16 years ago today

Sixteen years ago today, we got married.

On that morning, I had less than $30 in my checking account, having spent the massive sum of $80 the night before on pizza and two liter softdrinks for our rehearsal dinner.

My car was a small Kia with a leaky radiator someone had given me, because I couldn’t afford a car. My bride was in the early stages of the heart failure that had killed her mother, grandmother, and cousin.

A friend had lent us his condo at the beach for a week, so we could have a proper honeymoon. Another friend catered the reception, and told us we could have a month to pay for the food costs. Mom and Dad paid for the cake – it came from the grocery store down the street.

And virtually every person at the wedding handed us some cash, so we could have a lovely week at the beach – else we could not have afforded the trip.

As I said, the car had a leaky radiator, so I had a trunk full of jugs of water, and every so often I would pull over on the shoulder of the road and top it off. While at the beach, the car had an electrical problem, and I worked on it late into the night in the parking lot of the nice restaurant where we are supper.

Sixteen years later, literally nothing is the same. A different state, a different city. My wife has a new heart. We live in a house we love, in a neighborhood we love, and we can afford to get to a different beach 4 or 5 times most years. Renee does kitten rescue and I write things that matter to some folks, and for 16 years we have made it work, mostly because we have decided it will.

Sixteen years. 30 percent of my life. 6,540-ish days, more good than bad.

I’m glad she said yes.

On my own

The little door to enter the crawlspace under our house is tiny – perhaps 18 inches square. Every time I have to go under our house, I swear I never want to do this again.

The plastic that has been laid in the crawlspace to keep the humidity down rustles as I crawl on my hands and knees over it. It’s dirty and opaque, and in the worst parts of my brain I imagine snakes slithering under it, keeping warm as the temperature drops outside.

I have never seen a snake under this house, but my brain knows they are there.

It’s seven thirty in the morning, and it’s 46 degrees outside, and I am crawling under my house with a flashlight in my mouth trying really hard to not think about snakes because both of the toilets in our house backed up yesterday evening and I’m afraid I shall have to replace a section of drainage pipe. I cannot remember what size drainage pipe we have from the last time I had to replace a section.

Most houses have 4-inch drainage pipe – and as it turns out, we do as well. But our house is seventy-five years old, and was built at a time when all the standards were not yet written in stone. You cannot take such things for granted with such a house as this one. Like the Holy Spirit, it goes where it chooses.  

At some point in the sordid history of this house, a jack legged renovation in the en-suite bath led to chunks of mortar and concrete ending up in the drain pipes, and shortly after we bought the house, I had to crawl under the house and cut out a huge section of the 4 inch cast iron pipe and replace it with PVC because the chunks of concrete had wedged themselves in there.

I assumed instantly that since they were both clogged, this must be a piece of the concrete we had missed, come back to haunt us.

The last time this happened, I tried plunging it, and tried pouring Drano down the tub drain, and I even took the toilet out and tried running a plumbing snake down the drainage pipe. That last adventure is how I discovered the chunks of concrete. It was then that I surrendered and called Dad.

My father was one of those men who could solve any problem. He could fix your air conditioner, rebuild your engine, or rewire your breaker panel. And for 48 years of my life, whenever I had a problem I could not solve, I called him for help.

I explained the situation to him, and said I didn’t know what to do.

He asked two questions. “Does the other toilet work?”

I said that it did.

“The one that is clogged – is it closer to the road or further from the road than the one that works?” was the second question.

“The clogged one is furthest away from the road”, I told him.

“Then it’s simple”, he said. “You have a blockage – probably some chunks of that concrete – between the clogged toilet and the wye where the other toilet joins the drainage pipe. You need to go under the house and cut out the clogged pipe and replace it.”

Oh. That’s all.

He heard the uncertainty in my voice, and walked me through what I needed to buy, the procedures of how to do it, and all of that. And that afternoon, I did it, saving myself probably $800 in the process.

But it had been five years since my Dad died, quickly and unexpectedly, one of the more than 15,000 Mississippians who died of COVID during the pandemic. In fact, it had been five years ago yesterday.

Five years since I could ask him for help. Five years since I had a backup plan. Five years since I could hear him on the other end of the phone and know that my worries were over.

For the last five years, I’ve just been on my own.

It turns out that I didn’t have to replace any pipe this time.  It wasn’t a piece of concrete, just a pernicious clog. In an attempt to avoid crawling under the house again, I decided to try snaking it from the cleanout in the front yard. This approach had hit me at 3 in the morning, when I remembered Dad’s two questions, and realized that if both toilets were clogged, the clog must be after the wye where the two branches join, and thus really close to the cleanout at the front of the house.

Twenty minutes later all the pipes were running freely, and the disaster was averted and I had spent no money at all. And literally my first thought when I saw the toilets flush successfully was that I wish Dad could know about this. That he could know I figured it out. That he knew I was OK. That I didn’t need a backup plan.

I wish he knew I could make it on my own.

Podcast Appearance: Soul + Practice

Kathy Escobar and Phyllis Mathis interviewed me on their podcast Soul + Practice: Raw Conversations, Real Practices, and it went live yesterday.

Kathy was an early role model as I carved out this weird life I have now – she is one of perhaps 5 folks whose work changed my life. I think I’ve known her for 19 years now.

If you are new here (or not), there is a lot that might interest you on here: My “origin” story, beauty as an antidote to despair, practices that can sustain you over time, and making room in the midst of it all for joy to happen.

I also talk a bit about what it means to live in the deep south when the country is on fire, and it’s probably not what you might think.

It was a lot of fun, and Kathy and I are currently trying to figure out more ways to work together. I know I’m really looking forward to that.

Happiness as an orientation

This past weekend, I made a whirlwind trip to the mountains of North Carolina to see some friends who now live in Northern Ireland for the most part, but were back in the States to visit. Other mountain friends came by, and we ate some meals together and told stories and shared what was resonating for us and what scared us and what we hoped for. 

That it was the one year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, the terrible storm that had decimated the economy and life of the area we were in was on everyone’s mind. That it was overcast and rainy made that worse, of course. 

I love these people – most of them were people I knew when I lived in North Carolina, and others I have met on return visits since I have moved, and all of them matter to me. The hardest part about leaving North Carolina was leaving all the people I love behind. Most of these people I met while doing emotionally hard work, and that causes bonds that are not easily broken. 

As someone who blogs and writes and shares things on social media, there is a degree of asymmetrical knowledge when I see people I haven’t seen in a while – while they may not know the whole story, they know the broad beats of my life – the kitten rescue, the trip to the mountains, Renee’s health. 

I generally don’t know anything about what’s going on in their life, so I generally end up asking the most questions. 

But then I got asked the one that stumped me.

“Are you happy?”

I paused, thinking about that question. Am I happy?

“Do you mean right now, with you guys?” I ask. 

“No, in general. Since you’ve moved. In Mississippi – are you happy?”

A curse of neurodivergence is the tendency to take people seriously. When folk ask me how I’m doing, I assume they want to know how I’m doing. So I gave it some thought. 

I live with depression, and while it’s managed, it’s always there. I have periodic bouts of what I would call happiness, but I don’t think I have ever experienced it as a perpetual state, as an orientation. 

So I told her that I don’t think I have ever been happy in the way she means it, but that I am content. It’s much harder in Mississippi than it was in North Carolina on almost every metric except financially. I make more money here, and housing is cheaper here, but I am 7 years in and still don’t have the sort of deep community I had in North Carolina. 

I’m in the biggest city in the state, do very public work, and yet still feel a sort of perpetual loneliness here that I did not experience there. Of course, having two and a half years of your life taken by a global pandemic did nothing to help.

But I like my life. I like that I get to write a lot more than I ever have. I like that I have a house filled with cats and love, a yard with raucous flowers everywhere, and that my wife and I can afford to live in a house that is safe and fits our lifestyle. We have a few friends we are close to, and I get to do work that matters. 

Is that happiness? I’m not sure. But it’s definitely contentment. 

RIP, Harry

In the spring of last year, we ended up in the kitten rescue business. It started innocently enough – a stray cat had given birth to kittens in our backyard, in the hollowed out stump of an old pear tree. My wife, who does not do things half way, swooped into action. 

In the 18 months since, nearly thirty kittens have passed through our house, and 10 adult cats have been spayed or neutered and then released back to their colonies, so they can live out their lives while not increasing the feral kitten population. 

Over the last year and a half, this activity has altered our vacation plans, our home as we remodeled it to have a kitten hospital and nursery, our budget as we buy seemingly endless amounts of cat litter, kitten food and wet wipes, and most importantly, our lives. 

It is not now unusual for someone we do not know to reach out to Renee and say, “Hey – we found these kittens. Can you take them?”

And if we are not extremely over capacity, the odds are the answer is yes. Yes, we can. 

So it was not unheard of when a friend of a friend of a friend texted Renee last week and said that she had found four kittens, less than a week old, that someone had thrown in a dumpster, and could we take them?

We were over capacity, but one of our kittens was going to a new home in a few days, and newborn kittens really only need a warm place to sleep and regular feedings, so we closed off the dining room from our own cats and made it the overflow kitten nursery. When they showed up, they were starving – who knew how long since they had been fed?

Naming kittens is hard – especially when you are doing it every few weeks. It’s important to name them – both so we have a way to tell them apart, but also because people who adopt kittens connect with kittens who have names, and we need these kittens adopted. Most, but not all, folks rename the kittens when we adopt them out. This litter we named after Black celebrities – Harry Bellefonte, Morgan Freeman, Sidney Poitier, and Etta James. 

As is our custom, we took them all to our vet, who looked them over for obvious issues, and then we set to work feeding them 6 milliliters of formula every 2-3 hours and weighing them constantly to make sure they are gaining weight every day. 

When new kittens come in, we don’t get a lot of sleep for the first few weeks. 

All was good for a few days (other than our lack of sleep), but Harry’s weight began to plateau and then he began to lose weight, prompting another visit to the vet. The poor boy had parasites – it is assumed they all do – and he was sent home with medicine for him and all the others. 

But it was apparently too late – Harry didn’t make it through the night, and yesterday morning, I found him dead, nestled among his siblings, as if they were trying to hug him back to life. 

Various stats from kitten advocacy groups tell us that bottle fed kittens have a 20-40% mortality rate – it’s hard out here for a kitten without a mom to take care of them.

And it hurts to lose any of them, but we take some comfort from knowing that the mortality rate of the dumpster they were found in was going to be 100%, and in his last days, little Harry Belafonte was loved, cared for, snuggled, and warm, surrounded by his siblings who were also loved, fed, and warm. 

In his last week, he knew love, and was fed regularly from food bought by people who were rooting for him to make it. I’m glad we were able to do that for him, even if it doesn’t feel like nearly enough. But we’re also really clear it is infinitely better than his dying in a box in a dumpster, afraid and hungry.

Please, please don’t abandon kittens. Please spay and neuter your cats – especially those you let outside.

Bio statements

Before the pandemic happened (correlation, not causation – at least, not directly) I spent a lot of time as a c-level speaker at festivals and symposia and conferences. I was often mentioned on the program under the phrase, “…and other exciting speakers!”

As in, “Come hear Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, and other exciting speakers!”

Anyway.

The point is, I always got asked for a brief bio for them to read before I came on stage or, rarely, to be printed in the program.

I haven’t been asked for a bio in probably four years. But this morning I’m being interviewed for a podcast about being a pastor, and was asked for a bio. I looked at my old one and it was horrendously out of date, so I wrote a new one.

In this process, I learned two things:

I) I still hate writing about myself in the third person.

2) My life is weird as shit these days.

Hugh is a sixth generation Mississippian, a descendant of enslavers, and the pastor of Open Door Mennonite Church in Jackson, MS – a multiracial peace church formed in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. He is a writer and storyteller and has been the publisher of a newsletter called Life is So Beautiful for more than a decade.

Before becoming pastor at Open Door, Hugh spent 12 years working as a pastor among unhoused people and those struggling with addictions. This taught him much of what he knows about both second chances and grace, but not much that is useful at congregational meetings.

He and his spouse Renee live in the Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, where they run a small scale kitten rescue called Purr and Pounce and live with four permanent cats and five chickens.

Bio statements like this are always a bit weird, partly because you have to decide what is most important to convey in just a few sentences, which means you are necessarily curating. And since this is designed to be read by an audience for a specific event, they are even more heavily curated. For example, this one was for a podcast about preaching, so I focused heavily on my work in faith spaces, and didn’t mention my nonprofit experience.

If I were in a more secular space, I would reduce all that church work to something like, “Hugh is the pastor of Open Door Mennonite Church in Jackson, MS.”

I know all of social media is curation, but it is never so glaringly obvious as when you are writing your bio.

Maintenance work

“In August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and—from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone.” – William Faulkner

The foretaste of fall that Faulkner mentioned is where we have been in Mississippi the last few days. The humidity, after being brutal all summer, has resumed normal levels, and for the first time in many weeks we went 3 days in a row without a heat advisory from the Weather Service. I took advantage of the conflux of nice weather and a weekend to get some things done outside. 

As regular readers know, I live with depression, and so this past spring I was in a bad place, and thus did not get the spring clean up done outside. The muscadine vines did not get pruned, and the mulch did not get put down, and the shrubs were not cut back, and so my yard has suffered all summer from that initial neglect. And by the time I felt up to doing it, the heat was here, and while the mind was willing, the body was weak. 

With gloves on, I tugged at vines and pulled weeds that were firmly established. I cut down dead shrubs and cut back the muscadine vines that threatened to take over the nearby rose bushes. I thinned the goldenrod patches and marveled at the 8 foot tall swamp sunflower stands. 

When done (for the day, not done as in finished with the tasks) I had taken several wheelbarrow loads to the brash pile in the back yard, there is a large vacant space where I can put a new rose bush, and you could see the edges of my driveway once again. 

I sort of despise maintenance work. I begrudge the time spent. I would much rather enjoy watching the butterflies and hummingbirds in my yard than be bent over, ass in the air, grubbing roots out of the beds. 

But if there is no gardening, then there is no garden. 

My therapist pointed out once that, compared to many of her patients, I spend a lot of time doing preventative mental health maintenance. I exercise regularly and take long walks outside, I journal, meditate, and pray, I have a rigorous sleep schedule, and I have pretty strong boundaries in place around my energy. 

Which led me to add it all up, and on a given day, I might spend 2 hours doing things that can be though of as maintenance. Which seems like a lot, honestly. If I am awake 17 hours or so, and I’m working for 8 of them, that means I’m spending almost 1/4th of my free time on maintenance. Just doing things to make sure the other hours of my life are as pain-free as possible. 

There are days I let things slip, just like I let the yard slip this spring. But my body rebels much faster than my yard does, and thus the feedback loop is shorter, and so I return to the rituals and routines faster. Because, as my friends in recovery are wont to say, it works if you work it.

In that kitchen

In that kitchen I learned about alchemy – the practice, if not the word.

If I close my eyes, I can see the light filtered through the handmade green gingham curtains that move with the breeze. I can hear the news being read over the small radio to the left of the sink, next to the snuff box.

It was on those worn linoleum tiles, peeping over the edge of the counter, on my knees on the green vinyl chair, that I watched it happen – the battered aluminum bowl, the scoops of flour, the sweet milk, the knob of Crisco the size of an unshelled walnut.

Done without measurement, the muscle memory made deep by years of daily practice making biscuits, feeding your family for pennies.

In the old days, it was believed that if you knew the right words, you could turn base metal into gold, but in that kitchen, I learned the deeper truth, the even older magic: That with time and intention, you could turn flour into food, scraps into sufficiency, and ingredients into love.

Goodbye, affiliate links

If you google “best wireless printer”, the whole first page is full of weird sites that have endless lists of printers listed, with links to Amazon or Best Buy or wherever. They are all affiliate links – you click a link and the website makes a percentage – often not just from that sale, but from all your purchases from that merchant over the next 24 hours.

To be clear – there is nothing inherently wrong with affiliate programs, per se. And Amazon is far from the only company doing this. But it also incentivizes shitty behavior. Like the whole first page of Google on that printer search.

Over time, people have came to distrust affiliate links, so websites began to hide them with URL shorteners, or redirects, or clever server-side tricks, all to keep people from knowing they were clicking on affiliate links, and thus sending money to the website owner.

After all, the reader comes to think: Did you put that link in there to help me, or because you make money from it? Is this really your favorite novel of all time, or did you just want to make money from me?

These are questions I never want my reader to have to think about.

So: I’m announcing a change in policy. Going forward, I will use NO affiliate links on any of my properties. Not here on my blog, not in my newsletter.

To be clear, this will cost me some money. About 10% of my income last year was from affiliate links, mostly in my newsletter where I recommended books or movies. But when I launched my membership program, I said that this would mean I never had to sell ads on my website or newsletter. It also means now that I never have to use affiliate links.

Hugh's Blog

Hopeful in spite of the facts

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