Our Father, which art in heaven, hi. How are you doing? How’s the family? Have you made any progress on that request I made earlier about Florida Powerball?

Right now, as I’m sure you know, I am miles above Madrid, Spain, captive inside a plane. There are hundreds of us human passengers crammed inside this aircraft, like oysters in a can.

And I can’t help but watch all the people.
Such as the young woman, with her phone sitting face-up on her tray table. She is traveling alone.

She keeps scrolling pictures of her kids. And I’m pretty sure she’s crying because she keeps dabbing her eye with her pinky.

At least I think they are images of her kids, because the children in the photos look just like her. She’s with them in many pictures, too. Holding them. Playing with them. Smiling with them.

I know heartsickness when I feel it, God. I can feel hers. Give her strength.

And the man on my other

side. He is older. He looks like he’s in frail health. There is a telltale scar on his neck, right at the base of his throat, from what I believe is a tracheotomy.

His wife keeps fussing over him. She’s nervously asking whether he’s taken his medication. She’s so adamant about this. So panicky.

She is also quite insistent that he not eat much salt. She is forbidding him to eat the sodium-packed airline food, but to eat instead the special salt-free food she packed even though this “special” food tastes flavorless and not unlike—to use his exact words—“something passed through the system of a cow.”

Ease her fears. Restore his health.

And the college-age girl behind me. I can hear her conversation with the older woman who is sitting beside her. They obviously don’t know each other. The older woman is sort of…

My packing list for the Camino:

Hiking boots. The route we will be taking to Santiago this year is called the Camino Primitivo. It is the oldest route to Santiago. The first pilgrim to hike this particular route hiked it 1,200 years ago, shortly after the birth of Willie Nelson.

We will be hiking over some serious mountains. So I wear boots.

Last year we were told by “experts” not to wear boots for the French route. I wore them anyway. And I was glad I did because we hiked over so many rocky slopes and mudholes I cannot imagine hiking in, say, Keds.

Sometimes I think we have too many “experts” and not enough novices. This is just my expert opinion.

One ultra-light backpack, made of parachute material that manufacturers proudly call “water resistant.” And by “water resistant” I mean, of course, “it doesn’t resist anything.”

This is the same backpack I carried on my first Camino. It has a hydration bladder inside, with a drinking hose protruding so that, while

hiking, you can effectively and efficiently look like a Class-A idiot.

When it rains, I wrap my backpack in a poncho and the pack magically becomes “water resistant.”

One fiddle. Check. It’s an old fiddle from the 1930s. It was the kind of fiddle your grandfather would have purchased out of a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. The kind poor hillbillies played. It sounds like cheap trash. But I was born cheap trash. So I like it.

Last year, I carried this fiddle across Spain, and I learned a very important lesson: If you play a fiddle for Spanish people, they will give you free beer. This is why much of our first Camino is a blur.

Two main T-shirts. One of them has Mark Twain’s signature on the front. Samuel Clemens is my hero. The other shirt bears the Superman insignia. Not because I think I’m Superman,…

We leave for the Camino in two days. And I’ve been thinking about it.

We’ve been planning this trip for months. We’ve been doing six-hour training walks, eating healthy foods that taste like wet napkins, and gathering our outdoor gear.

This will be our second Camino.

People ask you about the Camino when they find out you’re doing it. Their main question is usually a version of: “Why?”

This question comes in different iterations. “Why are you doing this?” “Why are you doing this to YOURSELF?” Or in my case: “Why are you doing this AGAIN?”

And you always reply, “It’s the people.”

Whereupon, they look at you funny, then wait for you to explain. But you never can. There’s never enough time.

And even if you could choose adequate words, you still couldn’t explain something the heart feels. So, others naturally assume you’re going for the exotic experience, and for all the natural beauty. But you’re not.

It’s not the enormous sky. It’s not the arresting greenery found in craggy alpine valleys. It’s not the Pyrenees Mountains, capped

with clouds, so you can’t tell where the sky begins and the earth ends.

Neither is it living out of a backpack, having nothing to your name except what you can cram inside—which in your case is two T-shirts, a change of shorts, and a Montgomery Ward fiddle.

It is the older Brazilian woman who walks beside you. Limping because of her bad hip. Who stops at every landmark to pray. Who finds a miracle in, literally, everything. In every flower. Every sparrow. Every stray cloud. Who kisses you whenever she hugs you even though you’re an uptight American who does not kiss strangers.

It was the group of teenage boys you expected to be typical junk-food-eating, girl-chasing teens. But who, instead, walked in contemplative prayer, trying to find clarity in life. They were reading books by Saint John of the…

My granddaddy said you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog. Someone who treats a dog badly, is a bad person. A person who treats a dog with regard and deference is a good egg.

Right now, my wife is holding our blind coonhound, Marigold. She holds our rescue adoptee like a baby. Not like a dog.

Marigold’s face was struck with a blunt object. Her optic nerve scarred over. She lost her vision. The doctor removed one eye.

“What probably happened,” the vet said, “is that someone paid a lot of money for this hunting dog, but Marigold turned out to be gun shy.”

Her abuser wasn’t happy about shelling out thousands of bucks for a dog who doesn’t like noise. So he took his frustration out on the animal. He used a hard object. Perhaps the butt of a rifle.

My wife is softly humming to Marigold. “I love you,” she is quietly singing to the animal.

We’ve had our dog several years now. Life with

a blind dog was tricky at first. Not like having a regular dog at all. When we feed Marigold treats, for example, you have to touch her to let her know you’re near. Then, Marigold simply opens her mouth widely, gyrating her head back and forth.

“I don’t know where you are,” she’s saying, “but I’m opening my mouth to make it easier for you.”

Marigold’s internal schedule is all screwed up, too, because blind dogs can’t sense light or darkness. So they have no idea what time it is. Sometimes Marigold wakes up at 1 a.m. and starts licking my face. And I start cussing and I say, “Please go back to bed.” Whereupon Marigold barks with glee. Because there is nothing half as fun as 1 a.m.

But, we love this animal. Namely, because we don’t have kids. As a result, my wife…

My Uber driver is in her mid-30s, and she is friendly. She is driving us to our hotel, and we are stuck in gridlock traffic.

There is a network of tattoos adorning her limbs. As she drives, I notice a thumbprint tattoo on her neck. I ask about this tattoo.

First she doesn’t reply.

Then she says quietly, with a pained smile, “It’s my son’s thumbprint.”

I am prepared to let the subject die here, but it is she who breaks the quietude.

“He died last month. He was twenty-two.”

She goes on to tell us that it was an accident. The accident happened in her house. It happened in front of his little brother. It was bad.

She drives in silence for a long time. I offer her an “I’m sorry.” I hate saying this phrase in response to such discourse. It sounds so inauthentic. Even so, the only thing I hate worse than saying these two words is not saying them at all.

“He was an organ donor,” she says. “So they did the honor walk for him.

The whole hospital lined the hallways to watch his bed roll by. Everyone. Doctors, nurses. Even the janitors. Everyone was there. My son saved so many lives that day.”

Then she offers us a common piece of wisdom. But this time, the words fall differently onto my ears.

“Life is so short.”

We are dropped off at the hotel. There are no restaurants within ten square miles, so we need to call another cab to take us to dinner.

The cab arrives. It’s a young man. He’s nice. He’s got a story too.

He says he started driving cabs after his mom died. He had been her primary caregiver for so long, he’d forgotten what it meant to be around the general public.

“I’d been isolated so long, taking care of her,” he says. “When she was suddenly gone, I…

Pa Ingalls’ fiddle was sitting on the table of the museum archive room. Still in its case.

The curator, Tana Redman, smiled at me.

“You’ll need to wash your hands before you play it,” she said.

Pa Ingalls’ fiddle is one of the most well-known and sacred literary objects in American history. Second only to Huck’s raft, Hester Prynne’s scarlet ‘A,’ or the Leg Lamp.

The fiddle is on display at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Mansfield, Missouri. It is the star attraction of the museum.

I inspected the fiddle.

The fingerboard was not made of ebony but softwood. Pearwood maybe. There were divots worn in the fingerboard from Pa’s fingers. Millions of little nicks from his fingernails, peppering first position, carving grooves in the wood.

The fiddleback was adorned with a pattern of scratches, maybe from Pa’s collar, or perhaps the clips of his suspenders, scraping the varnish.

I tuned it, but the tension pegs weren’t holding. Dry weather makes tension pegs about as cooperative as an IRS auditor.

Charles Ingalls learned to play this fiddle

around age 16. This instrument might’ve been his first fiddle.

He learned to play by hanging out at local dances in Campton Township, Illinois, in the 1850s. Charles attended monthly dances at the Garfield House Inn, like all the young people in the area. Except Charles gravitated toward the band.

After about ten minutes of struggling against the tuning pegs, I finally got the fiddle up to pitch. I wedged the instrument beneath my chin. I positioned the bow against the strings, and…

The fiddle had already fallen out of tune.

The tension pegs kept slipping. In Pa’s day, he would have simply removed one of these pegs and sucked on it. The moisture from his saliva would have made the peg stick. But I wasn’t about to suck on a piece of cherished American history. At least, not unless someone could…

Visitors often walk through this high prairie farmhouse and say they can feel her. They don’t know how. They don’t know why. But she’s here.

A teenage girl is in the farmhouse museum, taking the tour alongside me. She and her mom are in my tour group. The girl is looking at the old woman’s artifacts, nestled behind Plexiglass cases, taking lots of pictures with a phone.

“This is the clock SHE wrote about, Mom,” says the girl.

She.

Everyone here is on a first-name basis with “she.”

The girl says her grandmother is who first got her into the classic book series, back when she was little. The girl has been in love with “her” ever since. Her grandmother would read these books to her every night. And when her grandmother went on hospice care last year, the girl returned the favor.

The home is nothing fancy. It’s your typical Missouri farmhouse. Like something your grandparents grew up in. Musty smelling. Unlevel. Creaky. Two stories. Simple to a fault.

The home was built in

1894. She and her husband made a $100 down payment. There were two rooms. Her husband and a few local carpenters built the rest. Sometimes they paid workmen in bales of hay. Or with chickens.

I rest my own hand on the cracked and faded wood paneling. I feel like I’m in the household of an old friend. The teenage girl, however, is having an almost spiritual experience. She traveled here to Mansfield, all the way from Florida, to make this pilgrimage.

She is carrying one of “her” books in her arms. A paperback. Tattered and worn.

And I kind of understand what she’s feeling. When you fall in love with a writer, you never fall out of love.

I read the old woman’s books when I was a kid, too. I read eight of her books in one week. Then I read them again…

The little boy was already on this plane when we boarded. He has a backpack bigger than he is. And a stuffed animal. He is maybe seven years old.

We passengers can hear him talking to anyone within earshot. He is loud. He is chatty. He does not use an indoor voice.

The kid is nothing but friendly.

“Hi,” he says to the businessman across his aisle.

“Hello,” the man replies without looking away from his device.

The boy is smiling. “How are you?”

“Fine,” the guy says. Very annoyed. His tone is communicating that he doesn’t want to talk.

“I am good, too,” the boy says even though the man didn’t ask.

The boy digs into his pocket. “Would you like a Starburst?”

“No.” The man doesn’t even say thank you.

The boy is unfazed. He has a new package of Starburst and it’s too wonderful not to share. He tears it open with his teeth.

“Are you SURE?” the kid says. “I have tropical flavor.”

The man just ignores the kid.

“Which color do you want?” the kid asks.

The man acts like the kid is invisible.

So,

the boy asks a lady nearby whether she’d like a Starburst.

The woman is put off by the constant chatter.

“I wouldn’t care for any,” she says sharply. But at least she adds, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he replies sunnily.

He turns to the old man in a seat behind him. “Would you like any Starburst, sir?”

The man looks almost offended. He’s watching a movie on his phone. His privacy bubble has been violated. He irritatedly tells the kid to quiet down.

The boy looks hurt, but then a flight attendant saves the day.

“Do you have red ones?” the flight attendant asks

“Yes! I do!”

He gives the attendant more than one.

She thanks him, then engages him in conversation. Many of the passengers surrounding her seem aggravated…

There is a US law stipulating that whenever you’re having a good day a pharmaceutical commercial must appear.

It will be a frightening one, too. Sometimes the same startling commercial will be replayed three, four, maybe five times. That’s the law.

You will see this commercial so many times, you will be able to recite the list of fatal side effects by heart:

“Zombacore may cause drowsiness, upper respiratory infections, headache, fatigue, injection site reactions (redness, swelling, brain death), fungal skin infections, paralyzation, organ failure, and lightheadedness in men who are nursing or pregnant.”

These advertisements are seldom pleasant. They are intentionally disturbing sometimes. It is, however, the shingles vaccine ad that takes the cake.

You see big, nasty, red, goopy infected lesions of shingles. The fluid-blisters are shown up close, as though you are watching TLC and it’s Shingles Week.

The music for these commercials is even better. Pharmaceutical commercials often select a knock-off version of a 1970s top-40 hit that nobody ever liked in the first place.

Such as Ozempic’s theme song, which is

a ripoff of “Magic” by Pilot. Which goes: “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!” Also, there is the nonsensical song for Skyrizi which features existentially confusing lyrics which say: “Nothing is everything.”

I don’t want my dogs watching this.

These songs are usually paired with scenes of normal people, losing weight, wearing sleeveless tanks, barbecuing, smiling about it, or playing pickleball, which is America’s fastest-growing sport.

At least this is what everyone tells me about pickleball. We have pickleball courts near our house. People are always waiting in line to use occupied courts.

You can see them there, waiting, spinning their paddles, doing violent stretches, talking about pickleball. If you ever engage them in conversation, someone is bound to say, “Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America.”

I don’t know why they all say this verbatim. It is the mantra for pickleballers. Even when you do…

The 18-year-old young woman walked into the office. She was nervous. Her hands were trembling.

Which was really saying something, because this was a young woman accustomed to being onstage. She wanted to become a serious actress someday.

In fact, that’s why she was here. Her teacher, Mrs. Ship, said she had real talent. Said she’d never seen an actress with such stage presence. Said she had flawless timing. She recommended the young woman visit the drama department director, Madame Pauleen Sherwood Townsend.

Madame Townsend sat behind her desk, reading glasses low on her nose. The woman peered over her spectacles at the rail-thin girl entering her office.

“You’re late,” said the woman, checking her clock. “By two minutes.”

“I’m sorry,” said the girl.

“What’s your name?”

“Everyone calls me Ophie, ma’am.”

“Sit down, Ophie.”

The girl sat. She tried to steady her quivering hands, but couldn’t. So, she sat on them.

“Mrs. Ship tells me you want to be an actress.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What will you be reading for me?”

Young Ophie had prepared a reading. She’d memorized a selection from a classic work. She had rehearsed her piece so

many times she could recite it in her sleep. She cleared her throat and began.

The old woman listened with eyes closed. But something was wrong. Terribly wrong. The woman’s eyes snapped open. Her facial muscles tightened. An expression of concern lit her face.

Madame Townsend stopped the girl mid-sentence. Ophie was not even halfway through.

“What on earth happened to your voice?” said the woman.

“My voice?”

“Your voice is horrid. You’ve strained it. How on earth did you ruin your voice like this?”

The color went out of the girl’s face. “Strained it?”

“Think, child. What have you done to your voice to destroy it so?”

“Destroyed it?”

Tears swelled behind young Ophie’s eyes. “I don’t know. I was a cheerleader in high school?”

“A cheerleader? Oh,…