Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Sean Dietrich 
We leave our inn at daybreak. Our innkeeper is awake and already at the front door, wearing a robe, waiting to say goodbye to us. Like a mom seeing her kids off to school. She gives us a heartfelt and emotional goodbye in French, with double kisses and everything.
There are hundreds of pilgrims. Very few speak English. We are all from different countries, age groups, and walks of life. And yet, somehow, although we are foreigners sojourning in a strange land, we all manage to—this is beautiful—gripe about how slow the line moves.
The inn where we are staying is manned (womanned?) by two French women who speak no English and almost no Spanish.
Amazingly, spirituality is not a “weird” and awkward subject for the people of Madrid, it’s normalized. Here, people seem to treat the topic of religion as cordially as you’d discuss college football.
Daddy used his belt buckle to pop open his Coke. He used his teeth to tear open the peanuts. Then he carefully dumped the nuts into the mouth of the bottle. He handed the bottle to me. “Here,” he said. “This is something my daddy used to do. Try it.”
I receive a lot of remarks in the form of emails, private messages, obscene hand gestures, etc. There’s no way I could answer all comments individually. So occasionally, I compile commonly asked questions and answer them in this column.
Today, my wife and I will become pilgrims. We will walk the breadth of Spain, upwards of 500 miles, over Pyrenees Mountains, on foot, to visit the remains of the apostle James.
There were ghosts everywhere. That’s what I kept thinking, while standing on Shiloh battlefield. Ghosts. You could feel them. You could almost hear their fraternal laughter. You could smell their gunpowder.
My dog, Marigold, and I have been walking a lot lately. It’s not easy, walking. We have very few “good walks” inasmuch as walking in a straight line is impossible when you can’t see.
It’s overcast. I’m with my wife and my dog. We are on the wide porch of a vacation rental house. This is the main road which cuts through this small town. There are sounds of kids laughing, playing. Easy traffic.
Six years ago. The Waffle House was packed. There were customers everywhere. Shoulder to shoulder. Sardine-like. I don’t know how the waitress managed to find a place for us at the counter.
People from all over the world are traveling to this sacred place. Farmers and peasants. Lords and ladies. Rich and poor.
As a boy, I’d awake to find my mother already in the living room, snuggled beneath a lamp, where she’d been reading for hours. The cat in her lap would just stare at me with moral disapproval.
You slap the power button on TV. The old Zenith console warms up. The television is cased in a faux wooden cabinet, with warped oak-grain veneer from a bygone Dr. Pepper someone once placed atop the television, even though this someone’s mother told them to NEVER set ANYTHING atop the TV, not that we’re naming names here.
Sean gets lots of letters asking some pretty interesting questions. Herein, he answers some…in his own special way.
Today is a big deal.
If you don’t read any further, just keep repeating the above sentence in a loud, clear voice until it sinks in and your spouse begins to wonder whether you’re clinically insane.
I have always wanted to see the Chesapeake. My whole life, actually.
It all started because my dad was a reader. He read books obsessively. You’d see him sitting in his chair, poking through some thick volume.
Five years ago I was in Huntsville when the world shut down. Five years. Almost to the day. I’ll never forget it.
I remember my first cellphone. I felt like one bad hombre.
I was in my mid-20s. The cellphone retail salesperson outfitted me with a state-of-the-age phone about the size of a residential General Electric refrigerator.
The young woman sits in my truck passenger seat. She is 19. Her hair is red. Scottish red. Luminously red. People always comment on her hair first.