“Homer’s the kind of guy you just want to git for something,” the sheriff said. But I see a different man…

Until you have ridden shotgun with my 98-year-old friend Homer on the drive he makes each New Year from the southwestern lip of West Virginia down into central Tennessee, you haven't lived.

The man dislikes freeways, and having grown up in these parts, he knows the back roads well and sticks to them, barreling through the mountains like a NASCAR driver on speed. 

There's no particular timetable for these excursions, which is part of their charm. Homer being a night person, though, the proceedings never seem to get underway until around four o'clock in the afternoon.

While there's still daylight, the scene outside the smudged passenger window of Homer's '52 cherry red F-Series Ford pickup truck never fails to delight: Furrowed fields asleep for the winter; swaths of woodland punctuated by rusty double-wides and the occasional log cabin; mountain churches with thin white spires and no perceivable means of access save a footpath through the trees.

Homer has lived alone since his wife, Pearlie, died in 1976, and a lot of people find him hard to take. So when he has a captive audience he really lets loose. Undeterred by a fact-based universe, Homer can hold forth on just about any subject. Currently trending:

• The ice in the arctic is melting because of coal mining in West Virginia.
• All of the media in the United States is controlled by three people, whose names we don't know. Brian Williams may be one of them.
• Bill Gates is an unhappy man who feels he hasn't accomplished anything. This is a true fact.
• The agenda for Obama's second term (though we pray to G*d that there won't be one) will include appointing an all-Muslim Supreme Court.
• Most people mispronounce the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche; it's Nitsky. (Nitsky’s poetry, by the way, is bitchin'.)

Some people think that Homer courts disaster, like the time he drove through three dry counties with a trunkful of liquor and a loose trunk latch that -- tripped by the Bible in Homer's glove compartment that slid on a sharp curve into the glove-box latch-control lever -- popped open the boot just as a state trooper pulled onto State Route 7 behind him.

Others say Homer doesn't need to court disaster because disaster always knows where to find him. The sheriff of our county told me once, "Homer's the kind of guy you take one look at and you just want to git 'im for something."

But these people don't see what I see. When you look past the rough edges and the hard talk, Homer is a softie whose hard-won wisdom about life and love could -- and come to think of it probably should -- fill a book. He looks up to his elders, of whom there still are a few. He believes in a higher power and trusts that if we do the next right thing, and then the next right thing, the day will turn out just fine.

Homer believes in redemption -- in this world and the next. He is a cultivator of faith and hope who, like Saint Exupery's Little Prince, has learned that "[W]hat makes the desert beautiful...is that somewhere it hides a well."

Stick around Homer for any length of time and you'll find out the one true thing about life: What is essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the heart that one can see.