I ducked beneath the turnstile like I always did—quick, low, quiet. The cops didn’t care much on this side of town. 42nd Street, west side—Port Authority. The side they don’t show in tourist brochures. The air was thick with the scent of old grease, urine baked into the concrete, and that ever-present aroma of stale pizza and burnt sugar from the corner cart upstairs.

This is my very first story on this page, and I’m kicking it off with a tribute to the man who raised me, shaped me, and made me laugh harder than anyone else ever has — my grandfather, Frank Weems. I called him “Daddy” because that’s exactly who he was to me: the father I never had.

There was once a palace at the heart of a great nation. Its halls were wide enough for echoes to get lost, and its chandeliers sparkled with a thousand suns. One day, the ruler of the land stood in its grand entrance and declared, “I shall build a ballroom here, the finest the world has ever seen—at my own expense!

He was born in a dusty, slow-moving town called Louisville, Georgia—population barely 2,000. I don’t know much about his upbringing except that it was hard, and that he worked the land with his father and brothers. Rumor has it...