Hugh Hollowell

The Cat with Magic Ears

It was the middle of July in 2016. I had just walked in the door from work. Renee was 11 months out from her heart transplant, and I was running a day shelter I had founded. It had been a particularly bad day. I had a lot of them that year. I was getting something to drink in the kitchen when she called me into her studio.

“I want you to hear me out before you say no,” she said.

Over the winter, our orange tabby Tony had caught a blood clot in his legs, and we had to take him to the vet in the middle of the night and have him put down. Tony had been Renee’s cat – they even shared the same heart disease, called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is very common in cats and very rare in humans. In the days after her coming home from transplant, Tony had laid in the bed next to Renee as if he knew she needed more comfort than normal. His loss had been felt very keenly.

So she had been crawling the pages of the local no-kill shelter, looking at orange tabbies. It was just window shopping – we knew we lived in a small house, and the two cats we had were already pushing our limits.

She showed me a picture of the most bedraggled orange cat ever. He had deformed ears and terror in his eyes, and his hair was thin. He looked like a stuffed cat that had lost half his stuffing. She told me his name was Pepe, and he had been at the no-kill shelter for more than a year. Because he was ancient and ugly, nobody wanted him. He also had a healthy dose of anti-social behavior.

I reminded her that we had said we were a two-cat house, and we already had two cats. Since he had been there a year, she asked me if we didn’t adopt him, who would? I think he might be a lost cause, I said. That has never scared you off before, she said.

I asked what the fees were. She told me that she had already reached out to the shelter, and since Pepe had been so hard to rehome, they would waive all the fees if we came up that Friday.

So that Friday, we went to pick up Pepe, the cat with the magic ears.

If anything, he looked worse in person. He was so skinny, and his fur was patchy. He and several other cats had been dropped off at the shelter the year before. At some point, Pepe had a horrible ear infection that ate away at his ears and damaged his hearing. He had been covered in fleas when they left him at the shelter. He was afraid of people – the shelter folks believed he had been beaten in his past.

He lived in a giant walk-in cage with other cats but was cowered under some boxes, hiding. He looked virtually catatonic. He didn’t want to be held or petted or played with. He came out of the boxes long enough to eat the snacks we gave him, and then he went back into hiding.

The shelter tried to be realistic with us.

“He has been horribly abused. He doesn’t like to cuddle, and he isn’t really affectionate. But he is special and needs a home where people will love him.”

So we signed the papers and agreed to take care of him for the rest of his life. Our first clue to how hard this was going to be was fighting to put him in the cat carrier and his screaming once we shut the door. We had to wrap the carrier in a towel to calm him down, and while most families have pictures of the adoptive parents holding their new kitty, we have one of us holding a towel-covered pet carrier with dazed looks on our faces.

We gave Pepe his own room at the house, with a closed door so he could be comfortable before we introduced him to the other cats. He promptly found every hiding place in that room and spent much time just staring into space. If you tried to pet him, he would attack your hand and then go hide again.

It went like that for about four months. But in the mornings, we would find his toys scattered, and his food had been eaten, so apparently, he was having a ball when we weren’t looking.

Eventually, things changed. He began to come out of the room, began to play with the other cats, and even would sit on the couch with us. He was our very introverted kitty – he wanted to be near us, but not actually touch us. As introverts ourselves, we understood this.

He was still very shy when we loaded all the cats into cat carriers two years later and moved 12 hours away. But I swear Pepe in Mississippi was a whole new cat. He was no longer the tentative, shy cat. He was full of confidence in our new home. Instead of hiding in the corners, he would lay in the sun on the rug in the middle of the floor. Our vet suggested that moving had put all the cats on an equal footing n the new house. Literally, the pecking order had changed.

In any event, for the next year, Pepe thrived. He gained weight, his coat filled out, and he would even climb in your lap and purr. The cat they warned might never love us back was affectionate and loving. It was the best year.

Things started to go downhill in the fourth year he was with us. His personality was still the same, but he wasn’t eating. The vet told us he had a horrible infection in his teeth and gums, and because of his FIV, he didn’t have the resources to fight it off. They gave him antibiotics and hoped for the best.

He recovered – for about six weeks. Then we had to go back for another round of shots. Each round, he had lost more weight, become more lethargic, and ate less and less. In the summer of 2020, it became obvious we were fighting a losing battle.

We had a foster son living with us at the time. He identified heavily with Pepe, and while the other cats would run and hide from him, Pepe tolerated his hugs. The night before Pepe died, we all sat with Pepe on the floor of the living room, and we petted him and told him we loved him; and that night, when I tucked the boy in bed, we talked about how when you love something or someone, you have responsibilities as a result. We had promised to take care of Pepe, and helping him die well was part of that.

I told the boy that you have to do the right thing for those you love, even when that is not something you want to do.

The next day a neighbor watched the boy while we went to the vet for Pepe’s last visit. He was purring in our arms when he got the shot. At that point, he was skin and bones, less than half his body weight when we had gotten him.

That was 23 months ago. A few months after Pepe died, the Boy went back to his family. Pepe is buried in the backyard, under a headstone Renee and the Boy made together.

I think about Pepe a lot. This cat that they told us would never have the tools to love us ended up loving us after all and taught us a lot about love along the way. He taught a hardened, traumatized boy in the foster system how to love, and he purred in our arms as we watched him die.

Shortly after we got him, when he was having such a hard time adjusting, we decided that if all he gets is to spend his remaining years in a loving home filled with kitty treats and toys and with people committed to loving him even when he doesn’t have the resources to love us back, that is a lot more than he would have had in the first place, and a lot more than any of us deserve. But for a few years, we got a lot more than that, and so did he.

Things That Endure

Jerry was a salesman of the old school, straight out of an episode of Mad Men. He was dapper as could be, with creases on his pants that would have cut you, and I never saw him without at least a sports coat, even that time I met him and a client at a ball game.

Jerry was my mentor when I was in financial sales, and he took my somewhat more casual approach to my appearance as a personal challenge. He also tried to teach me the finer points of the business lunch.

Jerry was a big one for lunch. We always lunched together on Fridays and always at one of several restaurants at least as old-school as Jerry himself was. They all had bars, tended to be dark paneled, and had pretty waitresses and generous bartenders. And, without exception, the food was always good.

I remarked on this once when we went to a somewhat shady-looking oyster bar whose dated decor did not fill me with high hopes going in.

“Of course the food is good! I’ve been coming here for 30 years. That doesn’t happen if the food is crap. You have to respect things that endure.”

One of Jerry’s favorite places was Mr. B’s. It was a steak and seafood house in Germantown, an affluent suburb of Memphis. The walls were raw brick, with a small bar along the wall, and the steaks were huge, and so were the cocktails.

Mr. B’s made their reputation on supper but had a strong lunchtime crowd, and being early in my career, my budget leaned more to the blue plate special than it did the porterhouse steaks. And one of the things they did really well was their country-fried steaks.

At least, that is what they called it. If you are used to a large piece of meat deep fried until crispy and then covered in milk gravy such as one may eat at a Cracker Barrel, this was not that.

Instead, it was a tender piece of beef, obviously pounded thin, then fried in a thin batter, and then cooked in a thick brown gravy until it practically fell apart. It was my favorite thing on the menu.

When I was a little boy, the elderly lady next door made something she called steak and gravy that my mom tried and tried to replicate but could not. This was very close to that.

We don’t eat a lot of beef – mostly because of the cost. But also, because we didn’t eat much of it growing up, it just isn’t something I crave. But the other day, the meat department at Kroger had their cubed steaks on clearance, and so I decided to whip up a batch of steak and gravy for dinner one night.

I got home from my last meeting today at 4, so I decided to make today the day it happened. I got out the deep skillet and put four tablespoons of shortening in it to melt and turned the oven on to 350 to preheat.

While waiting, I put a half cup of flour in a shallow bowl and added a teaspoon of black pepper, a teaspoon of salt, and a half teaspoon each of garlic powder and cayenne pepper. I stirred it well.

After dredging the cubed steaks through the flour mixture, I put them in the skillet to brown – about two minutes a side until the flour had formed a crisp crust, but the interiors were still not finished. I did them in batches, putting them on a cooling rack as they finished.

In the melted shortening still in the bottom of the pan, I sauteed a small amount (maybe 1 /4 cup?) of diced onion until brown, then added a few tablespoons of the flour dredge that was left over. After it was all browned, I added enough milk to make a thin gravy, into which I slid the breaded steaks. I put a lid on the skillet and slid it into the oven, where it sat and bubbled away for an hour and a half.

When I pulled it out, the gravy had separated – a danger of using milk gravy for something like this. I removed the steaks, put the skillet on the stove again, added a bit of half-and-half, and whisked quickly until the gravy was thinned out and reconstituted. I slid the steaks back in and let them simmer over low heat as I set the table.

Had I served it with mashed potatoes and English peas, this would have been my favorite meal of my childhood. But instead, we served it over white rice, making it my favorite meal today and still damn good.

Beauty and Decay

When I get back from my morning walk, I usually walk around the backyard to see what’s blooming.

This morning, it was my water lily.

I planted it in the “deep” end of my pond on the first day of June, and here we are 7 weeks later, and it is now blooming. It was a new plant for me, so I didn’t know what to expect. I think it’s lovely and took a picture to share with the people who have been following along on this wildlife pond journey of mine on social media.

Water lilies produce bunches of leaves – that is one reason we water gardeners plant them. The profusion of leaves covers the water surface, giving the wildlife places to hide, creating shade and thus cooling the water. When I planted this lily, it had five leaves. Seven weeks later, it has dozens.

The leaves don’t last forever; inevitably, some of them are dying, even as more spring up, hydra-like, to replace them. In the bottom right corner of the picture from this morning is a leaf on its way out.

I played around with the framing for a moment, looking for the best angle for the picture. I debated putting my phone down, getting my secateurs, and clipping off the offending leaf.

But in the end, I left it. It doesn’t make it a better picture, but it does make it a more honest one.

There are entire books, courses, and even schools of thought around the decision of what an artist should or should not include in their depictions of reality. If you photograph a beautiful woman with a pimple on the end of her nose, do you include the pimple? It depends on the artist and what message they are trying to convey to their viewers.

If you want to highlight the beauty of the subject, perhaps you edit it out. If you want to convey stark reality, perhaps you leave it in. If you are selling the photo to the woman herself, you definitely edit it out. If the woman is your enemy, you leave it alone. It’s all curation, in the end.

But these days, we are all artists. We take dozens of pictures a week – some of us, dozens of pictures a day. And it is easier than ever to get other people to see the things we make. And for many of us, the subject we are making the decision about how to edit and curate for consumption is our very lives.

So, we learn how to angle our hips to look more “photogenic.” We crop the broom leaning against the wall out of the picture. We clone stamp the floor in the photo of our living room, editing out the lamp cord. We pick up the floor around the cat before we take the “candid” shot of them being cute. We take selfies from about six inches above eye level to minimize our jowls.

Again, these are artistic decisions, not moral ones. I don’t think you are a horrible person if you like how you look better when your leg is slightly bent.

But there is a thing sociologists talk about called our “peer group.” It means the people we surround ourselves with. And a whole lot of our happiness depends on our peer group.

If you make $30,000 a year, and all your friends make $45,000 a year, you will, by and large, be less happy than you would be if all your friends also made $30,000. We compare ourselves to others in our peer group. It’s unavoidable.

When our peer group consisted of people we see in our daily lives, the facade was more apparent. We saw the beautiful family at church, but we also saw the argument in the parking lot. But these days, we only see the staged photo of the family walking into the sanctuary in their Easter finery that was posted on Instagram.

A result of this, over time, is that we experience a type of dysphoria where we are convinced that everyone has a better life than we do. They don’t have stretch marks or a spouse that forgets to take out the trash or weeds in their flower beds or underwear with stains or saggy elastic. They don’t have arguments with their partners, unpaid bills, overdrafted accounts, or ever have to make decisions on whether to buy the cheap mayonnaise in the grocery store. Nope. Just us, in our pathetic, small, miserable lives.

So I left the dying leaf in the picture. Because decay always accompanies beauty, even when we can’t see it.

But there is another reason I left the dead leaf in the picture. One that is actually even, I think, more important. Because while decay always accompanies beauty, the inverse is also true: Beauty always accompanies decay.

In an abandoned building filled with rot and ruin, you can find bird nests and intricate spider webs that glisten in the morning dew. In overgrown fields, the wildflowers bloom. In the prison camps, strangers gave away their last scraps of food to people in worse shape than even they were.

This, also, is a decision. To seek to include the beauty in our depictions of reality. Because it is assuredly there. It is the opposite of curation, a sort of anti-curation, an idea that is so rare that we don’t actually have a word for it in English.

It is more an orientation than anything else – a decision made in advance, based on the sure knowledge that beauty always accompanies decay. Beauty is as pervasive to reality as gravity. When you know it’s there, you can find it. In the midst of all the pain is a glimmer of hope, of life, of persistent goodness that underlies all of creation, and that is an essential part of its being, as critical to its existence as hydrogen is to water.

And all we have to do is decide to look for it.

My Favorite Sandwich

Until my late teens, my Dad worked for a propane company.

He literally sold propane and propane accessories.

In rural Mississippi, propane is a big deal. I live in town now, and we have natural gas piped in, but folks who live out in the county buy propane, and a giant truck comes out to your house and fills up a huge tank, and that is what fuels your water heater and your cookstove and your heater. Every small town in Mississippi has at least one propane dealer, and in my hometown for most of my childhood, that dealership was run by my daddy.

Now, they sold propane, but the propane accessories was where the money was. The showroom at the front of his building had propane cook stoves, propane fish cookers, and propane grills for sale. The markup on these was high, and after all, the more things you owned that used propane, the more propane you would buy. So every summer, they would have an Open House of sorts, where they would do some sort of sale and set up a grill in the parking lot in front of the building, and there might be balloons and, to highlight the cooking ability of this grill, Dad would put a couple of pounds of bologna on the rotisserie.

It was smart on a number of levels: Bologna was cheap, so this promotion was low cost. It highlighted a rotisserie accessory, which most folks didn’t have, and so they couldn’t replicate it without buying one. It smelled amazing, so it intrigued people who stopped by. And it just tasted good.

It wasn’t complicated: He went to the meat counter in the Big Star grocery and bought a 5-pound chub of bologna, which is just bologna that hasn’t been sliced. It looks like a huge hot dog more than anything else. It has a red plastic skin, which must be peeled away. Then it was threaded onto the rotisserie spit and scored about a quarter inch deep along its length in a criss-cross pattern. Then it was cooked for a good hour or two over medium heat and was periodically basted with a cheap bottled barbeque sauce.

The heat made the surface split along the score marks, and the sauce would seep into the cracks, and the barbeque sauce would sort of candy on the surface. He would keep one going all day, and would have another cut up into small chunks, which were speared on toothpicks for the customers to try as samples. But one advantage of having a dad who was the manager was that you didn’t just get the small samples: You got a barbeque bologna sandwich.

It involved a hamburger bun, toasted. On it, you put a dollop of cheap bottled sauce, a half-inch thick slice of barbeque bologna, all topped by a generous scoop of cole slaw. It won’t taste right unless it is served on a cheap paper plate, accompanied by a handful of Golden Flake potato chips, and paired with an ice cold Coke in a glass bottle that was purchased for a quarter from the cold drink box in the warehouse.

And for best results, it should be handed to you by someone who loves you.

Garden Party

Chairs were spread out in a semi-circle under the pine trees. There was a selection of wine, beer, and water bottles on the back porch. At the other end of the table was a platter with potato chips and some sort of dip. People milled about, drinking their beer and chatting. I didn’t know any of them, but many of them seemed to know each other. At age 50, I appeared to be one of the youngest people there.

I had been invited to this gathering of gardeners in the little village within the city in which I live. It’s more than a neighborhood – more like a collection of neighborhoods. We are holding a garden tour this fall, and if you have more than two daffodils in your yard, you got invited to this meeting.

Eventually, we settled down and held the meeting. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. It was what happened afterward.

It feels anti-climactic, honestly, but we all hung around, chatting and learning about each other after the meeting was over. Then, when everything was put away, and it was clearly time to go, we did the parking lot hangout. You know – that thing where you stand in the parking lot and are reluctant to leave because you are having such an enjoyable time and don’t want it to end, so you lean against the car and keep talking.

Honestly, after the last few years, just that felt remarkable. Meeting new people with which you have something – anything – in common.

There is a joke that goes to the effect that nobody wants to talk about Jesus’ biggest miracle – that he was in his 30s and had 12 close friends. That hits closer than I want to admit.

I mean, I have friends. I even have close friends. People I click with on a cellular level. But most of them live elsewhere. A wonderful aspect of this current technological age is that I am incredibly close to people I no longer live in close proximity to.

But local friends are harder. I mean, on one level, this makes sense. If I have the entire online world to pull from, that is a wider pool to choose from than just my village is. I can pick and choose more selectively, tailor my interests, and find people with whom I have many levels of overlap, rather than just “We live within 2 miles of each other, and both grow roses.”

But is that amount of overlap enough? Before the Internet, when you moved away, you just lost people. They were gone, and then you made new friends in the new town. But now, you can keep your old friends forever.

Meeting new people has been hard the last few years. I 100 percent do not recommend moving to a new city just before a global pandemic happens. In retrospect, that was poor planning on my part. Even discounting the pandemic, meeting new friends seems drought with peril in these politically divided times.

The other day I met a new person, and we sort of clicked. In the parking lot, I crawled their Facebook feed, making sure they don’t support things I have spent my life working against. The relief I felt when I saw their Black Lives Matter post was palpable.

Another guy I know isn’t on Facebook at all. He told me it’s easier for him to like people when he doesn’t know much about their beliefs. I get what he’s saying, but I’m just not interested in having friends with whom I have to hide parts of who I am.

It’s complicated. And lonely.

I don’t know if any of these people at the garden party today will eventually become my friends. I sort of hope so. But even if they don’t, tonight felt nice all the same.

False Alarm

It was about 6:30 in the morning, seven years ago today. I had already been up for half an hour. Renee, who is never voluntarily awake at 6:30 in the morning, was sound asleep. The cats were indifferent.

We were living in a small, 1000 square feet house in Southeast Raleigh in those days, a fixer-upper we had bought from a friend. The kitchen had concrete countertops, and I was leaning against them, my back to the window, sipping my coffee when, from the bedroom, I heard Renee’s phone ring with the ringtone from her cardioligist.

We had been waiting for it to ring for two months. When Renee was 12, she was diagnosed with a heart disease – the same one that killed her mother and grandmother and that, unless she eventually got a heart transplant, would kill her.

Heart transplants are funny things. They tell you over and over that they are not a cure for anything – rather, they are trading a condition they are unable to treat for a condition they know how to treat. So you don’t want to give someone a heart transplant too early – they need to be sick enough that they appreciate the increased quality of life they get from the transplant. On the other hand, if they are too sick, their body cannot handle the traumatic surgery that has to happen. And also, hearts are scarce, and so they want them to go where they can do the most good.

So, it’s a balancing act.

She came into the kitchen, hair askew and eyes wide.

“That was the call! They have a heart for me!”

They wanted us to be at the hospital in 90 minutes. They said there were still more tests to be done on the donor, but it looked good, and they wanted us there so we could do it quickly. From the time the donor dies, there is literally a countdown, and seconds are precious.

A flurry of activity ensues. She can’t eat, because surgery could happen in a matter of hours. We had been told to expect to stay in the hospital for two weeks – suddenly we are throwing things in a duffel bag, trying to guess at what we might need. She calls her family, and I call mine, forgetting that it’s an hour earlier in Mississippi and waking everyone up. And then, with our hearts pounding in our chest, we are on our way to Durham, in rush hour traffic.

The trip to the hospital would take 35 minutes unless it was rush hour, and then it took every bit of an hour and 15 minutes. Like the husband of a woman going into labor, I whipped in and out of traffic, took back roads, and cursed at the ineptitude of other, more placid, drivers. We pulled into the parking garage at 90 minutes on the nose.

The pre-op cubicle. Numerous questionnaires. Vitals taken. Blood tests. Peeing in a cup. Hospital gowns where modesty was impossible. The cardiologist comes by. The surgeon comes by. The nurses come by. We meet a cast of characters we do not know, and will never see again, but in whose hands we are placing her life. They are all remarkably calm. I am not. For us, this is the most important day of our life. For them, this is just Tuesday.

And then we wait.

And wait.

Someone tells us they are awaiting tests to come back from the donor. They won’t tell us anything about the donor – they never do. If the transplant is successful, they will, a year after the transplant, ask the donor if they want to know who you are, and if they do, the doctors will give them your information. And they might reach out to you. Or not.

And then, after we have been in the pre-op cubicle for 3 hours, they come in and tell us that the donor’s heart was nonviable, which means this is not going to happen and they tell her to get dressed. We can go home.

We drive home in shock. We had emotional whiplash, and as we come off the interstate in Raleigh we realize we are starving, so we stopped at Whole Foods to eat at the hot bar. We never did this, ever, because it was so expensive, and that we did it is a sign of how disoriented we were. We paid $40 for lunch and then went home, and I went into the office and she went back to bed and we tried to get on with our lives while we waited for the phone to ring again.

Lost words

Growing up on the western border of Southern Appalachia in the 70s and 80s was the end of an era. The people who largely raised and cared for me were adults during the Depression, who had values their children would not share and would, in fact, actively run away from when they got older.

In the years after the Second World War, their children would seek to distance themselves from the hardships their parents had faced, would go to school, would get careers instead of jobs, and would often move to town as soon as they could, and their kids would grow up to smoke dope, listen to rock and roll, and have kids my age.

But that wasn’t my story or my parents. My Dad was born to parents who were older than his peer’s parents, and so we were caught in a warp of sorts. I have always had much more in common with the generation before mine than I did with my own. I was the first generation to leave home and move to the city, in a pattern more in common with people born a generation before me than my own.

So in boot camp, I was the ridiculous kid who crumbled cornbread into his sweet milk in the dining hall unironically. I was teased unmercifully once in college for saying “My Stars!” when overwhelmed with the sheer audacity of something. I had country words – words that did not belong in those august halls of academe.

In fact, I think I miss the words most of all. Words I no longer hear, and that have, for all intents and purposes, disappeared, that remain in collective memory only as the butt of jokes on reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies.

My people did not think about things; neither did they reflect. Instead, they studied on it. One did not do something soon, but directly. It’s been an age since I heard anybody called a peckerwood. And while my current peers are likely to respond to a shock with an expletive, my grandmother would have said, in response to any shocking revelation, “Well, I swan!”.

I don’t think folks swan anymore. And I think we are poorer for it.

It’s sort of like how I lost my accent: I began to try to be broader – to communicate and be heard by a wider audience, both as a kindness to them but also because I suspected, deep down, that they, with their 5 o’clock news vocabulary, were smarter than we were. I tried to have the rhythms and cadence of Mr. Earnest Hemingway and the vocabulary of Time magazine, rather than the impeccable timing of the old men who told stories on the porch of Woodard’s Grocery, or the melodious cadence of those educated men (always men, sadly) who preached revival meetings in vast tents that traveled the Southland every summer.

I know we can’t go back. When I say I will do something Monday week, my people know what I mean – but in our mobile, transient world, I’m probably not talking to my people, but rather to somebody who grew up in Iowa or something. Instead, they need to hear it will happen next Monday, and since everyone on the TV and in movies says next Monday too, I either have to change or risk being misunderstood. And when I do say it the way they want me to, I lose a little bit of my heritage, my difference, and my past in the process.

The world I grew up in, a world I loved and was loved by, no longer exists. People are far more likely now to buy a biscuit at McDonald’s than they are to make them at home, and somebody is far more likely to take the Lord’s name in vain than they are to shout “Diddily Durn!” when they stub their toe against a rock. We can’t go back – it’s progress, they tell us. And our words and our distinctiveness are collateral damage along the way.

The Church

The church building was small – no more than 1000 square feet all told. My granddaddy’s name is on the cornerstone, along with the date – 1941 – when they built the brick building after the wooden structure that had been built in 1870 would no longer serve, but there was an even earlier building before they built that one that had burnt to the ground.

It was built in the height of wartime, and raising the money to build it was a struggle in this small community, 10 miles outside any incorporated town. But they did, and over time they would add on some Sunday school rooms, and when I was a little fellow in the mid-1970s, a fellowship hall that was the scene of all the church potlucks I remember. There were beautiful chandeliers in the ceiling that had been salvaged from the old building, converted from candles to electricity, and three different pictures of Jesus on the walls, all portraying him in varying shades of white.

Across the street is a small cemetery. Dozens of people who loved me are in that cemetery, including Monty and Doc, and my Dad. I suspect I will end up there one day too, one way or another. Our fortunes seem intertwined, this church and me.

I learned about Jesus in this brick church, and I memorized the Apostle’s Creed there, which was printed on a piece of paper that had been pasted to the flyleaf of the hymnal. The words Holy Catholic Church had a line through the word Catholic, with the word “Universal” written over it. Brother Burton, our pastor, explained to me that Catholic meant universal, but we didn’t say Catholic, because we didn’t want to confuse anyone.

During Vacation Bible School I learned how to look up verses in the Bible, and did it so well I won a Bible with my name written in it as a prize. We ate butter cookies and Kool-Aid, made crafts with popsicle sticks, and learned the ancient stories about donkeys that talked and floods and stones that rolled away because of love.

When I went away to the Marines, my mailbox was packed with letters and cards from the people of that church. They prayed for me like it was real, and they sent me care packages of homemade cookies as I moved from base to base.

Like a lot of kids, I drifted around as I got older, and I hadn’t set foot in that sanctuary in years. I came home from the Marines for a week’s leave, and I stopped by when I saw Brother Burton working in the yard of the church. I stopped to talk to him.

I had a lot on my mind. I had fallen in love with Heather, a woman who had broken up with me when it turned out she was a lesbian. I had never met a lesbian before, but I had learned in this building right here that same-sex relationships were sinful. I knew we couldn’t be together, and I knew I loved her, and I was powerfully concerned she was going to hell, and if I kept hanging out with her, I was afraid I might be going to hell, too.

I figured I would ask Brother Burton what he thought. He and I sat in the yard of that old brick church for an hour or so, just chatting about first this thing and then that, about how things had changed since I had been gone. I was trying to work up my nerve to ask him about Heather, when he said, “Now, take that house right there”, and pointed at the house across the road, by the cemetery.

“Yes sir. That’s Mrs. X’s house”, calling the name of the lady who lived there my whole childhood.

“Not anymore. She died, and now it’s a rent house. For a while, two gay fellows and some kids lived there. I never thought I would see gay guys living together like a family in this place, but things change, I guess.”

I got real still.

“Did they ever come to church?” I asked.

“The kids came to Vacation Bible School that summer. But then one of the guys lost their job, and things got hard for them, and they had to move. They didn’t have any money for groceries or anything, so we took up a collection and bought them a bunch of groceries. You can’t let kids go hungry, just because you don’t agree with the parents.”

This was exactly the conversation I had wanted to have when I stopped the car, and I hadn’t even brought it up!

“But wait”, I said. “Isn’t that condoning sin?“

He looked off into the sky like perhaps the answer was written there. Then he looked me dead in the eye and said, “Maybe. I don’t know if it is or it isn’t. Maybe I’ll pray on that for a while. But I do know that if you see somebody that needs help, and you can help them, then to not help them is definitely a sin.”

As I got in the car and drove off, I still didn’t have any answers. In the end, Heather and I would remain friends until the day she died 25 years later. Eventually, I learned that what I had learned about same-sex attraction was wrong and that there were many ways to be Christian beyond what I learned in that red brick building. But in the yard of that small brick building, I also learned, and have held onto, the idea that there were things you could not be sure about, and that was OK, but that didn’t ever absolve you from doing what you knew to be right.

I’m tired.

I’m whipped.

My job at the church has me running hard both last week and this week, and there is lots of detail work involved, and much extroversion involved, and while I love so much about my work there, neither of those two things are on the list. I swear I have spoken more in the last two weeks than I have in the last six months. It is at times like this that I am certain I am a social introvert.

And in the last three months or so, five people I care about have died – some from Covid and some from cancer, but regardless, they are still dead.

And then there is the lunacy that is the current Supreme Court, as we watch decades of civil rights work get rolled back. For folks like me – white, straight, Christian, male – we’re as safe as houses. But queer folk, women, people of color, and people of other faiths are considerably less safe than they were six weeks ago. But it shouldn’t have to affect you for it to matter to you.

And then there is the “mass shooting of the week” – most recently in Highland Park, Illinois. When Columbine happened, we were in shock for weeks. Now I can’t even keep up with which one is the most recent one.

It’s all too much.

As an introvert, I often take weeks to formulate my thoughts on something. I will process it in my head, turn it this way and that, argue for and against it, and then, having made up my mind, will want to write about it. But we will have had three new things to be outraged about by then. The internet is an outrage machine – it both generates it and rewards it – and I have no desire to participate in that game.

So, this is just a reminder that I don’t blog about current events. You shouldn’t mistake my silence on things for lack of care or concern – rather it’s that I only have so much energy, and I want to use my voice in places where those words are useful. We do not need my outrage – there is already plenty to go around. If you need me to tell you why you should be upset, you clearly are not paying attention.

I am a huge believer in the idea of modeling the world we wish to see, and I want to live in a world that rewards thoughtful writing, and intentional rest, and that recognizes that by telling the truth about our fears and struggles, we can reduce the amount of shame in the world.

So that’s what I try to model here. So, there will be no hot takes. No hashtags. No outrage. I probably won’t write anything that will go viral. I’ve done all that. It’s a lot like cheap sex – it feels good while it’s happening, but you won’t like yourself afterward. And like cheap sex, it’s hard to do it while caring about the other people involved. Or, honestly, yourself.

The Mentor

In the 1990s, I worked for about 18 months for a man who owned a number of businesses. He was in his early 50s then and was financially successful. He liked me a lot and was my first true mentor, and I learned a lot from him, including, ultimately, that I had no desire to be like him. But it would be a while before I knew that.

He was married to a beautiful woman who had been an Olympic-level track and field athlete. Together, they had a 12-year-old daughter who excelled academically and athletically. She went to a parochial private school, and in the summer, went to camps – basketball camps, soccer camps, baseball camps.

They lived outside of Memphis in a huge house on a golf course, and she volunteered and lunched, and he kept starting businesses. He had worked for FedEx in the early days and had cashed out with a bunch of stock which he parlayed into a number of companies – everything from cleaning supplies to service businesses to eventually, a bank.

Officially, my job was as a troubleshooter for his nationwide janitorial company – I went in to fix troubled accounts, which usually meant taking the clients out to eat and then firing half the employees. It got so that even the threat of my visit would turn troubled accounts around because the employees knew heads would roll if I showed up.

When he first taught me this technique, I asked how he knew which employees had been causing the problems.

“I don’t,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. They don’t speak English, so you couldn’t find out anyway. Just fire half of them, and the rest will be so scared they will do whatever you tell them.”

Fear, the mentor taught me, was an effective tool for getting people to do what you want. If that sort of thing is important to you.

He wasn’t a smart man, and he knew this. But he told me that what he lacked in brains he made up for in effort.

“There are people who are smarter than me. I can’t control that. But they can’t outwork me without my consent”.

He routinely scheduled meetings – especially unpleasant meetings or meetings with sales people – for 6 AM.

In fact, 6 AM on Monday mornings was when he would fire people, his rationale in those pre-internet days being that then they had a whole week to work on finding a new job rather than being fired on Friday at 5, and then you can’t do anything constructive until Monday and have the whole weekend to fester.

Many mornings the mentor would meet me at job sites at 4 AM and we would go visit accounts, then eat breakfast after the sun came up. He would tell me stories of business victories and drop bits of wisdom he thought I should know, and we would go over various things I was working on. My unofficial job was to be his sidekick and mentee – it filled a lot of needs for him at that stage in his life. I joked to my wife at the time that he paid me to be his friend. There was, it turned out, a lot of truth in that.

Once while eating breakfast, I told him that if I was as successful as he was, I would not be out at 4 AM looking at accounts. I would be in bed.

He laughed and said that part of the reason he was successful was precisely because he was the kind of business owner that checked on accounts at 4 AM.

“But you are in your 50’s”, I said. “You are successful. When do you get to sleep in?”

In six more years, he told me. He stabbed a piece of pancake and put it in his mouth, then pointed at me with the fork.

“There is a six-year plan.”

His daughter was 12, he told me. In six years, she would be 18, and then he would divorce her mother and cash out and retire.

“Truth be told, that’s the real reason I’m out here most mornings. I just don’t want to be home when my wife wakes up. If the choice is to make money or spend time with a woman I hate and a kid who hates me, well, that’s an easy choice.”

I was floored. He had every single status symbol I associated with success: A beautiful family, a nice home, lots of money, and control of his schedule. People feared him, respected him, and some of us wanted to be like him.

But all he had really done was build a life in which he was miserable and spent much of his time trying to pretend he wasn’t. I was reminded of Steven Covey’s comment about the man who climbed the ladder of success, only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall.

I can track so much of who I am now back to breakfast that morning in that diner. I wasn’t sure what I was going to be yet, but I was sure what I did not want to be – someone who sacrificed so much to build a life everyone envied, but from which they themselves wanted to escape.