Dear America

God bless the Great Smoky Mountains, so majestic their beauty could kill you. God bless the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevadas at sundown.

The same goes for the Tetons, the Blue Ridge, the Bighorns, the Elks, the Adirondacks, and the Appalachians, which were carved by the pocketknife of God.

And the Missouri River, seen from 34,000 feet above, moving like liquid silver across a green patchwork. The Mississippi, the Rio Grande, the meandering Columbia, the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Tennessee, the Colorado.

God bless the Gulf of Mexico at dusk. The Chesapeake Bay. God bless the geese overhead, on any Great Lake. Or any body of water for that matter.

And Ellis Island. If you visit Ellis, you begin to visualize the hundreds of thousands of congregated souls, dressed in drab rags, holding tight to their entire lives, crammed into duffle bags.

And it all makes sense, why your old man was such a tightwad when it came to buying your Little League uniform.

And Savannah. On Oglethorpe Avenue, where the home of Juliette Gordon Low stands. Low, a girl who was deaf in both ears, who founded a humble youth organization for girls in 1915. And although they were laughed at by high-society, these Girl Scouts would predate the American woman’s right to vote.

Mount Vernon, Virginia, overlooking the whitewater. And Moab, Utah, within the mysterious Arches National Park, where ancient remnants of time stand like archaic ruins.

God bless each Waffle House, where many of the waitresses just seem to know how to make you smile.

Bless the south rim of the Grand Canyon, staring at an itty-bitty, mercury-like river, miles beneath you, just before a 12-year-old tourist almost knocks you over the edge because he is playing tag with his sister.

And the serenity of the Great Plains of Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The remains of North America’s ancient interior sea, which covers approximately 1,125,000 square miles, roughly one third of the United States. An area almost as big as Disney World.

The lowlands of the Mississippi Delta. The wilds of Alaska. The deserts of Nevada. The Ozarks. Yosemite. Yellowstone. Mount Shasta. And of course, each Cracker Barrel.

That memorable field in Adams County, Pennsylvania, where a battle was once fought near the borough of Gettysburg, where an estimated 48,000 men fell.

And Saint Augustine, where in 1565 Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and his 800 colonists ate supper with the indigenous Timucua, and held the first Catholic mass on future U.S. soil.

Bless every truckstop cafe. Every beer joint. Boston’s Fenway Park. Busch Stadium. Yankee Field. Talladega Superspeedway. The Grand Ole Opry. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The American Royal Barbecue Competition.

Wednesday night church meetings. Pinewood derbies. Bunco night. Community theaters. And every backyard game of hide and seek.

Bless the ornate finery of the U.S. Capitol building, which has survived over 200 years of turbulence. And the vacant dust of Death Valley. The suffocating swamps of the Everglades. The traffic on Atlanta Interstate 285.

And bless the guy I met this morning. When I was walking along Birmingham’s sidewalks and almost got hit by a speeding vehicle.

And an old guy appeared out of nowhere. A homeless man, a person I didn’t even know was there. He stepped directly into traffic, held up his hands, and staved off an oncoming truck. For me.

On the front of his T-shirt was an American flag.

The guy could have been killed. But he didn’t even question his decision to intervene on my behalf.

Afterward, I looked at him, dumbstruck, and I thanked him profusely.

He just clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Man, it’s all good.”

He didn’t want any money, even though I insisted. He didn’t want anything from me. He just wanted to leave me with some parting words before he walked away.

“God bless you, brother. And God bless America.”

Indeed.