Before I visited Pennsylvania, everyone warned me that Philadelphia people are the toughest, most impatient people in America.
I believed them until I walked toward the front door of a Wawa gas station.
I was still forty feet away in the parking lot, walking between rows of cars.
A massive construction worker in steel-toe boots, carrying a twenty-four-ounce coffee in one hand and a paper-wrapped hoagie in the other, pushed open the glass door to leave. Then he saw me.
He stopped. He planted his boot against the bottom of the door. And he waited.
Forty feet is a very long distance when a grown man is holding a door for you in the wind.
In Japan, to make a stranger wait carries great shame. So I broke into that awkward half-jog every man performs when he wishes to show gratitude without looking like he is fleeing a crime.
"Go ahead, boss," he said as I passed.
Ten minutes later, as I walked out with my own sandwich, I saw an elderly woman locking her car thirty feet away.
I planted my foot against the glass. I held the door.
Another man behind me held the inner door. Within seconds we had formed an impromptu honor guard of grumpy men holding glass doors in complete silence.
Philadelphia may boo Santa Claus.
But inside the three-foot radius of a Wawa doorway, they have the manners of the imperial court.
Bohm could come back. Here is what @BNightengale told us.
"A lot of production down the stretch. If you let Bohm go, who is going to replace him? That's the problem with letting a guy like that go. And he is still very well liked in the organization."
📸Edward M. Pio Roda/Getty
Don’t tell him I said this but Chris Pronger. Always willing to talk and not just deliver stock cliche hockey answers. I just didn’t like the difference in our height. @chrispronger
This was Dolly Parton’s “farewell” video from May 2026 — and none of us realized it. Or believed it. Or wanted to believe it.
Her last words to us were: “I will always love you. Thank you.”