Category: Gratitude

My neighborhood

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

I love my neighborhood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My health

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

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

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

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

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

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

But really? I feel great.

What about your depression?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology

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

When I was 16, my dad bought a computer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a time to be alive.

My workshop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So this spring and summer, I built a workshop.

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

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

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

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

Why I Stay in the South

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They taught me that, and I believed them.

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

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

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

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

And that is not true.

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

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

Dr. Jabbour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did. And I did.

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

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

Everything.

Storytelling

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

I grew up among storytellers.

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

And she could tell a story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can do better than this guy, I thought.

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

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

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

Our cats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The opportunity to travel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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