Hugh Hollowell

Dr. Jabbour

On the tenth day, I am grateful to Doctor Jabbour.

When I was 18 months old, I had viral spinal meningitis. It was bad – I was in a coma for two weeks. The doctors really didn’t have any good news for my parents, and at one point told Mom to expect the worst. They had done everything they knew to do.

There was one doctor, a specialist they had called in, who said he had an experimental treatment option – mom and dad had to sign papers. The end result was that I came out of the coma, but not before my hearty stopped and I quit breathing for several minutes and sustained some brain damage.

I had to learn to talk again. I was way behind on everything, and my motor skills were crap. I had seizures pretty regularly until I was 10 or so. My hand and eye stuff didn’t sort itself out fully until I hit puberty.

In fact, up until puberty, I was sorta a sickly kid. My last seizure was at 13.

The bright side of all of this, however, was Dr. Jabbour.

Dr. Jabbour was a Pediatric Neurologist, and what’s more, he was MY Pediatric Neurologist. I saw him every three months or so until I was 13, and regularly after that until I graduated high school.

Because I had a neurologist, my ADHD was diagnosed and treated at a time when that diagnosis was rare. Because I had THIS neurologist, however, I learned coping mechanisms and he refused to let me use my diagnosis as an excuse.

By the time I hit puberty, most of the seizures were gone, and my EEG scans were near normal, so we spent most of our time working on the ADHD stuff. Mom would take me to the appointment, and then we would talk with her in the room, and then she would leave and he would just talk to me. When the door closed behind her, he would open the top drawer of his desk and pull out a bowl of Peanut M&Ms, a “secret” treat we would both eat while we talked.

The biggest gift Doctor Jabbour gave me was how he reframed my conditions for me. He insisted that I understand that I had a brain that was not broken, but different. I was different, he said, the way left-handed people were different. And just like being left-handed in a world designed for right-handed people was harder, it was going to be harder for me as someone who had a different brain than it would be for everyone else because this world wasn’t built for people who had brains like me.

The key, he told me, was to understand it wouldn’t always be like this.

“Because one day, you will get to make your own world. You can hire someone to do the things that are hard for brains like yours. You will be able to carry a calculator. You will marry someone who likes brains like yours. You will live in a house that works for people with brains like yours. You will be able to organize your work in a way that makes sense to you. And if they won’t let you, you can start your own company and then do it.”

“But before that can happen, you have to get through school. My job is to help you get through school so you can do all of that. Right now, you have to figure out how to live in their world so one day you can build your own world.”

He did. And I did.

A few years ago, it occurred to me what a huge gift Dr. Jabbour had been to me. The more neuro-divergent folks I met, the more I realized just how rare it was for kids with issues to be told they were special, that they could thrive, that they had the ability to create a world that worked for them. So I googled his name, hoping I could find an address or something so I could tell him how much it meant to me. But it turned out he had died the previous year after a long and distinguished career of helping kids like me.

So I never got to tell him. But I really wish I had. But the next best thing is telling every neuro-divergent kid I meet what he told me: You aren’t broken – you’re different. Like being left-handed is different. This world wasn’t built for you. But if you can figure out how to survive long enough to build a world that works for you, everything is possible.

Everything.

Storytelling

On the 9^th day, I’m grateful for being able to tell a story, and to have stories worth telling. Although I have learned that the latter is less important than the former.

I grew up among storytellers.

Like my Aunt Louise, my dad’s aunt, who was a fierce woman, a divorcee who refused the sacraments, who drank Jack Daniels, drunk dialed her friends, packed a pistol in her purse, and made coffee every morning for her dogs.

And she could tell a story.

She died when I was 12, but she must have told me 100 times about how when Dad was a baby and would stay with her, he slept in a drawer in the dresser, because she didn’t have a crib. Her telling of that story took 20 minutes, and I knew exactly how it would end, and I was on the edge of my seat anyway.

Or the time her and her second husband moved to Ohio and had never driven on the 4-lane highway before, so they rode through all of Tennessee on the shoulder of the road, because the sign said for slow traffic to stay to the left.

Or the time my Dad’s older brother yelled at the lady at the table next to them in the restaurant who was slurping her soup, “Hey lady – I hear you like soup!”

I knew all those stories like better kids knew the Bible.

Then there were the retired farmers next door who told me why you plant leafy greens in one phase of the moon, and root vegetables during another. The story I was told when I was standing in the window during the lightning storm about her brother whose cap was knocked off his head when he was struck by lightning.

The preacher who had a sermon illustration about every damn thing, that always started with, “There was a man I knew who…”.

And then there were the stories I had read – because I loved books.

By the time I was 14 or so, my head was filled with stories. Then I discovered stand-up comedy, because I would catch the Tonight Show when I came home from working at the grocery store. And what is stand up, but stories?

In the summer of 1988, I entered a talent contest in Byhalia, MS (population 830) designed to raise money for, I think, the Lions Club. I did a 4-minute bit – my standup debut. It was also the last time I did stand-up. The mic didn’t work, so nobody past the first three rows heard me. One judge, a local celebrity who had been an actor in the original Chorus Line Production on Broadway, told me I was good, but a bit too advanced for Byhalia.

I really was just happy to tell stories that connected with people.

My sophomore year of High School, an English teacher submitted one of my writing assignments into a statewide contest, and I won second place. It was the first time anyone official said I was good with words. I knew I could make people laugh. I knew I could tell you a story. I just hadn’t known the stories would also work if I wrote them down.

I probably wrote 50 short stories in high school after that. Lots of murder stories, vigilante stories, drug dealer stories, hero stories where the protagonist does the right thing, even if it cost him the girl. Often with lines like, “He knew this would end badly, but he had no choice: It was foredestined that he would walk a lonely road.”

I had decided I would be a writer. I write all during my time in the Marines. I kept a journal in BootCamp, thinking I would do an updated version of Biloxi Blues when I got out.

I probably would have been a professional writer if it hadn’t of been for college.

The way it happened was like this: I had gotten a D on a Freshman comp paper, so I went to office hours to talk to the teacher. Let’s call her Ms. Edwards.

“I want to be a writer,” I told her. “It’s all I want to be. And If I can’t do better than a D when I am trying really, really hard, I don’t know what to do about that. Should I just give this dream up? Am I deluding myself? Am I wasting my time?”

She said absolutely nothing encouraging in that meeting. Nothing. Instead, she recommended I “think twice” about “wasting my time” on this “writing dream” and figure out how I am going to make a living.

“I am never going to tell anyone what they can’t do, Hugh. But I think you will be happier if you give up this writing dream. You don’t have it in you to do this, I don’t think. You just don’t have the tools.”

So I did. I didn’t write a goddamn thing for pleasure for 10 more years. Why bother, since I didn’t have it in me to be a writer? If I didn’t have the tools?

In late 2003, a friend was telling me about this new thing he had, called a ‘blog. He had a small following, and he wasn’t even that good of a storyteller.

I can do better than this guy, I thought.

Blogging saved me. Writing for an audience, the immediate feedback, the community of bloggers back in those early days – had it not been for all that, I would never have written another word. Then I read Anne LaMotte, and learned about shitty first drafts, and Stephen King, and learned about rewriting, and Carolyn See, and learned about creating your own magic. And one day, I decided I was a writer, and Ms. Edwards could go to hell.

But here’s the secret: I’m not. Not really. Because inside, I’m not so much a writer as I am a storyteller. Every time I sit down to write, I imagine I am telling one person a story, and I just type out the story. Every word on this page is just how it sounds in my head.

But however it happens, it always feels like magic, and I’m glad I get to do it.

Our cats

On the 8^th day, I’m grateful for my cats.

I debated whether to do this one, but it’s too true not to: I love these damn cats.

First there is Felix, a standard grey tabby, who looks like literally every grey tabby in the world. Except Felix weighed almost 20 pounds at one point, and thinks he is a dog. I mean, seriously – the cat played fetch for crying out loud. If you come to our house, he is so happy to see you – just like a dog would be. He will lay on the floor in front of you and show you his belly. Felix has never met a stranger. He was born in a trailer park in NC to a promiscuous mother who popped out a litter or two every year.

Renee got him the year before we got married – he was our first “joint property”. He almost died as a kitten, and I held him and nursed him with a bottle for weeks and he and I bonded – he is very much my cat. He’s 13 now, and he has lost some weight, and he doesn’t move as fast as he once did. But he will still lay on the floor in the sun and show off his belly, and if we sit down to watch TV, he will crawl in my lap and you would swear he is watching TV too.

Then there was Tony – he was another trailer park kitty, but from another mother, but with a similar story that we got in 2010, the year after we got married. He was a beautiful orange tabby who, it turned out, had the exact same heart disease Renee did. It is apparently very common in cats, and very rare in humans. Tony was very much Renee’s cat, and in the months after her heart transplant, Tony would lay in bed with her, and snuggle next to her.

One night Tony woke us up, screaming. He was flopping on the floor, literally screaming. I’ve never heard anything like it. We took him to the emergency vet, who told us he had a blood clot keeping blood from flowing to his legs, a very common result of his disease. There was nothing we could do but put him down. The drive home at 4 in the morning with the cat you love in a box on your lap, when you had gone to bed with him snuggled beside your feet just a few hours earlier… That was not a good day.

The year before Tony died, we got Puss, a grey Tabby with white socked feet. She was the runt of the litter of kittens that had been born behind a homeless shelter in Raleigh. The mother had been hit by a car, and the kittens were about 4 weeks old. Renee bottle fed Puss, who grew, but disproportionately… she has tiny legs and a regular size body and a tiny head, but with a regular tail. I joke that she is a cat made of spare parts. She has, in recent years, gotten chunky, which makes her all the more comical.

Puss is our introvert kitty, quite happy to engage in parallel play with us. She wants to be in whatever room we are in – as I write this she is on the wingback chair in my office, not 10 feet from me. But she never wants to be petted, or picked up, or really noticed. About once a year she will get affectionate and try to climb in our lap. We usually suspect it means she is up to something.

And then there was Pepe. He was a senior orange kitty who had been severely mistreated before being abandoned at a no-kill shelter. He was scarred, physically and metaphorically when we got him, and it took months before he would even come out of hiding if we were in the room. Eventually, he began to explore, but was never really comfortable while we lived in Raleigh.

When we moved to Jackson, Pepe had a good year or so that he thrived. He was companionable, he began to get along with the other cats, and he gained weight and had shiny fur. That first year he lived here with us was the best year. Then he began to lose weight, and his teeth were bad and his throat got infected and for a year we limped along, taking him to the vet monthly for shots and buying special food until it became obvious to everyone that he was not having any sort of quality of life, and we were watching him slowly starve to death. He wasn’t going to get better. The day we took him to the vet to do what had to be done, he weighed less than 5 pounds, from the 10 he had weighed at his best.

If there are worse things than putting your cat down in the middle of the night as they scream, it is knowing for weeks that it is the right thing to do, and him sitting in your arms, purring as they put the needle in.

But as I told our foster son at the time, loving a thing means taking responsibility for its care. And if you only love it when it’s easy, then what you had wasn’t love after all. It is how we love when it’s hard that counts.

These four cats have defined our lives together, the last 13 years or so. They determined which apartments we would get, our travel schedule, the layout of our house. I love them, and I am grateful they are part of our lives.

The opportunity to travel

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

On the 7^th day, I’m grateful for the opportunities I have had to travel.

Growing up, travel was a thing other, richer people did. I lived in rural Mississippi, and we never had money for real vacations. Instead, when my parents got time away from work, we visited my mom’s parents in Texas, an eight hour drive we usually took in the summer, at night, because it was cooler then, and our car’s air conditioner seldom worked. So we would leave home at 8 at night and arrive at my grandparents at 4 in the morning or so, having driven across Arkansas all night. There isn’t much to see in Arkansas during the daytime, but there is nothing to see at midnight.

It would be when I was 16 that I would actually travel someplace other than family – I had placed 1^st place in a state level extemporaneous speaking contest, and was invited to compete at the nationals, which that year was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The shop teacher was my chaperone, and he and I drove to Tulsa in his pickup and stayed at a motel that had a pool. It was across the street from a Steak and Ale, where we ate each night we were there. I rode around downtown Tulsa, which at the time was the largest city I had ever seen, just star-eyed.

I was 18 when I first flew on a plane, en route to boot camp for the Marine Corps. I was terrified and exhilarated. A month later, on Parris Island, I would see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. We were on a forced march and came over a hill and there was the ocean, blue green and just a few hundred yards away, spanning as far as the eye could see, surf crashing on the sand. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I came to a complete stop, just frozen, staring at it. Like a slapstick comedy, everyone behind me kept walking and ran into me. I bet I did a thousand pushups as a result, but every one of them was worth it.

I was 26 when I first flew to New England on a business trip, to see a client in Hartford, Connecticut. The car rental place was out of mid-sized cars and they upgraded me for free to a Mustang convertible. I drove around New England for 4 days, including a night in Boston where I sat in a pew in the Old North Church and went on Old Ironsides and stood on Bunker Hill, and my head was so big you couldn’t have told me shit.

At 28 I stayed in Manhattan the first time, in the New Yorker Hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden. It captivated me, New York did. I loved the subway the way they spent so much time together and yet gave each other space. I fell in love with the people, their attitude, the can-do spirit, their utter refusal to give in to despair. That spirit was on display to the whole world the following year when the Towers fell.

For the next few years I would travel a good bit, flying into a strange city where I would meet with a client, eat in a generic restaurant, stay in a beige motel and drive a grey rental car and then fly back home. I make it sound boring, but every time was magical, and each place had something to teach me that the last place didn’t.

I then spent perhaps 8 years not traveling much at all. I was no longer in sales and no longer had money to stay in Manhattan.

And then word got out that I knew something about homelessness and I got invited to speak at a small conference in Pennsylvania, and then later another in Upstate New York and before I knew it most months I was flying into a strange city and staying in a beige motel or sometimes a preacher’s guest room and I would get on stage and people would listen to me and I would tell stories about people I knew and loved, and sometimes I got paid well for this and sometimes I got paid poorly, but every time was magical. Truth be told, I had spent several years where I would have paid them to listen to me, so anytime someone wanted to pay me, it filled me with amazement. For perhaps seven or eight years, I flew 10-20 times a year. I had frequent flyer miles and Amtrak rewards and had TSA pre-check status. I kept a bag packed in the closet and had a special briefcase just for traveling.

Since I took that first plane ride to Parris Island all those years ago, I’ve had my feet in both oceans, I’ve been in almost every state in the continental US, I spent a week in Costa Rica seeing parrots, monkeys, waterfalls, and mountains. I’ve been in deserts and above the snowline in the Rocky Mountains, met interesting people, learned about new cultures and made lifelong friends, slept on the beach and in the woods, and on a mountainside, and along the way ate food nobody in Byhalia MS ever heard of.

In short, I have gotten to go to all sorts of places and do all sorts of thing 12-year-old Hugh never would have dreamed of. Nobody could have predicted I would have ever had this life, and I’m incredibly grateful for it.

I have places I would love to go still. I’ve never been to Europe, and I have lots of friends all over the UK I would love to see. I think Venice would be nice, and what’s left of the 18-year-old Hugh that was captivated with Hemingway and Fitzgerald would love to see Paris, and eat from that moveable feast.

But if that never happens, I couldn’t complain at all.

Home

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

On the sixth day, I’m grateful for our home.

I don’t take it for granted. I spent more than a decade working among and with folks that had lost theirs, and it still, after all these years, feels fragile, like a thing that could slip away if you turned your back on it for a minute.

It sometimes feels ridiculous, this house of ours. After all, we are just two folks, who bought this house – with two bathrooms and three bedrooms and a living room AND a den and an eat-in kitchen AND a dining room. And a half an acre of land and a carport… compared to our last 1,000 square foot house with the tiny bathroom, it felt like a mansion at more than twice the size of the old house. Sometimes, it still does. I lose Renee in it regularly.

It helped that house prices in Raleigh were beginning to climb, although nothing like they did after we left. And prices here in Jackson had been stagnant for years, meaning we were able to buy the huge house here in the nice neighborhood for $20,000 less than the tiny house there in the, uhhhm, transitioning neighborhood.

The house in Raleigh had a leaky roof and uninsulated walls and on hot days the AC would struggle to get the inside of the house under 80. But we lived there five years, Renee recovered from her heart transplant there, we were able to provide a safe place for our niece when she needed a place to live for six months or so, and we tried hard to leave the neighborhood better than we found it.

This house, the one in Jackson, was a Methodist parsonage for 70 years before we bought it, meaning it was well cared for, but well cared for by a committee. Nobody loved it, in other words. But we love it. We love the long hallway, with hardwood floors, that reminds me of the neighbor’s hallway when I was growing up, that I would run and slide on in socked feet. We love the huge dining room, with the table for ten that was always crowded before the pandemic curtailed that. We love the deck we built last year as a COVID project, the fireplace in the living room, the hot pink bathroom in the hallway and the hardwood floors throughout. But mostly, we love that it is ours.

Friends who disagree

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

On the fifth day, I’m grateful for people in my life who disagree with me and yet try to stay connected with me.

I am a passionate person. I feel things deeply. I have a highly developed sense of empathy, and so I feel what I perceive as injustices to others viscerally. I don’t bend easily. I look around at the world as it is, with all our problems and it feels unbearable to me.

This runs a lot of folks off. And that’s regrettable, but I get it. There are some people who I so disagree with I cannot stand to be in the same room with them. So for the ones who try hard to stay in the room with me, I really appreciate the effort.

The other night, I was talking to someone I went to high school with, but hadn’t talked to since 1990 or so. Things have changed a lot since then (I probably had a Bush/ Quayle sicker on my car in those days) and I was trying to catch her up. She was someone whose essential convictions had not really changed – she was a progressive teenager, and is a progressive adult. I was just right of center on a lot of things, and moved dramatically left.

How did that happen, she asked?

I explained that moving away and meeting all sorts of people who were different than I am was a big part of it. As my relationships changed, my beliefs had to run to catch up with my relationships. In short, I changed because my relationships changed.

For me, it’s all personal. It’s all extremely personal.

I’m pro-choice because of the people I know and love. I’m pro LGBT people because of people I know and love. I’m a Universalist because of the people I know and love. I’m for Civil Rights because of people I know and love. I’m for the South because of people I know and love. I’m for working-class folks over Billionaires because of people I know and love.

And this extrapolates, too, to issues where I don’t know anyone personally involved. Because people I know and love have been on the wrong end of the Powerful, as long as there are people on the bottom of class and power, I’m for them, regardless of the particular issue.

I agree with Eugene Debs, who said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Every single bit of who I am and fight for is personal.

And all that happened because the people I ate with, the people I had conversations with, the people who fed me, the people who held me, and the people who loved me, changed. And when I was confronted with ideas from those people that challenged me, I didn’t run away, but I tried hard to understand, because they mattered to me, and I wanted to stay connected to them. And so I appreciate the people who disagree with me, who I make uncomfortable, who struggle to stay in the room with me, but do.

I think that ultimately, nothing has more potential to impact us and the world around us – for good or ill – as much as our relationships do. And for the people who disagree with me but try real hard to stay connected to me, I’m grateful for you. I see how hard you try, and it means the world to me.

Freethinker – Day 4

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

On the fourth day, I’m grateful to have been taught to be a free-thinker by my parents, even when it hurt them.

I know I tell a lot more stories about my dad than I do my mom, but that’s mainly because Mom is a pretty private person. The truth is my personality is almost a perfect split of the two of them – the part of me that is calm and introverted and pastoral, that stays calm in the midst of crisis, that can solve mechanical problems – that was Dad.

But the part of me that makes me the Mennonite you most want with you in a bar fight; the part of me that that marched a couple of dozen folks without houses into the city council chambers of Raleigh, NC; the part that gets so damned angry when people use their power to take advantage of others – that is all Mom.

I have lots of stories, but they are not mine to tell. But I will tell you this one, which also sums up a lot of our relationship.

I was back home for the weekend of my 20^th High School reunion. That Sunday, the church I grew up in was having a Homecoming Sunday service, and so I went with Mom and Dad.

It was after the service and they were all up in the potluck supper. Dozens and dozens of people were crammed in this room, plates balanced precariously as they stood in line to get chicken and dumplings, various casseroles, and caramel cake. The people were all talking, and I had said hi to a bunch of folks, but most of the people I knew were dead now, and so mostly I was just eating food and looking around, when I heard my name mentioned.

I sort of hid behind the cake table to see who was talking about me.

Old Lady: My son showed me the sort of things Hugh writes on Facebook. I know you didn’t raise him to be so liberal. I’m sorry he ended up like that. It’s not your fault, you know.

Mom: What? Of course it’s not.

Old Lady: Well, I mean, I didn’t want you to think I thought you failed somehow, raising him.

Mom: No, we didn’t fail at all. If our goal was to make him think like us, we would have failed. But that wasn’t our goal. Our goal was to teach him how to think for himself, and he does that, and that’s great, even if he doesn’t always think like we do. He does good work, and we are very proud of him.

The old lady shrugged and walked away, and I went and got some more cake.

I rode home in the car with them later, and nobody mentioned anything about that conversation. And 12 years later, we still haven’t.

Books – Day 3

II’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

On the third day, I am grateful for my love of books.

I grew up on 33 acres, 10 miles away from a town with 800 people in it. My best friend lived a mile and a half away. It could have been a lonely life. But I never felt that, because I had my books.

I can never remember not being surrounded by books. Our home had piles of them everywhere, and both of my parents read before bed every night, and they both read to me every night, and eventually I read to them every night, and even now, I cannot go to sleep without reading first.

My parents were just babies themselves when I came along, but I was mostly raised by people in their 50’s and 60’s, the elders in our community that stepped in for my dead and absent grandparents. And those people loved to read, and they ooohed and awed over my reading. I remember being five or so and at a neighbor’s when they had company over, and handed a newspaper and getting a rousing ovation for being able to read it.

They also didn’t cater to me. When I was 8 or so and would stay over at my great aunt’s, I would read her paperback mystery novels, largely because there were no “children’s” books to be had. I was taught to use the dictionary for words I did not understand, and I learned to love both dictionaries and pulpy mystery novels.

To this day I can get lost in either – there is nothing more comfortable to me than seeing Hercule Poirot assemble everyone in the drawing room for a satisfying denouement, or getting sidetracked in my search for a word by finding other words I did not know existed.

My immediate neighbors, an elderly retired farm couple, did not read books, but they read the paper each day as if it were Holy Writ, and taught me to do the same. It was a never-ending story, current events were, with chapters spread out that you had to piece together yourself.

In the small town we lived near, the town hall, the fire department, and the library were all in the same building. The library was really just a small room, perhaps 20×15, with shelves around the perimeter and a row of shelves down the middle. Ms. Lea was the librarian, and she was a retired English teacher. They only were open a few days a week – perhaps Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and only a few hours each of those days.

I read books at a prodigious rate and would, in the summer time, check out a stack of books on Saturday, bring them back on Thursday, and get one or two then to tide me over until Saturday again.

They had a summer reading program every summer, and after my winning each summer for 3 summers in a row, I was given the equivalent of a lifetime award and was not eligible for further participation, “to let the other kids have a chance.”

I didn’t care, as long as they let me read the books. I would rather read than compete: Still would, in fact.

In my early 30’s I would, for a few years, own a bookshop, which is somewhat akin to being an alcoholic and owning a bar. I had just gone through a horrible divorce, and I would sit in my quiet shop, early in the morning, before the shop would open.

The sun would come in the windows, and dust would catch on the rays of the sunlight against the backdrop of the thousands of books on their shelves and I would feel like I was surrounded by friends, and I knew – just knew – that nothing very bad could happen to me.

I still read at a prodigious rate. For instance, a quick search of my records tells me I have borrowed 121 library books since January, and bought another 43 (almost all used), plus others I have gotten as gifts, and I have reread more than a few.

My office is at the front of our house, and I can look out my window at the world going by, but inside here, I am surrounded by bookshelves on every wall. And every time I enter it, it is like being surrounded by friends, and I know – just know – that nothing very bad can happen to me there.

Imperfection – Day 2

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

I’m grateful for having had parents that encouraged me to be bad at things.

My dad was a pretty good photographer. He was a pretty good woodworker, and a pretty good carpenter, and a pretty good electrician. He wasn’t amazing at any of them, but better than most.

And he was OK with doing it less than perfectly.

In the dining room of our current house, the doorway has a piece of trim I put up and the miter is imperfect. It’s noticeable, but really only if you are looking for it. Of course, the first time they came over I pointed it out, embarrassed.

Being Dad, he told me not to worry about it, and then told me about a friend of his that studied how to make furniture.

“He would take all year to make a bookcase, but when he was done, it was absolutely perfect. But I wanted to know how to make a bookcase, and how to make a cabinet, and how to wire it for lights, and how to fix the engine on my car, and how to carve a whistle. He could make a bookcase better than me, no doubt. But he only knew how to do one thing perfectly, and I learned how to do lots of things imperfectly.”

I was never pressured to be perfect. I was never pressured to fit into their idea of what I should be, and it was fine for me to bring any grade home as long as it was a C or above.

“Because C is average, and you are not below average.”

Or this exchange I will never forget, when I was about 12:

Dad: Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Me: I don’t know Dad. What do you want me to be?
Dad: Happy, son. I want you to be happy when you grow up.

Renee – Day 1

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

I take privacy pretty seriously. I am pretty open with my life, but I made the choice to be. As someone who has been writing on the web since 2003, I’m pretty clear about what parts of my life are open for sharing, and which are not.

Other people get to choose that as well.

You have the unlimited right to tell your story. But you don’t have the right to other people’s stories. My wife Renee is much more private than I am, and so I don’t write much about her here, and anything I do choose to say about her has been read by her before I hit publish.

So what I wrote below is a fraction of what I could say about her, but sometimes, less is more.

Any list of the things I am thankful for has to start with Renee. The list of things she has given up to be married to me is long and lengthy. She’s always believed I could do it, no matter what “it” was. She believed in me and my ability to make it work when I couldn’t. Her confidence in us is staggering.

Her love for me is rivaled only by her love for 90’s Hip Hop. And even though she would much rather eat Kraft mac & cheese and chicken fingers than anything I want to cook, she lets me do all the cooking.

Whatever my idea of living a good life is comprised of, it includes her.

(That picture was taken on our first full day of married life, back in 2009, at Carolina Beach. I always love this smile)