When I was a little boy, both of my parents worked a lot, and I spent a lot of time at my neighbor’s house. They were retired farmers, and as my surviving grandfather lived far away, they filled that role in my life.
They were very much a product of their time. They didn’t follow daylight saving time, or government time, as they called it, and they didn’t have air conditioning, although I think that was mostly on him, because after he died, she installed a window unit in the room she spent the most time in. They unplugged the TV when it wasn’t in use, lest it cause a fire. And every day after 3PM, he would sit on the east side of his house in the shade.
He was, by the time I remember him best, pretty ill, and his days of strenuous activity were behind him. He had a chair in the living room that was his chair, and he would sit there and read the paper, or tell me stories, or watch the news to get the weather. And he would watch the way the light from the sun moved across the floor through the window, and when it reached the edge of the couch, it was time to go outside.
I pointed out to him you didn’t have to watch the sun—you could just look at the clock and go outside after three.
“But what happens if your clock breaks?” he asked. “Besides, the light lines up with the clock a little different every day. The light is what matters, not the time.”
He would sit out there until suppertime—about 6:30 in the summer. And I would play at his feet, and we would watch the cars go by, which were many fewer in those days than now, and he taught me to lie on my back and look at the clouds and see how they would shift shapes, becoming bears and cats and sometimes look like nothing but clouds and yet be pretty all the same.
Last Sunday was daylight saving time, but I was out of town when it happened. And, to my eternal shame, I did, in fact, change my clocks. Honestly, these days, most of them change themselves. But today was a gorgeous day, and I went for a long walk, like I do most days, and I saw the white clouds on the blue sky, and I would swear I saw both a bear and a cat. I like to think that, somewhere, wherever he is, he did too.
Category: Posts
Mike’s Bible
Today is Mike’s birthday. Facebook reminded me this morning, which felt like a punch in the gut. So, I thought it was fitting to tell you about Mike’s Bible.
The Bible itself is nothing to look at. If you were looking for a generic idea of what a Bible should look like, it would look like this one. It’s black leather, with gilt edges and a black ribbon to mark your place, and in gold script in the lower right-hand corner, it has Mike’s name embossed.
This Bible is nothing special on its own, but it is very important to me. Thoreau said the value of a things lies in what of we have to give up to obtain it. By that measure, it is one of the more valuable things I own–not from what I gave up, but what was given up for it to come into my possession.
It’s the King James Version – a no longer fashionable version first published in 1611, with archaic language that uses thee and thou as pronouns. In my experience, two kinds of people still use the King James Version. The first is people who grew up using it, who find the language comfortable and soothing, who relish the poetic notes as the language of devotion. The second is people who desire a scripture that is fixed in time, an immutable authority that does not change.
I am the first sort of person. Mike was the second.
He first came in my office about 13 years ago, just off the bus from Virginia. His marriage had ended because of his chemical addiction. He had an ex-wife and a daughter, neither of who would talk to him, and he had been raised by a grandmother, now dead. She had given him the Bible he carried everywhere, with his name embossed in gilt on the front.
Mike would come to the church I was at in those days and lead us in hymns he knew, which were the most strict sort, involving lots of blood atonement and proclamations of our unworthiness. He believed in a wrathful, powerful God in a way I have never believed in anything. He could cite obscure scriptures to “prove” his points, and when he was sober–which admittedly came and went–-he was a kind and gentle soul.
Over the three years I saw him often, Mike would occasionally go away for a while to various rehab facilities, and while there he would write me letters filled with Biblical citations and affirmations of his complete recovery when he was released. Promises made, the Holy Spirit invoked, Satan renounced. This time, it was going to be different.
Sadly, his aspirations always exceeded his abilities, for Matt never lasted more than a month outside of rehab before he was using again.
One day he walked into my office. I had not seen him for a good three months. We always said that when people disappeared on us, it was either really good, or really bad. For Mike, it had been bad. He was dirty, and smelled of sweat and urine. In his hand he held his Bible.
“Preacher, this is my Bible. My granny gave it to me when I got saved at a revival when I was a teenager. I don’t want to lose it – will you hold onto it for me?”
Of course I would.
Mike began a steady descent after that day. I wonder sometimes if the responsibility of keeping track of his one prized possession hadn’t been good for him. I don’t know – I just know that after that, he spiraled down quickly.
One day he came in, relatively sober, and asked if I still had his Bible. I told him I did, and asked if he wanted it back.
“Not yet,” he said. “You keep it for me until I am ready for it.”
That was the last time I saw Mike. He disappeared, and several weeks later we learned he had died one night in a storm, drowning in a drainage ditch while high on paint fumes.
Mike didn’t make it, but I still have his Bible. It sits on my desk, and I will pick it up some days and thumb through it-–sometimes looking for comfort, but other times when I need to be reminded of truths I know, but am prone to forget.
The page at the front of the Bible where marriages are to be recorded has Mike and his wife’s names written in, but her name marked through and obliterated, serves to remind me that things don’t always go like we wish they would.
The underlined verses about the wrath of God and the power of God (but never about the love of God) remind me that people like Mike, who in this life was powerless but loving, needed a God who was what he wasn’t.
The embossed cover with his name on it, a gift from his Granny, reminds me that as broken and discarded as Mike was when I knew him, he was once loved and prized by his family, and that all of us have a back story–none of us are the worst thing other people know about us.
But mostly, this old Bible reminds me that you don’t always win. When I read from it, I am reminded that no one ever wanted to be sober as much as Matt, and that just wanting it is never enough.
But I really wish it was.
The Bar
It was pouring rain outside, but inside the bar, it was warm and dry. It was also dark, and the task lighting here and there behind the bar made pools that illuminated the area around them. The murmur of conversation played off the piped-in piano jazz, and the overall effect was that you were lucky to be alive while such a place existed.
It was the bar in a nice hotel in downtown Memphis in the year 2002. I was freshly divorced and stony broke, and once a week or so I would scrape $20 together and visit this place of luxury and drink two drinks. Just two. That was all I could afford, and even in those days I knew alcohol was not my friend.
It was always the same order: A vodka and tonic in a tall glass, with a lime. I had picked that up in the days when I would take clients out for drinks, and I needed a “standard” drink that every bar in the world would be able to make. It was the blue blazer of drinks.
It had the advantage of being clear, so if you were getting in over your head, you could just order tonic and lime and no one was the wiser. But those days were long gone. Now I was no longer on expenses, no longer wooing clients. Now I was the sort of person who scraped $20 together once a week to get two drinks in a nice bar.
It wasn’t really about the drinks. It was the way they would kiss my ass when I showed up. The way they knew my name, knew my drink. The way the bartender polished the glasses, the way he always had a basket of pretzels at the ready.
I loved the ways the candles on the tables would flicker in the mirror over the bar, the way the glasses tinkled, the sound of the drinks being mixed. The bathrooms in that bar were temples to the art of tile and plumbing, and to this day, it might be the nicest toilet I have ever used. An elderly Black man in the hotel uniform handed you a paper towel after you washed your hands, and you gave him a dollar while you acted as if this didn’t embarrass either of you.
The bar manager was a Black man in his mid-thirties named Daniel. He was always happy to see me, and for a while, he would remember the name of the woman I had brought there once when it was important to me that she know the things that were important to me. And when I told him we had broken up, he never mentioned her again.
It would be another six years before I would have a smart phone, and this was much too nice a bar to have a television in it. The drink sat on a coaster, sweat running down the sides of the glass as I would twist it clockwise with my fingers.
I sat at the bar, slowly drinking my clear drink, eating pretzels, and chatting with Daniel. Nowhere to go, no one expecting me or trying to get in touch with me. I was just sitting in that perfect, dark, flickering world as long as the money held out.
I don’t really drink much anymore. I might drink three drinks a year, and some years, I might drink none. But I am still a sucker for a quiet, dark bar, one that’s warm and dry when it’s wet outside, the sort of place where, when you break up with someone, they do you the favor of forgetting her name.
These days, I have come to see luxury hotels as a sort of hack. I can’t afford to stay at a luxury hotel, but I can sit at the bar in the lobby and drink my clear drink with a lime, and be treated like a king for a $5 tip on top of the cost of the drink. It doesn’t have to be the bar, either. Maybe it’s their café. Maybe it’s the nice restaurant, where you just get coffee and a dessert. For a few minutes, you can sit in the flickering light while they pretend that you too are royalty. You too belong.
And in exchange, you too can relax and forget, just for a moment, that the world is on fire.
Anti-Ableism | Ask Hugh Anything
I intend to answer a question from the readers of this blog each week (you can read more about this here). This week’s question comes from Karen.
So many otherwise progressive people I encounter, especially in faith spaces, have not really examined their own ableism. You are a rare progressive who is on an anti-ableist journey. I’m curious how that happened to you.
First of all, thank you for the implied compliment. I get this wrong a lot, but I hope I’m better than I used to be. As a friend of mine says about another issue, the bar to clear to be good at this is so low, it’s in hell.
I have sat with this question a few days now, and have struggled with it, because I hate the “Tell us about your journey” questions, because it usually wasn’t any one thing, but a bunch of things, and because it would be easy to write about this in a way that makes me sound heroic, and really, I’m just trying to be a good guy.
So, I think I have to start there. I want to be a good guy. I think that is rarer than we think it is. Note: I didn’t say I want people to think I’m a good guy–I want to be one.
Because of a long string of events, in my late twenties I came face to face with myself and realized I did not like who I had become. While there were other people who did not admire me, what is worse is that I did not admire myself.
Over the next few years, I would spend a lot of time asking myself, “What makes a person a good person?”
This was not completely untrod ground for me. My father was a good man, and he modeled that for me. But I was eager to get out and make my mark on the world, and so I had to distance myself from my father’s teachings. Some truths we only learn on our own.
I would read a lot of books and take classes on ethics, and in the end, I came up with the simplest possible definition I could: a good person works to reduce the amount of harm in the world. Every single definition I could find kept coming back to this.
And so, since then, that has been my primary goal: I want to reduce the amount of harm in the world. And then the question becomes: how does one measure that?
The two principal ways I know of are to ask people who study such things, and the second is to ask the people who are affected. Although it often goes the other way: people first, experts second.
This has informed most of my life at this point. It has informed my garden, the city in which I lived, the food I buy, the recipes I cook, the political fights I enter, the religious tradition I belong to, the way I vote. It might feel like we have moved away from ableism, but I don’t think we have.
Ableism is one of the relatively quiet ways we humans have for harming each other, and it’s wrong, the way all the ways we harm each other are wrong. I confess I came to it late. As someone who is currently able-bodied, I didn’t notice it. Most of my friends were currently able-bodied as well. Like so many systemic injustices, it was just the water I swam in.
It wasn’t until some people I love called me in when they saw it in me that I came around. Now that you know something you are doing causes harm in the world, what now? Now you have to decide if you are okay with not doing anything about it.
There are times you cause harm in the world and the remedy isn’t clear. Perhaps you work in international aid, and you realize the jets you fly on weekly are damaging the environment. There is not much you can do about this and do that work.
But ableism isn’t like that. Working against ableism doesn’t harm anyone and makes the world better for everyone. So, once you know better, you should do better.
Looking back over my life, it is a source of shame to me that many things that didn’t directly affect me rarely struck me as bad until they affected people I care about. I think that’s true for most of us, however. It is a strong case for having a diverse group of relationships.
It excites me to know that I haven’t met all the people who will shape the way I think yet.
The Love List- part 2
In summer of 2024, I made a list of 100 things I love.
Here is another 50.
- That sharp bite in the back of your throat from horseradish.
- The first sip of a Diet Coke from McDonalds.
- Browsing a bookstore on a rainy afternoon.
- The smell of a freshly plowed field.
- Muscadine jelly on a buttered biscuit.
- Wandering the produce section at the Asian market.
- Listening to someone nerd out over one of their obsessions.
- Egg drop soup.
- Mentoring young people.
- The sound of a stream trickling over rocks.
- Dave Brubeck’s music
- See also Nina Simone
- A cup of hot chocolate, with vanilla and marshmallows, on a cold day.
- Soaking in a hot tub, alone.
- When people look at how I look and talk and where I’m from, and as a result they underestimate me.
- Watching old episodes of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood
- The joy my chickens have when I dump a new bag of raked leaves into their run.
- Stone ground mustard
- When someone reaches out and asks for a copy of something they remember I wrote years ago.
- A big salad as an entrée
- Eating in an empty diner at 3 in the morning.
- Antique roses
- The smell of Japanese honeysuckle in bloom
- Standing in the pickup line at the airport and seeing Renee’s car come around the corner.
- The way my cat Ella knows the sound of the cheese drawer in the fridge opening, and how she runs in the kitchen and starts screaming at me because she too loves cheese.
- The smell of our yard after the thunderstorm has stopped.
- The sound the house makes when you are the first one up, and you are sitting in a dim room, drinking your coffee.
- Thick bath towels
- The smell of cornbread cooking
- Hot buttered popcorn, salty, made on the stovetop.
- Folk yard art
- That feeling of fatigue in your muscles after working outside all day.
- Learning that something I did made a positive impact to someone.
- A long hot shower in a hotel room. I don’t know why it hits different there, but it does.
- Putting on clothes fresh out of the dryer.
- The way the temperature drops suddenly when it’s August and hotter than Satan’s armpit, but you just walked into the shade of a Live Oak tree.
- Drinking coffee from a thick porcelain mug.
- Being understood.
- Watching a school of dolphins play.
- Butterflies.
- Zinnias
- Black-eyed susans
- An oversized armchair big enough to curl up in.
- The color often called French Blue.
- When someone says that something I wrote gave them language for their feelings.
- The movie Mary Poppins.
- A room with throw rugs over a hardwood floor.
- Mint-infused iced tea.
- Watching Renee concentrate on something so hard she is oblivious I am there.
- Audiobook mystery novels
What do you love?
Ask Hugh anything (aha!)
Hi friends.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been updating my blog each weeknight for a couple of weeks now. I like daily blogging—it’s generative for me. It makes me practice writing, even when I’m not working on a specific writing project, like the next book. It’s like off—season training. Keeps me in shape.
But in a way, blogging daily without a unifying project to order it is harder. You know what would make it easier? If I was answering a question you asked me.
So, I am putting together a new series: Ask Hugh Anything. Or, as I like to think of it, AHA! (I crack me up sometimes). I have a simple form you fill out to ask the question, and if I feel like I have a good answer, I will answer it here on the blog. It can be anonymous on your end, or not (up to you), and you get an answer and I get things to write about.
I have been a pastor for nearly 20 years. I have worked with addicts, millionaires, business executives, and unhoused folks. I’ve witnessed three murders, delivered two babies in the field, and worked in four nonprofits. I was a US Marine, and later taught nonviolent social change. I can make a souffle and a shed, build up flavors in a roux and build kitchen cabinets, hem your pants and hem you in a corner in a fist fight. I’ve been an anarchist and a political organizer.
I have, in other words, seen some shit, and am eager to answer your questions.
So, seriously—ask me anything.
Why I stay
CW: Some mentions of sexual assault and spiritual abuse, but nothing graphic.
When Dan was a boy, he idolized his grandfather: they were inseparable. Dan’s grandfather was a minister, and the way Dan described it to me,the grandfather was revered in their small town. He moved with integrity, his word was his bond, and he embodied manhood to Dan, and to many others in their town.
It was his grandfather’s example that led Dan to become a minister himself, and his most prized possession is the Bible his grandfather preached from every Sunday, which Dan inherited at his grandfather’s death, more than 30 years ago.
A few years ago, (long after the death of the grandfather), it came out that his grandfather was a serial child molester. He had not only molested children in his church, but his own daughter, Dan’s aunt. The aunt that was always quiet and withdrawn as an adult. The aunt that had trouble navigating the world. The aunt that had always seemed, somehow, broken.
I always wondered how you navigate that. What you do when you discover that someone you loved and respected, who taught you so much, who you idolized and wanted to be like–what do you do when you learn they were a monster?
What does that do to your story? Are the things you learned from him now invalid? Is your judgment flawed? How do you know he didn’t try to turn you into a monster too? Or maybe he did? How do you process those memories? Are they now questionable?
# # #
In my late twenties, the questions I had around faith were no longer capable of being answered by the Methodism of my childhood, and I went searching. I flirted with Buddhism for a while, but I am far too much a practitioner to ever be happy sitting on the floor.
I discovered the activist Catholics (like Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin) who taught me you could be Christian and work for justice, too. They led me to death penalty protesters, who led me to nonviolence, which, if you stay there long enough, will lead you to Mennonites.
To a person, everyone that I asked who I should read to understand the Mennonite position told me to read John Howard Yoder. So I did – I bought Politics of Jesus and realized I had came home. These were my people. It wasn’t just that it made sense to me, but it made sense of me.
I joined the church, and then was pulled aside and told by several elders, that it was obvious I had a call to be in ministry. They would query me, shelter me, love me and, eventually, ordain me.
My work now as a Christian minister is directly because of my Anabaptist convictions – convictions I was first exposed to in the words of John Howard Yoder.
In recent years, it has come to (more public) light that during his lifetime, Yoder abused, molested or raped more than 100 women, in the name of pursuing “the perfection” of his theology.
The man who taught me the basics of nonviolence was a perpetrator of violence. The man who wrote against abuse of power was an abuser of power.
What does this do to my story? Is what I learned invalid? Does this invalidate nonviolence? Are the theories I learned about power wrong? Is nonviolence just a pipe dream? How much of my story does this put into question? Hell, how much of the theories around my work does this put into question?
# # #
These days, I’m a pastor, and I seem to attract folks who have been hurt by the church. Lord knows there is a lot of them. I have had deep conversations with so many people who have been sexually abused by church leaders I have lost count.
A significant portion of those folks are members of the LGBT community. When I was working in the unhoused community, a huge percentage of Queer folk were unhoused because of their family’s understanding of Christianity.
Lindsay was kicked out of her home at 16, when she came out to her mom. Her mom called the preacher, who said that tough love was the only thing that would change her sinful ways. Her mamma kicked her out and refused her calls since then. The last time I saw her, some eight years ago, Lindsay was 26 and a survival sex-worker, with a crack habit and HIV. And she hadn’t been home in 10 years.
Or the woman – one of the most gifted pastoral personalities I know – who was told she could never be a pastor, because she was a woman. And while she knew there were churches that did not believe that, none of those churches were her church. So she didn’t go into ministry, convinced what she thought was her call from God was invalid.
I know all these stories, and more. They are legion. I have heard about your assault at the hands of your youth pastor, the power trip the senior pastor at your last church put on you, the ways your grandmother was preyed on by that prosperity preacher on TV, the time you got called a whore by the church when you most needed help. I have heard all of those stories.
But none of them are my story.
I have always had a wonderful time in church. I was always loved, and taught to love. I belonged, I felt safe there, I grew up there, developed life-long friendships there. The problems I had in my twenties were about religion – they weren’t about church.
I loved church – right up until I learned the truth. Until I was a trusted pastor person, who got trusted with other people’s stories. Until I learned that many people did not have my experience. I loved church until I learned that for many people, the church was their molester, or at the least, the enabling system that allowed the molestation to happen.
I am a pastor. I preach most weeks, and I bury and marry people. I say the words of institution at The Lord’s Supper, and I baptize folks when they’re ready.
But I seldom go to church anymore – at least, not when I am on my own. Not when I am not paid to be there. Not for my own benefit.
Because I have too many questions: How much of what I learned was invalid? How much was abusive, but I didn’t recognize it? How much was coercion? How much was propaganda?
How much, dammit, of my own story is now in question?
When I talk like this to folks, some of them ask why I stay. Why stay in the church, if you know how problematic it is?
Well, there are several reasons, but a big one is that I want to make damn sure that when that queer kid comes out, when the vulnerable person shows up, they are as safe as I can make it for them. I want everyone to feel that their pastor is the one person who can hold their heavy things with them, and who tell them, with absolute assurance, that they are beloved children of God, who loves them and does not judge them.
In the end, I just want everyone to feel as safe as I did… before I knew.
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.