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On a two-lane highway in Tennessee, the pickup truck in front of me suddenly pulled off onto the grass shoulder and came to a complete stop. Then the eighteen-wheeler behind me pulled over too. I pulled onto the grass and looked through my windshield, expecting a wreck or a fallen tree. Coming from the opposite direction was a black hearse, followed by a line of forty cars with their headlights shining in the afternoon sun. Nobody on our side of the road knew the person in that hearse. Yet every single vehicle in my lane had stopped dead. Across the ditch, two road workers in orange vests shut off their grass trimmers. They took off their hard hats, held them over their chests, and stood at attention in the weeds. The driver of the pickup in front of me stepped out onto the gravel, removed his dusty baseball cap, and bowed his head until the very last car with a purple funeral flag had passed. It took three minutes. Nobody honked. Nobody checked their phone. People who only see America on television think this country moves too fast to care about strangers. They have never stood on the shoulder of a Tennessee highway and watched a hundred working men stop the world for someone else's mother.

In a town of eight hundred people in Iowa, I woke up at six in the morning and saw twelve pickup trucks idling outside the gas station. Nobody was pumping gas. I thought there had been a town emergency. I walked inside to offer my assistance. There was no emergency. There was only a rotating glass carousel inside a Casey's General Store, and inside that carousel was something the Midwest calls Breakfast Pizza. It is pizza dough covered in warm cheese sauce, scrambled eggs, bacon, and melted cheddar, baked at dawn by a woman named Barb who knows every farmer in the county by the sound of his diesel engine. A man in Carhartt overalls saw me hesitating. He opened the glass door with tongs, slid a massive triangle onto a paper plate, and handed it to me before taking his own. "First time?" he asked. I nodded, mouth full. "You're ruined now," he said gently, pouring black coffee into a foam cup. He was right. I now judge every bakery in the world against a gas station in a cornfield.