Hugh's Blog

The one about hope.

I’ve been in a position several times recently where I have been asked what I do. To which I replied, “Do about what, exactly?,” which I think is funny and they never do.

It turns out, when people asked that, they mean, “What is your occupation?”, and I don’t have a good answer for that. The closest I come these days is “storyteller”, which is somehow both true and not helpful, either to them understanding what I do, or to my getting paid work that uses my skills.

But the other day, a guy called my bluff.

“You mean you just tell stories? About what?”

“Well,” I said. “They are mostly stories that make people feel good, or happy, or hopeful.”

“OK, cool. Tell me a story about hope.”

I wanted to tell him that I could tell him, but I’d have to charge, but he seemed the sort of person who would not get the reference, AND, as luck would have it, I had just that morning remembered a story I had heard long ago, and I was pretty sure I had remembered the whole thing after mulling it over in my head. Now I just needed a no-risk place to try it out. So, I said OK.

In olden times, there was a king. He was a powerful, rich king who spent money on his caprices and whims. And one of his most prized possessions was a donkey. He and his donkey were inseparable.

But not all was utopia—there was trouble in the king’s court, and one of his trusted advisors had committed treason and was now before the king to receive his sentence. With sadness, because he had trusted the man, the king sentenced his advisor to death.

The advisor hangs his head, pauses, and then kneels.

“Oh, sire. Your wisdom is legendary, and no one doubts your pursuit of justice. I accept responsibility for this crime and understand your sentence. The timing is a pity, however, for just this morning I learned the secret of how to teach a donkey to talk. If only I had 12 months to do it in, your favorite companion could speak as plainly as you or me.”

The king perked up.

“Is this a gag? You really know how to teach a donkey to talk?”

“I would not lie to you, oh king. In just 12 months, you and your donkey could spend the evenings talking over the news of the day. “

The king was doubtful.

“I’m not sure I believe you, but I don’t see as I have anything to lose. I will spare you for 12 months. You will continue to live in your home, and each day you will go to the stable to teach the donkey. If, at the end of a year, the donkey talks, I will not only spare your life, I will reward you beyond measure. BUT, if you are lying to me and the donkey doesn’t talk, I will make your death as slow and painful as I can imagine.”

The king then set the man free. The man practically skipped all the way home, he was so happy. When his wife heard what happened, she called him a fool.

“You had the chance to die quickly and not suffer; now you will suffer and bring shame to us all.”

The advisor scoffed.

“Nonsense. I traded death today for 12 months of life. Besides, many things can happen in a year. The king might die. I might die. The donkey might die. Or, and hear me out here, the donkey might just learn to talk!”

Unfinished Business

I don’t know how he found me. But that’s true of so many people who read things I write—I write things, and some of them connect. It’s a partnership between me and the reader. I supply the words, and y’all supply the meaning.

He lived in Raleigh when I did, and so maybe he had sat in a church service where I preached, or maybe he was attracted to the work that happened at the nonprofit I ran there, or perhaps he just stumbled across me on Facebook because of something I wrote, and somebody else shared.

In any event, Dan (not his real name) was an ardent follower on social media. He would share almost everything I wrote of significance, he would like and comment on posts. Even so, he never directly engaged me, until he wrote me one spring through Facebook Messenger.

“Dear Pastor Hugh, I have followed you for some time and benefit from your blogs and comments and thoughts and photos. I am 76 and am winding down on the cancer clock, currently in [the hospital]. In the next couple of weeks or so I will be going home under hospice care until the end comes at home.

I am Jewish with a broad spectrum of ecumenical interests – to me, good loving hearted people are what they are not by organized religion but because our G-d intended it to be so. Once I am home… I would like you to drop by for a chat and a coffee if you can work it into your schedule.”

Many people do not yet know my situation so please respond with private message or email. Please do not post any info about me on my FB Page.

Almost immediately, I replied, and said that I would be moving to Mississippi in about six weeks, but that any time before then, I would be honored to meet with him.

I never heard from him again. Two weeks later his family posted on his Facebook profile that he had passed away, at home, surrounded by his family. So, at least he got home.

I have no idea what he wanted. What he wanted to tell me, or ask me. By his Facebook page, he had a wide circle of friends and loved ones that he was close to—I don’t know what in his final days he wanted to talk to a burned out street-scarred nominally Christian pastor, but he did.

I think about Dan a lot, not because he reached out—lots of folks write me with questions, or wanting my opinion on something, or sometimes, to call me a heretic or a jerk.

No, the thing with Dan feels like unfinished business. Like I have a debt out there, still hanging, unresolved. When he wrote me, I had spent more than a decade doing pastoral care for folks who were in horrible circumstances, so I assume that, like most people those days who reached out, he wanted to ask me something, but maybe not: maybe he had some wisdom to share.

I could have used it.

Being a regular

When I first moved to Raleigh some twenty years ago now, I was living in a tiny room in a rooming house, and I needed a place to write. On the third day, I wandered into The Morning Times, a coffee shop downtown, and the barista asked my name. The next day when I came back, she used my name to greet me when I came in the door. After that, The Morning Times was just my coffee shop. Over the next 12 years, I imagine I spent well over $5,000 there.

It was part of my routine—I would get there about 10 minutes to nine most days. Because I was a regular there, several neat things would happen. For example, I got to know the staff, and they got to know me. We weren’t going to each other’s house for dinner or anything, but they knew the coffee I liked and how I liked it. It was generally the same crew working, so I knew their names and we laughed at common jokes, and doesn’t that make the world a little better?

Other people on the same schedule as I was would also be there every morning at 8:50 AM. The professor from the college around the corner. The slightly smarmy businessman standing in front of the building, waiting for his 9:00 AM meeting to show up. The young mom who showed up with her 3-year-old, and every morning they would have long, endearing discussions in line about what he was going to order when it was their turn.

I try hard to be a regular at places. I am all for exploring, but there is something to be said for being a regular part of someone’s day, and they are a regular part of yours.

These days, I’m not in Raleigh anymore. Now I live in a ranch house on a wooded lot in a good neighborhood in Jackson, MS. My office is in the bedroom on the northeast corner of the house, and most of the coffee I drink is made by me.

But I still fight to be a regular at places.

There is a family-owned hardware store near my house where the owner knows my name and asks after our cats. The Asian restaurant where, when we show up, the owner updates me on her son’s grades in school. The coffee shop where I have meetings, and the barista knows my name and order. The Mexican place in the suburbs where they know our likes and preferences.

One of our traditions is to eat out on Friday nights, and we have about six restaurants in rotation, all of which we are regulars at. When we try a new place, one of our criteria is if we liked it enough for it to be a place where we would want to be a regular.

I write a lot about place and community, and almost always, comments on social media say something about how hard it is to build that community.

If I were to move tomorrow to some place where I didn’t know anyone, I would immediately begin looking for places where I could be a regular. I don’t know of any activity that so quickly makes you feel you belong to a place and its people.

Because I’m a regular at the hardware store, I want them to succeed. If they close, it isn’t just inconvenient for me; it harms Carla and her family. And I’m sure they voted for different people than I did in the last Presidential election, but I will tell you that when one of their employees said something that was offensive to me, Carla heard me and took action, because I matter to her, too.

Because I’m a regular at several restaurants run by immigrants, it forces my attention to politics that do not directly affect me, because it is no longer theoretical. And while it may be true (but I do not concede the fact) that in other cities they may have tamales that are better than Jose’s or bookstores nicer than Lemuria, the entire time I am in those foreign to me places I only think of how nice it will be to be home and see the people at the places where I am a regular.

Considering the circumstances

We live in perilous times. I’m sure that has always been true, for somebody. It’s after all, why apocalyptic literature always has an audience: it’s always the end of the world for someone.

But here in the US, things seem particularly fragile. Rights we assumed were etched in stone have been seen as ephemeral. Elected leaders have made room for White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism to go unchecked, even as they pour fuel on the fires.

When I started this piece, I made a list of all the ways our country is falling apart in front of us, and all the ways this is making it harder and harder on all of us. But I abandoned it because you probably have the same list, and any list wouldn’t be exhaustive.

But suffice it to say, we are not living in normal times, and everyone feels it. The question is, what do we call it?

Because when someone asks you how you are doing, it isn’t cool to trot out that list. I mean, none of us have time for that, and there isn’t much you can do to solve any of those things as an individual today, and again, we all have the same list.

In the aftermath of the Civil War in the US, a thing that was of such magnitude that it practically decimated the US South, Southerners would sometimes refer to the war and its aftermath as “the recent unpleasantness”.

In Northern Ireland, they speak of the time of the conflict from the 60s to the 90s as “The Troubles.”

So much of what happened from 2020 to 2022 globally can be put down to “The Pandemic”, even things that were not directly virus-related. It is just how we talk about that time.

“I lost my job during the pandemic.” “We got married during the pandemic.” “I went half-crazy during the pandemic.” “The inflation that happened during the pandemic is lingering.”

But what is our shorthand for what is currently happening?

I have begun referring to all the chaos around us as “The Circumstances.” I’m sure I didn’t invent this, but I’ve been on too many Zoom calls where people check in and they say, “I’m doing okay, considering the circumstances.”

Everyone I explain this to laughs, but usually a little too knowingly. They too are living in the circumstances, feel pulled about by the circumstances, and like they are living at the whim of the circumstances.

“How are you, Hugh?”

“OK, given the circumstances.”

“Will you be at [event]?”

“Probably, but it depends on the circumstances.”

“Why are you writing so much?”

“I don’t know what else to do, considering the circumstances.”

Looking for place

A few years back, I was at home for our annual family reunion. It happens every Easter—we Hollowells gather, and we bring food, and we hide Easter eggs, and we ooh and awe over people’s kids, and tell each other it’s been too long. They began doing this when I lived away, and now that I live much closer, I try to go every year.

I was standing down by the pond, watching the kids fish, when one of my many cousins moved up beside me and said he had heard we live in Jackson now.

You should know that Jackson is not only the capital of Mississippi, it is also the largest city as well. In fact, it is almost twice the size of the second-largest city. That all sounds much more impressive than it is; Raleigh, NC has suburbs that are larger than Jackson. Even so, relative to the rest of Mississippi, Jackson is huge.

And so, to my family back home, the big city often seems like a hotbed of crime and terror, whereas to me, it just feels like where I live.

So, I confirmed he was right: we live in Jackson now.

“No way would I live there,” he told me.

“Well, you have a great life here,” I told him. “We like it there, but I enjoyed living in Raleigh, too, and I enjoyed living in Memphis, and I enjoyed living here back when I did. I’ve just learned that you can always find a reason to love a place if you want to.”

“There’s something to that, I guess,” my cousin said before he went in search of another hot dog.

The other day, somebody I recently began working with on a project said, out of nowhere, that she loved how important a sense of place was to me. And while it’s true that I feel place deeply, like I told my cousin, it has always been like that.

I cannot describe to you how important the cedar trees on our place were to me growing up, how much I enjoyed the small creek that ran through our property, the sounds of the mockingbirds as I walked through the woods.

But it was like the way I felt a decade later as I rode the bus down Poplar Avenue in Memphis, watching the cars go by and the high-rises downtown become shopping centers and then mansions as we headed east. Or the way I felt as I walked in Tom Lee Park and watched the river roll by, or how proprietary I felt when eating dry-rubbed ribs at Interstate BBQ. I would visit Wild Bill’s juke joint on Vollintine, bobbing my head to the music and drinking a 40 and feel like this was home.

In Raleigh, I would walk the streets and pass the restaurants and the clubs and the shops and feel a sense of ownership, and a desire to protect the people there, as well as the people who were believed not good enough to be there.

And yesterday, as I walked the streets of downtown Jackson, the city I have called home for over seven years now, I saw all the ways beauty sneaks into what is a hard city to thrive in, and I felt a huge sense of pride for us, and for the resilience of the people here.

I guess I am just saying that what I told my cousin is true: there is always beauty wherever you are. There is always something to be proud of, something to notice, something that needs improving, and something to celebrate. And I have found that looking for a thing increases your odds of finding it, whether that thing is a reason to love where you are, or reasons to hit the road the first chance you get.

The thief of joy

I know a guy—let’s call him Steve. In one way, he’s my peer. We are both ministers. Both pretty active online. Both have newsletters. Both are on the very progressive end of our respective denominations. Both have reach and influence. In the circles we share, we are both known and respected for our positions.

But Steve has additional marks of success. He has served in a very high-profile role in his denomination, whereas mine barely knows I exist. He goes on international humanitarian trips and writes about them. I barely go to the suburbs, have only been out of the country one time, and my passport is currently expired. He has written books, probably five or six of them. I only recently published my first one.

In my head, I think of him as successful at all of this “being a public person” stuff, and I don’t think that way of myself at all. In my head, he is a successful writer, and I am not. Not because of anything I know, but because of the story I have written about him in my head.

Theodore Roosevelt once said that comparison is the thief of joy. He was onto something, I think. In truth, comparing myself to Steve is not a fair comparison. Because I know all the chaos and struggle that goes on in my head, all the times I catch myself slacking off, all the ways I let myself down, and with Steve, I only see the final results. I see his outsides and compare it to my insides.

I know this intellectually, but it doesn’t matter—not really. Deep inside, most of the time I am still convinced Steve has a better life and is more successful than I am.

It’s also worth noting that for all the ways our situations are similar, there are significant ways they are not. He has generational family financial resources that I do not have. His spouse works a professional job that provides health insurance for his family. My spouse is disabled and on Medicare.

Steve and I have another difference, too. He recently wrote a blog post about his writing, and it turns out that I make about three times more from my writing than he does from his writing.

Huh. Freakin’ Steve, man.

Steve isn’t the only one—he’s just a recent example. As a child growing up in a poor household in the 80s, I was taught by everyone, both implicitly and explicitly, to be deeply dissatisfied with the way my life was, and that my goal in life should be to improve it, to make it better. I was a child of Reaganomics, of greed is good, of the era that made Trump a household name and a source of aspiration. Titans of industry like Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch were household names.

I spent my twenties working in financial sales trying to get that life, and then my early thirties trying to get away from it. It would be the unhoused, the addicted, and the mentally ill who saved my soul as well as my life, and who ultimately showed me the way out.

But not all envy is about money, and not all the ways our society measures prestige have dollar signs attached. Which is why I can sell more books than Steve and still find myself jealous of his life.

Serendipity

On the day it happened I was 11. Mom had dropped me off at Dad’s office because she had to run an errand, and the plan was for me to ride home with Dad. It was always fun to be at Dad’s office. It was a very masculine place, and the employees treated me well, mostly out of deference to Dad, who was their boss. I would sit in his office on a comfortable chair and read a book, and if I needed a scene change, I would go exploring in the warehouse and hit up the Coke machine.

Dad’s office was only 10 minutes from our house if you took the most direct route, but on the way home that day, we turned right at Warsaw Grocery, leaving the highway we would normally take and instead went down Strickland Road—a viable path, for sure, but one that would add another 10 minutes to the trip.

I was confused. “Why are we going this way?”

“No reason, “Dad said.

“But it’s longer.”

Dad looked at me, and then back at the road. He sighed.

“Not everything has to be faster, Son. It’s just a change of pace. Seeing something different. And besides—it opens doors.”

I told him that this made no sense to me.

“Look at it this way: If we go the same way we always do, we are exposed to the things we normally see, the people we normally see, the routine we always do. But if you go a different route, you just opened another door for things to happen to you that wasn’t there before. You made room for luck, or serendipity, or providence, whatever you want to call it, to happen. Or, you can stay in your rut and complain that nothing good ever happens.”

* * *

I had occasion to go to the post office today.

That’s the thing about selling books-people expect you to mail them out. This leads to all sorts of side quests, like buying packing tape, shipping envelopes, and shipping labels. These are all things nobody tells you that you are going to need as a writer, but here we are.

People say they become writers because they love writing, but I don’t think that is necessarily so, because any time you get three or more writers together, what they talk about is how their books sell, or how they do not. It is not, after all, called the New York Times Best Writers list.

So, I had sold some books (yay!) and I packed them and bought postage and printed labels and taped them firmly and took them to the post office. Because they are prepaid and metered, I can drop them in the lobby box if I want to, but I don’t—I went inside and stood in line and chatted with the people next to me in the queue and then handed them to the clerk.

By now, some months into going there several times a week, she knows me. I don’t mean we hang out, but she recognizes me, and we have a small chat about the weather, and on Fridays she will tell me to be safe over the weekend. All of this is unnecessary—after all, I can drop them in the box in the lobby, remember?—but community is made up of thousands of small conversations, jokes, and pleasantries just like this.

The clerk is not anonymous to me, despite my not knowing her name. She smiles when I come in, and she comments on the number of books I have sold, and whether the orders are increasing or decreasing. She matters to me, in the sense that if she was not there, I would notice it. She is part of the world I have built here, one tiny piece of this community I call home.

It might indeed be faster to just put them in the box in the lobby, but I won’t know that, because I have no desire to replace her and the interactions we have with a speedier visit. And from a purely pragmatic point of view, one day, something is going to go wrong at the post office. I will need help to figure out directions, or my package might be a half an inch too large. And when that happens, I will have months and months of small deposits in my account with her. It is a lubricant to prevent future disasters.

But the main reason I go inside instead of dropping them in the box is the lesson I learned all those years ago on Strickland Road: when you get a chance, try to open doors and give serendipity a place to land.

Six years

Six years ago today–February 23, 2020-was the best day I had had in months. But I did not know then that it would be the last time I would hug my dad.

My wife and I were foster parents then, and almost a month before, a young boy we will call Paul (not his real name) came to live with us. Paul had just turned 7, and was full of energy and spirit, and Mom and Dad had heard so much about him. They had decided to come to Jackson to meet him for themselves.

It was a Sunday, and like today, it was a nice day, and the sun was shining. I had to preach that morning, and so my parents (who lived two and a half hours from us) got here in time to meet us at a local restaurant, and then they came to our house.

Paul showed off his room, and my parents oohed and awed in all the right places. I had told Mom how much Paul loved playing with Legos, so she had brought a huge bucket of Legos from when we were kids, and so she and Paul played Legos and talked about our cats, and then he and Dad went outside and my father who never once tossed me a baseball played catch with this kid he just met.

I made a big pot of chili and a huge skillet of cornbread that day, and we ate it for supper around our dining room table. Paul told jokes-he was a master joke teller- and Mom and Dad told him stories about me when I was a kid, and about the hoses they had, and how much they were looking forward to his coming to visit them.

When it was time for them to go home, we went out to the car and did that thing you do when it was a good day and you don’t want it to end. Paul got hugs and said how much fun he had had, and we all were talking about us going to see them one weekend soon.

That had been a really rough winter for us. We had major unplanned expenses, the chaos of the foster system, and car problems galore, all on top of the ever-present depression. But this? This was a good day. In my journal for that day, I said it was the best day I had had in a very, very long time.

In a few weeks, of course, the world would change forever. School shut down, and travel stopped, and we were all hunting for toilet paper and there were COVID projects and remote learning and we prayed this would all be over by Thanksgiving so we could all gather together.

But then in October Paul got sent back to his family, and two days later COVID killed my dad and I would not smile again for months.

But I didn’t know any of that on this day, six years ago. On that night, as I watched the red taillights disappear at the end of our street, I only knew the aching in your sides that comes from laughter, the hope of future plans, and that I had come from love, that I was loved, and was filled with love in return.

Applause

When I was 16, I walked across the stage at a community college in our state capital to cheers and applause. I had just won the statewide competition for extemporaneous speaking, and as a result, would go to Tulsa, Oklahoma to represent Mississippi.

Somewhere, in a box, I have a picture of that day. I was grinning from ear to ear. I was socially awkward and had been bullied, so I seldom got affirmations of my abilities like that. It was one of the best days of my childhood.

And the whole time that was happening, I was experiencing suicidal ideation.

I am a writer, and so I create metaphors to describe my experiences as I try to explain them to others. This frustrates my therapist, who wants plain language, but like Popeye, I am who I am, and who I am is a person who needs metaphor.

My favorite way to explain how I experience depression is that it is sort of like herpes. It’s always there – always. I have been medicated and CBT’d, and talk therapy’d, and it all helps, and it always falls short, because there is no fixing this—not really. I just accept that I have depression, in the same way my cousin has red hair, or I have blue eyes. Shittiest genetic surprise ever.

Like herpes, sometimes it presents worse than it does at other times. Sometimes I barely notice it, like a low-level headache that you just deal with. But sometimes I will have a flare-up and can barely move I am so overwhelmed by it, and I wonder if this is the time my brain will actually kill me. Not because I want to die, because I absolutely do not, but because brains are wild and capricious and it has tried before and honestly, some days it would be really nice not to be here.

If you knew there was someone out there who might want to kill you, you would try your best to avoid that person, but when it’s your brain, the best you can do is get help and follow instructions. From your helpers, I mean. Not from your brain. Because it wants to kill you.

But you still won’t be cured. It’s always there, and so you are self-monitoring all the time. The constant self-examination is exhausting.

There are things you can do to decrease the likelihood of a flare-up. Maybe you will win. You really want to. You definitely won’t if you don’t try.

So you eat lots of protein and get lots of sunlight and have a therapy lamp and walk most days and pet your cats and try to have a spirit of gratitude for all the ways your life is amazing. You plant colorful flowers in your yard and put pictures of people you love on the walls, and you read poetry that is so stunningly beautiful you cry in the shower while thinking about it. You feed the stray kittens and march at the protest, and you smile when the kids across the street get on the bus because they see you on the porch and wave and fill you with so much fucking hope.

I hope you make it, pal. It’s beautiful here.

The chicken tender

For more than a decade, and in three different locations, we have had chickens. It’s almost a cliché, being the sort of person who has chickens in their backyard, but here we are.

Our own flock has always been relatively tiny, usually fluctuating between two and six, but almost always more than was legally permissible by the municipality we lived in. Don’t get me started on that. People can have giant dogs that bark at all hours of the day and night and that kill other people’s pets, but my two peeping hens are a problem?

I have a bit of a weird relationship with our hens. I’m their primary caretaker—transplant recipients like my wife are warned against birds because of the many diseases they are prone to carrying. The four hens we currently house are not our pets—they don’t have names, and I don’t cuddle them or put cute curtains in their coop—but they are more than merely productive livestock.

In factory farms, where chickens are forced to lay eggs year-round and are fed monotonous meals, and live in crowded, sunless conditions, a hen’s life expectancy is 18 months, max. That is the age at which egg production wanes, and thus they are deemed to no longer be cost-effective to keep alive, and are then euthanized and either dumped in a landfill or composted. As someone who does not depend on our hens for our living, we can afford to keep “unproductive” hens.

We also do not rely on them solely for eggs. We are in a sort of partnership, these hens and me. I house them and feed them and keep them safe from predators, and they lay eggs and dispose of our kitchen scraps and turn it all into manure I compost and use in my garden. They live in spacious quarters—the factory farms could fit 20 hens into the space I give our four, and while they would be happier if they could roam free in the thicket at the back of our property, they would not be safe there. It would also make getting their eggs and manure far more difficult, and there you have the eternal dilemma—balancing my needs as chicken tender (see what I did there?) with their needs for safety. Because, let’s be clear, the average chicken is about as smart as a bowl of Jello.

But, if you decide to keep chickens, have a plan for what you will do with them for the 20 weeks they are alive before they can lay eggs, what you will do with them for the three years after they are no longer productive layers, and you have to have a plan for the eggs. That last one can sneak up on you: a 12-month-old chicken can lay between 200 and 300 eggs a year. If you have three hens, that could mean 75 dozen eggs in your first full year of ownership, or one and a half dozen eggs every week.

Tell the truth: How many eggs did you buy last year? Probably not one and a half dozen a week, every single week. Honestly, having three and four year old hens whose laying has slowed is much more manageable for us.

Right now, I have two new chicks, about three weeks old, living in a storage tub in my office under a heat lamp. They are tiny, perhaps the size of an avocado, and nearly as smart. They peep a lot and respond to my voice, which means they get loudest when I am talking, which makes Zoom calls delightful.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the chicks.”

They will live there another three weeks, by which time they will be living in a pen outdoors, separate from the other, older chickens until they reach full size and can fend for themselves. And then another six to eight years of partnership follows.