Hugh Hollowell

The Banality of Good

I believe it was Kierkegaard who said that life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forward. I could go look it up, but even if it wasn’t him, you know what whoever it was is getting at – we never understand the present nearly as well as we understand the past, because the past can be examined.

And examine it we do. In the current mess we live in, it seems every journalist, thought leader, guru, and pundit has a different opinion about how we got here. If we took away all the posts that blame others for where we are, would Facebook even be a viable business?

The past is written in stone, however, and will not change. While the past is useful for teaching us what went wrong, the future is written in sand, is infinitely malleable, and is where we should put most of our efforts.

How do we get there from here? How do we build the world as it is into the world as it could be? How do we change the future?

Having been in movement work for well more than a decade now, organizing poor people in the South, I have had the privilege of knowing some of the best activists and organizers in the US – some of whom are famous, but most of whom you have never heard of.

A while back, one of them – a woman who creates a place of refuge and safety for people without homes in a Midwestern town – and I were talking about a group that had just come through to tour her facility. The group was from an out-of-town church, and they had heard of her work and wanted to come to see the “radical” work this woman was doing.

She told me the group seemed happy when they left, but that while leading them around, she had felt a bit like a fraud.

“It doesn’t feel radical. It just feels like my life”.

I told her she was in good company – that Dorothy Day had felt the same way. In the postscript of Dorothy Day’s memoir, the Catholic activist and founder of the Catholic Worker movement describes how the movement came about, or at least, how it felt.

“We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, ‘We need bread.’ We could not say, ‘Go, be thou filled.’ If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread. We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded. We were just sitting there talking and someone said, ‘Let’s all go live on a farm.’ It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community. It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”

It all just happened. We were just sitting there, talking when it happened.

Of course, the truth is, the Catholic Worker did not just happen by accident. But it wasn’t the result of a grand plan, either. The reality is that it was the result of countless decisions. Ordinary decisions.

In her writings on the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “The banality of evil”. We want to believe, she argued, that massive evil is caused by external forces. Hitler was a psychopath, say, or that Eichman was mentally ill. But that isn’t true.

The reason massive evil happens is because of countless small compromises, countless small decisions that, on their own, are relatively benign and ordinary. Big evil is the result of little evil, quiet evil, banal evil done again and again and again.

I have come to believe the opposite is true as well. Goodness, Peace, Love, Harmony – whatever you want to call it, isn’t the result of grand sweeping gestures, but tiny micro-actions, repeated often. And that the banality of goodness, to coin a phrase, is the sort of thing Dorothy Day is describing in her postscript. Somebody said “We need bread” and so, instead of saying back, “Well, that sucks,” they went and got them some bread. And then they did it again, and again.

So, the good news in all of this is that if Goodness is brought about not by Saints, but by small decisions, then we all get to be involved. We all get to play a part in turning the world as it is into the world as it should be. And every little bit – our little bit – counts.

Secondhand Memories

Her name was Dorothy, and she had two sisters, Louise and Wilma. I was born on her birthday, and she loved me without reservation. Her life was a tragic one, the stuff of Southern Noir. She married for love twice, and both husbands would die tragic, unexpected deaths, both of them would leave her with a young child she had to raise alone, and both of them left her scant few resources with which to do it.

My father was her youngest son, and she died when I was four, and I only have two memories of her. The house she lived in was my grandfather’s house – he had moved her into it when they were married, in search of second chances, both of them having lost spouses and raised children on their own.

The house was old and drafty. It had been moved from its original moorings at some point in its past, using donkeys and greased poles, and so the doors no longer shut properly, and the windows may or may not open, depending upon whim and humidity. It had propane space heaters for heat, and in this memory, it was very cold, and early in the morning.

I was up before my parents and was walking around in my pajamas, looking for a grownup. I found her, wearing her housecoat, squatting flat-footed in front of the space heater in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette.

It was the cigarettes that killed her, of course, but slowly. She smoked because it was the 70s and of course she did. We brought a hospital bed into her living room, in front of the window so she could see what was going on, and so she would know who was coming to the house. That was where she spent her last days – watching the driveway, looking for company.

In this memory, she and I are laying on that hospital bed in the living room, in front of the window, and she was reading a book to me. The blanket was an animal print – I remember the cheetah and the lion and the giraffe – and she would tell me stories about each of them in turn. The pillow we lay on had a corner that had unraveled, and bits of foam rubber were poking from it. I don’t remember the book, but I remember feeling loved, and I remember her laugh that would end up in racking coughs.

That is really all I remember about her on my own. I have lots of stories filed in my head about her, but they are second-hand stories – stories dad told me, or her sisters told me when I was older, or that mom has told me recently since Dad died. Like I know her favorite flower was the orange daylily, but that is only because every summer, Dad would tell me that when the orange ditchlilies would bloom.

And she loved the music of Roy Orbison – especially Pretty Woman. But again, I know this secondhand, from hearing that fact relayed to me my entire childhood whenever it would come on the radio.

I was born on her birthday as a gift to her. Because of my size (10 pounds, 11 ounces) and Mom being tiny, I had to be born by cesarean, and so Mom got to pick the date. They picked Dorothy’s birthday. I’m told she loved this and was elated. But that’s second-hand, too.

Since we moved back to Mississippi a few years ago, I have planted lots of flowers. Shasta Daisy, yarrow, Asiatic lily, columbine, flags, and roses. So many roses. And daylilies. Lots of daylilies.

Including orange ditchlilies at the end of my driveway.

In a few months, it will be my birthday again. I will turn 50 this year, and were she still with us, she would be 111. Renee asked what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I told her I don’t have much planned. I will sit in front of my living room window, and listen to Roy Orbison, and read a book that makes me feel loved, and every so often I will gaze out the window toward the end of the driveway, looking for company, but not without also seeing the ditchlillies that always bloom on our birthday.

Use Your Words

There is a famous, but likely apocryphal story about James Joyce. The way the story goes, a friend asked how his writing was coming. Joyce, who was famous for his agonizing over the right word, replied that he was struggling, having only written 7 words that day.

The friend, trying to be upbeat, said, ‘Well, that’s not bad – especially for you!”

To this, Joyce sighed, and said, “I guess not – but I’m also not sure what order they go in.”

I never have trouble with words. But sometimes, I’m not sure what order they go in.

The other day, I was on a Zoom meeting with other organizers from around the state. They were talking about ways we can shape our messaging to be more effective in bringing people into the fold, and they highlighted some copy I had written for a website as an especially good example of what we were striving for.

Another organizer pointed out that I had authored it, and then said, “Hugh is good with words.”

I am, it’s true. I’m good with words. I think it’s because I respect them so much.

Words are sacred things – they allow us to pass on wisdom, to share culture and history, to give meaning and shape to our collective experience. Imagine if each generation had to invent fire, or the wheel, or paper for itself. Our words make civilization possible.

And so I take the words seriously. In the Abrahamic traditions, there is this idea that the Universe was created by words being spoken into the void by the Creator, where nothing existed but chaos until the words gave it shape and order.

But, as I said, sometimes I’m not sure what to say. Sometimes, I don’t have words.

Like when I went through a spell about five years ago when I lost six people that winter to drug overdoses. The streets were filled with laced heroin, and it was killing people left and right. You watch people who had struggled to get and stay clean have a relapse – which happens – but this time, the relapse was fatal.

Or the couple who had struggled for years and years to get pregnant, who had a perfect pregnancy, and who lost their baby 48 hours before their due date. I don’t know what you say about that.

Or the time my friend Nancy had struggled to get clean after a life of sex work and drug use and then did, only to have a brain aneurysm and die. Or my friend Jimmy, who fought for a decade to get housing, and did, and got hit by a car the day before we were to help him move in.

Sometimes, there are no words that make sense.

Or when you see that a million people have died in the US from a massive, two-year-long pandemic, and yet we don’t have the political will to have healthcare that works.

But I still believe in the power of words.

In 2020, my Dad died from COVID, and I’ve written a lot about it. But nearly 1 million people have died from COVID in the US over the last two years. My dad’s death, while tragic, isn’t unique. It’s devastatingly common. Almost pedestrian at this point.

Because those million deaths represent many millions of people, like me, who are impacted by those deaths. Everything I felt – millions of people have felt those emotions over the last few years.

On one hand, it would be easy to say that I don’t have anything special to add to this conversation. How conceited must I be to believe that any words I can come up with would have any impact on anyone?

But I don’t think that. I don’t think I’m special.

But I also believe that we don’t do a good job in our culture of talking about things that scare us, that frustrate us, that hurt us. I think we are all a little broken, a little damaged, and that we all spend a lot of time trying to pretend that we’re not. And so we are carrying a heavy facade around with us because we are afraid to use our words to talk about the ways in which we are broken, lest we admit our imperfections to others, who are also imperfect, and also trying to hide it.

And I believe that, as Fred Rogers said, anything human is mentionable, and anything we can mention can be made more manageable and that by talking about things, they seem smaller and less scary.

But to get there, we have to use our words.

The New Bike

My first bicycle was yellow, with swooping handlebars and a banana seat, and coaster brakes.

I got it the Christmas I was six years old, but wouldn’t learn to ride it for another three years. In the meantime, it would lean against the shed behind the house, while I was content to stay in the house and read my books. I had no particular place I would rather be than on the couch, reading.

Now, I should also point out that I lived on 30 something acres, with a long gravel driveway and no sidewalks or pavement anywhere. Riding a bike on grass is not a fun experience. Riding a bike on gravel is painful, but not as painful as falling on gravel. I was the oldest child by five years. My closest friend lived miles away. I had nowhere to ride, no place to go, and no one to go with.

But once I did learn, I burned up the road. I would ride to the neighbors, I would ride to the corner store, ride to my friends. Ride to the church. I loved riding my bike – right up until I got my license.

I probably didn’t touch a bike again for 15 years. I got one when I lived near downtown Memphis, as it was easier to bike places than to bother with parking, and when I lived in Raleigh, I had several different bikes over the years. I like biking, but I really don’t like bike culture.

While there are exceptions, I don’t like the way people here in the US treat biking as a sport, rather than as transportation. This means that there is little infrastructure for bikers, and it pushes the prices of bikes higher and higher, and because of that, there are gatekeepers and snobbery around the whole thing.

Compared to cars, bikes are cheap, they are easy to maintain, they provide low-level physical activity – the sort doctors recommend as particularly healthy – and particularly important right now, they don’t require any gasoline. We should incentivize them, not make them harder to use or acquire or drive.

I had bought a bike just before the beginning of the pandemic, but it got stolen shortly after the pandemic began. Bikes were hot items in those days. But recently I’ve been looking again, and the used marketplace is a hot mess still, but I found a commuter style bike, new, at a local sporting goods store for what seemed like a reasonable price. I went and got it this morning.

It’s nobody’s idea of fancy. It has a wide saddle seat. Wide handlebars. It’s a 7 speed. You sit upright on it, rather than lean over the handlebars. It has both a chain guard and a kickstand. It looks like something an old man would drive, and something nobody in spandex would look twice at.

In other words, I love it.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m trying to prioritize my health these days. And we live in a part of town that is a short way from grocery stores, coffee shops, bakeries, the pool I belong to, and an independent bookstore. Most days, I drive less than 3 miles. There’s no reason I need to use a car for any of that.

Today I drove it to the pool – what took 5 minutes by car was 12 by bike, but it wasn’t harder. And I saw things I don’t see when zooming along at 45 miles an hour, and got to use muscles I don’t normally use, and used a little less gas, and made the world a little less warm than it would be otherwise.

It started to sprinkle on me as I made my way home from the pool, so I guess I will have to start paying closer attention to the weather. But that’s not a bad thing, either.

Life Interrupted

The other day, I was thinking about how I have this persistent feeling of being behind. Not in my work, although that is also true, but behind in life. It’s like I am at least 10 years behind everyone. I am, right now, about to turn 50, but in terms of life markers, generally fit in closer to folks around the end of their 30s.

And then I realized it was that I didn’t really become “me” until I was in my early 30s, and I had this whole decade where I was floundering around, pretending to be something I’m not.

In my 20s, I was trying hard to run away from being a poor kid from Mississippi, and so I adopted an identity I thought would make me happy – I got a career I thought would make me enough money to wash away my blue-collar roots, a wife that would project the right sort of image, I went to the “right” church, made the “right” relationships.

But by my early 30s, the relationships, the career, the wife would all be gone, and I was adrift for a few years, and it was then that I began my second act and started to figure out what I had been meant to be all along.

But that’s a different story.

One of the things about having been married before is you have this whole other life that you were once part of. Places that were your favorite, inside jokes, routines, and friends. And when the marriage ends, a lot of that disappears.

We had some friends. They were a (hetero) couple, and the woman was a friend of a friend, but we both hit it off with her – Let’s call her Lacy – and then Lacy became our friend. She was in law school when we met her, but her daddy was a famous lawyer who helped her get a good job when she graduated. Lacy is a year older than I am, so she was perhaps 27 when we all met.

Eventually, she met a guy – let’s call him Fred – who was a little dorky, but sweet, and they dated and they were couple-friends with us. They ate in our house, we went to dinner with them on the regular, and we and their mutual friends all ran in the same circles and went to the same parties.

Lacy and Fred moved to another big city, the one where her father the famous attorney lived, and we stayed in touch the way one did in the early 2000s before social media, but then not long after that the divorce happened and I lost touch. I have not thought of either of them in years.

Recently, Lacy’s name just randomly popped into my head when I saw something that reminded me of something she once said. From curiosity, I looked for her on Facebook to see what she was up to.

She is still with Fred. He has a job where he wears a suit and looks very distinguished in a late-forties sort of way. She is still an attorney, but one who wears big hats and goes to fundraisers and throws derby parties.

It is as if they were the natural conclusion of what they were then. Like their life had gone on uninterrupted since 2001 or so, the last time we spoke, and meanwhile, mine has changed so completely as to be unrecognizable.

It made me wonder, pretty much for the first time in ages, what my life would have been like if I had remained a “financial professional”. Would I live in a McMansion? Would I now wear Italian suits and look distinguished in a late-forties sort of way? Would I have remained married? Would we have a condo in Destin? Would I vote Republican, and pride myself on being fiscally conservative but socially liberal (which means you think poor people need help but don’t think you should be the one to actually pay for it)? Drive a Lexus? Attend the big church that the “right” people went to? Would my wife “do lunch” with the ladies?

Because that is what I was headed for. It was all laid out for me as clear as the lines on a Rand McNally road map. I could have had that life.

Or, which is more likely, the drinking I developed as a coping mechanism to survive in a job that filled me with anxiety every day would have gotten worse, and I would have had an affair or two, and I would have lost the job and the car and the apartment and the marriage, self-imploding and ruining myself and everyone around me and I would live today in a half-way house somewhere if I was lucky, or be dead if I wasn’t.

But as St. John said, life is what happens while we are making other plans.

Back to my friend Lacy, the attorney: My life got interrupted. Hers did not. It was like looking at this bizarro look into an alternate reality that could have been mine except for maybe three or four decisions.

I considered friend requesting her on Facebook. After all, we were friends once. But what would we talk about? What did we have in common anymore? I wasn’t the person she once knew and hadn’t been for nearly 20 years.

In the end, I just closed the Facebook tab and went outside to sit on my porch and watch the sparrows play in the leaf pile. There are some answers you are just better off not knowing.

Imposter Syndrome

Once upon a time, I was considered a subject matter expert on issues surrounding homelessness.

I would lecture at universities. I’ve spoken to crowds of 10,000 people, taught police departments, consulted with denominations, and had waged war with a mid-sized city over homeless policy, and won.

There were articles about my work in Time magazine. The Christian Century. The Huffington Post. I had been interviewed on NPR Morning Edition. Al Jazeera. Fox News. My words had appeared in The Washington Post, as well as Ethics Daily and Sojourners, and other places I forget.

And I had years of front-line experience working with and among people experiencing homelessness. I’m not telling you any of this to impress you, but rather to impress upon you that when it came to issues around homelessness, I had ample evidence that I knew what I was talking about.

But none of that would stop the dream.

The dream was a recurring one that began to show up sometime in my sixth year of that work. I was getting invitations to write and speak at ever-larger events and platforms. I was invited that year to lecture at the NC Episcopalian Diocese Clergy Retreat. Basically, the then-Bishop of NC (who, incidentally, is now the Presiding Bishop of the whole freakin’ Episcopal Church) pulled every Episcopalian Priest in the state into a room and made them listen to me for three days.

Every person in that room knew more than I did about everything except homelessness. I am a very informal Mennonite, and they were all very formal and highly educated Episcopalians. They wouldn’t even let me be the guy who handed out their bulletins at the back of the church without some additional training.

The dreams began about six weeks before the retreat, and they still show up from time to time. The scene is always the same: The boardroom at the Episcopal Church across the street from the Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh, NC.

It’s a beautiful room – I’ve been in it many times – and there is dark furniture and a long polished table and book-lined walls and large windows and heavy paneled double doors. And in the dream, I am standing at one end of the table, on the end furthest from the doors, and all around the table are folks – men, women, Black, white – wearing clerical collars, and I’m presenting… something. Whatever it is, they are listening and taking notes, and it seems to be going well.

Suddenly, the door bursts open, and a silver-haired white man in full clerical regalia strides two steps into the room, points at me, and roars, “Get him out of here!”. Suddenly, the people who had been listening to me leap up and drag me out in the hall, and then they go back into the room and shut the door.

Subtle, huh?

That feeling – the one that says despite all the evidence that says you actually do know what you are doing, you still feel like you are in over your head, and surely someone will notice and point it out to the world? They call that imposter syndrome. And I don’t think it ever goes away. At least, it never has for me.

There is probably a lot of social conditioning that goes into this. I do happen to know many silver-haired white men who wear clerical garb, and they seldom seem to exhibit signs of imposter syndrome. We should all pray to have the confidence of a mediocre white man. Having grown up economically poor, I absolutely have unresolved issues around class and status that things like wealthy churches exacerbate.

When we show up, we bring more than ourselves with us. I bring generations of working-class stigma and prejudice into any room I show up in, and no amount of outside praise takes that away.

These days, I write. A lot. Around 30,000 words most months. I have thousands of newsletter and blog subscribers. People pay money to make sure I can keep doing that. In addition to my writing for the web, I’ve been published in magazines, newspapers, and in books. I’m pretty good at this.

And yet, the other day when a friend introduced me to someone as a writer, I found myself self-deprecating, minimizing, doing the Zoom-equivalent of kicking the ground and saying “aww shucks”.

“I have a little blog”, I told them. Gone were the newsletter subscribers. Gone were the publishing clips. Gone were the books, the newspaper articles. Gone were the 20 years of effort that led to any of this.

I have a little blog.

My friend corrected me, said I have an amazing blog, and that she reads it daily.

Imposter syndrome. I just couldn’t even let her call me a writer.

Despite the fact that I, you know, write. A lot. And pretty well. (I wasn’t going to put that last sentence, because it felt braggy. Imposter syndrome even here.)

I don’t know what you do about it, but I know I’m not the only one. I still have the dream, but less often now – probably because I’m dealing with fewer old white dudes in positions of power. But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten over it. Because I haven’t.

But I have gotten better at being willing to believe I’m wrong. That the evidence might be right. That I may actually be as good at something as other people say I am.

And that maybe I belong at that damned table after all.

The Levis

I just want to go on record that, despite what the kids at school called me, we were not “white trash”. We were “poor-but-proud”. As near as I can tell, the main difference between the two categories had to do with the fact that we owned land. In any event, when I was a child we had very little money.

Up through the fourth grade that wasn’t all that big a deal. After all, all of my friends were in the same boat. In the small, church-based segregation academy I attended until the end of the fourth grade, I was very unaware of fashion. We just wore jeans and shirts – nobody wore Levis. Well, except that one kid. But anyway.

But in the fifth grade, the closing of that school meant I had to go to the consolidated public elementary school. No one at East Tate Elementary wore jeans from the dollar store. All their jeans had names on them – Lee, Levis, Wrangler. And the shoes…no longer could you just wear plain old sneakers. Now there was Nike, and Puma, and Adidas, and Kangaroos (they had a pocket!). And all of those things cost money.

Money we did not have.

I begged my mom to buy me a pair of Levis.

“Just one pair,” I would say. “I will wash them every night.”

But no. Every August we would buy five pairs of cheap jeans that were that horrible, very uncool dark indigo blue color. And we would buy them a size too big, so I could grow into them because we both knew there would be no buying new ones until next August.

But I continued to beg and ask.

One particular Saturday, Mom had been out hitting yard sales and thrift stores, and she came home with a glint in her eye. Held aloft in her hands was a pair of button fly Levi Jeans. Sure, they were slightly faded, but that only added to the appeal.

Monday, I put them on, proud of my new station in life. I strutted when I got off that school bus!

I made it till the second recess, after 4th period. That was when one beloved Child of God informed me that, unlike his Levi jeans, mine had a white patch on the right rear pocket. In other words, they were “girl” jeans.

Oh no. Dear God, no.

As I write this 40 years later I still feel the anguish and shame that went through me as he and his friends stood around me, pointing and chanting. “Girl’s jeans, girl’s jeans. Hugh’s wearing girl jeans. ”

They called me names I had never heard before that called my sexuality into question – words I would look up in the dictionary that night when I got home. I was in fifth grade – what I knew about sexuality was confined to the neighbor’s dog that had gotten to our hound when she was in heat.

I raced into the bathroom, where I hid the rest of recess. I untucked my shirt, hoping to cover the offending label. But my hiding it made it worse, and for the rest of the day, the kids rode me without mercy. Through the remaining classes, people looked at me and giggled, pointing at me. And if I got up to sharpen my pencil, displaying the offensive tag, the laughter was so loud the teacher had to tell everyone to be quiet.

When I got home that day, after the longest bus ride ever, I hid those jeans in the bottom of my closet so I would not accidentally wear them ever again.

It was only a few days before Mom noticed they were out of the rotation. She tormented me to no end that I just “had” to have a pair of Levis, and there she went, spending her hard-earned money on Levis, and did I wear them? No sir, I did not.

In the cold, rational light of 2022, I wish that 10-year-old Hugh had been stronger. I wish someone had told him that clothes were not gendered. I wish the teachers had stood up for him.

But, as Dad used to say, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

I have talked to other people who grew up poor, and they sometimes say things like, “We didn’t know we were poor.” By the time I was 10, I knew we were poor. The kids at the public school never tired of telling me.

But I knew that Mom had bought me those jeans because she loved me. I knew that she hunted the places we could afford to find them and that the money she spent on them was money that should have gone to groceries, or stuff for the baby, or any number of things. I knew that her buying me those jeans was my mom’s way of saying “You matter to me. Your happiness matters to me. You are worth the trouble I am going to to try to make this thing you want, happen. ” And because I knew all of that, there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to tell her she bought the wrong thing and caused me ridicule.

That was the last time she bought me a name-brand anything. I would not wear a pair of Levis again until I was 16 and working after school at the grocery store and could buy them myself.

And I have still never told her why I quit wearing that pair of jeans. I would have rather had her think me ungrateful than for her to feel shame or to know she caused me to suffer. Ten-year-old me did not want her to think her love for me was, in any way, flawed.

And I still don’t.

Stimulus Pause Response

As motels go, it wasn’t horrible. It was the $50 a night option on Priceline, with a 7.9 guest satisfaction rating. It was a national chain. The water was hot, the room clean, and the water pressure was lovely. As someone who used to travel a great deal, I can assure you I’ve paid much more for much less.

But almost from the beginning, things began to go wrong. Someone was meeting us there, and he arrived a few minutes before we did. He tried to use the lobby bathroom, but it was locked, for guest use only, and was told he could go use the bathroom at the gas station across the busy highway.

All the lights were off in the lobby, with just one light on over the registration desk. The vending machine, the ice machine, the “business center” computer desk – all had large “Out of Order” signs.

The website had promised a “deluxe continental breakfast”, which in practice consisted of sugary yogurt, a selection of 4 small blueberry muffins, and some of the smallest Red Delicious apples I have ever seen, an apple whose name is half accurate in description and which has the distinction of being exactly no one’s favorite apple variety. Whatever continent it is where they eat breakfast this way, I want to die having not visited there.

The desk clerk was rude and curt. The housekeeping staff did not clean our room, and when we asked, we were told that because of COVID shortages, they no longer provided daily service – which makes sense, and wouldn’t have been a big deal, had someone told us. Instead, we came back to the room after a long day, ready to take a shower and had no clean towels, and were out of toilet paper. There were multiple clerks who worked various shifts, and none of them had English as their primary language, and they each blamed whatever the current misunderstanding was on the lack of English skills of the other clerk.

The morning we were to check out, I had gone to the front desk to ask for clean towels, and was told I had to bring my dirty ones to the front desk to turn in before they would give me clean ones, so they would know I wasn’t stealing the towels. It was frustrating, going up and down the stairs, over and over, each time being told you hadn’t done it right, or to get called a thief.

None of it was horrible – but each offense built on the previous one. While Renee was in the shower, I decided to leave an honest, if frank, review. The last time we had been in town, we had stayed at the motel next door and had an amazing experience. I thought people should know.

I opened up my computer and opened a text file to compose the review. I was scathing. Frank. Brutal. I poured my three days of micro-frustrations into this review. The longer I typed, recounting the various frustrations, the more heated I got. I decided I was going to wait until I got home to post it – I didn’t want to leave a bad review before we checked out, in case there was some sort of retaliation they could take.

We were checked out and on to have lunch with a friend before heading home when my phone rang. It was the hotel owner. His accent made understanding him difficult.

“Are you checked out? Are you done,” he asked?

I assured him I was and braced myself for whatever he was about to tell me had gone wrong. Instead, he just told me that we had left Renee’s camera bag, which conservatively contained $1000 worth of photography gear, in the room, but not to worry, because he would put it behind the desk and we could come by and pick it up any time.

Well, crap. How do you leave a bad review for a guy who saved you a thousand dollars? For a guy who was looking out for you? For a guy who went above and beyond?

We swung back by the motel on the way out of town, retrieved the bag, and hit the road. That night, when we got home, I deleted the poisonous review I had not yet posted, and for not the first time, remembered words I had read long ago in an article by the psychologist Rollo May:

Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones.

To pause between stimulus and response, and to choose one response among several possible ones.

Imagine if I had posted the review while she was in the shower. Imagine how horrible I would feel knowing I had trashed this man’s hotel and livelihood – this man who looked out for my family and would save our stuff.

Virtually every time I have done something I later regretted, taken action I would wish I could undo, said words I could never pull back, it was because I did not take sufficient notice of the power of the pause between stimulus and response, and thus chose my response poorly.

When you step on a dog’s tail, the dog may lash out, instinctively, and bite you. There is stimulus, and then response. But as humans, we have the privilege of being able to insert a pause between the stimulus and the response.

And in that pause, we can find both power and freedom.

I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

Every Monday morning, I send out a newsletter. I have done this for more than seven years now. At this point, it’s just something I do, and I suspect that if everyone unsubscribed, I would probably still do it.

And amazingly, people read it. I know that sounds like I’m fishing for compliments, but I mean it – that people read anything I write amazes me constantly. That other people spend folding money to make sure I have the freedom to do that writing is staggering to me.

Last week, I started a survey of my newsletter readers – a thing I’ve never done before. There are some demographic and informational questions I have wondered about – how old are my readers (mostly between 35 and 65, it seems) and when do they read my newsletter that I publish on Monday mornings (almost perfectly evenly split between “as soon as it hits my inbox” and “I save it for later when I can savor it”), but mostly I wanted the more subjective comments to questions like, “What do you like about this newsletter” and “How would you describe what this newsletter is about?”

From a marketing perspective, these are mostly useless. Knowing that an anonymous reader (I didn’t tie responded to email addresses, so people would be more honest) thinks that I need to do more of what I’m doing, or that another anonymous reader thinks that I am a “breath of fresh air” won’t help me get more readers, but it does reassure me that at least some people get value from what I’m trying to do.

But what I love about reader responses is what they tell me about myself. As I’ve said elsewhere, I believe writing to be a partnership between the reader and the writer. A friend who is a movie critic once told me that it’s the job of the critic to tell the artist what they are doing – that it’s actually the critic (or audience), for example, that decides whether a movie is sad, or inspiring.

So when I get responses to my question “Is there anything you would like me to know?” with things like “I love reading your newsletter because it calms my anxiety” or “You are like a Southern Bob Ross” or “I love how calm you are in the face of the tragedies all around us, without ignoring that they are happening”, it tells me something I would have never guessed on my own about what people get from my writing.

Because I don’t really feel calm, or even like I am trying to be calming. I mean, there are a couple of people who ostensibly have things in common with me who are sorta famous on the internet who are very viral, and who are always angry and post click-bait posts designed to provoke a reaction and make you angry at other people. I decided a long time ago that I don’t want readers that badly. So, it is not so much that I’m trying to be calming as much as I’m just trying to not be an asshole.

But knowing that people perceive the project I’m working on to not just be about beauty but also as calming and restorative is useful feedback and lets me know that I am doing things I didn’t know I was doing.

Just like how, when a friend says, “I don’t think you know you are doing it, but you chew with your mouth open, and it’s pretty gross”, you can stop. And once I know I’m doing a thing, and that people like it, I can do more of it.

I’ve been writing nearly daily on this blog for more than four months now – almost 99,000 words since the beginning of November, and during that time, I’ve sorted into a rhythm of sorts. I know that posts about self-care get shared in ways that nothing else I write does, and I know that posts about food are loved and heavily commented on, and I know that people respond well to my posts that are heavy on memories and nostalgia. But I’m not sure yet if the blog has figured out yet what it’s doing.

I mean, I know what I think I’m doing, but like the newsletter example shows – what I think I‘m doing and what people see you as doing can be different things. So, expect an anonymous reader survey soon, because I’d love to know what you think I’m doing.

In Praise of Cabbage

Often when reading a novel, I will find that if the author wants to indicate the smell of poverty, they will mention the smell of cooked cabbage. Like, “The stairway in the tenement smelled of used diapers, cooked cabbage, and despair.”

That’s no reflection on the cabbage, however, as cabbage is no respecter of persons, is filled with vitamins, and will keep in your fridge (or in your cellar) for damn near forever. No, in addition to all the virtues of cabbage, it is also usually inexpensive, which makes it the butt of jokes rather than be celebrated for the heroic vegetable it is, serving to fill in around the edges when the more respected fare is hard to come by.

As a young boy, I ate my share of cooked cabbage, but sadly, I never had any cooked cabbage that tasted good until I was grown. My people tended to, when in doubt, just boil a thing until it surrendered when some things benefit most by gentle encouragement instead of a full-on assault. They would make up for this by pouring the potlikker in the bottom of the pot – the vitamin laden broth left after the cabbage had been eaten – over cornbread, which was always the best part of the meal, the cabbage having been cooked until it dissolved, like the dreams we had of a meal with texture.

But done right, stewed cabbage is a delight, and there is virtually no likker to be had because we didn’t soak away all the vitamins. If it’s a weeknight and you don’t know what to use for a side dish, this is perfect. It takes about 25 minutes, from start to back, and if you add some bacon, you can make it a main dish instead. I think it’s even good enough to serve as a side at a celebration, like Thanksgiving.

If stewed cabbage is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

What you will need for this are a head of white (as opposed to red) cabbage, a big skillet, three tablespoons of some cooking fat – bacon grease is traditional, but butter is OK too, and I like to mix them both, half and half, each bringing qualities of which the other is shy – some salt, some sugar, and some water.

Turn the heat on medium under your skillet, and put your fat in it to melt. I’m going to assume you paid attention and are using one and a half tablespoons each of both butter and bacon grease, but you do you. Unless you doing you involves olive oil, in which case, just … no. There are things for which olive oil is wonderful, but this is not one of them.

While your fat’s melting, quarter your head of cabbage, cut out the stem, and then cut the rest of it into “steaks”, top to bottom (like, from pole to pole of the cabbage head) about an inch and a half thick. Then cut the steaks into chunks about 2×2, and then put the chunks in the hot fat. Don’t shred your cabbage – this ain’t slaw. You want chunks. It may fall apart a bit, which is fine, but don’t encourage it any. I mean, you fall apart, and we do you the kindness of not mentioning it, so return the favor here.

Sprinkle a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt over the top of the cabbage chunks. You want to give the cabbage a minute or two in the hot fat, so the leaves will begin to brown and caramelize – take your spatula and move it about a bit to keep it from sticking. When you see edges beginning to brown slightly, add a cup of water (slowly), and then allow the water to cook down over medium heat until the water is mostly gone, the house smells amazing, and the cabbage is tender when you stab it, but the chunks are still mostly intact – which on my stove takes about 20 minutes.

Some of you will want to cook this longer. I understand this, but you’re wrong. It won’t be improved by turning it into mush. I am in favor, however, of starting this dish by frying up three slices of bacon, then dicing the cooked bacon into bits, and using that bacon grease plus another tablespoon or two of butter as the fat and then proceed from there, using the bacon bits as a garnish when you are done.

Some of you will think this can be improved by reducing the fat down to only one tablespoon, making it less fattening. It may be less fattening that way, but it won’t taste better. And in all honesty, two tablespoons of butter has 200 calories, which when divided by the four serving this makes, means you saved 50 calories a serving, but managed to turn something delicious into something your kids will make fun of you for making.