Hugh Hollowell

For our neighborhood grocery stores.

On the 29th day, I’m grateful we live near great grocery stores, and I’m able to afford to buy the food we need.

In 1958, when my dad was 7 years old, his dad died, leaving my grandmother, a 47-year-old woman who had outlived two husbands, in charge of a house, 40 acres, a 7-year-old boy, and with no skills that were deemed valuable by the marketplace. She couldn’t even drive a car when he died.

She went to work at the small grocery store a mile from her house, and from the land I grew up on. She would walk to work every day and would work many, many hours for a dollar an hour so she could afford to provide for her and her boy.

The store owners went to our church, and so they were accommodating, within reason. Dad would hang out at the store after he got home from school. He was pretty much raised in the aisles of that corner store.

My earliest memory of commerce was in that store, of Dad picking me up so I could reach the counter, and putting sweaty pennies on the counter and being given brilliantly colored penny candy from the jar on the counter in exchange.

Another memory was after my grandmother had died. Mom was buying groceries there, and I must have been 6 or so, because my brother who is five years younger than me was there, and she was carrying him on her hip. I remember we bought some bologna, because the store owner sliced us some out of the deli case, and watching him do that was always my favorite part of the trip.

Mom put her pile of groceries on the counter. He rang it up. I don’t know exactly what happened next – somehow, she didn’t have any money. I am unsure if we were out of money (totally believable at that point in our lives) or she had just forgotten her wallet, but she asked him if she could put it on credit and Dad would settle up with him later. Either way, he said yes, and Mom signed the receipt, and we loaded the groceries in the car. Of course, I was watching everything.

When we got in the car, I said, “When I grow up, I’m always going to buy my groceries on credit!”

“Why?” Mom asked.

“Because then you get the groceries and don’t have to give them any money!”

That was when they explained debt to me, and that it was a thing to be avoided.

Anyway, that corner was the closest groceries to our house when I was growing up, and the store there closed at 7PM every night.

The next step beyond that was “in town”, – town having 800 people and a Big Star grocery store in it. The Big Star closed at 8PM during the week, at 9PM on Friday and Saturday, and 6PM on Sunday. If you wanted groceries after that, it was 30 minutes away and across the state line in Tennessee.

In other words, buying groceries for us required some planning.

I will never forget my first apartment in Memphis, where I lived a block away from a 24-hour grocery store. It spoilt me. Just imagine: Waking up at 4AM craving ice cream, and you can have a carton of ice cream in your hands in 10 minutes, including putting on pants.

Professionally, a lot of my work these days is around working to make sure that people have access to healthy, nutritious food in a way they can afford. Having access to good food you can afford is critical to being able to thrive in all sorts of ways.

We are incredibly fortunate on the side of town where we live. I am within walking distance of both a Whole Foods and a locally owned grocery store the size of the Big Star of my childhood, and there is a 24 hour Kroger just a little bit further. For large purchases, there is a Costco and a Walmart Supercenter in the suburbs, within easy reach.

We are also fortunate that we can afford the groceries we need. We are simple people with simple tastes, but we have never went hungry and have a pantry full of food, and plenty of friends to share it with. And I have never in my life had to buy groceries on credit.

Friends from other religions

On the 19th day, I am grateful for friends who practice other religions and traditions, and what I have learned from them.

The main street of our small town was called Church Street, and on it were the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Methodist Church. Literally everyone I knew growing up fit into one of those three categories, and the churches coordinated things like revivals and potlucks so they did not conflict on the calendar. Most of us kids would go to Vacation Bible School at at least two of the three churches each summer. When I was in high school, there was a Pentecostal church that opened up on the town square in the old hardware store. We thought them nice but strange.

Once, in the spirit of ecumenism, our youth group invited someone from the Pentecostal church to come and talk to us, to explain their ways to us, so we could know them better. They sent a man who had to be 70 years old, in a jet black suit and steel grey hair done in a pompadour with a lot of product in it, to talk to us. His large print King James Bible was the size of a small briefcase, and to his credit, he seemed as uncomfortable with the whole setup as we did. That said, it went well until he told us that speaking in tongues in his church was mandatory, as it was THE evidence of the Holy Spirit being in your life.

A heavily made up 17-year-old girl we will call Laura interrupted him.

“What do you mean,” she asked. “You mean, if we don’t speak in tongues, we are going to hell?”

He hemmed and hawed and finally, admitted that, yes, his understanding was that if she died having never spoken in tongues, she would go to hell forever.

She laughed out loud.

“All I’m saying is, given the things I’ve done, if that is what I end up in Hell for, I’m gonna be really disappointed.”

It went South after that.

In any event, my religious world was small. The first Catholic and the first Jew I ever met was when I was in the Marines. Oh, I had read heavily about other religions, but that was very different from knowing people who practiced them. And like so many of the gifts in my life, the real value came in the relationships.

In college I hung out with the Judaic Studies folks, and briefly dated a Jewish woman until she ended up with the Jews for Jesus crowd and her father blamed me for it. (I was blameless, but it was no use). I lived for a while down the street from a Buddhist temple, and my friends and I would walk over some nights after work and hang out with the monks.

Like many people in the twenties do, I began to explore other religions. Zen Buddhism was pretty attractive to me, and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t influenced initially by the movie The Highlander. But being me, I read heavily and found and met Buddhists and went to Dharma talks. Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of Engaged Buddhism made a lot of sense to me: The world is filled with suffering, AND we should work to reduce that suffering.

I was convinced I should be a Buddhist, but a Buddhist told me that everything I was looking for was already in Christianity, and it was my native tongue, so to speak.

“If you convert, you will always be trying to translate what you know as a Christian into Buddhism. But you don’t need to convert – the path is already there for you in Christianity.”

He then gave me a reading list of Christian authors I should read – Thomas Merton and Allan Watts figured heavily on the list, as did Martin Luther King and Walker Percy. So, I’m still a Christian because of the Buddhists.

As a Christian, I grew up thinking we were right and everyone else was wrong. But these days, I am the first to tell you that we have, over the years, gotten a lot of things wrong. I think that would be pretty hard to argue with. So I don’t understand Christians who don’t approach things like other religions with humility.

The more I study other traditions and meet people who practice them, the more I am convinced that Buddhist knew what he was talking about when he called Christianity my native tongue. I grew up to working class parents in rural Mississippi – of course I would be Methodist, or at least low-church Protestant. Had I grown up in Rome, Italy, I would have been Catholic. Had I been born in India, I would have been Hindu, and in Greece, Eastern Orthodox. So much of it was and is cultural.

All religions seek to answer questions its adherents have. As an Evangelical youth, my question was, “How do I make God not be mad at me?”

Our entire salvation theology made perfect sense if the goal was to make God forgive you.

But that’s no longer my question, because I don’t think God is angry at me.

My main questions these days are things like, “How can I find healing for the ways in which I am broken? How can I help heal the world?”

Those are not explicitly Christian questions. And they do not need explicitly Christian answers.

These days, I have close friends who are witches. Jews. Druids. Atheists. Agnostics. Neopagans. Roman Catholics. Every flavor of Protestantism. Greek Orthodox. Muslim. Sikh. And I learn from them all, and am in awe of the ways in which they make the world more beautiful by their practice of their tradition.

I won’t pretend we all have the same answers, and I won’t pretend there are not areas of disagreement on various points of both practice and doctrine. But in my quest to build a good life and a better world they have been invaluable, and I am grateful for them and the ways they have shaped my life, my thinking, and my world.

Moving back to Mississippi.

On the 18^th day, I’m grateful I got the chance to move back to Mississippi.

I’m the one who left. That’s how I once overheard my parents describe me to someone – of their three kids, I’m the one who left. I graduated high school, joined the Marines, and then after that moved to Memphis, one hour and a million miles away from home. After a dozen years there, I moved 12 hours away to Raleigh, NC. And I lived there another 12 years.

My youngest brother lives next door to Mom. My middle brother lives perhaps 15 minutes away from her. See? I’m the one who left.

I blame the books. At an early age, I hunted a murderer in the alleys of Paris with Dupin, outwitted blackmailers in London with Sherlock Holmes, stole from pirates with Travis McGee in Florida, hunted whales with Ishmael in Nantucket, boxed with Spenser in Boston, sailed the Nile with Hercule Poirot, and cracked wise in LA with Phillip Marlowe. It was a big, bold world out there, and the 800-person town we lived 10 miles away from seemed isolated and provincial by comparison.

In those books, I was exposed to not just different geography, but different ideas and different kinds of people. People who knew what wine to drink with what food. People who liked art, and understood it. People who were shameless womanizers, and people who were feminists. People who hated the church, people who were witches, who were Muslim, who were Catholic.

I dreamed big, and yes, there were even more things in heaven and earth, it turns out, than were dreamt of on my philosophy. I left home in June, a few weeks after High School graduation. Over the next 28 years, I would be, at various times, a Marine, a college student, a warehouse worker, a salesperson, a husband, a financial advisor, an ex-husband, a bookstore owner, a resident of North Carolina, a husband again, a pastor, director of two different nonprofits, a homeowner, and, lastly, someone who came to miss his people.

It didn’t happen all at once. In my twenties and thirties, I built an identity of being “from” Mississippi, and even famously said Mississippi was the sort of place it was good to be from. I would say things like I was in exile from Mississippi, happy to portray myself as the enlightened one who left – implying, even if I did not outright state – my intellectual superiority.

I traveled to amazing places, and I met amazing people. I befriended bestselling authors, Hollywood directors, rappers, bluegrass musicians, chefs, jewelers, politicians, lobbyists, preachers, monks, surgeons, and collectors of everything from 15^th century prayer books to classic Corvettes.

The first shift was in 2010. I came home for my 20^th High School reunion, but it wasn’t the reunion that did it. It was the cemetery. The small church we attended when I was a child had a cemetery across the road from the church itself. The Saturday morning after the reunion I got up early and went to the cemetery. I walked up and down the rows of granite, seeing names I knew as well as my own, along with several generations of my name, too.

I had a thought, walking through that cemetery I had never before contemplated: If I had children, they would never know any place in the same way I knew that place. I had far more in common with every single person buried in that field than I did any person I had met in my travels.

The next step was in October of 2015. It was our anniversary, and just three months before, Renee had been the recipient of a heart transplant, which should, all things being equal, give her a normal life expectancy and a huge quality of life increase. Suddenly, our options for the future seemed wide open. And for the first time in more than two decades, I considered what it would be like to move back home.

In the winter of 2016/2017, the fractures in our nation came to a head following the Presidential election. After a decade of working to teach Christians how to love their homeless neighbor, I was feeling more and more that the hardest person for people to love was not the homeless man at the intersection, but the person from a different political party. Discourse seemed impossible, and white supremacy seemed unleashed. It all felt very familiar.

White supremacy was not some novel idea I learned about after my book club read Ta-Nehisi Coates. No, I was “borned to it”, as Huck Finn liked to say about his sinful nature. It was the water in which I was raised, and to all appearances, the natural order of things. And one of the reasons I left. Going back would mean confronting that, and fighting that.

In the spring of 2017, I was in my backyard, planting flowers under my Japanese maple when Mom called to tell me Dad had had a “cardiac event” earlier that week. He was fine, and more than a little pissed she called to tell me. After I got off the phone, I sat on the porch, looking out over our front yard and thinking how, if something bad happened, I was 12 hours away. I went inside to talk to Renee.

We had a couple of problems: I needed to do meaningful work; Renee needed quality transplant aftercare; neither of us had any desire to live a rural life and every bit of ministry experience I had was urban.

A few minutes with Google told us that Jackson had a world class transplant center with transplant aftercare for people like her. There was a small multi-racial Mennonite church that had been born in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement that wanted to make an impact beyond their building. Gentrification had driven the value of our house in North Carolina upward, and the cost of living was such in Jackson that we could buy a house there that was much nicer than we were used to.

In June we came to Jackson for a week to look around. I met with some people here to learn about what needed doing. And we began to make plans.

Three years ago, I moved home to Mississippi. Because, as James Baldwin told us, not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. And it was time for me to face up to the forces and people who shaped me.

Things being raised evangelical gave me

On the 17^th day, I’m really grateful for some of the gifts that being raised as an Evangelical gave me, even if I no longer find myself in that camp.

I want to be real clear here – the evangelical church has harmed people. Heck, it has harmed me. But I’m still grateful for some things I got there that I have held on to.

The evangelical church taught me to study and revere the Bible. In Vacation Bible School as a young child, we would do Bible drills – where we all stood in a row with our Bibles in our hands, and then a verse would be called out – “Isaiah 53:5!” and there would be a mad rush to be the first person to find the scripture in question, and then to shout it out at the top of your lungs.

“BUT HE WAS WOUNDED FOR OUR TRANSGRESSIONS, HE WAS BRUISED FOR OUR INIQUITIES: THE CHASTISEMENT OF OUR PEACE WAS UPON HIM; AND WITH HIS STRIPES WE ARE HEALED!”

And if it was you that called out the verse first. you got a point, and whoever had the most points won. I won a lot. I memorized all the books of the Bible in first grade. I learned to memorize scripture. I can still recall vast portions of the New Testament and Psalms in the King James English of my childhood.

They taught me to take the Bible literally, and I no longer do that. But I do take it very seriously, and they taught me to savor its stories, to embrace its rhythms, to believe that the will of God could be discerned through stories, and to turn to memorized stories and poems for comfort. I’m grateful for all of that.

And they taught me to pray. Prayer was a real thing to them – not a meditative retreat, but an actual conversation with God. Sometimes it was pleading, sometimes it was devotion, and sometimes it was anger and even screaming. But the real presence of God in hearing our prayers was never in doubt.

We distrusted “written prayers”, as prayer was to be a spontaneous outpouring of our hearts, with never a doubt that God wanted our raw emotions and pleadings. There was a sense in which we believed we could change God’s mind – that “the fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” – and that prayer, as they say, changed things.

While I no longer hold that same view of prayer, I learned intimacy with God in that setting, grew up believing I could talk to God as a parent, and that what I wanted mattered to God. I’m grateful for all of that, too.

But the main gift Evangelicalism gave me was the belief that people can change, and that I not only can, but should play a role in their changing.

Changing people was all we talked about, and we took it very seriously. We learned how to tell our friends about what we believed. We learned what objections they would have and how to overcome them. We went to camps, retreats, and lectures to learn how to do it. We prayed hard for people to change. We raised money to fund programs to get people to change. We would work hard to get into situations where we would be the only people who believed what we believed, full of the confidence that God would use us to accomplish God’s purpose.

While what I want people to believe has changed, and what I believe has changed, my belief that others can be changed has not diminished. Nor has my belief that I can be part of that change.

I work hard to tell my friends what I believe – any 3-day search of my Facebook timeline would make that abundantly clear. I’m not hiding my beliefs under a bushel, no sir-ee. And I’m always ready to “give an answer to everyone who asks” me to explain the reason for the hope that I have, and to do it with gentleness and respect.

I no longer believe that people will go to Hell if they do not accept Jesus as their savior. But I do believe that if the racist, the greedy, the powerful, the ego driven and the rest do not change, they will bring hell down upon themselves and others, including more vulnerable people. And I believe that the God who heard the cry of the oppressed in Egypt and raised Moses up to liberate them still hears the cry of the oppressed, and still lifts up people to liberate them.

I fight hard to be in rooms with people who disagree with me – not out of some mealy-mouthed idea of tolerance, as I refuse to tolerate hate, homophobia, or racism – but because I want to convert people who are racist, homophobic, hateful, and bigoted into people who are not those things.

I pray fervently for people who disagree with me on climate change, vaccine science, LGBT issues, and more, to change just as we used to pray for people to come to church. I study the positions of the anti-vaxers and the homophobic so I can counter them, in much the same way I used to study other religions so I could convert their adherents to our side.

I believe people can change. I believe we can help them change. I believe nobody is beyond saving, is worth giving up on. I believe we can change the world.

I learned that in the Evangelical church. And I’m grateful for that.

Confidence and Curiosity

On the 16^th day, I ‘m grateful for confidence and curiosity.

Let me explain.

As I said on day 12, my dad could do anything. Build a house, wire a lamp, fix an air conditioner, network your printer, rebuild an engine.

I inherited none of those skills.

At least, that is what everyone said when I was growing up.

I had poor hand to eye coordination, for one thing. And I would have much rather been alone in my room with a book than outside building something – mostly because I was uncoordinated and I hated being bad at a thing he was good at, and I was very good at reading books.

My younger brothers both loved working outside with him, and loved the tools and the dirt and the grime and all of it. I did not. So the story developed that I was the nerdy son and my brothers were the useful sons.

I want to be really clear that I was never put down or chastised for not being into what he was into – I was given a lot of room to be me, and I was accepted for being me. If I was the nerdy bookworm kid, he was OK with that. Which is its own sort of gift.

But over time, my hand to eye coordination got better. And my interests changed. And I became responsible for the maintenance of cars, and then a house, and because I had grown up watching Dad fix the alternator when it went out, I knew it was the sort of thing that could be done in your driveway with not many tools. So you look it up on YouTube and you buy the tools and Hey Presto, you just changed an alternator.

I think the biggest gift was not learning how to do things from him – because I didn’t – but learning that a lot of the things other people pay people to do are actually doable by a normal person. A lot of what passes for DIY skill is actually just confidence. I’m not always confident in my skills, but I’m confident that I can do it, or learn how to do it.

Because I learned that most things are not specialties that require arcane knowledge. Most things are learnable skills, and in fact, most things are actually just a discrete series of steps, and when people say they don’t know how to do a thing, what the really mean is, they don’t know the steps.

For example, if you have never replaced a toilet, it can seem overwhelming. But really, it’s super simple. It’s actually less about knowing how and more about being confident you can figure it out. Because nobody is born with toilet replacement knowledge. But if you believe you can learn how to do it, you just need to find out what steps are involved.

And most common tasks can be done with about 20 tools. Then you just fill in around the edges as you need them.

And so, because I came to believe I too could be handy, could fix things, could build things, I did. Over the years I have built several different kinds of fences, put a metal roof on a house, gutted and remodeled a kitchen, put down multiple types of flooring, sanded hardwood floors, painted, wired outlets and circuits, built tons of bookshelves, built 5 different chicken coops, built a hell of a workshop, rebuilt a transmission, built walls, torn down walls, hung doors and windows, replaced alternators and radiators and water pumps and built decks and sheds and lots, lots more. Not because I knew how, but because I believed I could learn how.

I really wish I could have had stories about learning those things from Dad. It was a part of out life we did not share, and a way I was unlike him, this man I resemble in so many ways. But he did give me confidence and curiosity, and those were by far the bigger gift, and they led to all the rest.

My neighborhood

On the 15th day, I’m thankful for my neighborhood.

I love my neighborhood.

In fact, we really bought our neighborhood, and they threw the house in.

Each day I go for a walk through our neighborhood. The walk started as a distraction for the foster son we had living with us at the time, and has since become a sort of spiritual practice for me. I love walking the same path each day, knowing it will take between 40 and 43 minutes, depending on a traffic light or two.

But other times I am distracted by neighbors in their yards, and the pace suffers as the relationships increase. I will always take the time to have a conversation, to listen to a story, to hear their concerns or hopes. I spent most of my life thinking I had to avoid interruptions in order to do my work, until it occurred to me that my real work – the work of being human – was actually found in the interruptions themselves.

I pass by heavily wooded lots, hear the children playing at the elementary school, after rains hear the rushing water in the creek and the occasional speeder on the interstate. I see lots of neighbors walking, and a few running. I do notice that all the walkers are smiling and the runners are scowling, and this confirms for me that I am no longer a runner.

Jackson is a storied place – I live but perhaps ten minutes from the homes of both Medgar Evers and Eudora Welty (albeit in different directions). The only openly affirming United Methodist Church is a 3-minute walk from our home, and I pass by the houses where both a former Governor and the author Willie Morris used to live every day on my journey along what Morris called Purple Crane Creek.

We live within walking distance of 2 grocery stores, 3 gas stations, an independent bookstore, and a bakery. We are a 5-minute drive away from a larger grocery store, 10 minutes away from a Home Depot and a Target. The Elementary school is a block away from our house, and the Magnet Elementary school is also a 5-minute drive.

My neighborhood is diverse – of the 5 lots that touch mine, they are all people of color. My street has retired preachers, college professors, social workers, retired military people, salespeople, a psychiatrist, and whatever I am. I am one block away from mansions, and one block away from 900 square foot cottages.

Our neighborhood has block parties, a Fourth of July parade, a holiday party and loves Halloween and kids.

I remember when we were looking at houses, Renee strongly advocated for houses in this neighborhood, even though the houses here were slightly more expensive.

“That place (where we now live) feels like a neighborhood. The other places we looked at feel like just some people who live next to each other.”

And that sums it up nicely. We love this neighborhood because it feels like a neighborhood, not just a place where some people happen to live next to each other.

My health

On the 14^th day, I’m grateful for my health.

That sounds cliché, but it’s true. I have been incredibly fortunate.

My wife has been hospitalized overnight more than a dozen times in the last 12 years, the longest for 10 days when she received a heart transplant. I am intimately familiar with the American healthcare system, but fortunately, only as a spectator and not a participant.

I’ve had one broken bone my entire life. Since 18 months of age and I survived all that drama (See day 10 for more on that), I have not been admitted to a hospital. I pretty much haven’t had anything wrong with me more serious than a sinus infection in decades.

I got into prediabetes and prehypertension ranges when I was at my heaviest, but those problems went away when I lost weight.

I get migraines when the weather gets damp and heavy. MSG gives me severe headaches. (Yes, I know it’s the MSG, and yes I know about that study you want to link to that says it’s all in my head, but I assure you I do.) The hinge joint in my hips gets really stiff when I sit for too long, and when I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, my feet are super stiff.

But really? I feel great.

What about your depression?

I live with clinical depression, and will until I die. It’s just part of who I am, like being right handed is part of who I am, or having pale blue eyes. I’ve struggled with depression my whole life. I have dealt with suicidal ideation my whole life. The perfect storm of suicidal ideation and depression almost killed me twice – the most recent was in 2018, which led to my decision to go back on mental health meds for a time.

The thing is, if I didn’t talk about it, you wouldn’t know it. I can pass most of the time as neurotypical. That is part of the hell of the form of the disease I have – you would never know. Which is why it’s important that I talk about it.

In a lot of circles – including many spiritual circles – mental health is disregarded or looked down upon at best, and blamed on spiritual issues or “sin” at worst.

Here is the thing: If you have depression, you are just sick, and sometimes sick people need medication to get better. Sometimes medication just gets us back to where we can take care of ourselves (like antibiotics) and sometimes it is required the rest of our lives in order for us to stay alive (like insulin).

I try really hard to be open and transparent about my mental health stuff, even though I am fully aware that things I have alluded to in this post (such as past suicidal ideation) could be used (illegally, but still) against me in future hiring decisions.

But every time I write something like this, people reach out to me and tell me they aren’t OK either, and they had no one to tell.

There is no shame in getting help if you need it. There is no shame in saying you are not OK. There is no shame in being depressed. And the more we are honest about the ways we struggle, the less shame there is, period.

As an aside: I’m not including my ADHD as an “illness”, because I don’t see it as an illness. (again, see Day 10).

Technology

On the 13^th day, I’m grateful for technology, and the way it makes my life possible.

When I was 16, my dad bought a computer.

It needed a floppy drive to boot up. The hard drive was non-existent. The font was green and the screen was black. It was an “IBM Clone.” Dad was always a gadget guy, and he had been reading about this stuff for a while, and his friend Milton had gotten one the year before, so it was just a matter of time, really.

Dad was on the Bulletin Boards, and the modem in those days was a thing you set the receiver of your phone into. If someone else in the house picked up an extension, you got kicked off the modem. And the bulletin boards were all long-distance to call. I was not interested in any of this at all.

Thirty-three years later, it is such a different world as to be unrecognizable. I have not used a modem in over a decade. I’m typing this on a laptop that has more memory than many universities would have had access to in the mid-eighties. My cell phone has more communications capabilities than Bill Clinton would have had access to when he was President.

This afternoon, I watched a wedding happen in Georgia. I was in Mississippi, in my office. Just 30 minutes before, I was video chatting with the bride and groom.

This morning, I went to a Native Plant sale. I learned about the sale via social media. I downloaded a list of the plants they would for sale have from the internet, and then I printed it off on my printer. I paid for my plants using a cashless transfer using a debit card and their cell phone, and the money was instantly available to them.

Last night, I held a meet and greet for my Patrons. I used Zoom, and thus never left my house, and none of them left theirs. People as far apart as Montana, New Mexico, and New York all interacted, saw each other, and got to know each other without leaving their house, in real time, and used tools available to virtually anyone.

Last night, I wrote a 1200-word essay about my workshop and published it. It was immediately available to more than three billion people, and I used the exact same tools to do it that the New York Times uses, and that any high school child has access to.

Nothing that I do professionally existed 30 years ago, especially in this pandemic year.

The sheer amount of information I have access to – for free! – is staggering, and would have been beyond the comprehension of any person in 1985.

What a time to be alive.

My workshop

On the 12th day, I’m grateful for my workshop.

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my dad’s Aunt, Louise. Her husband, Lonnie, had died right before I was born, and so he was someone whose shadow loomed large in my childhood, but who I never met.

Uncle Lonnie was Louise’s second husband (y’all gonna make me devote a whole one of these to her before I’m done), after she divorced the drunk sign painter. Lonnie worked for Ford Motor company as a machinist, and had a good union job with benefits, but the thing that made him remarkable was that he was also a mechanical genius.

I don’t say that lightly – there were cars in the 60’s that rolled off Ford’s assembly line due to his patents (well, that Ford owned, that whole work for hire thing, you know). He wired the houses of pretty much everyone I knew growing up. He could plumb, do electrical, weld, build with brick, concrete or wood – he could do it all.

He had a workshop behind their house – a small 10×16 or so shed he had built, with his tools lined up above his workbench, a drill press and a lathe on the other side. And Aunt Louise told me that when he got home, he would eat supper, and then he would go out to his shop and work.

As a ten-year-old boy, I would go out to his shop when I would stay over at her house. It was dusty, having not been used since he died. The tools were gone, but the racks were still there, and so was his workbench. The lights he had wired still worked, and the fixtures he manufactured out of pickle jars still did what he had intended. It was a magical place. I would sometimes just sit there on a milk crate, soaking it in. I have, as an adult, been in gothic cathedrals and felt some of the same feeling, like I was in the presence of some higher intelligence just out of my reach.

Uncle Lonnie was the dominant man in my dad’s life after my grandfather died when Dad was 7.

My dad was a tinkerer – an inch thick but a mile wide when it came to skills. He could rebuild your engine, wire your house, fix your radio, cut down your tree, repair your air conditioner, weld a trailer, build a house. He wasn’t amazing at any of that, but he could do them all, and perhaps most importantly, he wasn’t afraid to try something he hadn’t done before.

He told me once that it had all started when he was 8 or so – his father had passed away the year before, and his mom was working at the grocery store on the corner for a dollar an hour – money was hard to come by, and there was none for frivolities. A lady at the church had a bike her daughter no longer used, and was going to throw it out – Dad took it and he and Lonnie rebuilt it.

“It was a girl’s bike, and it was in bad shape when I got it. But I didn’t have anything to lose, so I figured out how it worked, and then I asked him for help, and we fixed it. It was having that bike or have no bike, so I was motivated,” he told me once.

But Dad never had a workshop when I lived at home. We lived in a 1,000 sf home, the five of us, and there wasn’t room for things like that. And there wasn’t any money for things like that, either.

So, his projects would live on the kitchen table, or on the porch, or on the tailgate of his truck as an impromptu workbench. But he really wanted a workshop.

A few years before he died, he finally built one. He knew retirement was coming up, and he planned endlessly for what life was going to be like after he retired. He would build furniture, he would do blacksmithing – he had hundreds of pictures of pieces of furniture he saw out in the wild that he wanted to capture because he liked the way it was shaped, or fastened or was built.

But the shop just filled up with things – projects he intended to work on in retirement – tools he got on clearance he would need in retirement – bargains on materials he would need in retirement.

My Dad was supposed to retire in June, but then the pandemic hit and he didn’t feel he could ethically leave his job as Emergency Management Director for his county at such a bad time. He died in October, from COVID.

He never got to retire, never got to build things in his shop, never got to while away an afternoon there, never got to actually use it, in any real sense of the word. His shop is nice, and a lot of thought went into it, but it doesn’t feel like anything to be in it, because he didn’t get to really make it his. It’s just a building he built.

After Dad died, I inherited some of his tools. Like Dad, I have always wanted a workshop. I always have projects going, and tools scattered everywhere and…

Then we bought a house. And a pandemic hit. And my Dad died having never used the workshop he longed for and looked forward to.

So this spring and summer, I built a workshop.

It’s small – 10×16. But I mostly use handtools, and I don’t use it for things that aren’t a workshop (like, this isn’t where the freezer or the bikes go), and so it works for me. I also like to tinker, but mostly I’m a woodcarver and small wood furniture maker, and for that it works perfectly.

In some ways it’s nicer than either Dad’s or Lonnie’s. It’s insulated, and I have a window unit air conditioner in it, and led lights and Wi-Fi and clerestory windows and a small TV and an Alexa for music. I really wish Dad could have seen it.

Mostly, I’m glad I get to use it while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. I’m glad I get to actually use it, get joy from it, and get to have a creative workspace that I don’t have to clean up when we need to set the table, a space that is mine to shape and be shaped by.

It’s not perfect yet, and in some ways is still unfinished. But most evenings after supper, I go out to the shop and work.

Why I Stay in the South

I am a child of the Southland. I love it here, and I grew up here, in a childhood filled with honeysuckle, sweet tea, fishing, lightning bugs and church potlucks.

The earliest memories I have involve table fellowship with other folks, of lessons drummed into my head about hospitality and being told to “remember who I was”. I have vivid memories of elderly, blue haired ladies telling me they knew my grandma (who died when I was very young) and my daddy and that they knew I had been “raised right”.

In the South I grew up in, I was taught we had to take care of each other, because none of us had much. So my Daddy would miss supper sometimes, because after working more than 10 hours that day crawling under houses in a shirt with his name on it for barely over minimum wage, he would go straight to the volunteer fire department to get trained on some new piece of firefighting equipment. Because of this, I learned that love – for a place or a person – can’t be divorced from responsibility.

I learned that the things that make for a good life involve other people – the people who bring you a casserole when you are sick, the rounds you make at Christmas, as you take tins of fudge to old ladies who would wipe the snuff off their mouth and say with amazement, “I’ll swan…” as they bit into that creamy goodness. The neighbor who knows your daddy is sick, and comes down and cuts the grass and stacks the firewood for your family.

My grandmother’s sister Louise – my great-aunt — was a fierce lady. Born in 1907, she had been divorced in the 1930’s, when that was rare. She told me her first husband was a drunk, and “damned if I was gonna do all the work and watch him drink”. She told me that she might go to hell for it, but she had been in hell for the years she had been married to him, so she knew how to live there. She refused to take the Lord’s Supper at church, because “I am lots of things, Hugh, but none of those things is a hypocrite.”

In a small brick church that had my granddaddy’s name on the cornerstone, I learned about Jesus, who told us to love each other, and who had long hair, but that was OK, because he was God and, most important, he didn’t live in my daddy’s house. God was the Father, and demanded obedience – which made sense to me, as my own father demanded obedience. I figured Jesus had been told, ‘Because I said so!” any number of times as a kid.

But more than theology, in that small church I learned about community, about being a part of some people who would cut the articles about you out of the local paper when you won the spelling bee and put them on their refrigerator and pray for you every night. About casseroles when you’re sick, about not noticing Mr. Hayes sang off-key, about celebrating small victories and going to every funeral.

I learned other things too. I learned that we were poor, but proud, and that we were expected to work hard, but that didn’t mean we had to like it. But I also learned that some people would look at your Black friend’s hard work and tell you he was “a credit to his race”. And that would confuse you, but not as much as trying to understand why he wasn’t allowed to spend the night at your house.

As I grew older, I learned that complicated lesson that the very people who taught me to love can be, themselves, unloving to others. That the people who taught me to be hospitable can themselves be inhospitable. It means coming to terms with the knowledge that the people who loved me into being are flawed, and fall short often of the ideals they gave me.

Being a child of the Southland means feeling things fiercely, and so I learned that you stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves, and I learned that I had responsibilities to my community. That I learned to draw the circle of community larger than my people did is not my fault but theirs, and was somewhat inevitable: After all, they are the ones who taught me that “red and yellow, black and white – they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

They taught me that, and I believed them.

Being in and of the South while being a progressive white straight male means your liberal educated friends from North of here will watch how your state votes and will call your friends and family things like “inbred” and ‘hillbillies” and “white trash” and ask you how you stay there.

And sometimes, when you have the energy and the notion, you tell them those people are some of the kindest, best people you know, but folks in power have made them afraid in order to maintain power. That your people have been played and told that their diminishing paychecks and their insecurity and their inability to keep the land their granddaddy farmed and got 49 harvests from – that all of that is the fault not of the people who are in power, but of people who have black and brown skin and less power than even they do. And your people believe it, because scared people will believe anything that will make them less scared.

And sometimes, when you have the energy and the notion, you tell your friends from elsewhere that you stay because you love it here, and that you are not just from here but of here, and your roots run deep here, and one day you will be buried here amongst your ancestors. And that for them to ask why you don’t leave means that you are supposed to believe that there is a separation between the values you learned as a child and the values you have now, when the reality is, the person you are now is just the person you were taught to be then, only writ larger.

And for them to suggest you leave is to suggest that you cannot be the person who longs for table fellowship and church meetings and the smell of cape jasmine and the delight of sweet tea and cornbread and also be the person who fights for justice for your community and who yearns for the day we can all sit at the same table and eat cornbread and sweet tea together.

And that is not true.

Because the truth isn’t that I can be all of who I am and also be Southern – it’s that I am all of who I am because I am Southern. And to suggest I move and give up on this place and these people is to suggest I deny all of that, and that I deny them. And that I cannot do. I will not do.

Because I am lots of things – but none of those things is a hypocrite.