Hugh Hollowell

The Decision

George was 57 – just 7 years and change older than I am now – but he looked 70. He smelled of urine, he slept outside, and hadn’t showered in months. He shuffled when he walked, and a naturally small man, he was a popular victim when it came to street violence. When we first met, he had been mugged three times in the previous four months.

It hadn’t always been that way. George had been the dairy manager at a grocery store in a Raleigh suburb. He lived in a middle class brick house, in a subdivision. His wife was a school teacher. He had one daughter, who had gone to a good state university.

The house was no longer his. Neither was the wife. And the daughter had a restraining order against him and he had been trespassed from the bank where she now worked.

George liked to drink. And for years, he made it work. He would have a hard day at work and come home and drink a few, to take the edge off. Eventually he had to drink in order to go to work, too. Then he started drinking during lunch.

He wasn’t a bad drunk. He just got silly, and then sleepy. He got fired when his boss found him passed out in the dairy cooler. His wife got a divorce shortly after that. He was too drunk to fight, or to show up for court. He lost everything.

He had been on the street for 5 years when I met him, drunk as a lord. We hit it off well, and eventually, he decided to quit after having a heart attack. He went into a rehab facility where he stayed sober for 100 days, and then he went into a halfway house facility, where he got another 100 days, and then he went into a private apartment where he got less than 10 days. He didn’t have the money to pay the rent the next month, having drank it, and was back on the street.

I saw variations of that story play out over and over for more than a decade. I watched people – good, hardworking people, lose everything they had because of alcohol.

I didn’t grow up around alcohol, but not for religious reasons – it was because once Dad began drinking, he didn’t have an off switch. So he drank his last drink when I was 4. His half-brother lost everything because of drinking – wife, kids, stole from his mother and my dad, and as a result was exiled from the family for years and years.

I later learned my mom’s side of the family had people with similar stories. People who drank to forget trauma, who drank to manage pain, who drank and drank until it cost them everything.

I drank my first beer when I was 15. We stole it from the store I was working at that summer, and drank it hot behind the carwash. It wasn’t very good, but the cheers, the social approval, the back slapping – that felt amazing.

In the Marines, I drank a lot, because it was a social lubricant. Cheers, the social approval, the back slapping. My girlfriend Heather was an alcoholic, trying to cover the pain of being Queer in a world not ready for that.

I drank when I was a Financial Advisor, because I hated my life, often having to down a pint of vodka in the parking garage in order to stomach going into the office.

And when I became a pastor, I learned some folks drank as a way to signify that they weren’t some hellfire and damnation fundamentalist. “Hey, I’m not like those conservative jerks that called you a sinner: I drink single malt scotch!”.

The 12 years or so that I worked with people experiencing homelessness was the time in my life I knew the most alcoholics, but honestly, a good portion of them were social workers, pastors, and medical folks who just didn’t have other tools for dealing with what they felt.

And because the only people in the world who did know what you felt were the people you worked with, you could grab a drink after work, and then you get the chemicals from drinking and the chemicals from the social interaction, and you didn’t have to feel what you felt anymore.

One day not long after George lost his apartment I noticed that was what I was doing, and so I quit drinking after work with my peers and started looking for healthier ways to deal with what I felt.

Because that’s the thing: Abusing chemicals (whatever the chemical it is) is a way to hit pause on what you are feeling. And then you hit pause the next time you feel it. And then one day, you hit pause earlier than you did last time. Until one day, you haven’t felt that thing in a long time.

As an aside, this is one of the things that makes sobriety for an addict so hard – because suddenly, you don’t have your coping tool any more, and the last time you had to feel what you are feeling was whatever age you began using.

I’m not some religious wacko that believes there is no such thing as responsible usage of alcohol. Honestly, I love a good Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot, but since Renee can’t drink because of her medications, I often would have a bottle go bad before I would finish it. Or else I would finish it all at one setting, which worried me more. So I quit drinking at home.

Eventually I went from being a person who was worried about drinking too much to being a person who just doesn’t drink.

I didn’t “need” to quit – it just made my life easier to quit. And it greatly reduces the number of ways I can screw up my life and financial future.

And because I don’t “need” to quit, but chose to, I can choose not to. Like last month a friend I was staying with offered me a glass of wine, and I had one while unwinding with them. It was maybe my second drink in two years.

I’m not telling you what you should do – Lord knows I am powerless over the pull of caffeine on my brain in the morning, but then again, I don’t know anyone who lost their house because they drank too much coffee. If your life is working for you and the people who love you, then rock on.

So, why AM I telling you all this? Partly because I’m big on admitting when something scares me, as a way of reducing its power over me. And honestly? Losing everything I own because of addiction scares the hell out of me.

But also, because I have lots of people in the so-called helping professions that read my stuff. And if that’s you, maybe you have noticed that the beer after work can easily become the six pack after work, or the glass of wine before dinner can become the bottle of wine every night. Maybe you tried “Dry January” and had a dry 4 days instead. Maybe you drunk text your friends at 3AM and then spend the next week apologizing for what you said.

Maybe you drink as a way of hitting pause. And maybe you’ve thought about not doing that any more.

I just wanted you to know that it’s OK to do that. To drink a Diet Coke at the bar instead of the mixed drink. To not have friends you can only tolerate when you are doing shots. To really feel the things you feel.

It’s OK to stop, if you want to.

The Things That Stay

On our kitchen island is a giant cutting board, some 18 by 30 inches and nearly two inches thick. It was a stress purchase early in the pandemic. I had wanted one for years, and I finally found one for $50 at a restaurant supply house.

At the time, we had a 7-year-old boy living with us, one of six foster children who lived with us over a two-year period. The Boy lived with us for almost 10 months, leaving to be reunited with his family just 2 days before my Dad’s death from COVID. We hadn’t expected The Boy to leave when he did, but the foster system is cruel and capricious, not to mention utterly pragmatic, at times, and the feelings of foster parents are often a distant consideration, when they are considered at all.

The Boy and I cooked dinner together every night, and he had a special knife we bought for him to use to chop vegetables. He was a little fella, so he stood on a chair, and together, we prepped and cooked. And one day, when he was alone, he took a Sharpie and made a small mark on the cutting board. I have no idea why – I doubt he knew, honestly. It was a small carat looking mark, easy to miss if you didn’t know it was there. Sometimes, mischievous boys just want to mark something up. A sort of way of them knowing they exist, and to make sure you know it, too.

The Boy left his marks everywhere. There were whiffle balls in the flower beds, and he was always leaving his baseball glove in the yard, and his bicycle would get left out, and his dirty clothes would somehow often end up under his bed instead of in the hamper.

And even though he has been gone now for 15 months, evidence of his having been here still shows up sometimes. The last time I cut the grass, I found a rubber ball hiding under a shrub, where he had lost it. Since October of 2020, his baseball glove has sat at the base of the hackberry tree in the backyard. When he had to leave abruptly, he couldn’t find it – I found it there a few days after he was gone, and I haven’t had the heart yet to move it.

We miss him a lot, even now. His name comes up every few days – Remember when we ate there with The Boy? Remember when The Boy planted that flower? Remember when The Boy said such and so? Like marks on our brain, the stories – most of which I can’t tell you here – remain in our head and in our heart.

The other day, I was preparing supper, standing at the big cutting board. The combination of cooking for fewer people, the ennui of pandemic meals and the general depression I entered into at the end of 2020 all combined to make me cook less than I had done when he lived with us, but still, I found myself cutting potatoes up for supper, to coat in oil and creole seasoning and then roast in the oven until done.

And while I was cutting them, I moved the pile of peelings just a bit and saw the small caret mark, made mischievously with a Sharpie, sitting there, greatly faded after all this time but still there, still present, still a real reminder of the love that had been there.

One day I will have to sand down the board, which will erase the mark – it’s just part of the maintenance of such a thing. And one day I will pick up the last whiffle ball, and one day I will finally pick up the faded, decrepit baseball glove that still sits under the hackberry tree waiting for him to come back and pick it up. And when those things happen, the only marks of his existence left behind will be in our head and in our hearts.

And those will be the marks that last.

My Favorite Picture

In 2014, due to the generosity of friends, we had our first (and to date, only) trip out of the country together. Together, we went to Costa Rica, where we stayed with some friends in an amazing house on the side of a mountain near San Juan, overlooking a coffee plantation.

We had several adventures on that trip, and we have some amazing pictures of what was truly a paradise. We played with monkeys, stood in the Pacific Ocean, walked through ancient churches, and met some amazing people with whom we shared long meals and laughed much.

But my favorite part of that trip was that we took what has become my favorite picture in the world.

There is so much I love about this picture. Let me explain some of them.

I guess the first is that smile on Renee’s face. We had been married for almost 5 years at that point, and we were finally on a big trip together. One thing we do well together is travel, and this was (and still is) our biggest trip. She took a big risk marrying someone who does the sort of rarely well-funded ministry things I do and we honestly never expected to be able to go to a place that is legitimately considered paradise.

And then there is that scar peeking out from under her shirt. When we were dating, her heart began to show symptoms of the heart disease that killed her mother, and she had to get a pacemaker with a defibrillator, to shock her in case her heart stopped. Before she would get a transplant a year after this picture, it would shock her at least 8 times, saving her life multiple times.

Her health was precarious in those days. Two weeks before this trip, she had had an ablation to prevent the wild rhythms her heart would swing into. But more about that in a minute.

Another thing is that we are there, in literal paradise, because of friends. It is a reminder to me that I get to do work that some people find valuable, and because of that, they invest in me and us and want us to have good things. This trip happened because people loved us, supported us, and invested in us. The wealth that sent us on this trip was the wealth that comes from friendships and community.

You see those glasses she is wearing? Those were $14 frames from Walmart she bought because that was all we could afford at the time. It sent me into a spiral of depression that, because of my career choices, she could not afford “nice” glasses, but for the years she wore those, she got compliments everywhere we went, and she would light up. I don’t know that $1000 frames would have ever made her happier.

I bought her that handbag early in our marriage. It was handmade by a Raleigh designer, and we had seen it in a shop downtown while window shopping. It was more than $150, which was a huge amount of money for me then, but I had seen the way her face had lit up when she saw it, and I knew I had to get it for her.

And let’s not forget that this picture is taken in front of one of the most beautiful waterfalls in the world, in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, in the middle of a wildlife preserve. The roar of the water, the mist that hits your face, the sheer amount of biodiversity around you – the toucans in the trees, the birdsong as you walk through the woods – it really is the most beautiful place I have ever been.

But the main reason this is my favorite picture is none of those things. It is because of what happened within minutes of this picture being taken.

The day this happened, we were at La Paz Waterfall Gardens in the highlands of Costa Rica. It is an amazing place, with a wildlife preserve, an aviary, and this long, winding trail down into the valley, past the waterfall, and back up again.

This picture was taken and almost immediately, her heart went into one of its wild rhythms it used to do in those scary days before she was transplanted. This would present itself as crushing chest pain, fatigue, and shortness of breath.

We had walked for more than a mile at this point, all downhill. When it happened, we had no choice but to walk out – more than another mile forward, all uphill, with probably 500 stair steps in various places. It was walking a few steps forward, and rest. It took us hours to cover what should have been 30 minutes or so.

We had no real choice – we were at the bottom of a valley, on a trail barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. The only way out was through.

But she did not complain. She gutted it out like a boss, and worked her way, slowly but persistently, up the side of that mountain with a heart doing a thing that, under other circumstances, would have sent her to the emergency room. The image of her forcing herself up the side of a mountain in the jungles of Costa Rica is a funny one to anyone who knows Renee, but don’t be confused – I married a woman who, when she puts her mind to it, is unstoppable.

And all of that is why this is my favorite picture.

Breaking Slowly

I recently began doing morning pages again. If that means nothing to you, the least you need to know for the following story to make sense is that I am doing three pages of handwritten freewriting each morning. You can read more about the process here.

Anyway, since I’m doing this intentional practice, I decided to buy myself a decent pen to write with. I’m not precious about things, but I find that paying attention to things means I respect them. So, having a dedicated pair of shoes to go walking in, and a dedicated chair to read or meditate in, and to the point of this story, a new notebook and pen to write in.

So, after reading lots of reviews (because obsessing about small things is another thing I do), I decided to buy a Pilot Metropolitan Gel Rollerball. Mostly because it uses the same refill as my favorite pen – a Pilot G2 Gel Pen.

Amazon had them in stock, but for some reason, the earliest I could get it delivered was about 10 days away. Office Depot didn’t have any in stock at their store near me, but I could order it and have it delivered in 48 hours. This is a lot of effort for a $20 pen, but again, this was special.

The package was supposed to arrive today. It (the package) did arrive today. The packing slip that was enclosed said it was a pen, but it was not. It was instead a business card holder, like you would put on your desk.

No big deal – I went on the website and there was a huge button that told me that Office Depot was all about taking care of business, and that I could talk to a live chat agent. What followed was a comedy of errors. The live chat person was typing in what appeared to be broken English. They responded to my questions with answers meant for someone else. They told me I would have to return the business card holder and they would have to receive it before they could resend my pen. Then they told me that they would mail me a check (you know, like it’s 1997) as a refund, and I would have to reorder the pen myself.

At this point, I called their 800 number (which I apparently should have done in the first place) and I spoke to a really nice man who told me his computer terminal was broken, and asked me to hang up and call them again later.

At this point, I’m more than 30 minutes invested in trying to solve the case of the missing pen. Any cost-benefit analysis is out the window. Now, it’s personal.

I call back, speak to a lovely person named Paul, and I explain to Paul on the front end that if I seem frustrated, it is because I am, but I am not frustrated at him, but at the trouble I have been having with Office Depot, and I hope he can help me. As an aside – I find this technique to be extremely helpful, as it places them on the alert that things have went wrong, and it lets them be part of the solution – almost like they are striving to be better than their colleagues.

Paul listens, has me on hold for 30 minutes (no lie, but at least I’m on hold) and then comes back on and tells me my new pen will be here on Tuesday. Yay, Paul.

But here’s the point: Look at how many things were broken in the process of my buying a $20 pen. This is a major brand name pen – a few years ago, any chain office supply store would have had it in stock, on a shelf. Amazon, masters of logistics, can’t get me this pen in less than 10 days. Again – this is not an obscure pen. Office Depot messed up the order in their warehouse, shipping the wrong product, and nobody noticed. The Live Chat operator can’t type, and obviously didn’t understand what I wanted. The first operator’s terminal was down, and was unable to recommend I do anything but try later. It took 30 minutes of my being on hold to get Paul to do something as simple as agreeing to send me what I originally ordered.

The pen was not obscure or rare. Office Depot is not a Mom and Pop company. It’s all just broken, but it’s not obvious at first, and it isn’t a collapse. It’s just breaking… slowly.

A friend the other day described what is going on right now as, “Like the end of the Roman Empire, but with Wi-Fi and streaming”, and the more I think about it, the more on the nose that sounds. My local grocery store was out of canned vegetables the other day. Like, all of them. Two years in, the local Kroger has never recovered their paper towels stock to pre-pandemic levels. I went to buy a particular saw from the local Home Depot – which their website said was on sale, and that this store had 11 of in stock – and there were none on the shelf, and nobody there knew where any were. We literally had to talk to 3 employees and 1 member of management and invest 30 minutes to find a saw they had on sale.

I’m not complaining about the employees – everyone is, I’m sure, doing the best they can. But it’s obvious to me that the system is overwhelmed. Nothing is happening like it should, and yet, everything is still going. Sorta.

I get asked sometimes why I keep a deep pantry of food, and why we invest in redundancies, like the ability to cook food by three methods, or the ability to heat our house by two different utilities, or why I have cases of water in the closet. It’s not that I think there is going to be a major Armageddon scenario, where we are all eating acorns and wearing bear skins.

Instead, I think things are just going to wind down, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until it just breaks, and then we will have to fix it. But the slow part will take decades, and we have to survive while it’s happening. The Capitalists will do everything they can to hang onto our consumption, and so they are investing heavily in a façade of normality, to keep us going.

I think, eventually, things will balance out. But until they do, a lot of people will be hurt, and if history is any guide, it won’t be those of us buying $20 pens, but rather those who can least afford it.

On the Other Side of Burnout

I’m not sure when it happened.

Maybe it was taking Nancy off the ventilators and watching her die as a result of the drugs she just couldn’t beat. Maybe it was when Liz died when relapsed and someone gave her laced heroin. Or before she died, when she was severely sexually assaulted and then went back to the guy who did it. Twice.

Or maybe it was when Eric was murdered in front of me, or when I visited Steve in jail after he killed another guy, or when I watched the woman I promised I would sit in the dark with, die while I watched.

But I don’t know. Maybe it was when trusted employees tried to destroy what I had spent years building, or when I got pulled out of the mothballs when the news needed a talking head on the 10^th anniversary of my friend Martha’s murder, or maybe it was just when I realized the big church that wouldn’t give us any money was going to keep referring people to us.

I don’t know when it was, exactly. But at some point, I burned out. I just couldn’t watch my friends die anymore. I just couldn’t keep going. But at the time, I didn’t know that, either.

Twelve years. For 12 years I did that work. I was the person you called when you had no one else to call. Sometimes that looked like fighting the hospital bureaucracy that wanted to discharge you to the streets when you had no home and sometimes it looked like fighting the city that said you didn’t deserve to eat, but for 12 years, I was that guy. I was really, really good at being that guy, too. Hell, I even liked being that guy.

Not long ago, I tried making a list of the people I loved who died from poverty in those 12 years, but they all tend to run together after a while. I know it was dozens. Sometimes they visit me in my dreams. Every winter people I loved would freeze in the woods, and we would find them after the thaw. I still get triggered by snow – I feel anxiety creeping into my bones when I watch the winter weather forecast.

I taught classes on self-care, but like many before me, I was better at coaching than I was playing. It isn’t that I didn’t have good boundaries – I did, and do. I just didn’t know when to quit. I didn’t know how to stop.

In 12 years I had one vacation that lasted more than a week. The first five of those 11 years I barely made minimum wage. My wife had a heart transplant in 2015, and within twenty-four hours I was doing crisis management on the phone while she was in a medically induced coma beside me.

It wasn’t that I was bad at my job – I was really, really good at my job, actually. I was just tired. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I had a whole year there where I could not sleep unaided. I would have nightmares when I was asleep, and panic attacks when I was awake.

And then, in 2017, the depression came on like a wave and damn near killed me. I was just self-aware to recognize it for what it was, and I got some help. And once the fog lifted, once I wasn’t standing in the storm anymore, I realized I needed to stop. It wasn’t so much self-care at that point as it was survival.

After the fog lifted that fall, I knew I had to leave. I had to. So, nine months later, I did.

* * *

It was three and a half years ago that I drove a U-Haul 12 hours across the country and pulled up in front of an apartment building that would be our home for the next six months while I found us a place to live.

I didn’t just need a rest, I needed to build something new. I needed to learn how to be a different sort of person. I needed a new way to be Hugh. A way that was kinder to me, and to the people who love me. And it’s happening, albeit slowly.

I’m prioritizing my health these days, which means I don’t get as much done as I used to. Adrenaline is, after all, a hell of a drug. I sleep at least six hours most nights. I prioritize movement, and I’m attentive to what I eat.

Things don’t happen as fast as they once did, and I get tired faster than I used to. They say that goes away over time, and it has some, if slowly. I still have trouble sleeping, but not as much as I used to. I have a lot of anxiety around money, but that has always been true. For years, my fundraising strategy involved crisis, You don’t have to be Freud to see that was unhealthy, even as I try to find sustainable ways and methods to replace it.

My family is a day trip away, and that feels pretty amazing. When Dad died in 2020, it was a tremendous gift to be so accessible, even in the midst of a pandemic. I have always been better at loving than being loved, but these days I am trying hard to learn how to do that, too.

While still committed to justice, and perhaps even more so than before, my work is much more behind the scenes than it once was. I’m on no reporters speed dial. I have more influence and fewer adversarial relationships now than I did in those days. I am pastoring a small group of people who don’t need me to survive, but who just love me because I am me. Unlike my first 12 years of ministry, I can give my home address to people I minister among.

Like all of you, I have had to do this while trying to survive a pandemic. This is exhausting, but a different kind of exhaustion. At least now, I don’t feel like I’m the only one interested in my trying to survive.

And holy hell – I have hobbies now. Things I do for pleasure. I have off-time. I have moments of joy.

Should you find yourself where I once did, I don’t really have any answers for you. I just know that sometimes you can be really good at something, and yet that thing can still kill you. I, unlike many folks I knew, survived. I buried people who didn’t. I don’t know how or why, but I squeaked through, and I made it out the other side.

I’m older now. I am not as strong as I once was, but think maybe I am wiser than before I began. At least I hope I am.

But most of all, I’m glad I’m still here.

In Praise Of Letters

Are you a Sloppy Joe or a Neat Pete?

That was the sign on the wall of my fifth grade public school Language classroom. It was the first year I was to attend Public School after my formative years at the segregation academy, and culture shock was hitting me hard. But while the Christian School had given me no tools to live well in a multi-racial world, it had given me damn good Language skills – or at least, as long as the language we were discussing was American English.

My spelling skills were miles above the other fifth graders, who were spelling words like “WAGON”, while the year before one of our weekly words was “ANONYMOUS”. It had also given me above average penmanship, seeing as how we were plunged into cursive writing in the first grade. The Bible-based curriculum we had been steeped in sought to get you to writing script as early as possible – I am unsure why that was, other than a sneaky feeling I had that Jesus loved everyone, but must have preferred people with neat handwriting.

So, when that sign on the wall asked me to proclaim my camp, I was Neat Pete all the way.

I never had beautiful handwriting – it was quite utilitarian, but clear and legible. I had none of the loops and whorls that set my Aunt Louise’s fine Palmer-Method hand apart. She had been born left handed but made to convert as a child, which was common in those days, and could write equally well with either hand.

And Monty, my surrogate grandmother who had lived next-door to us my entire childhood, who was a farmer’s wife and scratched out a mean existence all of their life, had a lovely, quite readable script she used in her weekly letters to me late in her life while I was away in the Marines.

It was, of course, a different time then. For instance, people actually wrote letters to each other. As late as the end of the 1990’s I still regularly received letters from people – handwritten, because typewriters were business equipment, and computers at home were rare. In fact, until the proliferation of smartphones in 2008 or so, handwritten correspondence was still an occasional thing.

In college in the mid 1990’s, it was not uncommon to be required to turn in first and second drafts of papers in handwriting, using only the computer lab at school for the final draft. If you did not have access to a computer of your own, you would have to either que up at the lab, waiting your turn and saving your efforts on floppy disks when your 1-hour timeslot was up, or you could come late at night and share the lab with the Gophernet nerds.

But the letters. My mom’s parents would write me from outside Dallas when I was a child, filling me with tales of their Border Collie, King, and his adventures. There was the man who worked at their post office, a Mr. Prince, who had noticed my grandmother writing Mississippi so often, and she told him of me and my nascent interest in stamp collecting, and Mr. Prince became my pen pal until his death, sending me stamps with interesting stories long after I was no longer interested in philately.

And there is nothing like a handwritten letter to woo (or un-woo) your love interests. There was the girl I had met at Bible Camp the summer I turned 15, and who wrote me very chaste letters long after I had forgotten what her face looked like. The Baptist preacher’s daughter who I loved fiercely, and who wrote me a letter in response to my declaration of love with a note telling me she was “in like” with me. The girl I had a crush on all through High School that I was too shy to ask out, who wrote me a letter the summer after she moved away and told me she had been desperately in love with me and always wondered why I hadn’t asked her out.

But one huge advantage to written letters is that people sometimes say things in letters they cannot say elsewhere. The distance and the physical action of shaping the letters add nuance and feelings in a way hard to convey by email or text message. Like the letter from my Dad he sent me in Boot Camp, telling me words I needed to hear – then and now:

“Just remember, everything is temporary. Take it one day at a time. I have all the confidence in the world in you. I know you can handle it. Sometimes I have not told you how proud of you I am of you. I really am.”

Texting has nothing on that.

A Crowded Table

Our dining room table will seat 8 comfortably, 10 in a stretch, and we have squeezed 12 in on at least two occasions. It’s not a pretty table – it’s that honey oak popular in the eighties – but one day, I will build a better one. This table’s primary selling point when we bought it was that it was cheap and big. We scrounged yard sales for extra chairs, to expand the capacity from the six that came with it when we bought it. These chairs sit empty these days.

When we bought the house, it was suggested that we knock out a portion of the wall between the kitchen and dining room to make a more open floor plan – but we are the weirdo’s who don’t like open floor plans. Having a kitchen open to the table means looking at dirty dishes when you are eating supper with people you love. So we have a large dining room, with a large table, between my office and the kitchen, which holds our huge table, empty chairs, and some of our favorite artwork from friends.

We have a guest room, with a queen sized memory foam mattress that has been slept on 3 times in 22 months, a record all-time low.

This house, which we love, was purchased based on some assumptions: That we would entertain regularly, that we would routinely have guests in from out of town, that cooking for other people would be a thing I do regularly, that hospitality was our primary spiritual practice. None of those things are happening, and haven’t been done with any normalcy in almost two years and that shows no sign of changing soon.

This virus, and our national lackluster response to it, has stolen so much from me – hell, from all of us. If I were to make a list of things we used to do often, but no longer do, it would be a lengthy list. But other than eating with people, the thing I think I miss most is the lingering. When I have met folks face to face, it is a rush to be done, to get out of the place, to be done and get back to safety. I miss just being in the part of town where a store was, and deciding to pop in and just see what they had new. Of having a free Saturday morning, so you decide to hit up some antique malls just to see what was out there. It’s been so long since we just “killed time.”

My favorite part of any meal with other folks is the lingering – when the meal is over, the dishes are empty in front of you, and yet the conversation continues, ebbing and flowing. Perhaps there is a cup of coffee in front of you, and occasionally someone will munch on a roll or decide in favor of another piece of pie, but mostly you are just relishing each other’s company, and it all feels so right and comfortable and safe, and no one dares end it by getting up.

I miss that. I miss the joy of cooking things that would make people happy, of getting to share my gifts and the stories behind them with people who sat at my table, in my house, and telling them the stories of why we eat this dish this way, of who painted that picture on the wall, of why that drawing is important to us. I miss hosting a crowded table.

One day, it will be like that again. One day, I will cook stockpots full of food again, one day we will have overnight guests regularly again, one day, we will have crowded tables once more, and for me, when that happens, the world will feel more right, more just, more hopeful than it does right now.

Take care of yourselves, and your families. Get vaccinated if you are not, and get boosted if you can. We need to get to the other side of this – I am so looking forward to regularly hosting a crowded table once more.

The Shoes

It was the January of the year I was in the 4^th grade that I learned we were poor.

In 1968, four years before I was born, the State of Mississippi finally saw the writing on the wall, and despite years of dragging their feet, it became obvious they were going to be forced to integrate the public school system. And suddenly, many churches attended by white people became concerned about education and felt called to start a “Christian” school.

I mean, look at the website of virtually any private religiously affiliated school in Mississippi, and it’s amazing how many of them have origin stories in the late 1960’s. It’s almost as if education wasn’t their chief concern.

Nine years later, I started kindergarten in such a school. In our county, there were several private “Christian” schools. One was the one you went to if your daddy owned the company, and the others were the ones you went to if your daddy worked for the man who owned the company. I went to one of those.

To be fair, I never heard a word about race, pro or con, there; I had no idea I was participating, however unwillingly, in white supremacy; that the Native American brother and sister that would come to attend there were being used as tokens; that our curriculum was written by young-earth creationists who denied science. I knew none of that.

It was a small school – for example, there were 10 kids in my first-grade class. And we all knew each other, or at least our parents did, and we were all pretty much in similar economic circumstances, although that wasn’t a concept I really understood at the time. But we spent the night at each other’s houses, and some of us lived in bigger houses than others, and some of my friends had their own room and I had to share mine with my brother, and some of us drove older cars and some newer cars, but nobody thought anything about that.

There was one friend – her dad owned his company, so she went to the good private school, and they had a maid that came to their house every day and cooked supper for them, but everyone I knew thought that was pretentious, even if we didn’t know that word.

I have no idea how much this school cost to attend, but I know we didn’t make much, and I know it was a stretch, economically, to send me there. And I know it was a stretch for lots of the kids I knew – again, we were the kids of working people, and the classrooms were often cold in the winter and the textbooks shabby and the hallways dimly lit.

But it was all we knew, and we were happy. Until the middle of the 4^th grade, that is. There was a boy – I have done him the favor of forgetting his name – who showed up in January of that year. His family had just moved there from the city, and he had started attending after the Christmas break.

And he was weird. And by weird, I mean, different. He wore corduroy pants – we had never seen such – but worse, he pointed out that he wore “cords” and we didn’t. Sometimes he would wear jeans, but he didn’t call them jeans. They were Levis. Our pants, the sort worn by the great unwashed, did not have names – they were just blue jeans, often purchased in the basement of Sears and Roebuck when they would have clearance sales, and purchased with extra length and cuffed multiple times, so one could grow into them.

This boy’s pants fit him just as he was.

But the worst was the shoes. We wore sneakers. Or tennis shoes. He wore Nikes. Pronounced “Neyeks”, like the plural of Mike, with a long I and a silent E. I had never seen shoes that had a name before.

“Why don’t your parents buy you Nikes?” he asked? “At my last school, all the kids wore these. Well, except the poor kids.”

I asked Dad what Nikes were. He told me I was mispronouncing it, and he explained they were shoes that athletes wore and that they were expensive.

“Well, I want some,” I told him. It was the first time I had ever asked for anything by a brand name.

He said that I already had shoes – in fact, had just gotten new shoes for Christmas – and that maybe I could get some new shoes when school started back in the fall, but under no circumstances would we be getting Nikes, because we couldn’t afford them.

It was the first time I remember wanting something somebody else had, and understanding it was off-limits to us because we didn’t have the money.

It was the first time I saw myself as different, as less than, because of money. I was one of the poor kids. I was separated from this kid – with his fancy clothes and exotic stories of city life and his name-brand shoes – by economic status, and that was the first time in my life that had ever happened, or that I understood such a thing was possible.

But it would not be the last.

The Old Man and the Boy

I was 10 years old the summer Mr. Doc died, but we could have already filled books with the adventures we had by then. He was a large man, who wore black shoes and blue Dickies work clothes and when outside, a worn, frayed straw hat. His hair was close cropped and woolly white over watery blue eyes that always held the beginnings of a smile. Well, they always did for me.

Doc and his wife Montaree were retired farmers, and when they retired, they had purchased three acres from my grandmother and built a small house on it. They lived simply and kept a large garden and a couple of hogs, and when my young parents were spending so much time at work trying to make enough for us to survive, Doc and Monty were my caretakers, teachers, and surrogate grandparents.

As was typical of their generation, Monty ended up doing most of the actual caretaking, but I lived to spend time with him, and he taught me how to make a slingshot, a cane whistle, and almost all the important things an eight-year-old boy needs to know about life.

Tell the truth. Plant your watermelons after the full moon in May. Stand up straight. Don’t interrupt. Always shake hands. You will feel better if you take a nap after lunch. Always carry a pocket knife. Most shows on TV are useless. Do one thing at a time. Food tastes better if you share it with someone you love. There is value in sitting in the shade and doing nothing but listening to the mockingbirds. Everything is better if you can eat wild plums while you do it.

He had a designated chair in the living room, and sometimes he sat in it and stared down the road, lost in his own thoughts for hours, and then would suddenly stand up and ask me if I wanted to go with him to the store. I would scramble out to the old Chevy truck that stood in the driveway, and he would drive the mile down the road to the small corner store which had been my family’s salvation when my grandmother got a job there after my grandfather died.

Regardless of whatever else we were after, he would always buy a handful of penny candy and a Milky Way candy bar. The penny candy was for later, but he and I would sit on the porch of this small store and watch the cars at the crossroads while splitting the Milky Way before it had a chance to melt. Never has a candy bar tasted so good. We would sit there, in the shade of the porch on that hot summer Mississippi day, an elderly man and a small boy, neither of us saying much, but just sharing a rare treat and occasionally smiling at each other, as if we knew some secret known only to us. Some things are just too important to talk about.

This May, he will have been gone 40 years. Monty died some 25 years ago. The truck is long gone now, of course, and some city people bought the house and they didn’t make biscuits or have hogs or a garden and they cut down the wild plum bushes he and I tended. The store is gone too, long since turned into a pawn shop, and the porch bench is gone and that lazy corner is now a bustling intersection.

It’s all gone now, existing only in the memory of a man who will turn fifty years’ old this summer, and who still loves Milky Way bars and penny candy.

The Pie That Isn’t There

It’s not much to look at.

It’s a spiral bound church cookbook that the church of my childhood put out in the late 70’s as a fundraiser. It’s blue, with a drawing of the church on the front – the church as I remember it, before the fellowship hall was built, and the new sanctuary, and the new electric sign.

This cookbook – the Country Cookin’ Cookbook, the title proclaims, was the bible of the meals of my childhood. My mom was not a natural cook – she can do it, but derives no joy from it, and is as happy to warm something up as she is to make something from scratch. At times, she would get creative, leading to… unusual combinations. My Aunt Louise once said Mom was “slap-happy” in the kitchen, because she would slap anything together and call it supper.

So when this cookbook came out and you suddenly could make dumplings like Ms. VanHook, or a caramel cake like Mary Elizabeth, or a sad cake like Sister Betty’s, well, now you are onto something. And frankly, our suppers improved somewhat.

It has spots and stains, more on some pages than others, so you can track our preferences and dislikes, each spotted page a vote for the dishes on that page. It suffers from specificity of categories, having chapters for Pies, another for Cakes, another for cookies and Candies, and then yet another for Desserts, just in case some sweet managed to slip through uncatalogued otherwise.

But the recipe I have made most from this cookbook isn’t in there. It’s for Ms. Dunning’s Fudge Pie.

Don’t get me wrong – should you manage to somehow acquire a copy of the 1978 edition of the Emory Methodist Church’s Country Cookin’ Cookbook from Watson, Mississippi, you will find, right there on page 144, a recipe labeled Chocolate Fudge Pie, submitted by Jeanette Dunning. But that recipe will not work. It’s missing things. You try to make it like that and you will have pudding in a pie shell.

There were rumors in the church that Ms. Dunning left things out on purpose so as nobody could make a pie as good as hers. I don’t believe it – I’m willing to extend her some grace and just assume she just forgot to tell them everything. Those Methodists are all about grace except when it comes to dessert.

Anyway, after this cookbook showed up, we started having chocolate fudge pies at every holiday gathering and potluck dinner. Wherever 3 or more were gathered, there was a fudge pie. Birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving? Fudge pies.

The recipe in my copy of the cookbook has been so altered, with additions and subtractions and alterations made over the ensuing 40 years in various inks that it’s not really fair to call it Ms. Dunning’s recipe anymore.

But because I want to help folks, and I shudder at the thought of one of y’all coming across a copy of this cookbook in the wild and trying to make a fudge pie that won’t turn out, I have decided to make things right and release the proper recipe into the wild.

Now, the original recipe is for two pies – that’s what it says, anyway. But remember, this recipe was released in 1978, and it was old then. It was made for 8-inch pie crusts, and they don’t make those any more. I recently tried to buy some 8-inch pie pans, and was gonna make crusts, and had a devil of a time trying to find any. It seems our pies have all super-sized now, with 9 or 9.5 inch pans being all there is. So, over the years, we have modified this somewhat to work with one 9-inch premade frozen pie crust.

What you’re going to need:

1/2 stick butter, melted. I ain’t even going to lie – most often this was margarine growing up, but it’s butter now. When you know better, you do better.
1 1/2 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons of cocoa powder. I recommend sifting this. If you don’t have a flour sifter, you can put it in a sieve and tap it until all the cocoa comes out the bottom. Or hell, you can just dump it in and take your chances and probably be OK.
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup PET milk. Now, I’m afraid I better explain, as somebody out there is going to put kitten milk in this with who know what consequences. PET milk is what old people call evaporated milk, because PET was a brand name down here.
1 teaspoon vanilla. Don’t cheap out here – use the real stuff.
1/4 cup flour
pinch of salt
9-inch unbaked pie crust. You can make it from scratch, or you can use one of those frozen ones from the store, or you can buy one of those that you roll out yourself from the cold box at the store by the whop-em biscuits. I won’t blame you, whatever you do, having done all of the above at various times. Do know that the frozen ones are often “deep dish” pie crusts, and this won’t fill one of those up, but will still make a tasty, albeit thin, pie, none-the-less.

What you do

If you got a frozen pie crust, set it out to thaw. It won’t take long – it will probably thaw during the 10 minutes it takes you to mix this up. Otherwise, put your crust in a 9-inch pie pan. Then, turn your oven on to 350.

In a mixing bowl, mix the sugar and the cocoa until they are well blended. Then add the melted butter, and stir it all until well mixed. Now, add everything else, and stir until well blended. You don’t need to buy a mixer for this – just a whisk or wooden spoon will do fine. It’s pretty forgiving – my sister-in-law once forgot the salt and added it after it was in the pan and it still worked out.

The mixture is thin – you will be pretty sure you screwed it up. Nope, it just looks thin. Now, put your pie pan on a cookie sheet, and then pour the mixture into the pie pan. The reason for putting it on the cookie sheet is because it’s easier to pick up a cookie sheet than it is a pie pan.

Slide the cookie sheet in the pre-heated oven on the bottom shelf, and set the timer for 35 minutes. It won’t be ready in 35 minutes, but it will be getting close. It will probably take closer to 45 or 50, but it has snuck up on me before and been burned as a result. You will know it’s done when it’s firm in the middle – at 35 minutes, the center will probably still jiggle when you shake the pan.

Another reason for checking on it around 35 or 40 minutes is to make sure the crust doesn’t burn. I take a sheet of tin foil, bigger than the pie, and crease it corner to corner, and then lay it on top of the pie around the 40-minute mark to keep the crust from burning. Creasing it keeps it off the top of the pie filling – you don’t want the foil to touch the surface of the pie or else it makes an unholy mess. It will still taste good, but you would dare bring it to the potluck for fear of the talk that would follow you.

Now, some warnings: The surface of this pie might crack. That is not a defect. I have had days when it took almost an hour of checking to get this pie done. I can’t explain why, as I do it exactly the same way every single time. Were I still a Methodist, I’m sure I would find a way to blame the vagaries of my oven on the Baptists, but as I’m not, I have no explanation for it. The ways of both the Lord and fudge pies are mysterious. Just check every five minutes or so after 35 minutes and see if the center is still jiggly. When it quits jiggling, it’s done. It will firm up a bit when it’s cool, but not enough to take a chance on a jiggly pie from the oven.

Growing up, we often put Cool Whip on this, but we all did things when we were young we are ashamed of later. Now, I like homemade whipped cream, or, on the third day after Thanksgiving, will often eat it straight from the pie pan, while leaning against the counter.