Hugh Hollowell

Oxford

I grew up 50 miles away from Oxford, MS – the home of William Faulkner and The University of MS, although not in that order. The university was there first. Oxford is the county seat of Lafayette County – named for the French military hero and American general Marquis de Lafayette. It is pronounced “La-FAY-et”.

Next door in Louisiana, they have a parish (what they call counties) called Lafayette Parish, named after the French military hero and American general Marquis de Lafayette. It is pronounced the way the Frech would – “La-fah-yet.” We ignore this contradiction, as there is no telling what someone from Louisiana is likely to do.

We lived north of Oxford, so we ended up in Holly Springs or even Memphis when we wanted to go to the doctor or a department store, but people south of us would have ended up in Oxford for those things. It always seemed like a magical place to me – a picturesque town square and a huge university. 17-year-old me would go there on my days off and drive around the campus, fascinated by co-eds and the campus library, in roughly equal amounts. In those days, I believed college was something only rich people would do – especially a college like Ole Miss.

Many of the educated men in my life had attended college here. Most of the women, too, but they were quieter about it. The men had the Confederate battle flags that were de rigueur in those days hung from their businesses, especially during football season, and on their bumpers always.

When I joined the Marines, my recruiter was based here. I would drive here many Saturdays during my senior year as a term of my delayed enlistment contract.

Neilson’s department store is on the Square, and was in those days, too. In fact, founded in 1839, it predates the university by 5 years. But it is crisp and clean inside, and wealthy men I knew shopped there. To be clear, I didn’t know any men who were truly what I would now consider wealthy. But the men in question were business owners, insurance agents, and attorneys. Men who wore ties to work, and who got their weekends off. Whose families bought new cars, and lived in two-story homes made of brick. You know – wealthy.

I always felt special when I walked in the door of Neilsons, which has been selling goods to dirt farmers for so long that they don’t automatically judge you for the way you are dressed the way the stores in Memphis did.

When Heather and I were dating while in the Marines, we took a day trip to Oxford, walked around The University of Mississippi, and talked about how cool it would be to live there when we got out of the Marines. For 28 years now, I can’t be in Oxford without thinking about walking across the grounds of William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with her on that crisp fall day. She was filled with derision at the monument to the Confederate dead that was on the town square, on the lawn of the courthouse. As an aside, that monument finally came down in 2020, two years after her death. It took a while, but we got there.

And then there is Square Books – a legendary indie bookstore that will always be my platonic ideal of what a bookstore should be, with multiple levels, a lovely gallery overlooking the square, and books everywhere. The loving curation there is a sign of their respect for the reader, and the owners still, 40 years later, work the counter and will ring up your sale. I went there the first time with Heather in 1991, and have returned countless times with people I have loved – my sharing it with people is one of the ways I show I love them.

So this past weekend, when I knew I was going home for Easter, we made it a point to go up a day early and spend the afternoon in Oxford. I walked the square, peered in the door of Neilson’s, and drank a cafe au lait on the gallery at Square Books, looking over the rain-soaked square before spending money on yet more books.

It was a quick trip, so I didn’t get a chance to walk the grounds at Rowan Oak, to talk to Mr. Faulkner’s ghost, and to see his muscadine arbor which should be just leafing out about now, but I’m not worried. It’s not going anywhere. And even should it all fall down, should it burn to the ground and disappear, as long as I live there will be a small piece of my heart labeled Oxford.

The Storm

Her name was Betty, and how exactly we were kin is a long story that involves marriages, divorces, widows, and time, but it’s far easier to just tell you she was my cousin’s wife which, while true, downplays her role in my life.

She had always been beautiful – I remember being six or seven and going to the bank where she worked as a loan officer and seeing her at her desk, in the lobby, thinking she must be the most beautiful woman in the world.

Her husband was my cousin but was also 30 years older than I was, and 10 years older than Dad. He was the oldest of his generation and served as sort of the patriarch of our extended family (see, I told you it was complicated). He died 24 years ago, but since then, Betty had stepped into the role. And for the last 15 or so years, she put together a potluck dinner on Easter Sunday.

For most of that time, I lived far away. In 2019, I was on staff at a church, and it was my first Easter there, so I felt like I needed to be there. We left right after but got there just as everyone was leaving. In 2020 they canceled because of COVID. In October of 2020, Dad died.

In 2021, it was back on, and it was fabulous. Renee and I had been locked down for more than a year at that point, our vaccinations were current, and so we made the trip north, our first real trip in ages. We took the Natchez Trace north, spent the night in Tupelo, spent an afternoon in Oxford, and then on to home, turning a three-hour trip into a 24-hour one, but feeling a little bit alive again.

Betty was 79 at that point, and all during the pandemic had been in the most severe of lockdowns because of her health. But now there were vaccines, and she was fully vaccinated, and this was the first time she was in the presence of people who were not carefully screened or her doctors. After a full year of virtual isolation, she was there, grinning like a cat in the cream, so happy to just see people.

She would come up to folks and say, “I’m fully vaccinated. Can I hug you?”. I bet she hugged everyone at least twice. We all had so much hope that the nightmare was over then, in the spring of 2021 after the vaccines came out.

Betty talked to me last year about how it just seemed wrong without Dad there. Dad was always the man with the camera at any gathering. And 2021 was the first year he wasn’t. We all felt his absence.

In August, Betty would suddenly die from an unrelated illness.

So this year was very solemn indeed. A whole generation was gone. And while it was so good to see everyone, it was far from festive.

On the way home after the potluck yesterday, we got caught in a rainstorm. I hate driving in the rain under the best of times, and this was more than 2 hours of brutal rain and thunder and lightning, and being buffeted all around the road. It was exhausting.

Driving back home from being in my hometown is always a time of introspection for me, as I reflect on the ways things turned out, on roads not taken, promises unkept. None of that is easier when you are doing it in a thunderstorm.

We stopped at the rest area to get some relief from the storm, to stretch, and catch our breath. And standing under the pavilion, watching the rain pour around us, we read the text message from a dear friend telling us that her husband – who has been fighting COVID for months – is most likely going into hospice later this week and that, baring a literal miracle, he won’t be recovering.

Well, shit.

I stare at the rain some more before getting back in the car to continue toward home.

So much loss in the last few years. Every time I’m convinced I cannot take more, more happens anyway.

We were some 30 minutes away from home when the sun came out. It was still raining, but it had slowed dramatically, and the sun was shining fiercely and, off to the east, I saw a large double rainbow arching up from the horizon.

I know the old story about how, after destroying the world with a flood, God promised Noah that would never happen again, and the sign of that promise was a rainbow. And if I’m honest, I always wondered why a rainbow would be taken seriously as such a sign.

But yesterday – on Easter Sunday, no less, when I had come through that storm and was carrying so much death and despair with me, when I saw those bows in the East I knew that we would get through. That we could keep going. That we had to persist, to carry on, and build a better world.

So I kept driving.

The Man in Gray

When I was five, we built a new house, just 20 yards in front of the house in which my father was raised. Eventually, it would get torn down – some family friends tore it down in exchange for the wood, but for a few months, we lived sort of in both of them, as we slowly moved things from one house to the other.

I had watched them build it – we basically paid someone to dry it in, and then we completed the inside ourselves. I say we, like I played a part, but believe that 5-year-old me was always in the middle of whatever was going on. And Mom and I would walk around the house, being built, and she would tell me that this was the kitchen and that was the bathroom. And this one? This is your room.

And when we get moved in, we will paint it whatever color you want.

I told her I wanted it painted red. You see, red was my favorite color. But we ended up compromising. Instead of the whole room, my bed frame was painted red, Dad painted the door to my room red, and I had red pajamas and red sheets. If it stood still long enough, it ended up red.

But somewhere along the way, I shifted, and suddenly, my favorite color was now blue.

Blue is a good color – non-controversial and can be professional or fun, can be the color of swim trunks or a tuxedo, and, perhaps most importantly, somewhere around the age of 14 or so, a girl told me that blue accentuates my eyes. I had no idea what that meant, exactly, but she seemed to think it was a positive thing.

I wore blue almost exclusively through my twenties. Blue suits. Blue shirts. Blue accents in my ties and show hankies. I owned three different blue cars.

But increasingly, blue didn’t make sense. It felt way too festive, too bright, too colorful. The best way I can think of to describe it is that when I wore blue, my insides didn’t match my outsides. And in my mid 30’s, as I began to become more and more aware of the pain in the world, I started to wear more muted tones.

And one day, I woke up and realized that I was now the sort of person who not only didn’t wear bright colors – I was known as someone who wore gray.

This week I was at the courthouse, wearing a black polo shirt and khakis. A colleague said I looked dressed up, as he rarely ever saw me not wearing a gray t-shirt. I just checked, and I actually own 9 gray t-shirts, and three different shades of gray are represented in the drawer.

The people who bought our house in North Carolina are bright color people. When they walked through, they remarked that they had never lived in a gray house before. I informed them it was a bright gray, though. They laughed nervously.

It’s not that I don’t like bright colors – I do. They just don’t feel right when I’m wearing them. They are no longer me. In a world that’s gone crazy, it feels almost crass to wear bright colors. Like I’m not paying attention to the despair and pain around me. Like having Harlequin perform your funeral – it feels disrespectful, somehow.

Johnny Cash famously sang that he wore black because:

I’d love to wear a rainbow every day
And tell the world that everything’s okay
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
‘Til things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

I still own some blue shirts – if I preach at your funeral or wedding, I will probably wear one, because it’s more muted than white, and there aren’t a lot of other good options. But it’s always brighter than I feel.

Until things are better, I guess I’ll be the man in gray.

Children and Ancestors

When I was doing homeless work, there were children everywhere.

I knew children that lived in cars, who got cleaned up in gas station restrooms, and who wrote their school papers on old cellphones that were submitted using the wifi stolen from a Mcdonald’s parking lot. There were children abandoned on literal church doorsteps. Children who ate cold hotdogs for supper, while watching porn with their Dad. Children who had multiple diagnoses, but no services. Children on a rash of medications. And children who had executive function skills off the charts. The latter were often the oldest child, who had to step in as surrogate parents for their younger siblings because their parents were dysfunctional.

So many children.

And then there were the pregnant people. Many of whom were, in fact, still children themselves, having ran away (or were kicked out) when they told their parents they were pregnant. The women I took to the gynecologist’s office. The women I took over to Chapel Hill to the Planned Parenthood office after they made difficult choices. The women I was the only person there when they came out of labor. The women I stood with when the state took their babies away.

There were children everywhere.

One of the biggest populations of people who were experiencing homelessness I came across was people who were anywhere from 18-25, who had been children in foster care, and who had aged out. This means that they had turned 18 and, being adults in the eyes of the law, their foster parents would no longer receive stipends toward their care, so they got kicked out. So many people I knew who were homeless had aged out of the system.

A coworker was pregnant with her first child, and I asked if she was nervous.

“Absolutely”, she said. “There are so many ways to screw this up, it feels like. However, working here makes me feel better, ironically. You see this many babies and you realize there is a wide range of conditions under which humans can grow and develop.”

It’s true.

I am incredibly lucky in so many ways. My parents were just children themselves, having had me when they were but 20. My grandparents either died or were hundreds of miles away when I was very small. We had very little money. And yet I had parents that taught me to love books, encouraged my creativity and curiosity, gave me independence and that loved me without question. It truly was like winning the genetic lottery, without buying a ticket.

A critique of my writing is that I romanticize things about the past. But I don’t see it as romanticizing as much as I do curation. I am really clear I am who I am because of who I come from – because of who my people are. Had I been born under different circumstances, in a different place, to different people, I would be different. Heck, my two brothers and I are all very different, despite having grown up in the same house, with the same parents, and gone to the same schools.

Last week, while in the mountains, some friends were talking about my writing, and they said the thing they connected with the most was my hopefulness that doesn’t attempt to minimize the very real horrors of the world.

There are so many ways people maintain their resilience in the light of the chaos of the world. Some focus on self-care. Some drink. Some become jaded and hard.

I have, on various occasions, done all of those, and more.

But the sustaining belief I hold onto – that allows me to be hopeful in spite of the facts – really comes down to children and ancestors.

When I say children, I recognize that not all of us are bio-parents, nor can we be. But we can all put creative effort into the world, we can all leave legacies behind, and we can all be generative and supportive of people that will outlive us. Many of us have raised babies we did not give birth to. What are children but an investment in the world after we are gone? And all of us can make such an investment – not just those of us who have biological children.

If there is such a thing as a chosen family – and there is – then I can have chosen children.

But if we can all have children, then we are all ancestors. And more and more I resonate with the words of Jonas Salk, who said that our greatest responsibility was to be good ancestors. I am who I am because they were who they were. I am because of them.

Much like the quote credited to Gandhi about being the change we want to see in the world, I believe we have a responsibility to be the person for young people that the younger version of us needed. Even if we didn’t get it ourselves. Probably especially if we didn’t get it ourselves.

By doing that, we are bullish on the future. We are rolling the dice in favor of a better world, we are modeling the world we want to see, and living in such a way that is a defiance of the present darkness that surrounds us. By focusing on being the best ancestor I can be, I deprive the bleak reality of oxygen.

So that’s it, really. The source of any hope I can muster is that I have a responsibility to my ancestors as well as to my chosen children to be an ancestor, and what’s more, to be a good one.

Someone To Call

Two stories, perhaps 10 years apart:

Her name was Peggy. She was in her early forties when I knew her, but I only knew that because I had helped her get her birth certificate. She looked like she was in her late 50s, but life on the street makes you hard that way.

She was a Survival Sex Worker, which just means she sold sex to people – generally men – for money in order for her to have the resources to survive. There are lots of different sorts of sex work, from pole dancer to cover model to call girl to streetwalker, and all of it is actual work, but the distinction is important to the story.

As one might expect, the sort of people who pay people like Peggy for sex are sometimes not nice people. She also had a drug addiction – if I had her life, I would not have wanted to be sober for it either – and sometimes she traded sex in exchange for drugs. Those people tended to be even less nice, and would often refuse payment after services had been rendered, and Peggy, who had a mouth on her, would protest, and more than once she ended up in the hospital as a result.

Perhaps six months or so after I had met her for the first time, my phone rang at 5:30 AM. The caller ID said it was from the Trauma Center, so I answered.

“Hey Hugh!” she said. “It’s Peggy!”

Peggy tended to talk in exclamation marks.

In my groggy, barely alive state, I asked what was going on.

She said, “I’m at the emergency room, I’m getting stitches. I was on a date last night and he beat me up.”

Now, you should know that I knew she was a sex worker, and she knew I knew she was a sex worker, but we maintained the fiction that I didn’t know. It helped her maintain dignity, and I respect that.

So, I knew she hadn’t been at the steakhouse, sipping red wine over dinner when the “date” went south, but anyway, here we are.

I told her I was so sorry, and that I would be up there in about 20 minutes to sit with her. That was a big part of my life in those days – sitting with people.

She said, “Oh, no, You don’t have to do that. They’re about to release me.”

So, I said, “Well, no offense, but why are you calling me then? You could have just let me know when you see me later today.”

And that’s when she told me that the last time this had happened, the nurse in admission had asked her if she wanted to call anyone.

“And Hugh – I didn’t have anyone I could call. But this time, I did. I could call you.”

# # #

Earlier this week, a teenager who was once one of our foster children sent me a text. We had been in touch several times last year, but then her number changed and we didn’t have a way to find her, and so she disappeared. We hadn’t heard from her in perhaps six months.

“Hey, Mr. Hugh. It’s me!” the text said, but also gave her name, which I’m not sharing with you because of boundaries.

“I was afraid we had lost you,” I told her.

“Haha. No chance.”

When she and her sibling had left our care, we made them a scrapbook of their time with us, and she had one of my business cards taped to the inside.

“I’m sorry I changed my number and didn’t tell you. You told me when you gave me your card that now I always had someone I could call, no matter what. So I wanted to make sure you had my number. So you had somebody, too. ”

Shame Spirals

This past weekend, we went out of town. We went to the mountains of North Carolina, one of my happy places. But we almost didn’t make it.

The plan was to rent a car for the trip. Our car is fine, but it was going to be more than 1,000 miles round trip, and our Escape is great for short trips but not extremely comfortable for long ones, so getting something more comfortable and new sounded good. I went on Priceline and found a full-sized car with unlimited miles for $45 a day, and jumped at it.

We were heading out Friday morning, so at 6:30 AM I was at the end of our driveway, waiting for Tony the Lyft driver to take me to the airport. Tony was a big man, with lots of jokes and way too happy for it to be that early in the morning, but he got me there safe and sound.

When I walked in the door of the airport, there was a moderate line, but it moved quickly, and then it was my turn.

“I’m here to pick up a car. My last name is Hollowell,” I said.

She clicked lots of keys on her computer and made a face.

“Can you spell that?”

I did.

That was when she told me that I did indeed have a car reserved, but for next Friday, not this one. I had booked the car for the wrong date. And my rental was non-refundable because it was such a good deal. And they had no cars now.

We had friends meeting us there that afternoon. We had a room reserved. We were supposed to be leaving any minute now. I had screwed all of this up. And wasted $200 on top of everything else. I swear I almost burst into tears, right there at the counter.

It must have shown on my face.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” the kindly Black woman working the counter told me. “But you have to step aside now.”

“Next.”

I was in shock. I had screwed this up. I didn’t know how I did it. I was at the airport, with no way home, no rental car, and I had to call my wife and tell her we had no rental car, had wasted $200, and also, I needed her to come and get me.

While I waited for her, a nice man named Reggie with Priceline informed me that I had chosen the cheaper, non-refundable rental, and had not paid for travel insurance, so while I couldn’t get a refund, I could certainly come back next Friday and get the car then.

Thanks, Reggie.

We ended up taking our car after all. And it was fine. I mean, more or less.

We were three hours later than we had planned, and out $200, and most of all, I felt crushing shame, for not the first time in my life, that I sometimes can’t manage to do something so simple that it seems everyone else on the planet does OK.

This sort of shame is a common thing that those of us with ADHD deal with. I wish I could explain the shame I felt in that line on Friday. Shame that I had cost us money, shame that we would be late, shame that I looked foolish to the lady at the rental agency, shame I had to admit to my wife what I had done.

The worst is when my failures to executive function affects others. I go into a shame spiral.

On the way home from the airport, Renee, who read my mood perfectly, told me that everyone makes mistakes.

This is true. But most people don’t make them all the damn time.

No matter how often you repeat to yourself, “It was an honest mistake, it could have happened to anyone”, you never believe it. I have been living like this for nearly 50 years. And while it doesn’t happen as much as it once did, it will still keep happening. It’s safe to assume I won’t get better. It is what it is.

And what it is is exasperating.

Closed For Maintenance

Like I do most days, today I rode my bike to the gym. I don’t ride for exercise – I ride to get places. But the four miles of riding round trip do me no harm and help both the planet and our budget as gas continues to hover around $4 a gallon here.

It was a lovely day – the sort of beautiful spring day one gets in Central Mississippi that makes one temporarily forget the swamp-like August that will come. Early April is a lovely time here – the daffodils are still in bloom in places, the azaleas are a riotous mass of color and the wisteria runs along the fence rows, and red buckeyes and white dogwoods and spiderwort punctuate every thicket.

Today was a yoga day, and leaving after the 45-minute class, I heard a classmate – a woman in her early 70’s – say that she felt “noodley” and I thought that sounded about right: Supple, loose, and flexible. The tension had left my body and I felt wrung out like I had left all my frustrations on the mat.

And frustrations have been frequent of late. I’ve had tech problems galore over on the newsletter side of my writing business, costing me both weeks of time and hundreds of dollars, only to have it all dissolve in a vat of sunk costs that forced me to reconfigure and end up not far from where I started.

And after months and months of relative solitude, I have been thrust into the public eye again, with a steady stream of public meetings and actions and presentations. I feel like The Bride in that scene in Kill Bill when she wakes up after being in a coma and has lost the use of her legs to atrophy. My people muscles have atrophied, and while still there, they are not what they once were, and I leave most meetings exhausted.

And in multiple areas of my life, I am engaged in projects that are taking much longer than I anticipated, that are costing more than budgeted for, and that involve parts of my brain that are not best suited for that work.

My work has a lot of moving pieces, and pieces that should be moving and are not, and as I rode my bike to the gym this morning, my back was a mass of knots. I think I left them on the mat as well.

And as I rode home, passing under the fragrant wisteria and waving to my neighbor getting her mail and coasting down the hill like I am nine and carefree again and not 49 and full of responsibilities, I uttered a small prayer of thanks for the rejuvenation I can find in movement and in nature, for the clear skies and the beautiful flowers, and even the schedule flexibility that allows me to enjoy it all.

I’m taking a few days off from both social media and the blog. I’ll be back on both on Tuesday the 12th (both newsletters will publish as planned).

I need a little time away for both sanity and perspective. I’ve been publishing each weekday for more than five months now, and while I derive a lot of pleasure and benefit from the daily practice of releasing more than 700 words into the wild each day and have a very loyal readership, the reality is that readership isn’t really growing. It seems I like to write the sort of things people like but do not share, and rarely tell their friends about. Is this the best use of my time? Would I be better served to write one story a week, but make it amazing? Do I have the patience for that? Are there other options?

I just don’t know. But right now I’m too busy publishing every day to think about it. As a buddy once said, when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget your job was to drain the swamp.

I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get back. But I don’t have to know – at least, not right now. I just know that I will be back, in some way, next Tuesday, and I hope you will be here when I come back. I appreciate you, and your readership, and I hope you have an amazing weekend.

The Arrival

My mother’s father lived in Cooke County Texas, 50 miles or so from Dallas. He had retired there after he left the Navy, and bought some land just up the road from his own parents. He lived in a doublewide trailer, with a lean-to addition tacked on the back that was a combination TV room and guest room, as that was where the foldout couch lived, and so thus where I lived when I stayed with them.

There were times the dual roles of this addition – TV room and guest room – were at odds with each other. God help you if you were tired and wanted to go to bed while Walker, Texas Ranger was on. You might as well just settle in because you were going to be there a while.

The annual visit there was our default vacation plan – every summer of my childhood we would load up whatever car we were driving that year with sandwiches and thermoses of coffee and bags of snacks and we would hit the road to visit PaPaw and Granny Pat. Dad would work all day the day we would leave, and then come home and pack and load up the car. They planned our departure to be somewhere around 8 PM, and in those days of 55 MPH speed limits, we would roll into PaPaw’s around 6 AM.

Dad liked to drive at night when there were three kids in the car because we would rapidly fall asleep and he and mom would take turns driving in relative silence, with the windows down and the cool night and the radio fading in and out of range as you drove west into the night.

I loved those trips. You would sit in the backseat of the station wagon – the passenger side was my favorite because that let me watch the scenery better – from where you could see the landscape change from urban lights to Delta fields, clothed in utter darkness pierced only by lights twinkling in the distance, signifying a lone farmer’s home on the far edge of the rice field. You cross the Mississippi River in Memphis, and since the AC never worked on our cars, the windows were down and the bridge framework combined with the doppler effect to make its own sort of music.

On either side of the bridge, the river rolled under you but from where you sat, it was just darkness – endless darkness on either side. Around Little Rock I would fall asleep, my resolution to stay awake the whole trip forgotten and my eyes would surrender. I would wake up when we stopped at the truck stop in Texarkana, where Dad would refill his thermos and I would go to the bathroom. That was the first place I ever saw condom machines in the bathroom, and that led 9-year-old me to look up the words French Tickler in the dictionary as a result.

But after Texarkana, I was out again and would stay out until usually not far from their house. We would be on a lonely road, with horse farms on either side of the road, and scrub oaks punctuating the fields to give the livestock shade to rest under on the hot days. And it was that liminal time, neither dark nor dawn, where the brightness can be perceived but it’s not yet sunrise, giving everything a honeyed glow.

And we would pull into the driveway and all of us would pile out and Dad would stretch like a cat and Mom would make sure the kids were all up and PaPaw would come out onto the patio by the driveway and ask how our trip was and Dad would remark how many hours and minutes it took as if we were in a race, and PaPaw would call Mom “Tadpole” and give her a hug and we kids would be swamped with hugs and the attention of his Border Collies and we would take our bags inside.

Granny Pat was already up as well, and they had coffee going, and she would make breakfast – always sausage patties and scrambled eggs and whop-um biscuits – and we would eat our fill, and then Dad would lay down for a nap.

The rest of the trip would vary, but the arrival was always special. They must have set the alarm for enough time to prepare for our showing up, in those days before ubiquitous cell phones, back when you just told someone when you would show up and that was it.

And the knowledge that people love you and have missed you and have prepared for your arrival and are waiting for you to show up? There is no feeling like that in the world.

All the Confidence in the World

It was sometime in the first week of August of 1990, and I was a guest of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, on a small island off the coast of South Carolina for what they euphemistically called “Recruit Training”, and what the rest of the world called Boot Camp.

It was a hot and muggy day and the combination of the physical exertion and the extreme heat and the overwhelming humidity left your uniform soaking wet all the time. Then you would get chaffing on your inner thighs from the wet uniform always rubbing, and if you were not careful, you could end up with an, um, inner-thigh infection. I went through baby powder like it was water in the desert.

After a long day of classes and physical activities and then marching hither and yon and the evening meal, we came back to the barracks and took a super-fast shower, and then enjoyed our daily hour of “free time”. The name “free time” might conjure up images of playing poker and telling jokes, but alas, we were not the Air Force. Instead, we were to speak in low tones, write letters home, study our sacred texts, or polish our boots. And during the midst of all of this, we got mail call.

Mail call was the best. Dad had been in the service, and he knew. So my parents took it as their mission to write to me every day and to get as many people as they could to write to me. Dad used his new (remember, this is 1990) PC to make labels with my address that he blanketed our hometown with. I got a lot of kidding because I always had so many letters at mail call, but that was just jealousy.

It turns out there’s a little bit of jealousy in the best of us.

Anyway, I know it was 1990 because that is when I was at Boot Camp. And I know it was the first week of August because that was the week before we went to the rifle range, and I remember this happened right before we went. And I remember it was hot and muggy because it was always hot and muggy.

Always.

And so, this particular day, I am sitting on my footlocker at the end of my bed, in my underwear and t-shirt, polishing my boots when my name is called out and I run “with a sense of purpose” in my flip flops to the front of the squad bay and get my four letters. One of them was from Dad.

Mom would always handwrite her letters, but Dad’s were always written on his dot matrix printer. And on that night, I read the words he had never said out loud:

“I have all the confidence in the world in you. I know you can handle it. Sometimes I have not told you how proud of you I am of you. I really am. I know that sounds mushy, especially in a letter, but take it any way you want.”

I quietly got up and walked to the bathroom, where I sat in a stall and cried and cried. Because in 18 years I had never been the sort of person anyone had confidence in, and he had never told me he was proud of me.

I mean, I knew he was. He told other people he was proud of me, and they would tell me how proud of me he was. But he never told me. In later years, that changed. He told adult me any number of times, and not in a letter, but face to face.

But that was the first time. The first week of August 1990, when I was 18 years old, far from home and sent to learn how to kill people in the Marine Corps Approved Manner.

I don’t take praise well, and sometimes I wonder if it’s because it was so rare growing up. I was always the kid who had amazing grades except for the C or D in math class or the kid who read a lot but had terrible hand-to-eye coordination. Any accomplishment I had came with a caveat – always.

And so last night when my friend Amy complimented me on my writing in front of other people, my first instinct was to minimize it. To downplay it. All my old fears about imposter syndrome kick in, and I feel like any praise I am getting will inevitably come with a caveat, with an asterisk beside it, will somehow be less than genuine, or at least not the whole story.

I don’t hold it against my Dad that he didn’t know to tell me he was proud of me. He had been left fatherless in a man’s world at 7 years old, and when I was born he was but 20 himself, and children raising children is never a good recipe. They did the best they could with what they had, and again, to his credit, he worked hard to make up for it late in life.

When he knew better, he did better.

But there are some cycles it is up to us to break, so I try hard to accept praise when it’s handed out to me, hard as it is for me to believe.

But more than that, I hand out praise like it’s cotton candy at the carnival. Yes, I want to see your poems and artwork. Yes, I want to hear your dreams. Yes, I want to know what you’re working on. Yes, I want to know what your big scary plans are, how you want to change the world, or at least how you want to change your world. Even if I barely know you, I want to be your biggest fan. I see you doing hard things, and I’m damned proud of you for making it this far.

I have all the confidence in the world in you.

The Happiness of Lower Standards

A gift that ADHD brings is that, if it interests you (and granted, that is a huge precondition), you can bring near super-human powers of research to the table. And if it interests you, you can fall deep into a hole where you want to know everything about a subject.

Everything.

I currently own at least 200 books on gardening and horticulture. More than 150 on woodcraft. Perhaps 800 theology texts. Yes, I have read all of them. Many of them multiple times. Because it’s hard for me to explain to you how much more I want to know when I’m really interested in something.

It doesn’t always look like books – that’s just my particular poison. I know kids who will watch literally every TikTok on a given subject. A niece went through a Japanese phase and watched Japanese movies, ate sushi, learned to eat with chopsticks, and even ordered Japanese socks and pencils off eBay. I will say that socks take up much less space than books do.

But my point is that there is the desire – an overwhelming desire, to know literally everything you can on a subject in which you are interested. The list of subjects I can have an intelligent conversation with an enthusiast is large and unwieldy: Knights, dinosaurs, electricity, carpentry, horticulture, permaculture, aquaculture, southern culture, native plants. Asian plants, the military, pacifism, religious cults, religious orthodoxy, brick making, bricklaying, martial arts, and climate change have all grabbed my attention at various times, and that was a list generated by not even trying.

If you ever eat a piece of wagyu beef, it will forever ruin your beef eating experience, because what you previously thought was an excellent piece of meat is now just ordinary. Your standard for “good beef ” is now much higher because you know better. And if you compare every piece of beef to the wagyu beef, you will forever be unhappy.

Likewise, when you spend a deep dive into, say, karate, and you learn that much of modern karate is less than 110 years old and owes its origins to a man named Gichin Funakoshi who founded and systematized Shotokan Karate, but he was actually trained in Shorin-Ryu karate, which is much older but less formatted, and thus less easily teachable, and that much of what passes for karate today is really just people ripping off Funakoshi, then you don’t want to go take karate at the Y, or in the storefront school. You want to take Shorin-Ryu karate, where the modern karate movement started.

But if you didn’t know any of that, you would most likely be happy at Uncle George’s Karate Dojo and Storm Door Company. Which you might as well be because nobody in your state teaches Shorin-Ryu anyway. Instead, 19-year-old Hugh searches for the real true karate instead of, actually, you know, studying any karate at all.

Or in my 20’s when I was weightlifting, I didn’t just want to lift weights – I wanted to do it the “best” way. I read at least 100 books. Got countless magazines. Tried literally hundreds of workout routines. Totally wrecked my shoulders along the way.

So, those are examples of how ADHD makes you unhappy. Because you know too much. And because you do, your standards are impossibly high. The inverse is also true, of course – there are huge sections of human endeavors about which you know nothing because they did not interest you at all. But that’s another story, for another time.

One thing I’m trying to do these days is to lower my standards as a source of happiness. Or try to care less about doing it the “right” way or the “pure” way, and just do it at all. Like when I began walking regularly last year, I literally bought books on walking – a thing I have been doing most of my life, quite well. But I only began to get real enjoyment out of it when I gave up trying to do it well and just focused on doing it.

And recently, my back and shoulders seem a bit stiff, and I have considered going to Yoga classes. Of course, I read a lot of books, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and learned about the various lineages, but this time I just bit the bullet and went to the free “yoga” class my gym has on Monday during lunch.

Other than the teacher, I was the youngest person there by a good 10 years. The moves were slow and graceful, and only one pose was recognizable. I think there is a 50/50 chance that the soft background music was Kenny G. Really, it was more of a stretching class than anything else. It would have met no purity test at all. And I had a blast.

The little old ladies ooohed and ahhed over my being there. An older gentleman advised me to take an aspirin before I went to bed tonight. The lady to my right said she hopes I come back because they need “younger people” (I’ll be 50 in about six weeks). But still. It was great.

And most important is that I did it. I stretched. And Thursday, I’ll do it again. Not because it’s pure, or because it’s the best, or because from it I can learn to be the best. But when the choice was to do nothing or to do something, I did something.