Patrick Thomas

I talk a lot and sometimes I'm funny.

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

My mama always said: "If you can't say anything nice, try to mumble it under your breath..."

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

I get that some people aren't home for Trick or Treat, and some people don't want to give out candy. That's totally understandable.

What I don't get are the houses with Halloween decorations and colored lights around the front door, but no one is home. Why the fakeout?

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

Telling my 4 year-old the story of the Domecoming game, starting with the hurricane and ending with the @Saints winning it all four years later.

Me: "And you know who's never won the super bowl?"

Roy: "The dirty Atlanta Falcons?"

Me: 🥹 "That's right, son. That's right."

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

@johnrich There are very few people left in the world that everyone loves and nobody (sane) hates. I'm afraid she might have been the last one.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯 @japan_nobunaga]

There is a diner in the Tennessee mountains where a little girl showed me a book.

She could not have been six. She held it the way grown men hold the deed to a house.

A thin paperback. The cover soft and bent from love. A cartoon bear.

I asked her, to be kind, if it was a good book.

She said, "The Book Lady sent it. She sends me one every month. She knows my name."

Then she went back to her pancakes, as if she had not just described something impossible.

I could not let it go.

All through breakfast I turned it over. A woman who knows the names of small children, sends them books, and asks for nothing. In my country she would have a shrine. Incense. One clean day a year when the town remembers her.

I decided the Book Lady must be a gentle fiction. A story mothers invent, the way we tell children the old mountain is watching, so they behave.

I was wrong.

The Book Lady is real. She is the most famous woman in the state. Her name is Dolly.

I made errors. In a hardware store I called her "your empress." The man thought about it honestly and said, "Close enough."

I asked a waitress if Dolly was still living. She set down the coffee pot with great care. "Honey, Dolly will outlive us all, and then she will send flowers to the funerals."

Then they told me the thing, all of them, in the flat voice this country keeps for facts too large to raise the voice for.

Dolly grew up one of twelve children, in a one-room cabin, in these same mountains. Her father could not read a word his whole life.

So she built the thing that sends the books. Not the clever children. Not the deserving ones. Every child who signs up, from birth until they start school, free, their own name on the cover, whether the family has money or nothing at all.

The children do not know she is famous. They know only the Book Lady. Some will grow old and never learn it was her.

Two hundred million books, a man told me at a gas pump. Then, seeing the number had defeated me, he made it smaller and heavier at once.

"She did it for her daddy," he said. "He never got to read. So she made sure every child after him would."

I would like to tell you what happened in my chest when he said that. I do not have the words, and I distrust any man who claims he does.

I come from eight hundred years of men who wrote everything down. We cut our names into stone so the centuries could not misplace us.

My father was the last of that line before me. A silent man. For forty years I believed his silence was the only thing he ever gave me.

In that diner, I remembered something I had put away as nothing.

When I was a boy, my father worked among machines loud enough to take a man's hearing, and in time they took most of his. He came home each night with nothing left to say. But there was one year, when I was learning to read and ashamed of how badly it went, that every night, however late he came in, he sat beside me while I read one page aloud.

He never said a word. I thought he was only checking that I had done the work.

It took me forty years and a stranger's diner to understand.

He could not hear me. By then he could barely hear anything. He was not listening to the words. He could not have caught one of them.

He was only sitting where a small boy could look up and see that his father had stayed.

I carried that year my whole life as proof my father was cold.

It was the warmest thing anyone has ever done for me. I just never had the book to prove it, so I let myself forget.

There is a bookshop two doors from that diner. I have just bought a thin paperback with a soft-looking bear on the cover. I am mailing it tonight to my father in Japan. He is eighty-one. He still cannot hear.

He will not need to.

Inside the cover I wrote one line, large enough that he can read it without his glasses:

"I finished the page. I always finished the page. Thank you for staying."

The Book Lady learned it from her father, who could not read.

I learned it from mine, who could not hear.

And somewhere in the mountains between us, those two old men would have understood each other completely, and said nothing at all, which is the loudest thing men like them have ever known how to say.

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

I had no idea how unprepared I was for this news.

There are very few people left in the world that everybody loves and nobody (except maybe truly crazy or evil people) hates. She was one of the only people left that we will all mourn together.

God bless Dolly Parton.

[Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum @countrymusichof]

“Dolly Parton’s legacy is not celebrity, but humanity. She came from poverty to become the most important native of Tennessee. She shared her fortunes for the good of all of us, and shared her soul in every note she sang.” –Kyle Young, CEO

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

Have you ever seen a commercial SO BAD that it made you not only want to NEVER buy that product or service, but cancel or get rid of the product if you already had it?

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

I'm doing color commentary on the live stream of this poker tournament right now.
https://t.co/YTDZmmQoKx

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

In less than a week, we've seen the greatest @NHL finals game of all time AND now the greatest @NBA finals game of all time?
Unbelievable!

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

We must have been in the same room a thousand times. I know we had hundreds of conversations and at least as many laughs. There were even a lot of one-on-one meetings and moments over the years.

And somehow, this grainy old photo from 2015 is the only picture I can find of the two of us.

I talk a lot. Probably too much. Ok, definitely too much. But when I was with Bill, all I wanted to do was listen.

He had that kind of presence. That kind of voice. That kind of way about him. You didn’t just hear Bill Cody. You leaned in.

And there was something about hearing Bill say your name. I don’t know how to explain it. It felt like magic. Maybe because, with his legendary voice, it sounded like you were being introduced at the Grand Ole Opry. Or maybe it was because it was a reminder that he actually knew who you were.

"I can't believe Bill Cody knows my name."

I don’t know what I can add to the hundreds of beautiful tributes already being shared. I just know I was so lucky to know him, grateful for every conversation and every laugh, and sad there won’t be more of them.

And I really need to take more pictures with the people that I care about.

I will miss you so much, Bill.

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

Watching Winnie the Pooh with my kids and realizing two things I didn’t notice when I was young:

1. Rabbit is an insufferable @$$hole

2. I totally get it

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

I'm sitting in a @GuyFieri restaurant and they're playing @Nickelback ... It's like I'm living in the punchline of a @shanetorres joke and it's actually kinda awesome.

https://t.co/P4EDCG7KZ8

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

@H_ShoePokerRoom Why only smoking rooms? That's awful.

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

I feel seen...

[Men's Humor @MensHumor]

Shirts I wear: 7

Shirts I own: 218

Shirts I'm willing to get rid of: 0

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

@CodyBrownBets It hits! Great parlay Cody!

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

My mama always said: "If you can't say anything nice, try to mumble it under your breath..."

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

Viveca: "My favorite Halloween costume was when I dressed as the vampire from the Anne Rand book."

Me: "You mean Anne Rice?"

Viveca: "Oh yeah. That's it!"

Me: "I love that Anne Rand vampire book. Dracula Shrugged."

Viveca: "Shut up!"

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

Is @grok predicting the future? This game is at halftime now.

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

I'm excited to share that I've been invited to serve as a guest announcer at the Grand Ole Opry for its 100th anniversary celebration on October 14th! This is an extraordinary honor, and I'm deeply grateful for this incredible opportunity. #GrandOleOpry #Opry100 @opry

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

I'm counting this as a National Championship, also. Geaux Tigers!

[CWS Jello Shot Challenge @CWSShotBoard]

YOUR FINAL JELLO SHOT CHALLENGE UPDATE!!! @LSUbaseball you own the top two spots all time and you are the first repeat champion. Every shot matters, every fan matters, every new friend we've made matters. Y'all are built for glory, for greatness, for Jelleaux and we love you!

[Patrick Thomas @RadioPatrick]

On to the next adventure!