These are stories from the heart. Most have their genesis in events set in the Deep South with the accents, rhythms, and pathos of the unique Southern experience. Stories are not real until they have a past, which means that we cannot return to our yesteryears in fact but only in the wellspring of memory. But this turns out to be life's real fallback alternative. The only way we can understand our human and personal past and our prospects for the future is by telling our human tales, not by reciting facts and statistics. For more than biological creatures, we believe we are biographical creations, the stuff of our stories, the novelists of ourselves. And always behind and before us, we acknowledge the Creator with gratitude and humbleness and seek to conform our musings to his miracles. These convictions and the colorings they cast over our human condition have guided the authors in crafting these tales, which we offer with our good wishes to the reader.We have obeyed as best we could a compulsion to express in words the ineffable workings of the spirit. In this sense these tales are true, even though they are more than factual and less than final. For we share a conviction that God is the first and final chapters of our life. Our task is to make the best of the interval.