Here’s what Carpenter, an LBJ aide and occasional speechwriter, wrote on a blank post card as Air Force One flew from Dallas to Washington:

“This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help and God’s.”

As Gordon says, “Ms. Carpenter was confronted with a challenge that could be called unique in the annals of speechwriting, and she rose to it magnificently.”

Makes you proud to be part of the clan of those who put words on paper for others to say.

I’m thankful for great southern cooks like my wife, who does turkey, dressing (don’t call it stuffing), squash casserole, ambrosia and pumpkin pie with the best of them.

I’m thankful for all of my clients, especially those who pay in the same season in which they receive my invoice.

I’m thankful for our pastor, who isn’t bashful about proclaiming his love of golf, the Bulldogs and our savior, not exactly in that order, of course.

I’m thankful for the view out my window and the excited exclamation of the rare golfer who makes a putt longer than 5 feet.

I’m thankful when we get a free popcorn and Coke after patronizing the same theater 20 times. That saves me at least $25.

I’m thankful my job allows me talk to unforgettable characters like the late Ken Venturi. My interview with Venturi a year before he died, when he told the story of winning the Open at Congressional in 1964, was a thrill.

I’m thankful for my Kindle, which goes anywhere and has tripled the number of books I read in a year.

I’m thankful for the occasional drive that goes straight, the putt that drops and the ball that caroms off a tree and into the fairway.

I’m thankful for the client who finishes reading the draft of her speech and says, “That’s exactly what I wanted to say.”

I’m thankful for the gas station that appears long after the warning light but before I have to start walking.

I’m thankful for friends who remember my birthday without having to be reminded by Facebook or LinkedIn.

I’m thankful for Steve Hartman’s “On the Road” segments on Friday’s CBS evening news. 

I’m thankful for the remote control every time any reality show or local news program slithers onto the screen.   

I’m thankful for Pat Conroy and that he’s still churning out books. But, please, just one more like you used to write ’em.

I’m thankful for Furman Bisher, who invented ‘I’m Thankful’ and who gets ripped off every year at this time.

Conroy told a crowd of about 2,000, who crowded into the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta for the MJCCA’s annual book festival, that his mother lied to him about being a belle from a prominent Atlanta family. “Actually, she was from one of the poorest white families in Alabama,” Conroy said without the playful twist he might have added.

He continued by reminding everyone how much he hated his late father, Col. Donald M. Conroy, the subject of his latest book, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son. He also introduced the crowd, which moments before stood and applauded as he walked gingerly into the basketball gymnasium, to his six siblings, including Carol, the poet who made quite a spectacle at their father’s funeral with a wadded up ball of tissue; and a brother-in-law who Conroy describes as the “world’s biggest redneck.”

And so it went for about an hour, Conroy “in conversation” with Teresa Weaver, a columnist for a local magazine, eliciting polite, uneasy and sometimes authentic laughter from the crowd.

But the whole scene left me a little disappointed in the man whose prose has caused me over the years to reread whole pages of his books, underline rich passages and wonder what it must feel like to write with such mastery.   

But, of course, Conroy has made a career out of the misery his father brought on his family and the dysfunction it spawned. And he is on a book tour, after all. So maybe we shouldn’t expect any new material at this point. 

” I always wanted a normal family, but that’s not what I got,” Conroy says, his fingers doing a nervous dance along the arms of his chair.

“Does it feel like a burden, the life you’ve lived?” Weaver asks. 

“Nah, I’ve made too much money for it to feel like a burden,” Conroy says. His quick response gets another laugh, but makes me wonder: practiced line from the book tour or how he really feels? Or both?

“The pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention,” Steinbeck once said. As he explained to editor Pascal Covici in Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters: “I am ready and the words are beginning to well up and come crawling down my pencil and drip on the paper.”

I still like the feel of a pencil in my hands from time to time, although my Pentel P207 yields nothing of the clean magic that Steinbeck nursed from his beloved Blackwings. A pencil and a smooth sheet of brightwhite paper from the office supply store are my favorite note-taking tools. The 0.7 lead does a much better job of reproducing hastily scribbled words than any pen I’ve found.

in my early newspaper days, I loved the IBM Selectric typewriters. They were massive, even foreboding machines that took your copy seriously. But for writing today, there’s no denying the computer keyboard and a monitor that shows my words in real time, as they appear, disappear and magically rearrange themselves. I think I’m at least 15 percent better with a keyboard than with a typewriter or pencil. 

What would Steinbeck have done with a keyboard and a word processing program? Known as an inveterate tinkerer, he may have been fascinated. That is, until he couldn’t find the port to attach his pencil sharpener.

1. Double space: Yes, the space is a punctuation point. Don’t wear it out. There only needs to be one space after the end of the sentence. Adding two just means a lot of frustrating corrections on our end. And don’t get me started on triple spaces…or ellipses! (Every major style guide prescribes a single space after a period, according to Slate. – Editors)

2. Its vs. it’s: This is an easy mistake to make, and we’re all guilty of sending out an incorrect tweet in a moment of excitement or fury. For the record, per the famous Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL), here’s the proper usage:

Its and it’s are not the same thing. It’s is a contraction for “it is” and its is a possessive pronoun meaning “belonging to it.” It’s raining out = it is raining out. A simple way to remember this rule is the fact that you don’t use an apostrophe for the possessive his or hers, so don’t do it with its.

3. Misplaced semicolons: Semicolons can be used three ways according to OWL. The first is to join two independent clauses when the second clause restates the first or when the two clauses are of equal emphasis. The second is to connect two independent clauses when the second clause begins with a conjunctive adverb or a transition. The final way is to join elements of a series when individual items of the series already include commas. Don’t throw these around willy nilly. They have very specific guidelines for use.

4. Gratuitous use of quotation marks: Using quotation marks to designate something as ironic or novel has the official seal of approval from the folks at OWL. However, using it around every other word is annoying, difficult on your readers’ eyes and has the opposite intended effect.

5. Overuse of the exclamation point: This author is guilty of this on my Twitter feed (I’m just excited a lot of the time.) But, the exclamation point has no place in professional writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” Heed his advice.

Kelley died on April 11, 1968, in the gym at Pine Tops, the Athens YMCA camp he built along the banks of the Middle Oconee River with his own hands and determination. He was 54. So he was human after all. He sure fooled a lot of people.  

He fooled us every summer when he packed up a bus load of rambunctious boys and took off for California or Canada or Florida. With an itinerary only Kelley knew, he drove the Blue Bird bus, and we sat back and took it all in: Coney Island, Niagara Falls, Disneyland, Yellowstone, Juarez, White Sands Missile Base and the Green Bay Packers’ training camp. It was an eclectic mix of places Kelley thought his boys should be exposed to, and who were we to question.

At day’s end, Kelley would pull the bus off the road and rustle up supper. (I remember a lot of chipped beef on toast and Hawaiian Punch.) Then we would have a Bible study, sing some songs accompanied by Kelley on ukulele and sleep under the stars.

He fooled everyone into thinking he was bigger than life every time he took a bunkhouse full of boys under his wing for weeks at a time at Pine Tops. We’d eat pancakes in the dining hall, play games and catch snakes during the day. At night Kelley would lead vesper services in the chapel he built on the rock that everyone said wouldn’t hold such a structure. The Old Rugged Cross, Deep and Wide and There’s a Church in the Valley by the Wildwood were my favorite hymns. Kelley led the singing and played the organ, sometimes accompanied by a chorus of kazoos. Was there was nothing the man could not do? Not in our eyes.

He fooled us for years while in charge of after-school sessions at the Y. Before we moved into the big new building on Hawthorne, where Kelley is buried and where we came to be part of his 100^th birthday celebration, we met in a rambling brown brick building at the corner of Broad and Lumpkin streets. Kelley coached us in whatever sport was in season; if weather forced us indoors, we played steal the bacon and dodge ball. Afterwards, Kelley would lead a Bible study and hand out a new page for our Good Thoughts notebook, a collection of his favorite quotations and life lessons. Then, we’d peel off every stitch of smelly clothing and swim naked in the indoor pool.

Of course, that would never happen today. Not only because of the tenor of our times, but also because there’s no Kelley for mothers and fathers to entrust their boys.

Once, while riding the Cyclone and eating hotdogs at Nathan’s on Coney Island, my classmate Tom Hodgson wandered away from the group. He still hadn’t shown up when we got back to the bus and the grimy parking lot where we were going to sleep. If Tom’s parents had known what was going on, they might have been frantic, but only until they remembered their son was with Kelley. “He’ll be back,” I remember Kelley saying. And sure enough, a few minutes later, he walked up with one of New York’s finest.

Then he just out-of-the-blue died. No one was ready for that. We thought he was immortal because we thought he deserved to be. We all had the same question: How could the most unforgettable person any of us had ever known, the strongest, the most charismatic, the person who had put so many boys on the right path die without warning?

I heard the news in sixth period at Athens High School. On the bus home, I didn’t want to hear any of the talk. Maybe it was some kind of mistake, a cruel late April Fools’ joke. But when I ran home from the bus stop and my mother opened the door in tears and grabbed me, I could no longer pretend that Kelley was not gone.

But he was here long enough to become the most important influence in my life and in the lives of thousands of others. I don’t know that the boys who came through the Athens YMCA in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s are better men today than others who grew up then, only without Kelley’s guidance. But I know this: Kelley sure gave us that chance.  

But Masters week does nothing for my business. In fact, it’s a drain on productivity and earnings rivaled but not surpassed by the real 52nd week, the one between Christmas and New Years.

I’ll do my best to go about business as usual. But my efforts will be halfhearted. Morning Drive on Golf Channel is already doing live shots from Augusta National, where the birds are chirping, and we’re told, Tiger is lurking.

Hard not to sneak over to GolfChannel.com and the other websites to see what news might be coming out of practice rounds and news conferences today, tomorrow and Wednesday. Augusta National Chairman Billy Payne will surely have something to say about the ban on anchoring at his annual state of the Masters conference. Will Bubba drive down Magnolia Lane in his new hovercraft?

Then, come Thursday morning, it’s all over. Might as well shut down the global headquarters of BMC. After the ceremonial tee shots are struck, how do you not want to know who’s playing well, who grabs the early lead, if Rory continues to break out of his slump, if that 14-year-old kid can break 80 under this pressure and if there’s a Condi sighting on the grounds?

Friday is moving day, all right. By Friday afternoon I’ll have moved to the couch in front of the big screen.

The 53rd week is murder on my business, but it’s a small price to pay for the best week in golf.

The sky is crying, and the flags are at half-mast. It is a sad, sad day. But it is also your day, Noah, my little man. I will miss your forceful and purposeful little steps stomping through our house. I will miss your perpetual smile, the twinkle in your dark blue eyes, framed by eyelashes that would be the envy of any lady in this room.

Most of all, I will miss your visions of your future. You wanted to be a doctor, a soldier, a taco factory manager. It was your favorite food, and no doubt you wanted to ensure that the world kept producing tacos.

You were a little boy whose life force had all the gravitational pull of a celestial body. You were light and love, mischief and pranks. You adored your family with every fiber of your 6-year-old being. We are all of us elevated in our humanity by having known you. A little maverick, who didn’t always want to do his schoolwork or clean up his toys, when practicing his ninja moves or Super Mario on the Wii seemed far more important.

Noah, you will not pass through this way again. I can only believe that you were planted on Earth to bloom in heaven. Take flight, my boy. Soar. You now have the wings you always wanted. Go to that peaceful valley that we will all one day come to know. I will join you someday. Not today. I still have lots of mommy love to give to Danielle, Michael, Sophia and Arielle.

Until then, your melody will linger in our hearts forever. Momma loves you, little man.