Memories are snippets of time, caught forever in a little fold in our brains, and often, in our hearts. We visit them from time to time, perhaps talking for hours, hoping they will remember us, mostly just wondering what they mean to our present lives. Now and then, however, those memories are made of metal riding on four wheels. Those memories are special.

Every week they line up in the parking lot between the bank and the Chick-fil-A, their quarter panels and hoods and trunks polished so perfectly you want to reach elbow deep into the candy apple red and pull up a night from 1979 or ‘69 or ’59.

“I had one just like this when I was in high school,” said a nattily dressed man in his mid 60’s, his skin weathered and his thin white hair scrambled from driving the convertible Mustang to this same spot every weekend.

“We used to go to the drive-in all the time,” said his wife of forty years, her own silver hair pulled into a tight ponytail. “But I never told my daddy that.” She smiled. “He’d have killed Billy.”

Billy showed me every detail on the car, from the leading edge hood to the chromed “260” emblems to the pristine 160 horsepower engine.

“See the battery cooling louvers behind the grill and the generator charging system and the large horns?” said Billy.  "Those are special to this car.”

He made a point to take me around back and point out the slotted spare tire hold-down. While he talked about his love of original paint and his hatred of aftermarket hype, Lindy, his wife, sat in her folding chair reading a Kindle, oblivious to Billy’s ramblings.

“This is what’s known as a ’64-1/2 Mustang,” said Billy. “Some people say it’s just an early ’65, but not me. This beauty came straight out of Dearborn back when men with brass balls made automobiles out of Detroit steel.”

I asked him if it was true that the ’64-1/2 Mustang was really just a Falcon with buckets because the real Mustangs came later. There was a stoic silence in him that made me uncomfortable. He did not seem to take kindly to my suggestion.

“Son, that is no way to talk to a man standing beside one of the finest automobiles ever built in this country,” he said sternly, his bushy brows arching and his lip curling a bit. Slowly his face relaxed into a laugh.

“Had you going there,” said Billy. “Us old Mustangers know all those Falcon stories. It is sitting on a Falcon chassis though.”

“I thought there was a little Falcon in there,” I said.

“Ignore the Falcon part," he said. "There ain’t no such thing as a ’64 Mustang anyway. I lied earlier. This is sort of a pre-’65 Mustang, built somewhere between March and July of ’64. I’ve studied this stuff a little. Most people would just call it a ’65 and be done with it, but not us. This baby went from an idea to the highway in just 18 months. Figured they’d sell maybe 80,000 that first year. They sold more than a million in a couple years. I bought one when I got back from 'Nam. Wrecked it a year later. Then we started having kids and I drove 4-doors until two years ago when I got this little horse. ”

Billy offered me a “cold drank” from his ice chest and rubbed the Mustang’s door with a towel he never put down the entire time we talked.

“He pampers it more than he ever did me,” said Lindy. “I should be jealous. He calls it his pony girl. Surprised he hasn’t just given it a name and divorced me and run off with it.”

“It cain’t cook,” he smiled, trotting over to Lindy, hugging her tightly, half moon-shaped shrapnel scars from the battle of Ho Bo Woods straining against his forearms as he squeezed his wife and best friend and she kissed his ear.

“This is a by-God-1964-1/2 Mustang pulled right out of the brain of a young Lee Iacocca,” he said, then paused and squinted. “No, I take that back. This car came from the genius of Donald Frey, God rest his soul. He died a couple of years ago."

Billy folded the towel and nodded across the antique cars.

"If you want to see a wannabe pony car, go over there and look at ol’ Jimmy’s ’66 Camaro built in Norwood, Ohio," he said. "It’s green because it’s envy suffering on 4 wheels.”

Billy waves at Jimmy. Under his breath he says,  “When Jimmy talks about his car, he looks over here and wants mine. I know it. I can feel it. I’ve known Jimmy for 30 years.”

“Oh, come on, Billy,” said Lindy without ever looking up from her Kindle. “Jimmy’s your damned brother.”

“Well, there’s that too,” said Billy.

IMAGE FROM MUSTANG MONTHLY. WISH I HAD BEEN CARRYING MY IPHONE SO I COULD HAVE GOTTEN A PIC OF BILLY AND LINDY BESIDE THEIR MUSTANG.

Before you get offended by those words you should know this: Anna Jarvis, the mother of Mother’s Day started the modern celebration of mothers in 1907, but later, when it was hijacked by commercialization, Ms. Jarvis turned on Mother’s Day and was even arrested for protesting against the holiday which now uses sentimentality to fill the bank accounts of florists and other companies all over the world.

If that sounds harsh, please remember, I am just relaying how Ms. Jarvis viewed the money making scheme that Mother’s Day has become. And now that the facts are out of the way, let us talk about real mothers.

We all have one, like it or not. Biologically, there is no other way to get a ticket to this planet. Mothers run the world, even according to scumbags and holy men. Few people ever worry about saying something that embarrasses their fathers. Mothers, on the other hand, are the ones we think about offending when we type a curse word in a blog post, dammit. Mothers are the ones who washed out our mouths with soap and sent us to bed without supper and fed us a fine meal even when they did not eat themselves. Mothers held us when we were afraid and reeled us in when we were too confident. Mothers went to talk to the teacher who hated us and defended us to the kids who accused us. Mothers took us to practice and stood screaming our names as we scored touchdowns or hit homeruns or drained three’s at the buzzer. Mothers were also there when we rode the pine and never got a grass stain on our uniforms.

“I love you, mama!” has been a constant refrain by famous sports figures since Joe Willie Namath guaranteed victory in the Super Bowl 43 years ago. So this year, let’s celebrate our mothers ­– by doing something for them every day, not just once a year above our quickly scrawled signatures on a Hallmark card.

Starting today, tell your mother you love her, not in an email, but in person or call her on the phone. Yes, call her every single day and tell her what she means to you, and do not use the same story twice. Do it for a year. She probably sacrificed a lot to get you where you are. The least you can do is say, “Thanks mom,” and give her specifics surrounding those two words. That is what she really wants, not a store-bought card or e-card or flowers or candy or a trinket. She wants your love. And that gift costs you nothing. Think for a second what loving you has cost her? Her career? Her health? Her time? Her life?  Or maybe it cost her nothing but her love, in which case it is still a pretty good bargain. Better than $75 for a box of long-stemmed roses.

My mother is no longer here. I called her around 6:30 pm every day for ten years after my father died. We talked about what she did that day and I told her that I loved her and why. It seldom took more than fifteen minutes. On Mother’s Day the year before she died, mom told me that Mother’s Day was nothing special to her. As her voice cracked, she said, “It’s the 364 other Mother’s Days during the year that makes being a mom so special.” She paused. “When that phone rings and I see your number, it’s worth more than all the roses in the world.”

He carefully picked out a cart as if he was looking for a specific one and made his way to the produce section where he stopped next to the onions and potatoes, trembling hands at his side, gnarled fingers tucked tightly into his pockets like he was holding on to his pants just in case they tried to run off. His forehead piled into a stack of wrinkles as he watched the cooler of bagged salads neatly arranged in rows on shelves. He did not just stare at them, he watched them, and there is a difference.

After trying unsuccessfully for several minutes to introduce myself in a meaningful way that he might remember, I turned to walk away. He was in another world. He mumbled something that ended in a question mark.

“You like that stuff in them bags?” he said, pointing to the bagged salads. He never looked at me.

“Salad? In bags?” I said tentatively, not feeling the need to go into a deeper explanation since salads have been sold in bags for years. From the look on his face, he seemed to have missed the transition from a basic head of lettuce to this new way of selling greens.

“You don’t even have to wash it," I said. "Just pour it in a bowl and eat it.”

“I know what it is,” he huffed, walking over and picking up a bag of field greens. “If you're smart, you'll wash it no matter what it says on that bag.”

"I usually do," I said.

He patted the bag and cocked his eyes over in my direction, not at me, just in my general vicinity, just past me, off into the carrots and corn and squash.

"Just a bag of weeds," he grunted. "That’s what it is."

“I guess you could say that,” I said. “But a salad is just a bowl of weeds too. Not much else.”

"I reckon so," he said before leaning over and waving his hands out in the air about knee high as if shewing away chickens.

“When I was a kid, your food came out of the ground, or from an animal that ate what came out of the ground. Now it's chemicals and engineered crap, frankefood, I think I saw on the Discovery Channel. That's what the feller called it. Like Frankenstein. You ever watch the Discovery Channel?”

"I love the Discovery Channel," I said. 

"That's some smart TV right there," he said squinting. "Not like that old Gilligan Beverly Hillbillies Dating Game Petticoat Junction shit they used to have on TV. This is usuable stuff. No astronauts rubbing a bottle with a Genie dressed like Madonna in it. You can learn some serious things on Discovery. Mythbusters is better than everything I learned in school. Course I graduated 10th grade in 1949."

"Mythbusters does some interesting things," I said. "There was this one episode where they took a pig in a crash helmet and –" He cut me off.

“I bet this bagged salad right here has little droplets of cow manure in it. You believe that? Or is it a myth?"

He tossed two bags into his cart and watched me seriously.

"I sure don't know about that, sir," I said. "But there's a lot of leaves in there. Could be."

“Just a bag of weeds," he said again. "And the shame is, you cain’t even smoke it.”

I have heard bits and pieces of this story all of my life at different times from different relatives. Only toward the end of her life did my grandmother fill in all of the details. Then my father finished it off before he died.

“Haddie and Jenreal never got along anyhow.” I remember my grandpaw saying years later as he told part of the story during a butterbean shelling in his pine-paneled den. Back then there were "Onion People."

"That’s what we called them because some were sweet and some were bitter," he said. "Vidalia's were sweet."

A few years went by before I heard him speak of the onion incident again.

“They went at it hard for about ten minutes. Nobody stopped them. If you are a smart man, you stay out from between two women in a fight, especially these two. Both were hard enough to haul hay one-handed in August.”

Onions usually do not start fights, and we would laugh at such a notion these days. When the Vidalia Onion came to Lower Alabama years ago, however, strong words turned to busted lips and Onion People were born.

“This was back in the early 1940’s, when folks out here in the country didn’t have much to get excited about,” said my grandmother. She ended up on the side of the sweet Vidalia, although she never physically got in an onion scuffle. She did yell at a woman who wanted to start an onion argument in a dime store aisle once, although she would not tell me what she yelled. Regular old hot onion-lovers did not go down sweetly in this battle. They were aggressive and their nature, like their onions, would make your eyes water.

“One morning at church, Jenreal, brought a Vidalia Onion casserole,” said my grandmother. “Haddie, you remember her? She’s the one who got struck by lightning while gossiping on the phone a few years ago. You remember that?" Granny looked at me like she was describing calculus to an idiot.

"Lightning came in right through the window and blew off both her shoes and knocked her pure crazy as hell. She was off kilter for the rest of her life.”

I did not remember that, but I smiled and said I did since saying no would have started a whole other story about crazy old Haddie and all I wanted to do was get granny to finish the onion story so we could eat some homemade ice cream.

“Jenreal put her Vidalia casserole right next to Haddie’s white onion casserole. Nobody ate Haddie’s casserole. Not a bite. Jenreal’s Vidalia dish was gone in five minutes. Hadie took it hard and built up a grudge that boiled for a year.”

Some people say it was a mistake, this new onion from Georgia that was not hot, but sweet. My grandmother was not one of those people. She love Vidalias.

“It was just plain better than the onions we had before,” said my grandmother calmly about a year before she died.

“Your grandpaw loved a pure, Vidalia Onion sandwich with nothing but mayonnaise smeared on it. He could eat two or three for lunch. He liked them cooked in custard for dessert too. They were that sweet. You couldn’t make a decent custard desert out of a hot onion if you poured in a cup of sugar.”

As I ate my ice cream I thought about how Southern people will fight over just about anything: football, fried chicken, politics, barbecue, whisky, Jesus – and onions.

“Those two old women had it out on a Saturday night next to a coin toss game in a parking lot carnival at the Piggly Wiggly,” said my father who was a witness since he was the butcher at “The Pig,” as some called the legendary grocery store ironically headquartered in Vidalia, Georgia.

“It was ugly, and embarrassing and caused a split in the church, as I remember it,” said my father. “All because of an onion." He paused to think back. "That’s why I got into meat instead of the produce department, I reckon. Beef, chicken and pork people all get along pretty good. I don’t want nothing to do with them damned Onion People.” 

The young girl lies on a gurney in the hallway outside the CT room,
braces and mechanical gear holding her mangled 17 year-old body
together. Her eyes stare into a fluorescent world that feels brutally
different than any nightmare she had ever experienced, her mouth
gaping at the side unnaturally as if muscles cannot remember how her
smile used to work before the accident, or if there was ever a smile
to begin with.

Her single mother stoically pushes away the thought of sleep. She
knows there will be none anytime soon. A technician in dreadlocks
pushes a machine into the room to her right. Jokes bounce
off the tile from inside. No one laughs in the hallway, however. The
jokes are for employees only.

From the opposite direction comes another girl in a wheelchair, PICC
line cinched in an armband, a girl not much older in years than the
first girl, but decades older inside. She looks serene, almost happy
in a weary way. Wheelchair girl knows every hallway here, every
elevator, every floor, every view out every window, every style of
room. She has been in almost all of them. She knows the tired women
who do the housekeeping. She knows the tired nurses and tired doctors and tired residents. She has met them all under the worst possible circumstances. She knows what days fried chicken is served in the cafeteria, and when the therapy dogs come by, and what it feels like to have a deadly staph infection eating away at metal plates and screws in her bones.

The two girls eyes meet. They each recognize the pain in the other.
There is a pause. The girl in the wheelchair reaches up to touch the
arm of the girl on the gurney. Gurney girl's eyes widen as the
Dilaudid mixes with Percoset in her veins. The motion of compassion
jiggles the IV bag.

"Are you afraid of the pain?" asks wheelchair girl who has weaned herself from pain meds many times. "Are you afraid you will never walk again?"

There is a strained pause.

"Yes," says gurney girl. The word catches in her throat as if it has
barbs and will not come out. Pain is the tread that holds everything
together in this place.

Wheelchair girl has been here for six months and nine surgeries. She
has beaten the fear, tolerated the pain, and overcome the odds. She knows things the doctors will never know. She knows what the nurses fear. Wheelchair girl has cried through horrors that morphine and all of its hydro-cousins could not dull.

"You will not walk," says wheelchair girl.

Gurney girl recoils slightly at the bluntness of the words.

"You will run," says wheelchair girl. "And so will I. Soon."

Gurney girl nods, a small amount of hope filling her face. A longer, silent conversation has taken place that only they can hear. Wheelchair girl makes her way down the hall to another test, smiling. 

The same halls. The same food. The same smell. The same elevators and parking garage. The same pain. The same weariness. The same blood soaking the same sheets on just another floor in another small room on another day, another week, another month.

How do you fight fatigue and hopelessness and turn them into strength and confidence. How can you scrape love from walls of despair? When will you lose worry and embrace faith? Can fear become peace in a place like this?

Between retractable curtains of hurt, people find life or death with equal fervor. In here there is no contempt for frivolity. It is longed for like breath. Through the words of serious people sneaks a foolish laugh.

Absolutes are replaced with maybes. Certainty leaves you alone in uncomfortable chairs. Black and white is a fog of gray. Truth is slippery.

Hell is not flames and gnashing of teeth. It is a simple place behind a wide door with another number that another person used to try to remember when all they wanted to do was forget. Hell is the unknown voice on the other side of the wall moaning for relief. Beyond the reach of humans is the domain of angels.

Hell comes with a food tray, rubber gloves, PICC line, tubes, a beeping machine, a bedpan, and a lot of good people who make mistakes trying to save your life. 

Love lives in hell. There is little hate. No time for it. Hope is practiced here. Faith survives in hell. Hell is not even hell, and yet is never leaves.

If you think hell is just for the dead, get sick, get injured, get an oxygen mask and lie down with a blood pressure cuff and watch your heartbeat on a monitor. Push the little red button and wait. It takes a while. You are not the only one in hell.

Heaven happens in hell. Miracles are on the daily menu. Heroes wear scrubs and slice peoples' guts open with knives. Hell is not what we think. And it is everything you have heard. Hell is pretty now and then, beautiful, even.

Rain streaks the windows of hell. Helicopters land on the roof of hell. Your children bleed all night in hell. Their eyes look at you and wonder why you cannot save them from hell. They roam the deepest holes of hell, and yet they see light in the darkest places. God visits them in hell. So does the devil. And during it all you sit in hell, powerless to change any of it. That is why it is hell.

Sent from my iPad.

At their core, advertising, branding, marketing and several other professions are built to do one thing: sell. Facebook may have connected nearly a billion people, but if it has a value, that value is intrinsically based on the ability to sell our lives as a product to companies willing to pay for a customize message that will tempt some of those billion users to click through and eventually buy something.

The other day I talked with a car salesman and his message sounded a lot like a social media or digital expert, or an ad guy, or a CMO.

"Engagement has always been the key to selling people stuff,” he said. “Although people talk about it like it fell off the back of a new F-150 last week, engagement is not a new practice, it's just a new word for something we’ve always done: interact with people in relevant ways so we can sell them things. Now we have a lot more ways to get into their heads. And sometimes we get in there through the back door."

He talked about selling a vehicle the way Zuckerberg talks about social connections, or Steve Jobs talked about the new iPad.

"We used to run and ad in the paper, or do a whacky TV or radio commercial. And we still do now and then. But if you want to sell somebody a vehicle - the biggest expenditure a person will likely have next to a house, wedding or funeral - it starts on their smartphone or iPad or computer. We used to sit around the front door of the dealership waiting for you to pull up in that old car you wanted to trade in. Now I'm emailing and texting and pulling people to our site and talking with them on Facebook and Twitter. I'm showing them inventory on Pinterest and giving them spiffs for checking in on Foursquare. I seldom even talk to people on the phone anymore unless it is to give directions or confirm a visit.” He sipped his cup of coffee. “You see what I'm saying here? Social media is a wonderful communications tool. A great way to engage. But when push comes to shove, for me, social media is about selling you something, plain and simple."

Perhaps you believe this, or perhaps you think he sounds like a materialistic Philistine hijacking a precious and personal technology for crass purposes. Either way, his intense believe in social media made him sound more like Guy Kawasaki than Billy Bob the Car Dealer out on the turnpike.

"Orchestrating social media sales is, quite honestly, easier than it was before when we used to just sit here and wait for customers. Now we can go far outside the old boundaries and use these awesome tools to pull people in, have a conversation, find out who they really are and what they want and how we can fit a vehicle to their lifestyle. I’m really less a salesman than an arranger."

The car salesman's viewpoint was a stark contrast to a conversation I had with an engagement director at a branding firm.

"It's all about the conversation, getting to know people, talking with them, providing value to their lives in new ways. It is less about selling them something than it is about giving them something."

The car salesman heard that opinion and offered a comment.

"All of that is true. But at the end of that conversation, after you’ve given them something, your job depends on selling a customer something. That's just the nature of business."

He did not call her an angel at first.

“She didn’t have wings,” said the man, staring out the hospital window across the rooftops. “She just held my hand tight as the heart monitor leveled off. She also told me something I didn’t want to hear at the time.”

Two years later, he saw her again. This time she said nothing. She did not have to.

He did not tell many people what happened because he did not want to be seen as crazy, which is how people view those who see things that cannot be easily explained.

“Was she an angel?” he said. “In a world of high tech medicine it’s hard to see how an angel could keep a job,” he said. “But it sure did look like she had a job.”

Angeling is as old school as it gets, yet most people do not even believe they exist. The man was skeptical himself before she showed up in the middle of an operating room with his heart shutting down.

“She squeezed my right hand so hard I thought she broke it,” he said.

As he talked, each line of his face showed the wear of that night.

"'You cannot go yet,' she told me, 'You have something else to do.'"

He asked the doctors and nurses if they had seen her. They all said no.

 “I suppose saying that she was an angel is dependent on my understanding of the profession,” he said. “Or yours. Either way, I didn’t go that night.”

Perhaps he fought to stay. Perhaps she fought for him. Perhaps a lot of things.

“It’s hard to say when you’re busy dying,” he said. “I did wonder what it was I had to do, though” he said. “I still do.”

Then four months ago, in a surgical trauma unit of a giant urban medical center, the tall woman showed up again. Same alabaster face. Same pale arms, long, sinewy, thick bones, taut muscles, fragile and strong like a horse's legs. This time she was holding a broken and dying girl – the man’s daughter.

“She was over my daughter's bed, face to face, eyes to eyes, kind of hanging there, suspended, arms gripping my frail, bleeding girl with all those tubes and wires draping up out of her into computers and monitors and bags of liquid,” he said. “You don’t forget something like that.”

At the foot of the bed, the woman's legs hung over bending awkwardly almost to the floor, her feet, like her hands, spindly and muscular and bare like an animal. Her clothes were not clothes, but a shape. Hard to make out. A shape that defied the man’s attempt to describe it.

“The room was shaking slightly,” he said. “Could have been a helicopter bringing somebody in. There’s probably a scientific explanation, but science and angels probably don’t cross paths too often, do they?”

Perhaps they do.

“You can make of it what you want,” he said. “I’m still alive. My daughter’s still alive. Neither of us should be.”

He paused for a minute, searching for a way to say what he was thinking.

“Maybe she’s just the angel of hard times,” he said.

His daughter survived massive internal injuries and five surgeries. A deadly staph infection still rages in her broken pelvis. Another surgery is looming. Her fight is far from over.

“You have something else to do.”

“Those words seem louder these days,” he said. “Is helping my daughter get through this what I was left here to do?” He lingers on the question. “I don’t know. All I know is what I’ve seen and heard.”

It is all any of us ever really know.

Once upon a time, in the early 1980’s, my back was famous, and my front too, now and then. My wife and I lived east of Fort Worth, Texas in a neighborhood most people will only see on “Cops,” but that is not the show I’m talking about.

Larry Hagman starred in “Dallas” as J.R. Ewing. It was a big deal back then, even if you still had a 1970’s black and white Zenith sucking CBS in on a bent coat hanger.

Here is what happened. My wife had the notion that she wanted to be an actor. And she did it too. She got an agent and wrangled a bit part in a boxing movie with Dennis Quaid. Okay, she was an extra, but it paid $50 back when that was a third of my paycheck drawing maps for Six Flags Over Texas and writing headlines for an animal park.

She was working three jobs and I was hanging onto two. One day she asked me to run by and pick up her movie money at the agent’s office. The place was filled with people dressed like the circus train had taken off to Oklahoma and left them in the lobby. On the way out the door, a woman yelled, “What are you doing this Saturday?”

 “Saturday?” I said. “I’m mowing the yard. You need yours mowed?” I could have used the money.

“Here,” she handed me a piece of paper with a North Dallas address. “Be there at 7 A.M. wearing a suit. Pays another fifty bucks. And there’s more where that came from.”

I showed up in North Dallas wearing a suit bought on sale at Penny’s three years earlier. It cost $59. 

What followed were several Saturdays worth of extra work on “Dallas,” sometimes in scenes with J.R. and sometimes with Jock Ewing played by old cowboy actor, Jim Davis.

Over the next few weeks, my wife and I walked past cameras and sat at tables pretending to talk while Hagman pretended to be mean and guys holding microphones pretended to care. We played restaurant patrons and bank customers and roasting strollers on the street. We shot in 130º heat at Dealey Plaza and at the infamous Southfork Ranch. It was quite an education in sweating and boredom and practical jokery. Hagman once shoved me through a door and into a scene where I stumbled wide-eyed and stupid.

“Cut!” yelled the director, giving me a look that said I would never be a movie star. “Dammit, Larry. Come on!” Hagman strolled in feigning innocence.

I have not thought about this for years and then I saw a preview of the new TNT series “Dallas” coming this summer. There’s Larry Hagman’s J.R., chest puffed out, a smirk of superiority now surrounded by thin, white hair and eyebrows twirling up into little, fuzzy horns. Bobby and Sue Ellen have a few miles on them too.

After thirty-something years, the brothers are still fighting and screwing over business rivals, proving there is no karma in Texas, just deviously despicable oil tycoons and their unstable families balancing torn relationships between a cowboy hat and a pair of Tony Llamas pushing the accelerator of a Mercedes-Benz up the Central Expressway. And I see there are new Ewings to spread the drama and pain. Hopefully one of them is not named Snooki.

This time my wife and I will not be in the background acting like Yuppies in clothes bought on sale at JCPenney’s. A dead man is now wearing the suit I wore in every one of those episodes. I donated it to a family member who did not have a proper burial outfit a few years later. It kind of bothers me that I will always be wearing that gray suit in old “Dallas” reruns, and he will always be wearing it, well, forever.

(pic: TNT)