He Is Abel
Abel Rodriguez had no car. He’s a janitor at Community High School in Collin County, near Dallas. Abel is nice. Not a big guy. Easy going, mostly quiet. Friendly. He deals with teenagers all day. He cleans spills from the floor.
Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Abel Rodriguez had no car. He’s a janitor at Community High School in Collin County, near Dallas. Abel is nice. Not a big guy. Easy going, mostly quiet. Friendly. He deals with teenagers all day. He cleans spills from the floor.
I’ve spent this entire morning reading letters. They are stories sent to me from people who have seen things bigger than themselves.
His name is Callum. He is a Labrador. He is brown. He has a little white developing around his snout. All the best dogs have white on their snouts.
Listen, I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but technically, that’s not my fault. You probably don’t remember this, but you quit listening to your inner voice just as soon as you hit the fourth stage of puberty.
I remember who I was as I walked the ancient trail. I remember those 40 days. Living out of a backpack. Hardly any possessions. Two T-shirts. One pair of boots. I had a fiddle on my back.
The main reason I’m writing is because the world is going to go nuts someday. And I mean totally, flipping nuts. I can’t even describe the level of nuttiness you’re about to experience.
Calhoun, Georgia. An autumn evening. I was supposed to be putting on a show with my band The Grand Ole Optimists. But that wasn’t happening. I was unable to perform because of a serious gas problem.
A little girl rescued a turtle from a busy highway. This happened yesterday afternoon. Moving a turtle is not a remarkable sight, really. It happens every day, somewhere in the world. Somewhere in the known universe, a rural kid moves a turtle off the highway. I have been that kid myself. Many times. Maybe you …
I have an important question. How would you spend your best day ever? This might sound like a dumb question. But if you have time, take a brief break from doom scrolling and think about your best day ever (BDE).
And so it was, on an average weeknight, somewhere in California, a team of 15 random people volunteered to lift the helicopter. A gaggle of bystanders, both male and female, gathered beneath the belly of the great wreckage. Feet planted. Hands ready.
My friend Morgan Love is in the hospital again. I’ve lost count of how many times she’s been in the hospital. She’s slept in a hospital bed more times than any human I’ve known.
When I was a kid, church ladies ran the whole world. Elderly women were always telling me what to do, randomly appearing from the shadows and trying to feed me.
When you walk the sidewalks of Fairhope, Alabama, it’s the trees that impress you most. It’s not the upscale homes, nor the Mayberry-like storefronts, which all give you the impression that you have fallen into a Rockwellian planned urban development. No. It’s the live oaks.
You probably missed this information, but loneliness was recently listed as an epidemic by the US Surgeon General and the World Health Network. That’s how big of a deal this is.
Rico was going to be euthanized in a few days. He was in his kennel. Unmoving. He wasn’t making a fuss the way hopeful dogs do when visitors come. It was almost like he knew. He was not long for this world. That’s when Rachel happened.
As the sun peeks above the roofline of the Hoover Metropolitan Complex, 2,000 of Birmingham’s most bloodthirsty competitive runners begin to gather at the starting line, forming tight social clusters.
Wake up. Get dressed. Remove phone from nightstand charger, put phone in pocket. Your phone dings. The phone is already notifying you about your highly sophisticated security cameras, which have just picked up movement by the neighborhood cats.
You know what I wish? I wish I could hug everyone in the world. I think I’d start by hugging the young waitress in the restaurant where I had lunch. Earlier that day, she was cussed out by an angry customer. He screamed at her. Called her a bad name
The 71-year-old man cradled a small, juvenile robin in his hand. He fed the bird soggy dog-food pellets with tweezers. The bird was injured badly. But not dead. “Sssshhh,” he said as he fed the bird.
It was January, 1906. The S.S. Valencia was being tossed upon the ice-cold Pacific like a rubber ducky. Two days earlier, the ship had set out from San Francisco to Seattle. It was a bad trip.