articulate those ideas. Other than taxing the rich for their fair share, how will income disparity be addressed on the other side? What will the healthcare plan be? How will it be paid for and why will it be worth it?

What we are seeing every day is an orgy of blowing stuff up, the “bombs bursting in air,” and tough guy posturing and preening by our feckless Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, whose every press conference is an utter embarrassment in performative theater.

It is beside the point that there is no plan, no strategy at all, no concept of what all of this will look like in six months, or what it will cost not only in terms of dollars, which is already staggering beyond belief, but in terms of US investment in the Middle East.

Blowing stuff up is one thing. But then what? With Trump, there was never going to be anything more than rubble, not in Iran and not in America. For him, the only endgame is the adulation of the MAGA crowd to feed his ego and the enormous increase of wealth of his family and his cronies that will be much discussed for generations to come, as people struggle to understand how this could have happened in the United States of America.

It happened because the system was broken, and nobody had a real plan to fix it. Blowing it up has been something to see. But what is next? Whoever can answer that question can redefine the future of their party and possibly save this dying Republic.

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I can’t be objective about the Eagles. In the 1970s, you couldn’t drive from Ray’s Kingburger to Northside Drive-In on Main Street without hearing at least one Eagles song on FM radio.

That’s how we got our music then. Classic rock. All day every day. On the jukeboxes in schools and the bars and the restaurants. A-3, “Lyin’ Eyes.” C-7, “Witchy Woman.”

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All summer long at the pool, every morning on the clock radio while we tried to wake up and find our way into the shower, and then on the radio on the way to school. When we were finally old enough to drive, some of us got eight-track tape players and could listen to albums whole, in one long gulp, but mostly we listened to the radio so that we never knew what song was coming next, an endless river of random songs: “Carry On, My Wayward Son,” “Philadelphia Freedom,” “Show Me the Way,” “Surrender,” “Gimme Three Steps,” “Refugee,” or any one of a dozen Eagles songs, every one of them attached to an essential memory that we had no way of knowing would endure to the end of our knowing.

The mysteries and wonders of a pretty girl in your arms in an elementary school cafeteria repurposed into a dance hall on a Saturday night, her perfume, her shampoo, with its suggestions of tangerines and honeysuckle, the contour of her lower back, which your hands explored like settlers in an undiscovered country while Randy Meisner scaled to an impossible octave to urge us all to “take it to the limit, one more time.”

Another Eagles song, “One of These Nights,” will always remind me of Gary Dozier’s apartment, where I spent many, many nights with my buddy, Mark. The bunk beds, the fish aquarium, the little single-serving boxes of cereal we had for breakfast, despite Gary’s constant promises of a big breakfast of bacon, eggs, pancakes, and fresh fruit. A running gag for years.

When we were old fourteen-years-old, Gary took us to Greensboro to see our first rock concert, Fleetwood Mac opening for the Eagles. Fleetwood Mac was right then in the process of developing the songs that would be on “Rumours” a few months later, but I was already smitten with Stevie Nicks and her dreamy song, “Rhiannon,” an FM radio staple.

I am not sure that I took a breath or blinked once during their entire set, even though we were probably a football field from the stage, which was decorated to fit their witchy vibe, with dark trees and a full moon, Stevie swirling around the stage like some gothic ballerina. Pure theater.

After a fifteen-minute break, when Mark and I observed little clouds of marijuana smoke billowing up from different spots down on the floor from our vantage point in the nosebleeds, the house lights dimmed, the crowd roared, and the Eagles came out. The stage was plain, their clothes were ordinary. They looked like guys getting together for a beer after their shift at the shoe factory.

And then they tore through all the songs we knew so very well, the songs that meant so much to us, the soundtrack of our lives.

What if someone had appeared at my side and whispered between songs, “In fifty years, you and your siblings will see the Eagles again. You will see them in a giant bubble in Las Vegas. Your childhoods will be repurposed like that elementary school cafeteria.”

Our mom died last April. It was in her little hot dog red Toyota Corolla that we listened to some of these songs on the way to school, or coming home from basketball practice.

Not long after she died, we decided we needed to take a siblings trip, which would be our first. Our family was not especially big on vacations when we were growing up. Dad was gone driving a truck most of the time, and neither of them cared much about going to Myrtle Beach, which seemed to be the go-to for most of the people we knew who did go on summer vacations.

We did go to the beach once and to Ghost Town once, but otherwise, our summers were spent at the pool, playing basketball or tennis or little league baseball, or hanging around town finding creative ways to spend five dollars at the drugstore lunch counter or on baseball cards in the five and dime.

Jeff suggested Las Vegas as a destination, since the Eagles had some shows scheduled at the Sphere. Also, the “Wizard of Oz,” another childhood favorite, was going to be playing in the Sphere, complete with swirling winds and leaves scattering over the crowd during the tornado scene, among other special effects.

Our trip was everything we hoped it would be, better than we dreamed it could be. It was Lisa’s first time on a plane.

Half the Eagles are gone now, but Glenn Frey’s son stood in for his dad, singing the same songs I heard his father sing fifty years ago. But Don Henley is still here. And Joe Walsh. And the three of us.

What better way to honor mom, to reconnect with our past while forging a new path into the future for the Cox kids? We are planning on regular vacations now. As the writer Tom Robbins put it, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

The first thing is to tame the rage so that you do not live in it all the time. Or, worse repressing it so often and so much that it calcifies into all-consuming despair. That won’t do.

The next thing is to cultivate joy stubbornly and aggressively. You know, that “pursuit of happiness” business. It is not easy to do it in our madhouse of a country. You know it and I know it.

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They know it, too, the citizens of MAGA nation, whether they will admit it or not. How exhausting it must be to watch the daily chaos in America, the unpredictable array of insane acts large and small. How difficult to shore up the elaborate forms of denial which make it all “okay.”

This involves turning to the usual right wing propaganda sources that reassure MAGA nation that what they thought they saw is not really what they saw. Because that would be terrible. There has to be some other explanation, and there always is.

Those weren’t violent insurrectionist thugs storming the Capitol on January 6. They were peaceful tourists. Or Antifa. Or Democrats impersonating Republicans. They weren’t criminals who would eventually be convicted. They were political prisoners who would need to be pardoned.

Renee Good wasn’t murdered in the street. She was a trained assassin with a deadly weapon attempting to kill an ICE agent, who had no choice but to shoot her three times, to shoot her in the face, to call her a “fucking bitch” after doing so and then somehow bravely walking away despite having been run over.

Never mind what the footage shows. Never mind what the facts are. In our post-truth, post-reality world, everything is negotiable. Wait an hour or two and there will be a narrative to give you comfort, one you can take to social media if you are so inclined. There will be a thousand memes. There will be a justification for anything, for everything.

Even if you are the quiet type, a good person who truly strives to do the right thing, you will be supplied with a rationale for what has happened so that your nights are not haunted by images of a young mother turning the wheel away from the agent, trying to avoid hitting him, or of her children’s stuffed animals in the car just a few feet away from the blood-soaked airbag.

Or her final words, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”

And his: “Fucking bitch.”

It did not take long after her death for the usual strategy of demonizing the victim to emerge. She was an unfit mother. A child abuser. An unhinged lesbian. Or my favorite, a “domestic terrorist.”

Do you remember what we were all told during the campaign, that ICE would be primarily involved in finding and deporting illegals who were criminals and thugs to make the country safer? How long was it before that changed into all illegals, including restaurant workers, college students, or mothers in car lines? And how much longer after that until it changed to anyone who didn’t have their papers on them, even if they are American citizens?

This is where we are in America now. Show me your papers or else.

Yes, rage is the appropriate response. It’s the appropriate response for the President’s threats to take possession of Greenland by any means necessary. It is the appropriate response for his complete about face on the release of the Epstein files, which was a linchpin of his campaign but now magically transformed into a “Democrat hoax.”

We have less than one percent of the files, much of that heavily redacted, but we have been inundated with so much chaos that it is hard to stay focused and consider why the Department of Justice is refusing to release everything. Golly, do you think that might be more than a coincidence?

Politics have become so tribal that it is hard for MAGA nation to believe that any Democrat would be in favor of criminal prosecution of a Democrat if there were damning evidence in the Epstein files of criminal conduct, but this is just more evidence that we live in a post-truth world. If it were found that Bill Clinton was having sex with thirteen-year-old girls, there is no Democrat I know who would not want him prosecuted.

The foundation for all of this is the systematic demonizing of the Democratic party by the right for the past four decades. In this view, Democrats are not just the opposing party with a different view of the role of government and a different set of values. Democrats are the enemy. Democrats are socialists. Democrats are “very bad people.” Democrats are anti-American.

It is no coincidence that ICE agents are swarming Minnesota rather than Texas and Florida. Democrats are the enemy, and Minnesota is a blue state.

So, as a registered voter in the enemy party, let me tell you what most of us stand for. A living wage. Affordable healthcare. Investment in education. Respect and fair treatment of every person, regardless of race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Sensible gun control, which certainly does NOT mean disarming American citizens. A fair tax system that does not favor or reward the wealthy. Democracy: voting should be easier instead of harder. A belief that government can and should be a force for good, as it often has been in the past. Remembering that the Constitution includes more than just the Second Amendment and that all of our rights must be preserved. A belief in the separation of powers. A free press, with accountability to the truth.

To a large degree, we Democrats have been let down by our own party on some of these issues. We know that. To a large degree, you have been let down by yours, although it is less a party now than it is the rule and whim of one man. The Republican party is no longer the party of conservative values and small government. Far from it. It is MAGA nation, nothing more and nothing less. It is far less clear to the rest of us that you know that.

We seem to have reached a place in America where we are separated, but not (yet) quite divorced. We aren’t really on speaking terms anymore, and when we are it usually devolves into shouting or depends upon pleasantries that distract us from the unsettling truth of the vastly different realities that we inhabit.

For the Republic to survive, we’re going to have to move past that. We’re going to have to learn to trust each other again. We’re going to have to learn to believe what we see with our own eyes.

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In the valley below our house, the trees are now bare, bleaching the landscape of color except for the evergreens. The days are shorter and shorter. Well before 6 pm, the dogs start their nightly ruckus to come inside where the warmth and the people and the treats are. On the refrigerator, the Thanksgiving grocery store list gets a little bigger every time I pass by.

These are the signs of another semester coming to a close. But not any semester. It will be my last. After thirty-four and a half years, my time as a member of the faculty at Southwestern Community College is almost up. A pair of skinny weeks left before I pack up my office, the last of six I have had at the college, and turn in my keys.

Hardly enough time to walk these familiar paths and say goodbye to the people and the places I have loved so well, and so long. Those particular classrooms I liked best: Oaks Hall 108, Bradford 202, which is now a fitness room, and Burrell 301, where I have competed with a glorious view for the attention of my students.

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My current students know I am near the end of my time at the college. After we had said all we had to say on the class content for the day, they began asking me questions about my career, which touched me. Would I miss it? What would I be doing with my time now? Did I have a favorite class of all time?

I told them my children were worried about me, but that I would be okay. I told them I planned to write more often and see if I might have a novel in me. Such a cliché, I know. I told them that near the end of my first semester teaching back in 1991, I fell into a terrible period of sadness and dread because I had been so shocked and inspired by the quality of my students and classes that I was sure that I would never have students or classes like these ever again.

Then, the very next semester, I had another amazing group of students, more wonderful classes. And then another the semester after that. I told them that it must have been seven or eight years before I finally realized that the great students and the great classes would never stop coming.

“My mama says ‘hey’,” said a student in the front row. “She said your class was one of her favorites. My brother, too.”

The film class has been one of my favorites to teach. I was allowed to develop one when I was hired and have been teaching it every year since. For many years, I taught it every semester. In the beginning, I would use a cart to wheel a television with a 25 inch screen and a built-in VCR down the hall to Oaks 108. Students on their way to class might intercept or join me along the way.

“What are we watching today?”

“’Taxi Driver,’” I would say. “Brace yourself.”

I had to bring or rent movies for the class myself then, and the students had to crowd up around the television to hear and see the film. Now, I have a dedicated classroom with a big screen, a projector, surround sound, a Blu-ray player, and a large collection of films I have accumulated over the years.

In my composition classes, students are working hard on researching and developing their argument papers, railing about the housing crisis, the healthcare crisis, the social media crisis, and so on. In American Lit, we are dancing one last dance with Walt Whitman, trying to find a way to consume “Song of Myself.” I’ve never been able to get anywhere near a satisfactory discussion of it in less than three full class periods.

“We could have spent the entire semester on this poem and skipped William Bradford, couldn’t we?” says one precocious young woman.

After class, I tell them about a fellow in this same class who declared without hesitation on the very first day of class that he despised poetry, and how upon encountering Whitman, he became transformed to the point that within two weeks time after making his acquaintance, he drove over to Barnes and Noble and purchased Whitman’s collected works and a Whitman tee shirt, which I saw him wearing several times around campus the rest of the year. This poetry hater, now an evangelist.

I have as often thought of myself as a matchmaker as a teacher. Raymond, meet Walt Whitman.

I am not entirely sure what I will do without the unique thrill of sitting in a room with a group of people working through their thoughts on and troubles with Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Frost, Faulkner, and my long beloved, Flannery O’Connor.

How can I ever thank or repay these generations of students, who first shattered my ridiculous assumptions about community college students and then inspired me for decades with their willingness to go with me on these sixteen-week adventures, every one of them different than the last one, or the next one?

How many drives home after class, savoring an insight, a question, an exchange, or the day a shy student gathered the courage to take the first brave step into the fray?

The classroom is the soul of a college. The heart of it is all of the people working together in their various roles, all indispensable, to support our students. Most people have no idea how many meetings, phone calls, and emails are required to make it all work, to solve a thousand problems.

This student just lost a parent. This one no longer has reliable transportation. This one, with an A average in the class, has just vanished with two weeks to go in the term. Here comes a hurricane. Or a blizzard. Or a pandemic.

Hundreds of colleagues, thousands of students. I’ve been to their weddings. I’ve been to their funerals. So many stories. I’ve spent more than half my life experiencing them. I’ll spend the rest of it telling them.

When I was a just a kid, I thought my Aunt Sandy was absolutely cosmopolitan. Even before I learned that she had driven her daddy crazy listening to Elvis Presley and painting her bedroom furniture black, I knew she was different and maybe a little dangerous, which I found thrilling. I think we all did.

She was born in a small town, but there was no way she was going to stay there. No little fish bowl could contain her dreams of a bigger, more unpredictable life. One of my earliest memories is the time I went to spend the night with her and her husband, Jerry, who was on the police force in Winston-Salem. Sandy was working at Wachovia. I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded exotic.

I must have been five or six at the time. For a small boy from a town with one stoplight, Winston-Salem was overwhelming, especially at night. It was as if the constellations had fallen from the heavens and were instead illuminating the city, a galaxy of street lights and blinking skyscrapers.

I thought of Sandy the same way I thought about Magellan or Lewis and Clark, the intrepid explorers we were learning about in school, someone always in search of new lands, new adventures. She had a restless heart and a fearless spirit, an unquenchable thirst to taste whatever else there might be around the next corner.

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She had a contagious enthusiasm for life. There is not one other person I could ever imagine talking my mother into traveling to Hawaii and Cancun, and then having one of those cocktails with a little umbrella in it. Then she took her on a cruise. She took her mom and her aunt to the Grand Canyon. She gave the people she loved experiences they would otherwise never have had. That’s part of who she was, part of what made her special.

My siblings and I will always remember Sandy as the “fun Aunt.” She made Christmas stockings with elaborate designs for all three of us that we still have to this day. I have been hanging mine every single Christmas for more than fifty years. When I do it this year, memories of her and that time and place will burn just a little brighter, feel just a little warmer.

She gave us silver dollars and presents in brilliant wrapping paper with artfully arranged bows and ribbons. It was a shame to even open them. She spent hours concocting incredibly detailed scavenger hunts, with little handwritten clues and prizes hidden all over the house. She made delicious Hungarian Goulash that we looked forward to every year.

A few years after her first marriage didn’t work out, she met a fellow named Harold and found her next adventure in Atlanta. Harold had four daughters, ranging in age from six to nineteen. Talk about an exciting new adventure! When I was twelve or thirteen, we went to visit them. It turns out that Winston-Salem was perhaps not quite as impressive as I remembered. Being in Atlanta felt like being on another planet.

This turned out to be much more than another adventure in Sandy’s life. It was her chance to experience motherhood and then some, thrust full on into it as if dropped into a movie halfway through. She relished the role, embracing all of these girls as they embraced her. She cooked for them and cared for them. She taught them about manners, and most of all how to have a good time. It was the role of a lifetime.

Even as she adapted to this more conventional life, Sandy was always an independent thinker with her own opinions. In her mother’s generation, many women either did not vote at all or voted however their husbands told them to. Sandy, of course, was having none of that. Not only did she form her own views, she jumped into the fray herself, running for and winning a seat as a county commissioner.

She did not suffer fools gladly, or as my brother so eloquently put it, “Sandy didn’t take any poop from anybody.”

In the closing chapters of her life, she met and married Paul. Like Sandy, he had his own opinions and was always willing to share them with anyone within earshot. He was a good foil for her, and also a good and faithful companion. Here was yet another travel partner. They spent at least a year traveling all over the place before settling down and buying a place in Appalachicola, where Sandy actually became so involved in the church that she even taught some Sunday school classes.

The very notion of Sandy, who certainly could be irreverent, teaching Sunday school makes me smile. I bet she had some interesting things to say about Bathsheba, but I’ll have to wait until the next life before we can talk about that.

Eventually, when Paul’s health declined, she cared for him as long as she could before it became necessary to enlist the help of a friend who eventually moved in and cared for them both, especially after Sandy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, as cruel a thief as ever there was.

We lost mom, Sandy’s older sister, six months ago. It is hard for me to comprehend that this entire family is gone now. They are reunited in the sweet hereafter, and that thought brings with it a measure of peace.

Since Sandy passed, I have been consumed by memories not only of the people and places that are gone, but of a time that seems just as surely to be a relic of the past, a time when neighbors knew and looked out for another and ate from each other’s gardens and at each other’s tables. It was pre-Internet, when people turned to each other instead of their iPhones.

Sandy was for me a role model, someone who understood the deep and abiding significance of the old ways while also and always reaching for something new, exciting, and different, always pushing beyond the boundaries of the prosaic, the workaday world that could and still can put you in a trance with its endless and mindless habits and repetitions.

In this way, Sandy was a contradiction, as the most interesting and fun people always are, straddling these two worlds, wild, vibrant, and alive. Thank God for this woman, who showed those of us lucky enough to know her how to be alive in the world, and how to have a good time while we are here.

The plan was for the groom to marry our daughter. It was going to be one of those arranged marriages. But then, when he was two-years-old and they were in daycare together, he bit her. Maybe that ruined it. Later that same afternoon, when his father returned from lunch, he found his office covered with graffiti.

“Tannibal the Cannibal!” one poster read.

Tammy’s handiwork. You bite her daughter, you are publicly shamed at the very least, even if you are two-years-old, but especially if you are the father.

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The groom’s father, Rich, shared this story at the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding while we all sat there with our flutes of champagne and cake-bearing paper plates waiting to toast the couple.

Rich and Tammy were coworkers in the same building, hired at the same time, and became fast friends. Rich and his spouse, Tamara, had two children, as we did, or would, as soon as our son was born. Their youngest, Tanner, was the same age as our daughter, Kayden.

As our friendship developed, there were playdates at the park and lots of photos of the kids in various park poses. Plans were hatched. Why shouldn’t they get married someday? Look how cute! Wouldn’t that be something?

But then Rich and the family moved to Florida, leaving Kayden jilted at the age of four.

By the time they moved back here, the kids were in high school and fully ensconced in their own social circles. By then, it would have been awkward to arrange a marriage, especially for the teenagers. Even so, the parents reconnected and renewed our friendship.

A few short years later, I was asked to officiate the wedding of Tanner and Jordan, his lovely fiancé.

Now, I have served as the officiant of exactly zero weddings in my life. I have attended two, maybe three, weddings in the past twenty-five years. Tammy and I were married at the jailhouse in Haywood County with a frustrated and impatient magistrate as the officiant. Our ceremony took approximately three minutes.

I’m the guy you call if you need a couch moved down a flight of stairs or if you want to complain about your baseball team or your job or politics. Until Rich and Tamara came along, I don’t think anyone I’ve ever known has looked at me and thought, yep, this is the guy we want to officiate our child’s wedding ceremony.

Fortunately, Tammy has far more experience and expertise with weddings than I do, so as the time for the wedding started to creep up, she began sending me all kinds of templates, tips, and tidbits, including various blessings and messages I might want to consider incorporating into the service.

Eventually, we met with the couple, first on Facetime and then in person, and found that they did not necessarily have strong preferences on what I should include. Maybe something from the Bible, since grandma would be there and would certainly want that.

The venue was lovely, sprawling and bucolic. Participants were ferried up and down hills between the different locations for the ceremony and reception on golf carts. The scenery was magnificent. During the run-through on rehearsal day, several cows served as placid witnesses to the proceedings. They were assembled no further than a hundred feet away, just on the other side of an electric fence.

The weather was perfect for the wedding, one of those glorious days you get in October, just a touch breezy, but still warm and comfortable with just a hint of crispness in the air, some trees showing the first signs of their lustrous colors, most still a deep green.

Right up until showtime, we were still working out some details in the program. The bride and groom had decided on rehearsal day to say their vows privately and then just sort of summarize them during the ceremony, whatever that might entail.

Then, on their wedding day, as we were gathering and getting ready to proceed down the hill to line up, Tanner approached me and said, “We decided we are just going to read the vows to each other.”

“So, no summary?”

“No summary. The whole thing.”

“Cool. Does your best man have the ring? Remember, when I start talking about the ring exchange, that’s his cue to give you Jordan’s ring.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I’ll run ask him.”

Tammy, who has sort of jumped in as the de facto wedding planner, is lining us all up in the correct order: me, the groom, the groomsmen, the bridesmaids, the flower girl, the cute kid with the banner that reads: “Here comes the bride!”

Before we proceed down the hill and through the big white door that has been placed in the field for us to open and walk through, the best man rushes up to me with the ring in his hand.

“Here, will you give this to Tanner?”

“No problem.”

I have a microphone in one pocket and a handful of mints in the other. I give the mints to Tammy so the ring can be alone in my pocket until its grand appearance during the ceremony.

Finally, it’s on. Everything is going perfectly as we all march in with nearly a hundred well-dressed people waiting and watching. When the bride has at last been escorted down front by her father and has clasped hands with the groom, I take a breath and welcome everyone—friends, family, honored guests—to this wonderful occasion.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a little commotion and then notice that the wedding photographer is completing a backward somersault in the grass. He has stumbled over the first row of chairs as he was trying to position himself for a better angle. There is considerable tittering, an audible gasp from somewhere. The bridge giggles.

I take another breath, then a moment to smile, and proceed. Everything else is perfect, especially the vows, which I am glad they chose to share with everyone.

During the reception, speeches are shared over plates heaped with barbecue and the fixings. Laughter, tears, nervous young folks overcoming their self-consciousness to honor their friends.

Then come the dances. Father and bride. Mother and groom.

Tammy cries. So does Rich. Then we all dance. Tammy and I dance, the officiant and the planner. Over her shoulder, I can see the cows, still watching and perhaps wondering about the curious ways of humans. ‘Til death do us part.

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