Category: Gratitude

Why Do You Like to Cook?

Kaylee, age 13: Uncle Hugh, how often do you cook?

Me, age 49: I cook something almost every day, and some days I cook two or three times a day. Why?

Kaylee: Well, I could tell by the way you stirred the food around that you know what you are doing. Do you like cooking?

Me: I do. I really do.

Kaylee: Why?

Me: Hmmm. Well, there are several reasons. The first is that when I left home, I could suddenly eat anything I wanted. But most of the food I could afford and had access to wasn’t very good. So learning how to cook was a way to be kind to myself. I deserved to have good food, and the only way I knew to get it was to cook it myself.

But more than that, it was that there were people in my life that I dearly loved, and now they were gone. And when I thought back over my memories of them, most of those memories involved food. Like today, we ate chicken and dressing. I can never eat chicken and dressing without thinking of Aunt Louise. But how often in your day-to-day life do you get to eat chicken and dressing? But by knowing how to make it, I can feel that good feeling any time I want to. Knowing how to cook is like having a photo album filled with people you love, that you have an opportunity to see any time you need to eat, which is multiple times a day.

Another reason I like to cook is that most of my adult life has been trying to solve unsolvable problems. Like, no matter how hard I work, people are still hungry, still homeless, still lonely, still addicts. You can work hard all day, all week, all month, even, and at the end of that time feel like absolutely nothing has changed.

But I can have some rice and some sausage and a pepper and an onion and a few other things, and it doesn’t look like anything at all, but if you know how you can turn that pile of random things into jambalaya. I can start with chaos and end with something that tastes good, that reminds me of people I love, and that makes other people happy and fills your belly in the process. It’s the one part of my life I can fix. I can turn the chaotic into something good, and I can usually do that li less than an hour. How cool is that!

But my favorite reason? Today. We sat around a table, and we ate food that was good, and we talked about stories from our past, and people we missed who were not there, and the food reminded us of meals we had had like this before, and the people who had been there, and for a minute, we all felt very loved. I love knowing how to make that happen.

2021

I was talking to Renee today about how weird 2021 has been.

Nothing really bad happened to us, personally, this year. But the general anxiety of living through the second year of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people has been exhausting. In some ways, the day to day of this year, where we are in a constant state of expectation and shifting boundaries, has been much harder to navigate than 2020 was, where the boundaries were more clear.

I was elated when, in February, we drove 2 hours in the snow to get Renee her first vaccine shot. I literally wept at the relief. Finally, I thought. This will all be over.

But it wasn’t over. It still, 11 months later, isn’t over.

Early on, I predicted this was going to last for years and years. I hoped I wasn’t right. But I was right.

Like many of you, we spent this year trying to figure out how to live in this new reality. We spent a lot of time at home, although not as much as we did in 2020. We stretched by traveling, albeit travel with lots of precautions. We ate out more, mostly outside or in empty restaurants. We saw three movies in empty theaters. I met people for coffee. It felt, for a minute, almost normal between the variants.

I became more distrustful of people this year. Instead of being potential allies and friends, they became potential disease vectors. Crowds are unsafe places in this new world in which we live, and people who intentionally seek out crowds became unsafe people. Millions of my fellow Americans intentionally chose not to get vaccinated, placing my immune compromised wife at risk. I am as yet unable to forgive them for that.

This year I prioritized my health in a way I never have before. I committed to daily physical activity – 2.5 mile walks or 30 minutes of swimming nearly every day. I began eating consciously, and along the way lost 48 pounds. I have a set bedtime, and fight hard to get at least 7 hours of sleep.

I built a workshop over the summer, where I now spend my evenings making things that make me happy. It is an extravagance, that creative space, but it makes me happy.

In 2020, I wrote 2 blog posts on my personal blog. This summer I built a new website, where I blog daily and since September 1st have published 84 posts and more than 60,000 words.

I leaned in this year to my identity as a writer, as now I make a not-inconsiderable portion of my income from writing related activities, and in addition to this blog I also publish two newsletters each week (this one and this one.)

So, while a lot of good things happened this year, it was all fought for and won reluctantly.

As I have said before – I don’t set goals. But I do intend to lean further into my identity as a writer and Internet publisher in 2022. I intend to lean into my identity as a craftsperson more in 2022 – expect an online shop where I will sell some of my wares, and more writing about craft. I intend to lean more into my identity as an organizer, as I continue my work organizing faith communities here to make a better Mississippi. But mostly, I intend to continue to believe in a better world than the one in which we currently live, and to strive to live as if that world was already a reality, and by so living, bring it a little closer to fruition.

Happy New Year, friends. I wish you every good thing.

 

I’m rooting for you.

It’s probably the nicest pool I have ever seen in my life.

It’s the half-sized pool, 25 meters long, but so wide it’s almost square. Three walls of the room are floor to ceiling windows, and there are skylights overhead, piercing the knotty pine ceiling, flooding the room with natural light. When you speak, the sounds bounce around a bit, sounding unnatural and flat.

There is another pool in the room – a square heated pool they call the therapeutic pool, but they assure me that if no one is using it for a group, I’m welcome to use it, too. When I walked through this morning, it was in use by two women who appear to be around 80, talking in low tones while using foam dumbbells to exercise.

My focus this year, the year after my Dad’s death, has been on my health. My dad was only 21 years older than I am, and while his death from a virus says nothing about my own life expectancy, it does make one begin to count. I’ve been eating better, and logging my food. I exercise nearly every day. I prioritize getting enough sleep.

And this week, I joined a gym with a pool, because my joints are trash after years of abusing them.

This morning, I put on my trunks (which fit me perfectly 50 pounds ago, but are now relying more than they should on the drawstring to defend my modesty) and slid into a warm pool, and commenced to do laps – quiet, slow, trudging laps – the equivalent of walking as opposed to the running the speedo-clad twenty-something guy in the next lane is doing.

I can only really backstroke with any degree of proficiency, so I am watching the ceiling, following along under a wooden beam that spans the length of the room, keeping all the moving parts going the way I was taught all those years ago on Parris Island: Hands up along the sides to the armpits, then out, then down, hands cupped. My shoulder grates a bit, unused to this particular motion.

And in the aisle next to me is a Black woman somewhere in her late 70’s, with the foam dumbbells, raising them and lowering them in the water, all the while moving down the length of the shallow end of the lane sideways, back and forth. A woman I assume to be her granddaughter cheered her on, saying, “Good job, Granny!  I’m so proud of you!”

I knew I was not moving quickly, but I have to admit I did notice when Granny passed me. Several times.

And I did think, briefly, that it is a crying shame that my swimming ability is so slow that an 80-year-old woman can walk sideways faster than I can swim. But as I swam, back and forth, slowly, like an impressionistic portrait of the athlete I used to be, I couldn’t help but think how awesome it is that she is doing the work, and how great it is that her granddaughter is spending time with her, and how much I wish I could spend that sort of time with the people who loved me into being.

And then I spent some time in what my Buddhist friends call an act of Loving-kindness, where I just took Granny and her family and focused on them and wished them every good thing.

I’ve never been good at competition. I almost died as a kid, and often in the years after it was an accomplishment that I showed up. I learned long ago that whatever motivation I have to have to get through my day is going to have to come from my own motives, and not what you think of me.

And can we be honest with each other a minute and admit to ourselves and to each other just how hard the last two years have been? There has been so much put on us that we had to just survive, so any thought of winning or not seems so secondary right now. If we just show up, that feels like winning to me right now.

Wherever you are in this whole thing, I’m rooting for you. I want us all to win.

So good job, Granny. I’m proud of you, too. And while you might get there before me, I’m glad you’re ahead of me, to show me the way.

Miracle Enough

I spent this morning among Pentecostal folk.

I have never seen a blind man regain sight.
I have never seen a cancerous tumor go away untreated.
I have never spoken in tongues.

When I prayed over the dying, they still died.
Despite intense prayer, my church still has a hole in its roof.
And praying in Jesus name has yet to bring me wealth.

But each day about 5PM, the birds gather
in the bamboo grove near my house
And sing songs of praise as they prepare to sleep.

And for me, that is miracle enough.

Reflecting on 30 Days of Gratitude

“Twenty Twenty One hasn’t been so bad,” she said. “It just feels like… Groundhog Day, maybe. Every day is the same. Lots of uncertainty. We are both home pretty much all the time. Going out feels unsafe, but you see lots of people acting like 10,000 Mississippians didn’t die in the 18 months.”

It was the end of October, and Renee and I were sitting at our kitchen table, having just eaten one of perhaps a dozen meals that we have in rotation right now – meals we can fix with little mess and fuss, that don’t require much creativity or fresh produce. We think of it almost as a pandemic playlist, but for meals.

And that is what so much of my life is like these days – hoping for a time beyond this current uncertainty, and yet realizing we are going to be here for a really long time. If I still drank, a drinking game where I take a shot every time someone says “the new normal” would wreck my liver in short order.

I just happened to be on Facebook on November the 1st when someone posted their first post of “30 days of Gratitude”, a popular Facebook meme where you post a thing each day for which you are thankful.

Honestly? These things suck me in. My ADHD brain loves structure – but my executive function is such that my brain can’t manufacture it. So, 30 days where I don’t have to think about what to write about is a gift. So I decided to use it as a prompt.

I made some rules.

Other than Renee, I couldn’t write about being thankful for a living person. That was mostly to avoid leaving people out.

I had to have an original picture I took or owned to illustrate or accompany the post. In other words, no stock photos. The only time I broke that was the Doctor Jabbour post.

I have a complicated relationship with my past – I know a lot of us feel that way. But I also have come to recognize that the things for which I am grateful have come out of my past – that I am really the product of my stories. So each post needs to have a story in it.

I had to write it every day. I broke that rule once, writing Thanksgiving’s the day before, but I was on the road 10 hours out of 36 during that time, so if I didn’t do it the day before, it wouldn’t have happened.

And it needed to be at least 500 words. To put that in perspective, this post you are reading now is at 450 words at the end of this sentence.

And after a year of writing about Dad, I decided that no single post would be about him.

There were days I had no idea what I was going to write about. Some days I wouldn’t know until I was halfway through the post. Some days I thought it was going to be about X, and it ended up being about Y. Sometimes I narrowed it down while writing: The post about Heather started as a blanket post about my LGBT friends, the same way I wrote about my atheist friends. The post about friends who disagree with me started about a particular person, but he was still alive, and the more I wrote I realized he was one of several in that position.

And I think that is the thing I liked most about it – in fact, it’s one of the things I like about writing: The discovery. That you learn something you did not know before as you write.

Having grown up evangelical, every time someone mentions the word accountability, I think it means somebody got caught with porn. But the accountability of knowing that people were expecting me to publish something each day mattered, even if nothing would happen if I had missed a day. The truth is, I am more afraid of letting you down than I am letting me down.

The last 20 months or so have been horrible. But this month I learned that I have much to be grateful for, that there are things in the midst of a pandemic for which to be grateful, and that the common thread that runs through all of the things for which I am grateful is the relationships that have, formed me, held me, and given my life shape and meaning.

I’m not sure what to do next. I don’t really want to break a now 31-day streak, but I don’t know what I can write about tomorrow. But hey, I’ve been there before.

Regardless, thank you for reading my stuff, for sharing it, for commenting and interacting with it. It’s good to be known.

You.

On the 30th and last day, I’m grateful for you. Yes, you, who is reading this post.

A long time ago, I knew a poet. Like, a real poet. She is published these days, and went to school and got her MFA at a famous university and introduced me to Phillip Larkin and Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. But this was before all that.

We had similar, blue collar roots, but she had just a bit more direction and management than I did, and even though she was much younger than I was, and even though when I knew her she was living in genteel poverty and making minimum wage, I aspired to her life. We shared books, and stories, and walks along the Mississippi river on Saturday afternoons.

At this point in my life, I had written nothing in a decade, since a horrible encounter with an English professor that tried to squash my dreams. But I remembered the joy that came from sitting down and opening yourself up to the universe- the ancient magic that happens when you show up, ready to write, and the universe gives you the words.

One day, looking over the river, I asked her, “Why do you write?”

I have heard many people try to answer this question. Often they say something about how they can’t avoid writing, or they have to write, or something like that. But her answer stuck with me, and has rung true for me.

She turned her back to me and walked a few steps away, looking down at the ground, hands in her pockets. Then she turned around. “Why? Because I want to be understood. I’ve never made sense to any of the people who knew me – not even to the people who thought they loved me. I write because I want someone to read it and understand who I am. I write, Hugh, because I want to be known.”

Instantly, I knew the truth, and like the old story goes, the truth set me free.

I too write because I want to be known. Because I have never made much sense to the people who know me or love me, and I want them to understand. I write because I have stories that have shaped me and changed me, and I’m conceited enough to believe that if you knew them, they may change you, too.

There are people who write in a journal, with instructions that it be burned after their death. They are an audience of one, and they write as a way of understanding themselves. But it is not lost on me that it took the invention of blogging to get me over my self-imposed writing embargo. It wasn’t enough for me to have the means – I also required a reader.

Often when I write, I imagine a particular person reading it, and I write it as a personal communication to them. I have six ideal readers, all actual people, even though none of them know, and two of them are now dead. But when I write, I write it to one of them.

For more than 18 years now, I’ve been writing down my stories, my ideas, my discoveries, sharing them in various places. It’s like we’ve been on a journey together, you and me, and I’m sharing what I learned along the way. And sometimes you are going someplace I have been before, and I know where the pitfalls are, and might be able to save you some steps.

I’m constantly amazed that anyone cares at all about what I have to say. Every time something I write travels at all, it is a shock. People often will reach out and tell me how something I wrote a decade or more ago changed their life. That never ceases to move me, and to remind me of the importance of story.

At the end of the day, dear reader, I’m just a working class kid from rural Mississippi who realized one day that the things he felt and that seemed so huge were things we all feel, and we are all just searching for language for those things. The highest compliment someone can ever give me is when they read something I write, and they say, “This is how I feel too, but I didn’t know how to say it.”

Because in that moment, they know more about me, yes, but feel known, too. They know then that they the things in their head and hearts are not worthless or pointless or known only by them, but are human things, and they feel a little less alone, a little bit more understood, a little bit more emboldened to share their own stories, and a little less shame, perhaps, over the late night fears that greet them in dark places.

In other words, I write because I want to be read, and what’s more, I want to know you and be known by you. And for almost 20 years, you have kept showing up: Reading, sharing, interacting, telling me your stories in response. You are the most important part of this operation, and I couldn’t do any of it without you. You make my life more than I ever dreamt possible, and I’m grateful for you beyond words.

For slow mornings

On the 29th day, I’m grateful for quiet mornings.

The house I grew up in was 1050 square feet – three bedrooms and one bathroom. One tiny bathroom. Mom, Dad, and three sons – I am the oldest. And there was never a time, it seemed like, when someone wasn’t in the bathroom. In the evenings, we stacked up like cordwood, just waiting on the person in front of you to take a bath or shower, and while being the oldest meant I got to stay up the latest, it also meant there was no hot water to be found when I got in there.

So somewhere along the way, I decided to start waking up early and taking a shower then. It was lovely – take as long as you want, run the hot water tank dry if you want, because it’s an hour at least before anyone else will need the hot water. And the house was quiet and still, making the gentle sounds a house makes in the dark: The hum of the refrigerator, the rhythmic whir of the ceiling fans, the soft padding of the cat on the tile floor.

I came to look forward to that hour that was just mine, alone in the house before anyone else stirred. It was a sort of freedom.

In Boot Camp, your time was scheduled from the minute they woke you up until the moment you got in bed. We showered by the clock, peed by the clock, put on our socks to the sounds of Drill instructors counting down from 5. You were never, ever alone.

Every night, Marine regulations required there be two people on watch all night, from lights out to lights on the following morning. We took one hour shifts, and the watch roster was posted. By the end of the first week, I would look to see who had the watch the hour before lights on, and ask them to wake me up 45 minutes early. I would then take a long, slow, comfortable solo shower, shave my face with care and attention, and then slip back into bed 5 minutes before the lights came on, Drill Instructors screaming for us to get up.

Again, getting up early had saved my sanity.

Even when I lived alone, getting up early, before the world is moving, was always my happy place. I can write uninterrupted, nobody is going to call me, nobody expects anything from me.

But the favorite thing I love about mornings is what I think of as the reset button. My energy peaks about an hour after I wake up, and then it’s a slow downward taper the rest of the day. But that first hour is slow and gentle. It’s like someone reset the etch a sketch. It’s a blank slate, a clean sheet of paper. No mistakes made yet, nobody yet disappointed, no balls yet dropped. No matter how horrible the day before was, I wake up each morning excited because it’s a whole new chance to be my best self.

I will get up in my quiet house – houses make more noises now than they did when I was a child, what with air conditioners, computer fans and the gas hot water heater, but still – quiet house sounds. I pad into the kitchen, bleary eyed: These days it seems like it takes longer for my eyes to focus than they did when I was younger. I will turn on the electric kettle and lean against the counter, and perhaps check the headlines on my phone. I make a cup of coffee, and then pad into my office, where I will fire up MS Word and write.

After an hour of writing and coffee I will rustle up some breakfast, and maybe I shower then if I didn’t the night before and my day begins like everyone else’s. But that first hour, alone in a quiet house, is always the best part of my day.

For second acts.

I’m grateful for second acts.

I’ve debated which story to tell to illustrate this concept, but here is one example:

I have friends who were pressured as kids to be certain things – their future already set out for them, as clear as a road map. They were not children, but future accountants, future farmers, future lawyers, future truck drivers. I knew lots of people with that story – but it was never my story.

My parents never pressured me at all.

I went through a phase when I was about 9 years old where I decided I was going to be a superhero when I grew up. And because I am me, I had elaborate plans – I mean, actual plans – I drew blueprints to my Fortress of Solitude, which would be hidden behind some trees on the back of our property by the hay field, because that was where I went when I felt overwhelmed.

I went through phases – I was going to be Thor at first, and went around telling my family I was a Norse God and was now immortal. Then Dad had me look up the definition of “Norse” and “Immortal”, and I decided to be Cat Man instead.

It was all consuming. I built grappling hooks and climbed trees with them and once fell off the roof of the shed when nobody was looking while “training”. I must have been exhausting. They would patiently sit and listen to my latest schemes, Dad would answer my questions about what type of rope had the most strength for the least amount of weight, and how to make grappling hooks and I got Mom to commit to helping me sew my costume, even though I never saw my mother sew anything more complicated than a hem on my church pants.

They never told me it was impossible. They never told me to be realistic. They never ridiculed me, and if they told their friends, it was never in my presence. I felt 100 percent affirmed, loved, and believed. And that was pretty much the story of my whole childhood.

Lord (and the therapists) knows my parents got some things wrong, and I have no idea how some first time parents in their twenties in the early years of the Reagan administration in Byhalia, Mississippi had the emotional intelligence to know that their quirky, introverted, nerdy bookworm kid needed them to embrace his weirdness, but they did.

But what I also needed, and they didn’t have the tools to give me, was management.

There is this lovely scene in the original Rocky movie, where the boxing veteran Mickey is trying to explain to Rocky why Rocky needs to hire Mickey as his manager. Mickey tells of how he never got the good shots because nobody explained the facts to him, nobody watched out for him, and so he took the easy money instead of planning for his future.

“I had no management, kid!” he tells Rocky.

Well, the downside of being raised the way I was is that I had no management. Nobody explained to me that I really should have taken algebra in 9th grade, instead of the general math class I was allowed to take. Nobody in my world explained that I really would want to go to college. Nobody in my world sat me down and explained the long game to me, explained how college aid worked, that I didn’t have to risk being sent to a war zone in order to get college paid for.

I’m not blaming my parents – it was the whole system. We had a guidance counselor at school – she basically pushed poor kids into the service and richer kids to college. I didn’t understand how financial aid worked. I scored in the 98% percentile in Mississippi on the ACT – not only did nobody really explain that I could have went to any state college for free, there was nobody recommending that I go to college in the first place.

It was as foreign a concept to me as if you recommended I consider going to the moon. I accept that some people have done that, but I have no idea how to go about getting there, or how to pay for it, or what the process is.

So instead I went in the Marines. And there I learned that college was probably a good idea, but I was years behind by the time I got out. And because I didn’t take college prep courses in high school, the first year was virtually all remedial, non-credit classes. And I had to work while going to school, so it was a lot of night classes and summer seminars. I never lived in a dorm, never pledged any Greek organization, never met with any industry recruiters, never went to a college sports game, never went on study abroad trips. Every single thing you liked about college, I didn’t do there. The totality of my college experience was to write them checks and take tests and fight traffic leaving the parking lot before going home to collapse in bed, exhausted.

I would flounder for more than a decade. Before I was 35, I would quit three different jobs that dumber people than me have made good, lifelong careers doing. I made good money at times. I got married for bad reasons, took jobs for bad reasons, quit them for bad reasons, got divorced for questionable reasons, got into relationships that dead people would have known were doomed for failure, and generally drifted. I first read Kerouac because a woman I dated said I reminded her of him. It took some time before I realized she was not complimenting my writing style but instead meant I was drifting and goalless.

When I was 35, things both fell apart and came together. I moved to a new town, took up a new course of study, met new people, and reached out to people who were successful at what I wanted to be, and I learned from them. I had direction, goals, and mentors. It’s like a whole different world.

I have read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in one of his essays, he said that he used to believe there were no second acts in American lives. I did too. But I had one, all the same.

I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like if I had been more directed as a kid. If I had had people in my life that valued formal education. If that guidance counselor had done her job. If my 98th percentile ACT score had attracted the same sort of attention from college recruiters that my 99th percentile ASVAB score did from military recruiters. If I had gone to Ole Miss right out of high school? Majored in English and learned to write when Willie Morris was still there? How would it all have come out? If I had gotten not only a degree at college, but a network and a fraternity and mentors as well?

I will never know. That wasn’t how the first act played out. But I’m really grateful for the second one.

Heather

On the 27th day, I’m grateful for Heather, and the things she taught me.

A long time ago, I was a 19-year-old Marine, and I was in love with a fellow Marine named Heather. We were an unlikely pair. She was a liberal Catholic from Montana. I was a conservative Methodist from Mississippi.

We were inseparable. One weekend I brought her to Byhalia, to see where I grew up. We then went to Oxford, where The University of Mississippi is, and talked about how cool it would be to live there when we got out of the Marines. For 28 years now, I can’t go to Oxford without thinking about walking across the grounds of William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with her that crisp fall day. She was filled with derision at the monument to the Confederate dead that was on the town square, on the lawn of the courthouse. As an aside, that monument finally came down last year.

We talked a lot about children, and figured between my round head and her dimples, we would make some pretty babies. We talked about marriage, and she told me about the examples of strong women she had in her life, and that I shouldn’t expect her to be June Cleaver sitting at home making dinner.

When we were dating, Heather drank. A lot. And the closer we got, the more she drank. It was a huge problem in our relationship. Drinking has never been really important to me, and drunk people annoy me in the way they can only annoy sober people. Her birthday was coming up, and I had planned a great day for us to spend together. We would go to the art museum, then a picnic afterwards.

She didn’t show up. She had gone out with her friends the night before to celebrate and gotten incredibly drunk, and then overslept. Actually, that isn’t quite true – she just didn’t remember that we were doing anything. I was, in a word, forgotten.

It’s hard to remember what life was like in those days before cell phones. Her roommate told me what happened and that Heather was passed out in their barracks room, and that she would tell Heather I had called when she woke up. I sat in the lobby of the barracks, waiting for her to show up. Just after lunch, she showed up, looking like hell.

She apologized profusely. I was royally pissed. But I could never be mad at her for long. We went for a long walk, and then I took her back to the barracks and we agreed I would take her to the art museum tomorrow instead.

And we did. It was a lovely fall day. We walked through the museum grounds, hand in hand. I saw my first Warhol that day. And when we were in the parking lot, she told me she had something she wanted to talk to me about. We went to a diner she liked and that we ate at a lot, and then she took my hand and told me she wasn’t going to be able to marry me, because she was a lesbian. She had seen how much she had hurt me the day before, and knew that if she didn’t tell me now, it would only hurt me more later. I had been her last shot at trying to be straight, she said, and apparently, wanting to be straight wasn’t enough.

I wish I could say how accepting I was. I wish I could say I saw her coming out to me as the gift that it was, that I recognized she was putting her safety and her career in the Marines in my hands, that she loved me enough to tell me the truth about who she was.

But I didn’t handle it well. I mean, I am Southern enough I wasn’t rude, but I was hurt and confused by it all. It wasn’t just breaking up with someone. Instead, it felt like they were gone forever.

When we got back to the barracks, I went for a long walk to process. Everything I knew, everything I had been taught about sexuality told me that being gay was a sin. Everything I knew about Heather told me she was one of the kindest, best people I knew. It was my first real ethical crisis – do I stay true to the religion I grew up in, or do I stay true to the person I knew and (still) loved?

In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is a point where Jim, the escaped slave, is captured, and Huck is faced with a choice: He can break the law and go against the everything he had been taught about religion, morality, and racial norms and try to rescue Jim. Or he can be safe, and follow the things he had been taught, and let them take Jim.

He knew what he had been taught. He knew what the preacher and the Sunday School teacher would have told him the right thing to do was. But he also knew he loved Jim, and that Jim loved him. And he believed that to throw in with Jim would damn him to hell forever – it would be the point of no return.

He came to a conclusion: “Alright then. I’ll go to hell!” And he helped Jim escape.

I decided that I was throwing in with Heather. I knew her, had loved her, and would support her, even if I would not be able to be her partner or her lover. And if it meant betraying the religion I grew up with, then so be it. If I was going to Hell, it was going to be while loving Heather.

I went back to the barracks and told her I loved her, that I would always love her, even if it meant we couldn’t be together, and that I would always be on her side.

Over the next six months or so, she introduced me to her friends – other Marines who were also lesbians, people I had known but who were not out. This was the first circle of LGBT folks I had ever been invited into. They were so accepting of me, answered so many of my questions – even the ones that were unintentionally rude – so loving toward me. I think I freaked some of them out, but they knew I was important to Heather, so I was accepted.

Our marriage plans ended the day she admitted to both me and herself that she was a lesbian, but our friendship stayed intact. She and I were the same age, and we watched each other celebrate milestones – she had first a partner, then a wife and then children and grandchildren.

She continued to struggle with alcohol the whole time she was in the Marines, back in those days when being Queer and in the Marines put you in danger of being arrested, but after she got out, she eventually got sober and became an EMS worker, then went back to school and got her RN and eventually fulfilled her dream of becoming a trauma flight nurse on the air ambulance.

The last time we saw each other face to face was in the early 2000’s, but we stayed in touch – first by email and then Facebook. When I was in NC, she supported my work there as a monthly donor – one of the first, actually.

About 5 years ago, she ended up with breast cancer. They did all the right things and the normal treatments and it went into remission – and while she was in remission her granddaughter was born.

But it came back. She died in December of 2018.

Heather was my first of so many things: My first liberal friend. My first feminist friend. My first Catholic friend. My first Queer friend. And the beginning of the end of the religious certainty of my youth.

For friends from other cultures

On the 26th day, I’m grateful for other cultures, and how they have influenced and shaped me.

In the 1830’s, Jonathan Hollowell and his wife Clara and their children Edwin and Calvin moved to Marshall County, Mississippi from around Goldsboro, North Carolina. They were one of many families that moved here after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, which removed the Choctaw and other tribes from the State and across the Mississippi River to western territories.

In other words, I am a Mississippian directly because my ancestors profited from the coerced removal of a culture and a people.

I grew up in Byhalia, MS. I had friends who lived in Pontotoc, MS. Went to Senatobia, MS all the time. They are all Chickasaw names. I never learned anything about the Chickasaw people in school. Never knew a Chickasaw person.

The main street of my home town was actually part of the road that was the Trail of Tears. I learned about the Trail of Tears in school. I did not learn it happened less than 500 yards from where I sat.

I learned I was not guilty. I did not yet know that I was, however, responsible.

Growing up, my world was very Black and White. Literally. I knew a (very) few Latinos, and no Asians. We went to Memphis occasionally, and there was a Chinese restaurant Dad liked up there, and he would eat with chopsticks like he learned how to do when he was overseas in the Air Force.

We ate Mexican food, but really, it was the Old El Paso taco kit with ground beef and refried beans from a can. That and bean burritos from Taco Bell was the limits of our ethnic food.

Of course, that wasn’t true. We ate copious amounts of sweet potatoes, summer peas, and greens, all cooked in ways passed on to White people like me from enslaved Africans generations ago. Likewise, the chitterlings and fatback and blackstrap molasses were all foods enslaved people ate because the wealthy landowners didn’t want it. The turnips we prized were originally food for pigs, but enslaved folks learned to make them taste great, and they taught the rest of us.

We didn’t count any of that. It was our food now.

I was sixteen and in Tulsa Oklahoma on a school trip before I would ever have a real conversation with someone who was not Black or White.  She was Chinese, and was there from another school up East.

Mark Twain said something to the effect that travel was fatal to prejudice, and while I want to argue with him, it certainly helped me. As I traveled and met and worked with Mexican and Guatemalans and Brazilians and Serbs and Croats and Indians and Chinese and Koreans, I learned we are far more alike than different, and that at the end of the day, we want the same things: To be safe, to take care of our families, to have hope tomorrow will be better than today, to leave a legacy in the hearts of our loved ones.

My curiosity has served me well, and my desire to hear their stories. To learn about their lives, to eat their foods, to share mine with them. This requires a level of intentionality: I have a relation who lived with her husband for 2 years in Germany while he was in the service, but she learned zero German, only shopped and ate American food on base, and used every chance to tell the rest of us about how much she hated Germany.

I don’t ever want to be like that.

A few years back, I spent a week in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I would love to go back and explore more, but one thing that struck me was how they actually had an indigenous culture there – White culture was not the default. The beauty, diversity, and richness that came about as a result of that was striking.

I have come to believe that all of us are smarter than any of us, and to be grateful for all my friends from cultures different than mine, who took me in, who fed me, who loved me when I made that hard, and who have enriched my life in innumerable ways.

Thank you.