Category: blog

My Dad

In October of 2020, my dad died from COVID. Dad was the Emergency Management Director of his county, and so he was constantly on the front lines, getting his rural community what they needed to get through this pandemic.

Back in February, I was told the Chamber of Commerce of his hometown was considering him for a posthumous award as the “Pandemic Hero” of 2020 in their annual award celebration. I was asked to write his official nomination submission, and it’s as close as I have come to writing his eulogy.

Here is my nomination letter in full, written by a grateful son who, when all is said and done, just misses his Daddy something fierce. Thanks for indulging me for putting it here.

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To the nominating committee:

My father, Hugh Hollowell, died on October 22nd of 2020, from COVID. He had lived and worked in Marshall County his entire life, barring four years in the Air Force. He raised three boys on the land he himself had grown up on, and he taught them about what it means to belong to a place and its people.

His main teaching method was his example. He served for more than 7 years as the chief of the Watson Volunteer Fire Department, coming home from long days crawling under houses as a gas company repairman to wolf down a sandwich and go back out to attend some class that would teach him how to make his community safer.

In 1989, he began a career transition to Emergency Management, when he became the first Fire Coordinator for Marshall County, and began to work for the County full time as their Emergency Management Coordinator in 1996. It was then, at 45 years old, that my dad began to flourish.

My dad had an almost superhuman ability to remain calm when everyone else was losing their head. He could diffuse anger and had the ability to make everyone feel heard, an important skill as he navigated the world of politicians, EMS frontline workers, volunteers, and career civil servants.

He was set to retire in June of 2020. He was at our house Christmas of 2019, and it was a topic he talked a lot about. He had long dreamed of travelling, but budget constraints and the responsibilities of his work and family had prevented it. He and my mom would buy a camper and drive out west and see the wide open spaces of my mother’s childhood and my father’s dreams.

When the pandemic hit, I was glad he was set to retire. I saw the way in those early days it made this 68-year-old man tired, and the fatigue in his voice was obvious over the phone. He had long been able to handle a crisis – tornados, fires, storms, bad wrecks – but this was a crisis that did not stop, and he was the person who was responsible for making sure people were protected.

He felt that responsibility heavily.

That is another thing he taught us – what it means to be responsible: To your family, to your job, to your community. So I was saddened but not surprised when he told me that he had chosen to not retire in June as he had planned.

“I can’t do it to them. I can’t leave the county in a lurch. I’m going to get them through this year, and then retire in January.”

The pandemic got worse, of course. When I would call, he would be in the truck, on his way to pick up some PPE or just coming back from delivering it to the hospital or one of the fire departments. His emails came at odd hours – 4AM, or 11:30PM, as he grabbed snatches to time from a packed day. He lamented the weight of the boxes, saying that it bothered him that he wasn’t as strong as he used to be, and he was really, really looking forward to next year, when he could finally retire.

“I’m just tired,” he said. “I’m really, really tired.”

To those of us who knew him, it wasn’t a shock he would give up his own comfort and pleasure, that he would postpone his rest if it let him make sure the community he loved was safe. When he called me on October 17th to tell me he had tested positive for COVID, he tried to keep the focus off himself and on his concern for who would do the work of making sure the county had what it needed to stay safe while he was out.

I last spoke to him on the 20th. Predictably, he spent perhaps 2 minutes talking about his own condition and 10 minutes talking about how the virus had affected others and the county.

“You know,” he said, “I always joked that I would rest when I was dead. As much sleep as I’m getting right now because of this virus, I have to tell you, I am tired of resting. I want to get back to work!”.

He died around lunchtime on the 22nd.

My father was not perfect, and as a child I often resented the ways that his love for and sense of responsibility to this community took him away from me. The Thanksgiving he missed because of a shooting, the Christmas he missed because of the house fire, the evenings spent away from us to be in the company of others where he could take yet another class instead of spending time with me, the endless fundraisers for the little fire department that was all that protected my community.

But as I told a friend after his death, the hardest part of it is that there is no one to be mad at in this. I wish there was. It would make it all easier. But he died protecting the community that had raised and protected him when he was the child of a middle-aged single mom, who had made sure they had enough when that was far from certain, who had given him the means to earn a living, to raise a family, had given his life meaning and purpose, and that taught him along the way that your community contains all the things you need to have a good life. It is the only way his story could possibly end that would have made sense, given who he was and how he lived.

He was not a demonstratively emotional man, but he loved this town, this county, and the people who lived there. He would not want to be called a hero – he would maintain he was just doing his job. But one of the roles community plays is to tell us the things we cannot know or admit about ourselves, and those of us who knew and loved him know the truth.

Respectfully submitted,

Hugh L. Hollowell, Jr.

Designing for Hospitality

When we were looking for houses to buy, we had a hard time explaining to the Realtor what we wanted. It wasn’t as simple as “We need a three bedroom with two baths in a good neighborhood.”

No, our descriptions always revolve around large yards, shade trees, guest rooms, large dining rooms, guest bathrooms, room for bookshelves and a central kitchen. We will, when we see a house, remark on traffic flow patterns, the suitability for porch sitting and neighbor conversations, whether a house is in a real neighborhood, or whether these people just happen to live next to each other.

In fact, one of the reasons we picked here to move to rather than Nashville or Atlanta or Memphis had to do with the large amount of affordable housing inventory available here, so we could afford a house that would let us live the way we want to live – hospitably.

See, hospitality is not just a matter of inviting people to dinner: It’s also about having room for a table big enough to have them over for dinner. It is easier to have guests spend the night when they can have their own room (or at least a room that can be repurposed on short notice) and don’t have to fight the cats for a slice of the couch. If you have a pantry, you can store food for the times your friends are doing without, and if you have room for a garden, you can grow some of that food yourself.

And it isn’t just about being able to, but being likely to. You are more likely to meet your neighbors when there is not a large fence or hedge between your front yard and theirs. You are more likely to invite your friends from church over for dinner if it won’t be cramped, and if you have room to cook for 12 folks. You are more likely to be the house where your kid’s friends hang out if you have room for the hanging out.

It’s about having values and then finding a house that meets those values. And while every house is a compromise, when there are literally a hundred options at any given time, you can pretty much find something that fits. The point isn’t that we could afford to buy a house that fit our needs, it was that we moved to a place where we could afford to buy a house that fit our needs. The list of needs came first, then we built a life (and bought a house) around them.

We couldn’t have had that house in a different city. So we found a city where we could have that house, and moved there.

Hospitality is one of my key values. Had I had different ones, I would have made other choices. But either way, the point is that I made a decision in keeping with the values I have, and the sort of life I wanted to live. If your decisions don’t support your values, you can’t be surprised when your values don’t get lived out.

Photo by Nick Hillier on Unsplash

Invest in your joy

A friend who is between jobs told me the other day that she had really curtailed her discretionary spending.

“Well, except for the pajamas.”

“The pajamas?”

“They are adorable”, she said. My (11year old) daughter and I got matching pajamas, and I love them so much. But I wonder if I should have spent that money.”

I told her I didn’t think a pair of $20 pajamas was going to be what put her on the streets. “Besides, I think there is a difference between spending and investing. And you made an investment in your joy.”

I hate to spend money, but love to invest in my joy. Let me explain the difference.

If I buy a six pack of beer, well, I may enjoy the beer, but when it’s gone, it’s gone. I will never get that $12 back. I will, in all likelihood, never think of those beers again. That is a cost.

But if I spent that $12 on a coffee mug that makes me smile when I see it, or that reminds me of the mug my grandfather drank out of, well, every time I use that mug for the rest of my life, I will feel a spark of joy. I just invested $12 in my future joy.

As much as possible, I want to own things that help me feel good. That’s it. Is it beautiful? Is it useful? And finally, even if it is one of those things, does it make me feel good? Not, “does it make me feel good when I buy it?”, but, “does it make me feel good that I own it?”.

Like I own this lamp. It’s ugly as sin. I hide it in a closet most of the year. But it emits a spectrum of light that is helpful to me around winter solstice when my seasonal depression kicks in. So, the lamp helps me feel good, and thus we keep it.

Or coffee cups. If the goal is to drink coffee, then practically any cup will do. Practically any coffee cup would be useful. But some coffee cups make me feel better than others. Having spent an awful lot of my life in diners, I love to drink coffee from a thick, heavy china mug. It keeps the coffee warm, it feels good in my hand, and when I drink from one, I feel safe and comfortable.

I drink coffee every day, multiple times a day. Let’s say, on average, four cups of coffee a day, times 360 days a year, equals 1440 cups of coffee. And let’s say that every time I drink coffee from a thick, heavy porcelain cup, I feel just a small shot of comfort, of happiness, of peace and belonging.

That means that by the one-time act of buying myself a good coffee cup that costs at most $8, I am going to make myself feel good 1440 times next year.

Why in the hell would I not do that?

When I was growing up, we owned Corelle dishes. Like these. I hated them. They are break-resistant, chip resistant, and, in my opinion, joy resistant. They are thin and feel weird to me. And every meal, we ate off of them.

Now I am a grown-ass man and can buy my own plates, so we own Fiestaware. They cost more. But they are heavy and sturdy, and when I eat off of them, I feel good. Because they cost more, we have bought them over time, slowly, and rely heavily on thrift stores and estate sales. But every single plate was worth it to me, because I believe them to be beautiful, and owning (and using) them makes me feel good.

If I wake up in the sheets that make me feel good, and I drink the brand of coffee that makes me feel good, and I drink it out of the coffee cup that makes me feel good, and I drink it at the table that has happy memories attached to it, under the wall of shelves I built that hold the bowls and platters we bought together at flea markets and antique stores (and thus are filled with happy memories) and all of which I believe are beautiful – why, I have had a wonderful morning just by waking up and drinking coffee.

Just imagine if your whole day was like that.

Planting as resistance

I went tree shopping today.

We live on half an acre, in a former suburb. The house was outside the city limits when my neighborhood was built, but it would be annexed just five years later while the Korean War was smoldering.

It was nearly a blank slate when we bought it nearly three years ago, with a beautiful southern magnolia in the front yard and seven pine trees scattered around the lot and not much else. It was a great house with good bones, not looking its seventy years. It had been a church parsonage for its whole life before we bought it, which meant it had been cared for but never loved. We decided to love it.

Along came the pandemic, and then we endured hell as foster parents (not from the kids – from the system) and then my Dad died from COVID and then we had a damn insurrection in Washington and through it all, the old house began to love us back.

It’s easy to anthropomorphize things like a house. Heck, I just did it in that last paragraph. But it did seem like the house was happier being cared for, like it liked having the perennial bed planted in the front yard, liked the new deck we put up after cutting down the overgrown wisteria crawling all over the back patio. It’s like it knew we were looking out for it when we fixed the leak in the roof and replaced the sewer pipes.

But it isn’t just because we love the house.

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” – Leonard Wolf, in Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939

So I went tree shopping today. I’m currently looking for a particular crab apple tree, one that has edible fruit and long blooms and is disease resistant and can put up with our severe summer humidity. I love crab apples – I planted three at our last house – but here I am going to try growing apples as well, and I need the crab for a pollinator, in addition to its being beautiful and a gift to the wildlife.

By next spring, we will have 2 apple trees, a crab apple, six plum trees, a peach, two figs, 10 blueberry bushes, four blackberries and two muscadine vines. The apples and crab will go in this fall, and the peach is currently sitting in the driveway waiting for me to plant it.

It’s not just the fruit. It’s that planting things that will endure are acts of resistance to a world gone mad. It’s a form of resistance against all the forces that try to harm us, that try to drag us down, that try to dehumanize us.

Growing fruit is a long-term commitment to a place. We will have figs and blueberries next year, but it will be at least 3 years before we have peaches, and perhaps five before we have apples. But they will feed people long after current politicians are long- dead, they provide us nourishment and flowers and pollen for the bees and food for the birds and perhaps most off all, they are our vote for a future that looks very different than the present.

They are living, growing monuments to hope, to the future, to a world that will long outlast the one we have now. They let me remember who I am and what I hope for in the midst of a world gone mad.And while I don’t think you have to plant trees – maybe you plant iris instead, or flowers, or raise children – I’m all in favor of planting something.

Do you have practices that sustain you in the midst of all this? If so, tell us about them in the comments below.

Photo by Jacob Farrar on Unsplash

A Good Walk Shared

I went for a walk this morning. That isn’t unusual – I walk about two and a third miles most mornings, rain or shine, and have done for more than a year.

What made it notable this morning was that I walked with a friend. Normally, my walking is a solitary pursuit, but my friend Jill is wanting to get back in the habit of exercising, and asked if she could walk with me this morning.

It’s a great walk, with gentle hills, through a midcentury neighborhood with ranch houses and mature trees and a creek, with surprises around many corners, like the airstream trailer or the bridge over the creek or the hedge of azaleas that is a wall of pink in the springtime. It is the high point of my day, this walk is, and I was glad to share it with someone else.

As we were walking along, I couldn’t help myself – I kept pointing out things that I was excited about. That live oak, the ways this house had renovated their garage, the unusual plants these people had in their side yard, the vintage car in the driveway. All things I knew to expect, because I have seen them every day for months.

I also took delight in showing her the house that really went all out for Christmas, and the house where you will see a giant inflatable bunny rabbit come Easter, and the house that put up the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag after the insurrection back in January. Sigh.

Really, it almost felt like hosting a tourist in your town – like I was the guide, giving the history of the houses, letting her know where the famous author had lived, I pointed out when we passed the home of the former governor, showed her where the city limits had been in the 50’s.

It was a lot of fun, this playing host. I had not realized how much of this walk I have internalized, how much I had soaked in, how well I knew this stretch, and how fascinated with it I was.

Some things are better when you share them.

 

Unitize your time.

Those of us who are in the helping professions seldom end up having 40 hour, structured workweeks. Instead, we are often responsible for creating our own schedule, which always involves other people’s schedules, which can lead to long, unstructured days.

For instance, I have an office, but am only in it three to four hours a day, with the rest being nighttime meetings, breakfast meetings, coffeeshop meetings, or time spent out in the field. And I still have paperwork to do and writing to do, and all the other sorts of things people expect me to do.

If I’m not careful, I can end up having a day where I have a breakfast meeting at 7:30, get to the office at 9:00, have a lunch meeting at 1:00 PM, spend time in the field until 6:00, where I grab something in the drive thru on my way to a seminar I am supposed to teach at 7:30 PM, and finally get home at 10:00, exhausted.

And for many of us, this sort of thing happens all the time. It is really easy to have a workday that spans 12 or 14 hours, and we wonder why we are exhausted and burned out.

Or maybe we are really good at sticking to eight hour days, but we end up giving up our days off to “just catch up”.

A technique I have learned that has really helped planning my days and weeks. It goes like this:

Your day is split into three units: Morning, afternoon, and evening. You have two goals – don’t work more than two units any given day, and don’t work more than 12 units in a given week.

For the days, you shouldn’t work all three units in a given day. So, if you know you are going to have night meetings, schedule your day so you are not working that morning or afternoon. If you have a full day packed from 9-5, don’t schedule anything that evening.

For the weeks, if you know you have to work Saturday morning and have a presentation Tuesday night, you are already starting the week with two units filled. Throw in a Thursday night meeting and we are up to three, which means, if 12 is our goal, that we can’t work full days the rest of the week.

I find this much more helpful (and realistic) than counting hours. It is easy to wrap my head around, easy to plan around and imposes structure. It turns your calendar into more than a device for recording your appointments and meetings, but rather a framework for structuring your life.

Saying goodbye to Carolina Beach

Carolina Beach

When we got married, we had no money. We spent a total of $300 on the wedding and reception, combined, and even that was incredibly stressful. Her ring came from a pawn shop. I didn’t have a ring for the first year we were married – we couldn’t afford it. A friend bought Renee’s dress, and another friend gave us their house for the reception.

It was really, really, tight.

So when a friend gave us the use of their condo in Carolina Beach for a week so we could have a honeymoon, it was a dream come true. At the wedding we had been given nearly a thousand dollars in cash from guests who would come up and slip folded bills in our hands, so we had the money to enjoy ourselves that week.

That was the week we fell in love with Carolina Beach.

It is a small beach town, with cheesy bright colored buildings, seasonal shops, restaurants of variable quality, and a pretty nice boardwalk along the dunes. That week we found new restaurants we liked, we walked along the beach for hours, went to the nearby aquarium, rode the ferry, and slept with the sliding glass door open so we could fall asleep to the crashing of the waves.

The Deck House is a restaurant in a converted church just off the main drag, and we ate there the first night we were in town at a friend’s recommendation. It felt decadent to eat there, and we instantly fell in love with it. I don’t think we have spent the night in Carolina Beach since without eating there at least once.

Next door is Kure Beach with a massive wooden dock that juts out into the ocean, where old men fish and the seagulls wait patiently for bait droppings and fish cleanings. We learned that if you bought popcorn in the bait shop, the seagulls would flock to you like you were St. Francis and that it would delight any small children who happened to be nearby.

There is a small island bookshop that sold overpriced used books and a few new books, but we believe in supporting what we want more of, so we always would spend an hour or so in that shop, and always buy a book or four. It is next door to the fifties themed diner, and just down the street from the coffee shop.

Up the road a few miles is the dock where I scattered a friend’s ashes, and down the road is the causeway where I love to sit on the rocks and watch the ferry go by while the waves lap at my feet.

We have been there probably 30 times over the last nine years. We have watched businesses change hands and improve, or fail. We have been there in every possible season, every possible weather. We learned that the week before Memorial Day is the best combination of affordability and seasonal shops being open, developed favorite restaurants and must do’s anytime we are there. We have even talked of moving there.

And now we are moving 12 hours away.

In some ways, moving away from there is harder than moving away from Raleigh. Carolina Beach was where we went to get away. It is where we went to relax, and where we began to be a family. We dreamed there, and we dreamed of there.

So last Thursday, we went one last time to say goodbye.

We ate at a restaurant we liked. We walked the boardwalk. We swung on the swings and talked about the future and reminisced about the past. We walked out on the pier and watched the waves and the seagulls. We bought a couple of used books. We got sunburned, ate donuts, watched the birds dart into the receding waves in search of food. Along the way, I wept some. Several times, in fact.

And then we drove the two hours home.