It’s okay if you don’t believe her. Nobody is asking you to believe. But Sandra believes.

It all started when Sandra was walking home from work. It was 1969. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was still in theaters. We landed on the moon. The top-40 hits du jour belonged to the Stones and Neil Diamond.

The young woman had just gotten off work. She was on her way to the bus stop. It was icy, the sidewalk was a bit treacherous. She was in a hurry to get home; she wasn’t watching where she was walking..

Sandra misstepped. She fell. But her fall was in the deadliest direction possible. She fell off the curb, directly into the street of oncoming traffic.

She could see it all happening in slow motion. She tumbled into the roadway. The grill of an oncoming vehicle came flying up at her. She could hear the tires, up close and personal, crunching in the snow.

What she did not see, however, was the woman who saved her. At least, not

at first. The woman appeared out of nowhere it seemed.

The woman was very tall. She was strong. Quite strong. And she was wearing overalls.

The stranger rescued her. The speeding vehicle missed Sandra by a few inches. And the woman moved her body to a safe place.

“San,” the strange woman said, using Sandra’s family nickname. “Can you hear me? I need you to keep your eyes open, sweetie.”

The woman kept using this name, until Sandra opened her eyes. Which she eventually did. Then—just like that—Miss Overalls seemingly disappeared.

Not a single witness saw the woman. Maybe Sandra imagined her. After all, this was a traumatic experience, who wouldn’t start seeing things? Moreover, as I say, this was 1969, who WASN’T hallucinating?

She sustained a broken femur. In her hospital bed, she was in agony. The pain meds made her loopy. But she…

The snow in West Virginia clings to the world like shaving cream, covering every surface, every automotive hood, every interstate sign.

In the distance, the blue Appalachians stand watch over the Mountain State, like mother hens, guarding their young. And I’m staring out a plate glass window in my hotel lobby, just watching it all.

As I watch snow fall like white noise on a TV screen, the beauty puts me into a mild trance. I almost forget that I’m in a hotel lobby.

A young man enters the lobby, using a motorized wheelchair. He is college age. Wearing a West Virginia Mountaineers T-shirt.

An older woman is walking behind him. The woman follows the kid’s chair to the window, so they can look better at the snow.

“Look at ALL that snow,” says the older woman as though it is the first time it has ever snowed in West Virginia.

The kid gazes out the window, and with labored speech he says, “Oh, wow!”

Everyone in the lobby is lapsed in a sort of quiet reverie.

Nobody is talking. There is a TV playing 24-hour news on low volume, but nobody is watching it. Everyone is just looking at this boy, who is so excited about snow, it’s making us excited, too.

“Supposed to get five inches tonight,” mutters a man to the kid.

He’s a businessman, working on a laptop. But he is not paying attention to the digital screen anymore. He has caught the kid’s wonder.

“Five inches,” repeats the boy. “Omigosh.”

“Could get more than five inches,” offers one a hotel employee, an older woman cleaning tables. “I hear we could get six or seven tonight.”

The kid pilots his electric chair even closer to the window. His knees are almost touching the glass.

And even though snow is a common occurrence in this part of Appalachia this time of year, even though it snows every…

I was scared to death. It was my first day of second grade, and I was terrified to the point of regurgitation.

“Please don’t make me go to school,” I begged my mother.

Mama was driving the car. I sat in the passenger seat as she drove our station wagon. I had the countenance of a man wearing a noose.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mama said. “You have to go to school. What are you so afraid of?”

I was afraid of the second grade teacher, Ms. Burns. Ms. Burns was a hard woman who, according to rumors circulating the first grade, had done a stint in Leavenworth.

She was an exacting woman, with a sharp tongue, high standards, at times using rulers, riding crops, or other such instruments of persecution in class. She was nothing like Mrs. Anderson, our first-grade teacher, who was soft spoken, smelled like strawberries, and had soft bosoms perfectly created for absorbing childhood tears.

We first graders would often stand on the playground and cower behind a tree whenever Ms. Burns was present. She had

yellow eyes and green teeth.

“She’s so mean,” I cried to my mother. “Please don’t make me go.”

My mother eased to a stop sign. “How do you KNOW she’s mean?”

“Everyone knows.”

We were nearing the school. The brick building was getting closer. My nausea had transformed from an upper gastrointestinal issue into a lower one.

“Please, Mama,” I was crying now. I was also trembling.

My mother pulled into the parking lot. She just held the wheel with both hands and stared forward at the flagpole.

She looked at me. “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?”

I shrugged. Then I began breathing into a paper bag.

“Okay. Then let me ask you another question. What’s the worst thing that could happen to anyone in this life? What is the worst thing you can imagine in the…

The story was told to me by a former deliveryman named John.

The Christmas season was the busiest time of year for delivery-persons. Drivers saw a major uptick in workload. This did nothing to improve John’s sunny disposition.

At Christmastime, John was about as cheerful as the infamous storybook character who once purloined Yuletide from Whoville.

One night, at the end of a shift, John was making final deliveries in a rundown apartment complex. There was a little girl, standing outside the building, waiting for him.

“Did you bring anything for me?” she asked in a small Who-voice.

“What’s your apartment number?” he spat back.

She told him. He rifled through his packages. “Nothing here for you.”

The girl was crestfallen.

After he finished deliveries on foot, the girl was still standing on the curb beside his truck.

“Maybe it got lost,” she said. “Don’t packages get lost sometimes?”

“No,” he said.

“Not even sometimes?”

“No.”

She was now his shadow. The girl wouldn’t leave his side. She kept asking about her package.

Finally, he turned to face her. “Listen, I’m really busy tonight. You need to write down the

tracking number and call the company.”

The little girl turned to walk away, hangdog.

He felt one inch tall.

“Wait,” he called. “Let me look in the back of my truck, just to be sure.”

He knew the package was not in his truck, of course, but he saw no harm in digging through parcels in his truck, pretending.

The girl was patiently waiting outside the vehicle, chatting up a storm.

“It’s a Christmas tree,” she said. “We ordered an inflatable tree. You blow it up.”

“You should always write down your tracking number,” he said. “That way you can follow your package.”

“We’ve never had a Christmas tree before because my mom says we can’t afford one. And they’re messy.

“Plus, Mom’s never home, she’s always at her boyfriend’s…

We lit the peace candle for Advent a few nights ago.

My wife and I read aloud from our little Episcopal book, standing before our Advent candles, using solemn voices. The dogs were seated around our feet, trying to interpret our human words, listening closely for words like: “Ham.”

The peace candle is important. Namely, because peace is elusive. A lot of people don’t even know what peace is. I’m not sure I do.

Foster homes are full of kids who have never known peace a moment in their lives. Prisons are overrun with the unpeaceful.

Addiction rehabs shelter souls desperately seeking peace. ICUs are chock-full of people pleading for peace.

I wonder what the world would be like if we had more peace. What if stress and worry and fighting and bickering, which constantly run in the background, like an internet browser with too many tabs open, simply vanished?

Who would we be if we had total peace? How many more hours in the day would we have available? Would we finally quit interacting with our

phones and start living?

FACT: Every day, an estimated 660,000 motorists text and drive. That ain’t peace.

What about culture? What would society be like during absolute peace? Or is such a thing even possible? Is world peace even a real thing?

Or is peace just a storybook idea, but not physical reality?

After all, our biological and ecological environment is anything but peaceful. Life itself is always moving. All the time. Planets orbit, spin, and rotate. Animals and plants struggle for survival. Living things procreate. They grow, they age, they buy real estate, then die.

Atoms vibrate. Cells divide. Bacteria multiply. That doesn’t sound very peaceful.

Then again, maybe I’ve got peace all wrong. Maybe peace isn’t stillness. Maybe peace isn’t even something we “do” at all. Maybe peace simply “is.”

Maybe peace on earth IS here, right now, and we humans…

They left him in a dumpster. They just didn’t want him. Simple as that. So they threw him away. Like garbage.

He was six weeks old. They could have taken him anywhere. A church. An adoption center. They could’ve left him on a doorstep, for crying out loud. But they put him in the trash.

When someone found Dennis, he was crying. His furry body was cut up, bloody, from head to foot. Maybe the cuts came from rolling around in a dumpster that contained shards of glass. Or maybe they came from the person who put him here.

No way to know. All anyone knew is that Dennis would probably die.

He was found in South Oxfordshire, England. Someone took him to Blue Cross animal shelter where they cleaned him, and bandaged his wounds.

“I didn’t expect him to be so small,” said a shelter worker. “He was absolutely tiny. I’ve never seen a dog of his age quite so little and thin, and with so many injuries...”

Dennis’s little body was weak. He hadn’t

eaten in days. He was frightened, and trembling violently. If he would’ve had any fluid in his bladder he would have released it out of fear. But he was too dehydrated even swallow, let alone tee-tee.

When they washed him, they found more severe wounds beneath his fur. They rushed him to the emergency vet. It was evident, Dennis would probably die. He was too small. Too weak.

Then, the emergency vet discovered something else.

Dennis was blind and deaf.

“His eyes couldn’t focus… and he couldn’t really hear what you were saying, or [figure] out where he was. So, he would sort of go to the corner of the room or try to nestle into you in order to feel safe.”

Blue Cross placed him in a foster home with experts. The fosters had worked with blind dogs before. But Dennis presented a…

George wanted to be a musician. He was born to a working-class family. His mom was the daughter of a minister. His dad was a barber.

His mom supported her son’s passion, but his dad was deadset against it. Music was a waste of time. Frivolity. George’s dad wanted him to be a barber, just like his old man. He prohibited any music in his household.

So George’s mom took matters into her own hands. She secretly bought a secondhand keyboard and placed it in the attic, where George’s father couldn’t see or hear it.

George would practice when his father was at work. Sometimes, spending all day practicing scales in the attic.

As an adult, music became George’s career. He actually became quite famous. He wrote for important people. He performed in prestigious places. But the life of a musician is an unsteady one. Audiences are fickle. Trends move fast.

As he aged, George’s career took a downturn. Nobody wanted his brand of music anymore. It was too old-school. Audiences wanted young

blood, new talent, rebels with weird hairstyles. Not old-geezer musicians who looked like your dad’s barber.

Before long, George was washed up. Work disappeared. He was drowning in debt. Soon, he was accepting donated food just to survive.

Sometimes he wished he’d listened to his dad. But it was too late to become a barber now. God knows, he was no spring chick. George was 56. This, during an era when average life expectancy for males was 45 or 50. People George’s age were considered seniors.

He downsized. He relocated to Ireland with his proverbial tail between his legs. Maybe he could find work there. Earn some money. Perhaps, rebuild whatever career he had left.

He was forced to take a job as an organist for a small Irish church. Also, he accepted charity gigs performing for places like local hospitals, prisons, and institutions for the mentally…

Meredith is a good Catholic woman. A mother of three. A pillar in her church. So, I can only assume this story about her father is true, since good Catholics never lie.

It was 1939. America was swallowed in a Great Depression. Everyone’s old man was either out of work or about to be.

The 16-year-old kid was walking home from work, carrying a loaf of bread beneath his arm. His jeans were covered in white flour. There was flour in his hair. He had flour in crevices of the body he didn’t even know existed.

After his father died, the boy dropped out of school to work at the bread factory. The job paid poorly. But it was worth the trouble because he was around food all day. His mother worked two jobs. But they were falling behind.

On the walk home, the boy stopped by the church. He knocked on the parish priest’s office door.

“I brought you sourdough this time, Father,” said the boy.

The old cleric looked up from his desk. “Oh, I love

sourdough.”

The clergyman knew the bread cost the boy more money than he had. The bread factory did not merely give away products to employees. But this bread was part of the deal.

“Are you ready for work?” said the priest with a paternal smile.

“Yes, Father.”

They walked outside to the church shed. The priest unlocked the garage door, then flicked on the lights. A half-demolished Packard sat beneath the humming lights. Dented, dinged, and rusted.

The priest popped the hood.

“Tonight we’ll begin repairing the engine block,” the old man said. “We’re going to be welding. You ever welded, son?”

“No, Father.”

“Then this is going to take a while. ”

They spent all night beneath the heavy engine, wearing goggles. They worked until 1 a.m.

This all started when the priest visited the junkyard, looking for a car to…

It was quite a day. Not the kind of day you’d expect to have inside a prison.

The holidays were fast approaching when the inmates walked into the prison’s Bible college room and were swallowed by pink.

Huge pink swaths of decorative fabric, draped from the ceiling. Pink carpets. Pink tablecloths. Pink flowers.

They weren’t dressed like inmates, either. All 29 of them wore donated tuxedos. Bowties. Shined shoes. Buttoniers, made of fresh-cut flowers. The kinds of outfits you’d never expect to wear inside Angola.

Welcome to Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as “Angola.” The facility lies smack dab in West Feliciana Parish. This is the largest state prison in the U.S. You’re looking at over 18,000 acres, 28 square miles of land, and about 6,000 inmates.

“This ain’t just a prison,” says one inmate. “Angola’s a town.”

And just like a small city, it comes with its own social norms, folkways, and culture. Prison culture hardens most inmates beyond recognition.

One Angola prisoner explains: “Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life. Every

hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.”

Inmate Leslie Harris is serving a decades-long sentence for armed robbery. He’s been inside for a while. He probably won’t get out before his daughter’s first prom or graduation. He will likely miss her wedding.

But tonight, the rules of Leslie’s reality were suspended for a moment—albeit a brief one.

His evening began when 37 inmate daughters were turned loose to reunite with their inmate dads.

The girls exploded beneath floral arches and walkways, adorned with rose petals, and made pictures with their fathers. Daughters ranged from ages 5 to 20. They were wearing evening gowns. Hair fixed. Makeup. There were enough corsages to start a community rose garden.

Leslie’s daughter surprised him from behind. He…

My blind coonhound sits before our fireplace. Staring into nothingness. Caught in the darkness of her own visionless world.

“Marigold,” I call to her. I’m using my high-pitched dog falsetto.

There is an important reason I use this voice. I speak this way so I can effectively sound like an idiot. Dogs love idiots.

“What’re you doing, Mary?” I ask.

Her tail wags, ever so gently. But she simply continues gazing with her dead eye into the whistling, steaming logs.

Before we adopted Marigold, an angry hunter paid a lot of money for her as a puppy. When he discovered she was gunshy, he beat her until she went blind.

She was found chained behind a tire shop, starving. That man is still walking around, somewhere in this world, breathing free air. Whereas she lives in darkness.

I close my eyes and try to join her sightless world for a moment.

The smells of a fireplace are intoxicating. I smell woodsmoke, but that’s about all. Namely, because I am a big, goofy human. Humans can’t smell much of anything.

Humans consider themselves to be God’s most noble and cherished work of art—they’ve announced this to the world many times. But I think it’s important to note, God has admitted that, for a work of art, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

For my money, a dog is God’s masterwork. Humans are not smart enough to realize how smart dogs are.

Recently, a Border Collie named Chaser, from South Carolina, learned 1,022 words, and could distinguish between different objects by name. Scientists had no idea dogs possessed this kind of brain power.

And in the early ‘90s, Rico, another Border Collie, demonstrated a dog’s neurological ability for “fast mapping,” a skill human toddlers use for learning new words. Whenever Rico heard a new object-word, he would select the only unfamiliar object in the room, then narrow his choices down.

Scientists…