Hugh Hollowell

At the funeral home.

The slide show plays on the monitor on the wall, a large selection of pictures from her life on repeat roll past, with no pattern to the selection. Here she is in her team photo from when she played basketball in 1940, here she is in the nursing home, here she is at her second wedding 10 years ago, here she is at 17 doing a backbend.

We are gathered in a loose circle in front of the coffin that contains the subject of the slide show. We alternate between pointing out things on the slides, looking at the woman in the casket, and having snippets of conversation. We are participating in the “viewing”, a much more sedate version of the wake, where the body is on display a few hours so friends and loved ones can pop by to say a few words and pay their respects.

The slide show is a recent innovation.

As we stand there, someone says, “I bet she can hear us right now, and is laughing.”

Her granddaughter turns to me. “Can she?”

“Can she what”, I ask.

“You’re a preacher. Can she hear us?”

“Oh. I don’t know”, I say, quite truthfully.

A long pause ensues.

“I mean, I can tell you what the Christian tradition say – actually traditions, because there is more than one version. But nobody really knows.

“But I can tell you that she loved God. We are told there is no place God is not, so she was with God before her passing, and she is with God after her passing, and she is more fully in the presence of God now than she was before.”

“So she is in heaven.” Another lady chimed in.

“Again, I don’t know that she is in some specific place or what that looks like. Nobody does. But I do know she is no longer confused, and no longer hurting, and she had a long, hard life and is now at peace.

“Meanwhile, we have dozens of stories to remind us of when she was here and how much she loved us, and we have the opportunity every day for the rest of our lives to be the sort of person she thought we could be. And in turn, we pass those lessons on, and her influence and love will continue on for generations.”

Another long pause.

“I like that”, one woman says. “I like that a lot.”

Me too, I say. Me too.

Miracle Enough

I spent this morning among Pentecostal folk.

I have never seen a blind man regain sight.
I have never seen a cancerous tumor go away untreated.
I have never spoken in tongues.

When I prayed over the dying, they still died.
Despite intense prayer, my church still has a hole in its roof.
And praying in Jesus name has yet to bring me wealth.

But each day about 5PM, the birds gather
in the bamboo grove near my house
And sing songs of praise as they prepare to sleep.

And for me, that is miracle enough.

Indispensable and Invisible

Like many children, I ran away from home.

Not literally – I was way too chickenshit for that. I did dream of building a raft and going down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans on it after reading Huckleberry Finn, but it never happened.

No, my childhood was about wanting and desiring what I did not have, and rejecting that which I did have. And so as soon as I was able, I left.

One example of this is that while I am naturally like both of my parents – my mother’s boldness and passion, my father’s introversion and peacemaking – I saw those things as flaws to overcome, rather than gifts to embrace.

Our heroes often contain what we lack. How many bullied children have looked up to Superman and dreamed that they too could save the day and be respected for their strength? Our conception of God (or gods) often does too, but that is another conversation for another day. As the meme’s say, y’all ain’t ready for that conversation.

My heroes were rich. Assertive. Full of confidence. Respected for their business acumen. Donald Trump. Lee Iacocca. Gordon Gecko.

Or strong, physically. Lee Haney. Sylvester Stallone. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I had no heroes that worked behind the scenes for systemic change, who showed up and did the work and were respected for their work ethic, their persistence, and their wisdom. That isn’t to say I did not know such people: I did, and was raised by them. But I did not see those traits as traits to be admired.

So I ran away to become strong and rich. I was a Marine and then a salesman. I was strong and if not rich, I made good money and learned that lesson many people who aspire to wealth learn – how to fake it: You lease cars you cannot afford to buy, you buy your designer suits at factory outlets, you learn enough about wine to drop tidbits into conversations at dinner in the restaurant you put on your credit card.

But this post isn’t about that – I have covered that ground elsewhere.

Even after I walked away from that life, I still tended to approach things as someone assertive and full of confidence, full of privilege and assertiveness. Like, imagine Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, but after he joined a contemplative order of monks.

In some sectors of the Christian Tradition, they lift up aggressive voices that conflict with the status quo and call them prophetic, and if they are not honored, they are often respected. I often got put in this camp, and thus received social recognition and reinforcement for my privilege and brashness.

It becomes an endless cycle, however, and you have to keep amping up the aggressiveness or else you risk someone else being more aggressive that you are, and thus eclipsing you and then you no longer get the social reinforcement you crave and are feeding on. And then, like Icarus, you may end up flying too close to the sun and destroy yourself in the process.

When I moved to Jackson three years ago, I was exhausted after more than a decade of being the angry prophet that vigorously defended my community’s right to exist.

Exhausted.

The last three years have been a time of rebuilding and reflecting. Of doing good work that nobody on Facebook knows about. Of building local relationships. Of learning how to actually organize people to action, instead of just making them angry. Of learning how to change things when you are not the one in charge. Of learning how to take care of myself. A time of learning how to fall in love with a place and its people.

It is not lost on me that had I embraced the models I had at home, I could have saved myself a good 25 years of striving.

After I was an adult, my Dad once told me his goal over his career had been to be both indispensable and invisible.

“Son, if the only way people know you are important is that you told them you were, then you weren’t important anyway.”

I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying.

The world is listening.

When I read old novels from the turn of the last century, it’s a kick to see that they didn’t really have protocols in place on how to answer the phone yet.

Some of them answered with the name of the family that lived there: “Smith Residence”.

Some answered with their phone number: “4286”.

Some said, “What?”

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, favored “Ahoy” as his preferred answer.

When I was little, almost 50 years ago, our small town phone book had instructions in the front of the book for how to use the telephone, and it recommended you answer the phone with “Hello”. Which, I recently learned, was the protocol recommended by Thomas Alva Edison.

Anyway. My point is, it takes time to learn how to best use a new technology. And so when I get frustrated with the ways some people use Social Media, I try to remind myself that the medium didn’t really go mainstream until after the smartphone went mainstream – about 12 years ago. It’s a very young medium, and many people still don’t have intuitive ways on how to act there. I mean, my mom signs her text messages, for crying out loud.

Historically, most of us only had one on one relationships. I would talk to Bill, and then I would talk to Mary. I may, at a party or something, talk to both Bill and Mary. But mostly we talked one on one. We didn’t have many other options.

Some people had public relationships. Pastors come to mind, as well as teachers and of course celebrities – people who were watched, who had a platform and the capability of being heard by many people at once, and who were known by many more people than they knew.

But now many of us have these public relationships. And we are like the nouveau riche child stars who don’t know how to handle the sudden attention and so we act out and end up with the equivalent of a heroin addiction and a neck tattoo.

Because of the algorithms, despite the fact that I have more than 2400 Facebook friends and more than 1400 additional people follow me there, I really only interact with about 150 of them regularly. And so it’s easy to think that when I post something there, I only imagine I am only talking to those 150 people. But I’m not.

Instead, I have found it useful to imagine I am having a conversation on a live radio show, and I am broadcasting for all the world to hear. If you were having a conversation on a live radio talk show, you would comport yourself differently.

In any event, we are all still figuring this out, this mixture of public and private, and we all have different boundaries and lines. But it’s important to think about these things because right now, there is no “standard”, and the medium thus requires a level of intentionality that most of us are unused to.

Here is a concrete example that may be helpful:

It is not uncommon when someone dies for their friends or family to post it on Facebook. It makes a lot of sense to let people who you are not in regular contact with know what has happened.

Sometimes it is simple, like, “My aunt Mary died last night, the funeral is Friday.” And other times someone writes a formal obituary, such as you might have put in the paper in the past.

But the key is, and a good general rule on social media is, people get to decide how much they share. So when somebody posts that someone has died, please don’t ask how they died. If it’s important to the conversation, they will tell you. And if it isn’t, then that isn’t information they want to share.

When Dad died last year at the height of the pandemic and I saw lots of people acting like this virus was not serious, it was important to me that you know he died from COVID. That he was a First Responder and caught this virus while caring for people who were dying from this virus was important to me. So I made sure you knew, in everything I wrote, that he died from COVID.

But I, the author, get to decide.

If we were on a live radio show, and I told you my 17-year-old daughter died*, would you say, “How did it happen?”. I hope not. But some people have no problem asking that question on Facebook, while not seeing it’s just rude and inappropriate. Do you really want me to say, on a live radio program, “She killed herself, Karen”?

No, Karen imagines it is just us, one on one, chatting away in the living room, eating tea cakes and coffee. But it isn’t. We are on the air. And the whole world is listening.

*For the record, I do not have a 17 year old daughter.

The Bully

He was a nerdy kid. Let’s call him Brian.

Brian’s family had been living in England before moving back to the States. He didn’t really fit in.

To start with, he was very small. Like, much smaller than other kids his age. He was a year behind me when we shared Algebra II class, when I was in the 11^th grade. He looked like a 6^th grader when he was in the 10th grade.

But a well-dressed 6^th grader, because he wore a tie most days, and often a blazer. Our school was in the middle of a dairy farm, and smelled strongly of cow manure. Blazers and ties were seldom seen. We believed his clothing was a holdover from his time in the UK, but who knows. Not me, anyway. I don’t remember asking him much about himself. He also wore product in his hair, which he wore in a style reminiscent of something from the movie Grease.

Brian also spoke very properly, and sneered at our accents. He made us feel inferior – like he really knew he was better than us. Brian didn’t make it easy to like him, and we tended to distrust anyone who is different.

There was a Senior in that Algebra II class as well – let’s call him Steve. Steve was very popular. And attractive. And a cut up. Girls thought he was adorable.

I was not popular. Nor adorable. Nor attractive. In fact, the only thing I really had going for me was that Steve thought I was funny. It helped that we both were failing this class, so we bonded over that.

And for some reason, Steve seemed set to make Brian’s life miserable. I don’t think Steve really thought poorly of Brian – it’s just that Brian was easy to pick on, and was often the butt of Steve’s jokes. Brian had a last name that seemed tailor-made for making fun of. Steve was happy to oblige.

I was desperate to fit in, so I made fun of Brian too. This was another way Steve and I bonded – over our shared hazing of Brian. Once, I remember Brian falling asleep at his desk, and I tied his shoe laces together. Steve then slammed a book down, and Brian jumped up, and then fell on his face. We all laughed. The teacher laughed.

Brian didn’t laugh.

When I watch Back to the Future and I see the way Marty McFly’s dad acts around Biff – that good natured aww shucks sort of ingratiating thing he did – that was how Brian acted towards Steve and me.

These days we would say that Brian was being bullied by Steve and I. At the time, we made snide comments about Brian’s being gay, but he wasn’t – he was just different. I was different too, but I sought out someone who I could feel superior to so I could be assured that I was not on the bottom.

The way we treated Brian was wrong, on multiple levels. It was wrong, period, but I also hate that I did it in order to suck up to someone else. I was cruel in order to be popular. Several people that year mentioned, when they signed my yearbook, how funny I was in Algebra II class. In other words, I was funny and liked because I was cruel to Brian.

I only remember Brian being at school that one year. Some folks said his family moved to Memphis. I never heard from him again. Steve graduated and now is a truck driver. And I did lots of things before I ended up being me.

Recently, I wondered what became of Brian. I looked him up on Facebook. He had a very distinctive name, and so it didn’t take long to find him. He had gone into the Army right after high school, and there were lots of pictures of him still looking small, but otherwise very brave in his desert fatigues during Desert Storm. He then became a cop, and there are lots of pictures of him with guns, with “thin blue line” posters, pictures of him looking very serious and posed, like he is trying to convince himself that he was really strong.

There were pictures of him and his wife and their two kids. He apparently liked to hunt and had taught his son to hunt. There were lots of overtly patriotic imagery too. It seems as an adult, Brian liked to project an image of strength.

Two things stood out: Although we had gone to the same school, we had no shared friends on Facebook. And his last Facebook update was in the middle of 2018. I Googled his (rather distinctive) name and learned he had died from suicide in June of 2018.

A therapist who knew me pretty well once asked me what I was repenting of to live the sort of life I do now. I told her it wasn’t quite that simple of a story, but there were many stories. And one of those stories would have been about Brian.

There is no way to wrap this up prettily. I wish I could tell you that before he died, Brian and I had made amends. That I was able to ask his forgiveness before he died. That he had forgiven me for the way I bullied him in the fall of 1988 so popular people would like me.

I wish I could tell you any of that. But that’s the thing about death – it stops everything in its tracks. It takes away all your options. And if I have learned anything in life, it is the futility of wishing you had a different past.

But as long as you are alive, you can still have a different future.

Road Trip

When I was in my mid-twenties in the 90’s, I had a job working as an account manager for a national janitorial company. We would contract with someplace like Best Buy to clean all the stores in a given district, and then find local folks to subcontract the individual stores to. We made money on the spread between the amount we got and the amount we paid the subs.

Because I am pretty good at de-escalation and have good people skills, I would often be used as a trouble-shooter on troubled accounts. There was much I did not like about this job: Many of the subcontractors were undocumented folks we were taking advantage of; Our entire business model consisted of paying as little as we could to small business so we could make as much money as possible; and we always took the side of the clients over the workers. Always.

When I first started troubleshooting, I was told by the CEO of our firm that his technique in these situations was to do a site visit, assemble the cleaning crew, tell them their performance had been unacceptable, and then fire half of them right then.

I asked how he knew which ones 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.”

Then he invited me and my then-wife to come to the Christmas pageant at his church.

“The choir is so good. It just really makes you feel like Jesus is right there, you know?” he told me.

See? There are reasons this was not to be my career.

Anyway. The one thing I did like about this job was that I traveled a lot. I would fly into Flint, Michigan, for example, and then rent a mid-sized car and spend a week visiting every Best Buy in the state – I think there were 14 of them at the time. I might drive 5 hours, and then visit with the store manager and do a tour and makes appropriate noises and then drive 3 hours and do the same things in a different store, and then rent a room at whatever motel was by the store and eat at a decent chain restaurant and then go back to the room and crash, because I needed to be up at 4AM to see the cleaning crew, and then keep repeating that until I had seen the whole district.

I don’t like driving, but I like solo road trips. I like the meditative aspects of the roadside passing by, the sky unfolding in front of you, the hum of the tires on the asphalt, the feeling of vastness that is this country.

This Thursday, I’m renting a mid-sized car and driving 12 hours to Raleigh, NC for the memorial service for my friend Blugh. She died way too early, for reasons that make no sense to anyone, especially not her partner and kids.

When I met her, she was homeless but getting clean after years of a heroin habit. Eventually, she got and stayed clean and came to work with me as a Peer Support Specialist, helping people who were still using or who were experiencing homelessness get access to resources they needed. She was so good at that work – it was as if she had been made to do it.

Even after I moved away we still talked on the phone once a month or so, and back in October, she asked me if I thought she should keep doing this work. She was in a rough patch, and she was considering giving it up. I told her that she was incredibly gifted at this work, but that one doesn’t win wars by dying for your country. I wish I had advocated harder for the “take care of yourself” camp.

I’m giving myself 24 hours to do a 12-hour drive so I have time to be alone with my thoughts. I might drive straight through, but also might just stop at a motel along the way if I get tired.

In other words, it’s pretty unstructured. I need the alone time to think, time to remember my friend, and tell myself that none of this is my fault.

Eventually, I may even believe it.

Kindness

When I was 5 years old, my best friend in the world was a boy named Paul who went to kindergarten with me, and who lived a mile and a quarter up the road from our house.

Paul was adopted, and his parents had been around 50 when they adopted him as an infant, so Paul always had the “old” parents. By contrast, my parents were 21 when I was born, so his parents were nearly 30 years older than mine.

His father was a tall man, who worked in a warehouse and had thick ropey muscles in his arms, and a silhouette of a naked lady putting on her panties on one forearm, and an anchor on the other – vestiges of his time in the Navy. At the time, it was the coolest thing in the world. I remember asking him if the naked lady was Paul’s mom, and he just giggled.

He also had an old Ford Falcon that he had turned into a pickup truck with the help of a cutting torch and some plywood. If there was anything cooler than having a naked lady tattooed on your arm, it was making your own pickup truck. I thought Paul had the coolest parents in the world.

Anyway, it was Paul’s birthday, and I was invited. It was a beautiful spring day, and there were lots of kids there. Paul’s parents didn’t have a lot of money and they lived in a small single-wide trailer with one bathroom. And so, predictably, when there were suddenly 10 little boys in the house, a line formed outside the bathroom. And I suddenly had stomach cramps.

I was hurting bad. My stomach was churning and there was this long line to the bathroom and suddenly my intestines exploded and then there was warm diarrhea running down my legs inside my Sears ToughSkin jeans. I was mortified. But, as often happens when you get everything out of you, I felt so much better, other than having a pants load of poop, that is.

I went and found Paul’s mom, but I couldn’t tell her I had crapped my pants. So I told her I wasn’t feeling good, and asked if somebody could please take me home. Paul’s dad was pressed into service. I climbed into the cab of his homemade pickup truck, with a cloud of putrid funk following me. He gets in, looks at me, and rolls down the window. We head to my house.

At the stop sign, he said, “So, you are not feeling good?”

I replied that I was not.

He said, “You know, it smells like you messed your britches.”

I sat silent, mortified.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

When we pulled up in the driveway, Dad was outside, working on the car. Mom came out when she saw us, and I ran to her and hugged her legs. Paul’s dad explained that I said I wasn’t feeling well, and he and Dad talked about whatever was wrong with our car while Mom took me inside, her nose telling her exactly what the problem was.

She asked what had happened, and I told her, and she told me it was OK, and asked how I felt. I told her I felt wonderful, now. She asked if I wanted to go back to the party. I assured her I did. She cleaned me up, we put on new clothes, and I ran outside and told Paul’s dad I felt much better now and asked if I could go back to Paul’s with him when he went.

On the way back, he looked at me, and said, “So you feel better?”

I assured him I did.

“I’m glad.”

And the rest of the way in silence, and everyone welcomed me back when we pulled up at Paul’s house, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

There were so many ways that could have went differently. He could have made a big deal out of how much I stunk. He could have laid out plastic for me to sit on, or demanded I answer him when he asked if I had soiled myself. I was already embarrassed beyond belief – he could have made it so much worse.

But he didn’t. Instead, he tried to empathize with me, and normalize what I was feeling.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

I think about that story sometimes, about just how… kind he was in that moment to a mortified kid with poop in his socks.

Kindness counts.

Grief: A metaphor

It’s been a rough week.

A friend died earlier this week, very suddenly. She had overcome a lot, had provided hope to a lot of people, and now she’s gone.

I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet.

But it stirred up some thoughts about Dad’s death last year.

A friend who lost her dad a few years ago and I were talking this morning about Dad’s death, and she asked how I was coping.

I told her that if was as if when he died a piece of glass shattered, with sharp edges and jagged pieces everywhere. And for weeks, these pieces just tumbled around, slicing and stabbing. It was really bad.

But as time went on, they rubbed up against each other, and eventually the edges wore smooth. They are still there, easily observable, but for the most part, they are softer, less abrasive, almost beautiful, like sea glass.

But every once in a while, you find a sharp edge. It catches you by surprise when it happens.

It happens less often than it did. But it still happens.

Hope is a choice.

I met a new friend today. At least, I think we will be friends.

It was one of those conversations where you just agree to meet up for coffee and before you know it, three hours have passed and you have talked about 5 or 6 different things, and the conversation flows easily from one thing to the next. Those are rare for me, but I love it when they happen.

And one of the things we talked about was how change happens. I have these conversations a lot these days. We look around us and feel like things are bleak and divided, and we wonder if there is any way out. If those who work to oppress others, those who would take rights from others, those who work for their own self-interest even when it hurts others, and we wonder how we get them to change.

My new friend was somewhat cynical. “I think I have given up on their changing,” she said. “I mean, I want to believe they can, but it doesn’t feel like a real possibility”.

I told her I didn’t have enough self-esteem to believe that people can’t change.

She was puzzled. So I explained that I once believed very different things than I do now about… almost everything. I used to be an Evangelical who wanted to save your soul from Hell, and now I’m not. I used to believe God did not love Gay people, and now I don’t believe that. I used to chase money, and now I chase relationships. I used to want to distance myself from the South, and now it’s a core part of my identity.

“But here’s the thing: In every one of those instances, I didn’t change because I accidentally had a change of heart, but because of a relationship I had that caused me to reconsider my position. I changed because who I knew changed, and I changed because my ideology had to follow my relationships. My heart changed, and then waited for my head to catch up.

The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel said that when it came to God, there were no proofs, but only witnesses. In other words, some things can’t be proven but only experienced. I believe people can change because I have changed. A lot. I can’t prove that people can change, but I am a witness to the fact that they do.

And I don’t believe I’m special. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not. I’m pretty mundane, actually. And if I can change, as un-special as I am, then pretty much anyone can, given time and the right relationships. Or else I have to assume I’m so special that I think I can change, but they can’t. And I don’t have enough ego for that.

“That is… hopeful. Maybe more hope than I have right now,” she said.

“Oh yeah. It’s hopeful as hell. Because I want things to change. And I believe that the only way things will change is because people change. And if I thought people couldn’t change, then what choice would I have but despair? So I find myself having to choose between hope and despair.

“And I choose hope.”

Reflecting on 30 Days of Gratitude

“Twenty Twenty One hasn’t been so bad,” she said. “It just feels like… Groundhog Day, maybe. Every day is the same. Lots of uncertainty. We are both home pretty much all the time. Going out feels unsafe, but you see lots of people acting like 10,000 Mississippians didn’t die in the 18 months.”

It was the end of October, and Renee and I were sitting at our kitchen table, having just eaten one of perhaps a dozen meals that we have in rotation right now – meals we can fix with little mess and fuss, that don’t require much creativity or fresh produce. We think of it almost as a pandemic playlist, but for meals.

And that is what so much of my life is like these days – hoping for a time beyond this current uncertainty, and yet realizing we are going to be here for a really long time. If I still drank, a drinking game where I take a shot every time someone says “the new normal” would wreck my liver in short order.

I just happened to be on Facebook on November the 1^st when someone posted their first post of “30 days of Gratitude”, a popular Facebook meme where you post a thing each day for which you are thankful.

Honestly? These things suck me in. My ADHD brain loves structure – but my executive function is such that my brain can’t manufacture it. So, 30 days where I don’t have to think about what to write about is a gift. So I decided to use it as a prompt.

I made some rules.

Other than Renee, I couldn’t write about being thankful for a living person. That was mostly to avoid leaving people out.

I had to have an original picture I took or owned to illustrate or accompany the post. In other words, no stock photos. The only time I broke that was the Doctor Jabbour post.

I have a complicated relationship with my past – I know a lot of us feel that way. But I also have come to recognize that the things for which I am grateful have come out of my past – that I am really the product of my stories. So each post needs to have a story in it.

I had to write it every day. I broke that rule once, writing Thanksgiving’s the day before, but I was on the road 10 hours out of 36 during that time, so if I didn’t do it the day before, it wouldn’t have happened.

And it needed to be at least 500 words. To put that in perspective, this post you are reading now is at 450 words at the end of this sentence.

And after a year of writing about Dad, I decided that no single post would be about him.

There were days I had no idea what I was going to write about. Some days I wouldn’t know until I was halfway through the post. Some days I thought it was going to be about X, and it ended up being about Y. Sometimes I narrowed it down while writing: The post about Heather started as a blanket post about my LGBT friends, the same way I wrote about my atheist friends. The post about friends who disagree with me started about a particular person, but he was still alive, and the more I wrote I realized he was one of several in that position.

And I think that is the thing I liked most about it – in fact, it’s one of the things I like about writing: The discovery. That you learn something you did not know before as you write.

Having grown up evangelical, every time someone mentions the word accountability, I think it means somebody got caught with porn. But the accountability of knowing that people were expecting me to publish something each day mattered, even if nothing would happen if I had missed a day. The truth is, I am more afraid of letting you down than I am letting me down.

The last 20 months or so have been horrible. But this month I learned that I have much to be grateful for, that there are things in the midst of a pandemic for which to be grateful, and that the common thread that runs through all of the things for which I am grateful is the relationships that have, formed me, held me, and given my life shape and meaning.

I’m not sure what to do next. I don’t really want to break a now 31-day streak, but I don’t know what I can write about tomorrow. But hey, I’ve been there before.

Regardless, thank you for reading my stuff, for sharing it, for commenting and interacting with it. It’s good to be known.