The old man was in Walmart. He was wearing pajama bottoms and an Eagles T-shirt. The band, not the football team.

He also wore slippers. I knew they were slippers because they were fuzzy and white. Ballcap, crumpled and stained with sweat and grime. He hadn’t shaved in a while. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and chin.

There were tattoos on his forearms. Not the new kind of fancy tats, multi-colored and expensive. These were a few grades below battleship tattoos. Crudely done. Almost like the inkwork inmates give themselves with guitar wire and BIC pens.

He wore an oxygen tank, contained in a fanny pack, strapped around his waist. A rubber cannula snaked from his pack, securely set beneath his nose.

The old man checked out at the self-checkout kiosk. He loaded his own plastic bags. The machine spit out his receipt. He grasped his aluminum cane and began shuffling toward the door to present his receipt to the receipt checker.

I remember

the days before receipt checkers. I remember the days before self-checkout kiosks, too. In fact, I remember a time, boys and girls, when—hard as this is to believe—you walked into a store and there was an ACTUAL person behind an ACTUAL cash register, who, after they rang you up, ACTUALLY told you to have a “blessed day.”

Those days are gone.

The old man, unsteady on his feet, walked toward the door. I was afraid he was going to fall. By the time he reached the yellow-vested sentry, he was teetering badly, on the brink of collapse.

He fell into the Walmart employee, holding the employee’s shoulders for support.

“God, I’m sorry,” the man said to the employee. “I’m so sorry.”

The man at the door looked like a manager of some sort. Maybe even a high-level guy, stuck working the door. He was well dressed. Pressed…

I was blue. I had just watched the news. Wars were raging. Bombs were dropping. People dying. All God’s children were bickering over the price of rice in China in the rain. And each onslaught of horror was only interrupted by pharmaceutical commercials which all tell you exactly how (a) this drug can save your life, and (b) this causes suicidal thoughts.

So there I was, approaching the pinto bean aisle when I met her. She was five years old, about three feet tall, following her mom’s buggy. She was Chatty Cathy.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was cheerful. Her hair was dark, and her smile was catching. She wore a pink skirt and T-shirt. And draped around her neck was a gold medal.

“I have a gold medal,” she said, brandishing the medal.

“Really?” I said.

“I got it from gymnastics. Two years ago.”

“And you’re still wearing it?”

“Yes.”

The girl’s name was Evelyn, she said. Evelyn’s face was round and full. Her brown eyes were the size of washtubs.

“I got this medal in gymnastics for doing this. Watch…”

Whereupon Evelyn demonstrated

a dance position that can only be described as a cross between a ballerina’s second position and a pointing English Springer Spaniel.

“Hey, know what?” she said.

“What?”

“I get to play Mario Kart Rainbow Road.”

“What’s Mario Kart?”

“It’s a game. But I can’t play it very much because my brain is still developing and playing too many video games or being on computers makes my brain go like this…”

Evelyn then made a gesture not unlike a crazed Frankenstein’s monster who was short-circuiting in the pinto bean aisle.

“I like Mario Kart. I play it on Saturdays. The game has Mario and Luigi, they’re brothers, did you know that? I just learned that about them. All this time I didn’t know they were brothers. And Mario Kart has princesses, too. I will tell…

I have here a letter from Randy. “Sean,” the note begins—people are always calling me that. “Do you have any words of wisdom I can give to my son?

“My son, Jason, is getting married on Friday, and I am responsible for his wedding toast. I’d like some wisdom to pass on, the only problem is, I don’t have any.”

Well, Randy, I asked a handful of friends for words of wisdom from elders in their lives.

The rules were simple, the wisdom giver had to (a) be over 75, and (b) they had to be—technically—still alive. The deadline for submission was yesterday. The maxims and folk expressions came in from all over the US.

Here are some:

LINDA, 91—Being frugal doesn’t mean you have to be cheap. Being cheap doesn’t help anyone, and it takes the fun out of life. My late husband was so cheap he wouldn’t have paid a nickel to see Jesus riding a bicycle.

SIMON, 82—A lot of people are into fitness, and that’s great, I guess. But you can’t live longer, you can only

live deeper.

BEVA, 89—Happiness is a town halfway between Too Little and Too Much.

RITA, 83—American girls need to eat real food. Eat until you have to unbutton your pants now and then. Heavensake, there are girls on TV so skinny you can’t even see their shadow.

JERRY, 80—Being rich isn’t the same as being comfortable. My uncle was so rich, he bought a new boat every time the other one got wet. And he was miserable.

ROBYN, 78—Even if someone is ugly to you, don’t be ugly back.

DANNY, 91—This is a generation of workaholics. On the farm, we stopped work every day at three to enjoy our life. But young people today are busier than a cat covering crap on a marble floor. Slow down.

SAM, 88—Being humble don’t mean you ain’t got your pride. But a Rolls-Royce…

Dear Young Writers,

You know who you are. You’re reading this on your phone, computer, tablet, or maybe a soggy newspaper you found in a gutter.

Maybe you’re in college or in high school. Maybe you’re a middle-schooler with a munificently grandiose vocabulary.

Either way, you’re a writer. And you know you’re a writer, deep inside. So I’m writing you. Because you’re confused. You don’t know what you’re doing with your life. You’re embarrassed to talk about who you are.

Writers are viewed as oddballs in our American culture. And it’s a shame because it’s not this way everywhere.

In Europe, for example, if you tell someone you’re a writer, the Europeans get dreamy eyed and converse about “War and Peace” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”

But in America, when you tell someone you want to be a novelist, they look at you as though you have just broken wind in a school board meeting. To many people, wanting to be a writer is like wanting to be an astronaut.

Thus, I am going to share with you a few thoughts about

the field of professional writing. Things many writers don’t want you to know: such as, how to find a complete three-course dinner by rummaging through the municipal garbage.

Because, you see, professional writers are sort of like stage magicians. It’s all an act. These “magicians” continually try to pull literary rabbits out of their hats. Only, instead of calling them “rabbits,” they obsess over whether they should use the word “bunnies,” “hares,” “cottontails,” “lagomorphs,” or in extreme cases, “chinchillas.”

Thus, the first thing I can tell you about writers is that none of us know what the hellfire we’re doing.

I don’t want to generalize, but this is true for every single writer alive. Don’t trust any author who says they know what they’re doing. They are full of chinchilla.

Writers are not nuclear engineers. We confusedly type words…

My mother always told me to smile. Especially when I didn’t want to. She often told me to smile when I was sad, when trying on school clothes, or whenever I was forced to eat beef liver at gunpoint.

“Smile,” she’d say. “You have a lot to be thankful for, young man.”

A mother knows how her child is feeling by looking at their face. Are you in pain? Upset? Angry because your Little League team lost the opening game? Your mom knows. Because your face tells the story.

Turns out, you have 43 muscles in your face. Your face contains more muscles than any other body part. The only anatomical region coming close to having this many muscles is your back, which has 40 muscles, excluding the muscles of your bootyus maximus, which are the heaviest muscles in the body. This is totally true. Your buttocks, skin and muscle combined, weigh 33 pounds.

So, why is your face so muscled? Because. Your face was not just made for

photographs. Your face is a precise signaling system.

You can communicate entire paragraphs with only your face. It’s how you were designed. Don’t believe me? Try getting lost in a foreign country without cell service or a functioning GPS. By the end of the day, your face will be tired.

As it happens, the default mode of your face, according to research, is smiling. Recent studies discovered that we are born smiling. Doctors used 3D ultrasound technology to find that developing babies smile in the womb.

Once born, babies continue to smile. Even when crying, they are flexing their smile muscles. And babies keep smiling throughout childhood. A child smiles, on average, 400 times per day. Whereas the average adult smiles fewer than 20.

Something else researchers discovered is that a smile is catching. It’s called the “yawn effect.” Just seeing someone else smile stimulates your empathetic reflex system. If one…

Yesterday, I visited the house where you were born. And I got chills.

I’ve chased you all over the US. I visited your grave in the Washington National Cathedral, I got chills there, too. I performed in a historic theater where you once lectured. Chills. I drove past the house where you died in Connecticut. Chills.

You see, I don’t have many heroes. I dislike the idea of personal idols. I have always felt that if you put someone on a pedestal it’s not fair to them, and it’s doubly unfair to yourself.

Because you can never measure up to an idol. Once you idealize someone you have degraded yourself. You have made the beautiful unattainable.

No matter how hard a man tries, his idol will always be “smarter,” “more exceptional,” or “better-looking.” All chances for growth diminish beneath the poisonous drug of comparison.

But you were no idol. You were never on a pedestal. You were always down here amongst us sinners. Groping your way through your own inner darkness and

silence.

You never had children, but you were maternal to me. I read your books as a young man, fatherless and lost, ignorant and uneducated, the victim of paternal suicide and I would imagine that you were my grandmother, sharing nuggets of wisdom only with me.

You were an artist whose medium was the English language. Your words were balm to me. And still are.

You once said: “We can decide to let our trials crush us, or we can convert them into forces for good.”

And: “Relationships are like Rome -- difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the ‘golden age’, and unbearable during the fall. Then, a new kingdom will come along and the whole process will repeat itself until you come across a kingdom like Egypt... that thrives, and continues to flourish. This kingdom will become your best friend, your soul mate, and…

Sunset in Avondale Park. The dogwoods are in bloom. Little League teams are in the park, suited up for practice. Kids are fielding grounders, running bases, or standing in the outfield and seriously picking their noses.

Only a few hours ago, an armed 41-year-old Lebanese-American rammed his truck into a synagogue full of children in Michigan. The gunman was killed. A security guard was injured. Eight first responders are being treated. The kids are safe.

The suspect’s family members, reportedly, had been killed in an Israeli attack earlier this year.

And I am trying to understand this world. Within the last 5 years, there have been nearly 40 major shooting incidents at houses of worship. In the last five years, there have been 181 major shooting incidents in schools. And those are just the “major” ones.

I simply don’t understand.

Tonight, baseball team parents are sitting together on the bleachers, watching their kids play in relative safety.

The parents form their respective cliques. Moms sit with moms. Dads sit with dads, providing an important contribution

to the game by slow clapping and telling their ballplayers to “Show some hustle!”

Meanwhile, there is a homeless man who goes largely unnoticed in the park. There are several homeless people encamped in Avondale Park, in plain view, but they are invisible. He sits on a picnic table. His eyes are bloodshot. His clothes are rags.

A little boy in a baseball uniform walks by, on his way to the concession stand. The old man is surprised when the kid approaches him of his own volition.

“Hi,” the boy says, casually.

The man’s eyes register a kind of surprise. His teeth are missing. He returns a greeting.

“How’re you?” the boy asks.

“Good,” the man lies.

Then the boy presents his hand for a handshake.

And I am thinking about my late friend Myron. Myron was homeless for most of his adulthood until he…

This week the headlines were pretty dim. Fighting in Iran, surging oil prices, and just when you think current events couldn’t get any worse, it’s time for the Oscars.

But then, those were only the headlines you actually heard about. Not all news headlines see the light of day.

Such as the story of Chicago Girl Scout Troop 26286, in Englewood, grappling to sell enough cookies to stay afloat.

A few weeks ago, news of their problem broke. The troop needed to sell at least 2,100 boxes just to cover basic membership fees and keep the troop alive for one more year. The story made the nightly news. All of Chicago got involved. People were ordering cookies all over the nation.

As of this week, the troop has sold 26,000 boxes.

And in North Carolina, Kerwin Pittman, a former inmate who spent upwards of 11 years incarcerated, and one year in solitary, became the first ex-inmate to purchase a prison.

The 400-bed prison, formerly Wayne Correctional Center, is in

Goldsboro. The former correctional facility will be transformed into transitional housing and occupational development for former inmates re-entering civilian life.

Kerwin knows firsthand how difficult reintegration is. When he was first released, he said, “I had family support, so I had housing. But a lot of my friends didn’t have any place to go. Or if they did, there was a time limit on how long they could stay.”

In Rio de Janeiro, a new initiative using seed-firing drones has successfully reforested an area the size of 200 football fields in record time.

The drones fly overhead, buzzing above the Amazon, planting approximately 40,000 trees per day. That’s over 1,600 trees planted every hour. In the time it took you to read this, several new trees were planted.

How big of a problem is deforestation in Brazil? Over an 18-year span, foreign and domestic logging companies in the Amazon destroyed an…

As a kid, I remember going to the beach. I remember walking the shore, wearing my little swimsuit. I remember the glorious and inimitable joy of having sand in my crack.

My biggest objective, of course, was finding seashells. All children care deeply about shells. This is the main reason you visit the beach as a kid. It’s about looking for shells.

What are you going to do with the shells? Nobody really cares. You haven’t worked that part out yet. All that matters is looking for them.

You do this if for no other reason than because, hey, we’re at the beach, y’all! Isn’t this great?! Wow, check out these shells! Whoa, look at that one! It’s orange! I call dibs!

It didn’t matter if the sky was overcast and foreboding. It didn’t matter if the water was muddy, or if the shore was littered with clumps of dead seaweed that smelled like a Port-a-John.

You’d find your little shell, pluck it from the sand, then dust it off like you’d just found a thousand

bucks.

I, personally, had no organizational system for collecting shells. No buckets, containers, or nets. Thus I was forced to carry my collection in my hands.

Which wasn’t a big deal until you had collected WAY more shells than you could carry. Soon, I would be walking along the shoreline with an entire armful of shells. Big shells, little shells, and all shells in between.

Then, at some point, toward the end of the day, reality would hit. You’d look at the beach and realize there were gazillions and gazillions of shells beneath your feet. There was no way you could ever collect them all. Furthermore, what the heck were you going to DO with these shells?

So, I would let them go. I would scatter the mass of shells to the wind, flinging them into the air, watching them disperse like rain. The…

Dogs know stuff. Yes, I know they’re just animals. I know their brains are only about the size of tangerines. But I’m telling you.

Take my dog Otis Campbell. I don’t often write about him, but I should. Because he’s our main dog. Our other dogs are his supporting actors.

Otis is the alpha of our family pack, ranking just below my wife. I am ranked somewhere near the rear of the pack. I eat supper last.

I wish you could see Otis right now. He is half awake, half asleep, sort of standing watch over me. That’s what he does whenever I write. He watches me, without moving.

And I’ve always wondered how dogs can remain deathly still, watching you, without falling asleep.

It reminds me of a guy my father once knew. The man could sit on the front porch without moving a muscle for days. The only way you knew he was alive was by his cigarette—it moved occasionally. My father said the man had been told by doctors to drink spirits to steady his

nerves. It worked. Sometimes he got so steady he couldn’t move.

That’s who Otis reminds me of. So that’s who we named him after.

Otis is a good dog. He has witnessed every random emotional event we’ve ever undergone in this household. He has been present for our entire lives.

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly eight years since Otis came to us from an adoption center. We found him when a local pet shelter had a meet-and-greet.

The place was a circus. You couldn’t hear what any of the volunteers were saying because of the collective noise. Each kennel had a fanciful poster with the dogs’ names emblazoned in theatrical letters. Some of the puppies were dressed in little costumes to look like lion tamers and tiny Little Bo-Peeps. The volunteers referred to these costumes as “curb appeal.”

My wife…