Category: Posts

Dead Things

When I was in high school, I read the novel First Blood, which is the novel that the Rambo movies were based on. As is often the case, the movies were very unlike the book.

In the novel, John Rambo, a homeless Vietnam vet, is passing through a small town when the local sheriff tags him as trouble. Keep in mind this is in 1972. The novel talks about Rambo’s beard and unkempt appearance. The war was just ending, and many folks returned to broken dreams and brought their nightmares with them.

One thing the author, David Morrell, does well is we are privy to the inner thoughts of John Rambo, a homeless trained killer. Early in the novel, he sees a dead cat on the side of the road. It seems like it was a nice cat, he thinks, and wonders what series of events caused its demise.

Then he thinks that that is one thing that has changed for him after the war. He notices dead things more.

Trauma changes your brain like that.

On the other side of my burnout, my brain changed, and then after the trauma of 2020 and 2021, it changed some more. I, too, notice dead things more than I did before. I, too, wonder about the stories that led to their destruction and empathize with the people who experienced the loss.

And I crave predictability. Routine. Safety. I love to read, but I bet I have reread every novel by Rex Stout and Agatha Christie at least three times in the last five years. I’m currently on my 5th marathon of Murder She Wrote. Formulaic fiction is my comfort food, where I won’t be surprised, and there is no real tension, and I’m not emotionally involved. I bet I haven’t read any new literary fiction in 5 years. I miss it so.

I hadn’t read any John Grisham in a decade, and on a lark, borrowed an audiobook of one of his novels to listen to on my walk. It was not amazing, but OK, and I was into the story, and there was a moment when one of the characters was about to do something self-destructive, and I had to turn it off. I still don’t know if they got arrested for drinking and driving.

I get tired much easier than I used to, despite my being in much better shape than I was then, and getting much more sleep than I did then. My temper is shorter than it was, and yet I’m less eager to fight. Not because I am afraid of confrontation, but because I know it’s not good for me. Or them, honestly.

Crowds freak me out a bit. I’m thinking that I will stand six feet from people until I die. Every single ambition I had in early 2015 is gone. My life changed, and then the world changed. A lot of people died. And we all acted like they didn’t.

I no longer desire to “go viral” or write sharable content. Viral content is mostly content that evokes strong reactions, and I don’t really want to do that.

I want to write my stories, go for my walks, feed my chickens, plant my flowers, worship at my little church, and work to improve my city and state. I just want to have an ordinary, boring life. I just want us all to make it.

Trauma changes your brain like that.

The Whole Story

Some years back, my wife and I were in the grocery store. It was our regular grocery store, and we were just going down the aisle, discussing groceries and putting things in the cart. The store was busy, but not unduly so.

A woman I had never seen before came up to us.

‘Hi, Hugh. Hi, Renee!”

I had no idea who this person was. I looked at Renee. She obviously had no idea who she was, either. Our confusion must have been evident.

“Oh, I’m sorry. My name is Maria. I go to [large church I had spoken at the year before], and I follow you on Facebook and read your blog and newsletters.”

I’m always a little uncertain about what to do next. I thanked her for reading my stuff.

“It sounds like you had fun at the beach. And what a cute beach house! And I hope Felix [our cat] is doing OK after that scare at the vet last week!”

She was harmless. But it felt just a tad creepy. It was the first time I had really experienced what I have come to call the “knowledge differential.”

In the first lines of Walden, Thoreau said, talking about his writing in the first person: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.”

Like Thoreau, I only know myself well, and even that knowledge evades me at times. I write from my own experience and only feel qualified to tell my own story. The advantage to this is relative expertise on the subject matter, but a disadvantage is that our relationship – mine and yours – is asymmetrical.

You know a lot about me. You don’t know everything because I have boundaries, but my life is well documented. Frequent readers know my cats, hobbies, favorite candy bar, anxieties, hopes, and goals. There are probably 75 of you I know some amount of stuff about. For another couple of thousand of you, I know (or at least have) your email address. And that’s about it.

This asymmetrical quality sometimes makes having friends really difficult. But not as difficult as making friends.

* * *

I was in a strange town on the East Coast for a few days, and I had mentioned in my newsletter that I would be in this town and was happy to grab coffee on a given day if anyone was game. This is how I ended up across the table from Steve.

We have an hour or so, and I recognize him from his Facebook profile picture when he shows up at the coffee shop. I ask him a question or two – the sort of small talk you do when getting to know someone – and then, in response to something he says, I begin to tell him that I can relate because of this thing that happened to me.

He interrupted me.

“Yeah, I know that story. I read about that when it happened.”

He then asked me a bunch of questions about that thing, including some that were boundary crossing. The next 45 minutes felt like an interview. When we left to go our separate ways, he took a selfie with me that went on his Instagram, and then he told me that he was my biggest fan.

Maybe it’s my age, but I always hear that line in Kathy Bate’s voice.

* * *

It’s weird, this asymmetrical relationship we have, you and me. When I run into people I have not seen in ages, they tell me about things that happen in their life, and then they comment on my life – they mention the trip I just went on, my depression struggles, and my cats. I hesitate to mention things I have written about because I don’t want to repeat myself if they already know, and I don’t want to assume they read my stuff (how annoying is THAT guy? “As I said in chapter 9 of my latest book, …”).

And so, when I meet people for the first time, I find myself reluctant to bring up my writing. Like I want to have a person in my life who is not a consumer of my words, who only know the IRL version of me and not the curated version, who only knows what they observe and can gleen. Friends who never worry if I am going to write about them. Friends who get excited when I tell them about the big thing that happened to me and who don’t already know how the story ends.

I’m not complaining. I signed up for this gig. I enjoy writing, and I write confessionally and openly. I enjoy it. It’s changed my life. Hell, it’s saved my life.

But it’s important for you to know that the Hugh you know from here is curated. I mean, it must be, by definition. So you don’t know if we would be best friends if we met. Maybe I chew with my mouth open, and that would annoy the hell out of you. (I don’t, but it’s an example – just go with it).

And I guarantee that you don’t know the whole story.

Experience

I used to believe in talent. These days, I’m not sure I do.

In high school, I took the ASVAB test – the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery exam. Basically, it was a tool the military-industrial complex used to filter students with skills that would be valuable to the military into the recruiter’s hands.

Which is pretty screwed up if you think about it. But anyway.

A thing that absolutely shocked literally everyone who knew me was that I scored ridiculously high on the mechanical portion of the exam. Things like they show you a series of interlocking gears, numbered 1-7. And then they ask, “If gear turns clockwise, what direction does gear #1 turn?”

Like that. I did really well on it.

I was not known for my mechanical ability. I was known for my reading. I was known for my acne. And that was pretty much it. If I had a talent, it was not anything mechanical. It was reading and writing.

We had shop class, which I liked the idea of, but it was filled with what I would now call toxic masculinity (including the teacher), and even then, it felt icky. Even today, I seldom fit into all-male spaces and don’t do bro-culture well.

My Dad was very handy. I would much rather read a book. It used to frustrate him to no end that he wanted to teach me how to work on cars, and I wanted to read.

“Hugh’s just not talented,” people would say. “He’s more of a bookworm.”

I don’t really think that’s a thing. I mean, I did well on that test – I obviously had an aptitude for thinking about things mechanically. But I still couldn’t use a hammer to save my life. And since Dad’s effortless way with tools was my basis of comparison, I felt uncomfortable and awkward. I was comparing my 2 weeks of experience to his 30 years of experience and was mad because he was better at it than I was.

He wasn’t necessarily more talented than I was – he had more experience than I did.

This Sunday afternoon, our kitchen sink clogged. This was particularly annoying because it clogged right after I had made waffles, but before we washed the dishes. I emptied the sink of all the dirty dishes and then plunged for a while. Nothing doing.

I then went to the hardware store and bought a 25-foot-long drain snake (I thought I had one, but maybe not because I couldn’t find it). After 30 minutes of cursing, I had a clogged pipe AND was the owner of a drain snake. Wherever this clog was, it was more than 25 feet away. But the washing machine drained fine, so I knew the clog was between the sink and the washing machine.

I went back to the hardware store and bought some sulfuric acid. Poured it down the drain and went to bed.

Monday, when I woke up, the drain was clear. Yay! I ran water for a while, and it worked. I set about my day. Just before lunch, I began to wash some dishes and realized it was clogged again. Dammit! And I had an afternoon of meetings scheduled.

Last night after supper, I climbed under the house and saw the culprit – a section of the drain pipe that had been repaired long ago just before where the washing machine drains was catching debris from the disposal and had clogged. The repair was questionable in the first place, and the drain pipe was cast iron, original to the house. I could buy a 50-foot drain snake and probably get it, but the problem would still remain.

So this morning, I was at Home Depot at 6 am, and I bought a 10-foot length of 2-inch PVC and two generic fernco couplers (to connect the PVC to the cast iron) for about $30. I crawled under the house and, using my $14 angle grinder, cut the cast iron pipe on the downhill side of the suspected blockage. It was relatively dry, so it looked like my thesis was correct. I connected the franco coupler and one end of the PVC pipe to the cast iron.

I laid the PVC pipe along the existing pipe to measure 10 feet and then cut the cast iron pipe. This time, it was filled with nasty water, proving the blockage was in the 10 feet I was removing (probably at the damaged spot). In 10 minutes, I had the fernco coupling connected and had moved the plumbing strap from the old pipe to the new one.

I went inside and washed my hands and face in my unclogged sink.

14-year-old me would have been amazed at 50-year-old me’s “mechanical ability.” Lots of y’all think I am “very handy.”

Nope. I just have done this before. I have replaced bad pieces of drain pipe before, did a shit ton of research at the time, and learned about fernco couplers. I have used an angle grinder before. I knew how to get under my house.

But the first time I did it, I didn’t. That was when I bought the angle grinder. That was when I did the research and when I watched all the YouTube videos. This time, I didn’t have to. I wasn’t talented – I just had experience.

The other side

When I was 10 years old, my 5-year-old brother got appendicitis. His stomach was hurting intensely, and after a period of home remedies, we took him to the doctor, who diagnosed him with a swollen appendix, and he went to the hospital.

It turns out his appendix was swollen, and they did surgery to remove it before it burst. This was the early 80s, and as I recall it, he went into the hospital one afternoon, spent the night in the hospital, had his appendix removed, and then spent another night in the hospital before coming home.

The evening before his surgery, I was talking to Monty, the elderly lady who lived next door to me and who was, in my objective AF opinion, the best cook in the world. She was born in 1910 and had lived through two world wars, the flu pandemic, and a global depression, had raised three children – two whom she had not given birth to – and all as a well-digger’s wife. She had seen some stuff.

When I told her my brother was in the hospital, she asked what had happened. I explained he had appendicitis and that he was having surgery in the morning, but I had seen him at the hospital, and he was doing OK. She began to weep, then cry, and finally wail. Huge alligator tears ran down her weathered cheeks, and her wrinkled hands covered her face.

There was no air conditioning in her house. The windows were wide open, and the box fan hummed in the corner. Otherwise, it was silent, except for her heaving, low wail. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I didn’t understand – I had read books that mentioned that the appendix was not a necessary organ. I had read that appendix surgery was very low risk. I thought it was sorta cool that he was in the hospital. Honestly, I was sort of jealous.

She got up and left the room. I sat at the chrome and Formica table and watched the dust waft through the sunlight as it came through the window, low in the evening sky. Eventually, she came back, and neither of us spoke of what had just happened. Soon, I was walking home through the pasture that separated our houses and got home in time for supper. I don‘t remember what we ate that night, but I remember Mom was not there – I think she was at the hospital – and it was just Dad and me.

I told Dad what had happened.

“But I don’t understand why she was so upset. Appendicitis is a simple surgery. You don’t even need your appendix. He’s going to be fine.”

Dad explained to me that to us appendicitis was not dangerous. But Monty had buried many people who had died of things that were no longer really dangerous but once had been. Before vaccines, before antibiotics, before ambulances, a lot of people died. And in her head, she was remembering all the people she knew who had died because their appendix had burst.

Earlier this summer, a dear friend of mine got COVID. He was traveling for work, and somewhere along the way, he was exposed and then tested positive. When I heard, I was devastated. He is one of perhaps 3 people I would drop anything and go where they were, anywhere in the world, if I was needed, no questions asked. When I read the text message, I just wept.

He assured me his symptoms were mild. He had all his vaccines and boosters. He was sick, to be sure, but was under a doctor’s care and would be fine in a few days.

I know this intellectually. But in my head, all I could think about was the folks I personally know who died from COVID. The endless stream of names on my timeline of loved ones of friends who had died. The horror of dealing with Dad’s death from COVID.

There was every reason to think he would be fine on the other side of this. But in my head, it was the summer of 2020, and folks were dropping like flies.

I don’t know how long this will last, or if I’m just changed, the way Monty was forever changed because of the pain she had lived through. But I do not like it.

Not one little bit.

Most Days

Creative people love to hear about the routines of other creative people. They hear that Hemingway often wrote at a standing desk, so they buy a standing desk. Or that Austin Kleon uses a Pilot G2 Gel Pen, and so they buy a Pilot G2 Gel Pen. Walter Mosley says that you should write two hours a day, Sunday through Saturday, 52 weeks a year, for the rest of your life. Julia Cameron says that the secret is three handwritten pages a day. Stephen King writes in the morning and reads in the afternoon.

I belong to a book club made up of creative people, and we read and discuss books about creativity. Quickly you see that they all have some sort of recipe or prescription. They also don’t seem to recognize that there is a degree of privilege in even the best of them.

Take Walter Mosley and his two hours a day of writing. When we had infants living with us, I didn’t sleep for more than 3 hours at a time. I didn’t shower every day, let alone write every day. My writing output was zero. But Mr. Mosley would say I was just not serious about your work. In his book This Year You Write Your Novel, he mentions time constraints, and his advice is basically that you have to figure out how to do it. “Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls,” he says.

That it is easier to neglect walls and lawns than children’s feeding schedules goes unmentioned. Also, we creative people tend to be a thin-skinned lot, and once you realize the impossibility of the average working person being able to take Mosley’s advice, it is easy to be filled with despair. It is a recipe for failure if success is defined as following Mosley’s prescription.

Yesterday, I wrote 1200 words. Thus far today, I have written over 300 words and will most likely write another thousand more before I am done. I don’t write every day, but I do write most days. Because I am OK with writing most days, I have written more than 200,000 words in the last 12 months. If I were only a success if I wrote every day, I would have 200,000 words and be a failure.

Yesterday I walked 2.5 miles. Today I walked 2.5 miles. But Saturday, I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter, because most days, I do. That has been enough, over the last year, for me to lower my blood pressure, lose weight I needed to lose, and feel more connected to my neighborhood.

I think 24 hours as the default unit of time is a mistake – I try to take a more seasonal approach these days. It doesn’t matter what you do every day. It matters what you do most of the time.

Over this season, did I write most days? Did I meditate or pray most days? Did I walk most days? Did I eat in ways that respect my body most days? Was I kind to other people most days? Was I a good partner most days? Was I the sort of person I wanted to be most days?

When I focus on doing the thing, say, 70% of the time rather than doing it perfectly 100% of the time, I get a lot more done, and I feel like I do better work. And honestly, I feel better about myself.

Most days.

Brevity is not my goal

As I have said elsewhere, I am, first and foremost, a storyteller. The writing is a secondary decision and a distant one at that.

However, I learned long ago that some people discount what you have to say if you do not couch it in terms and frameworks they accept as authoritative. So, I try to get the grammar somewhat right, anyway. As much as I wish I did not care what other people with more education than me, more credentials than me, and more platform than me… I do.

Deep inside is still the eight-year-old kid who was laughed at by a grownup for mispronouncing the word “proprietor” as I had only read the word and never heard it said. I am yet to forgive that guy. Honestly, I am yet to try. It’s on my to-do list. Admittedly, it’s at the bottom of the list, but it’s on there.

We carry so many ghosts around with us.

So, anyway, I worry about my grammar. And spelling. And usage. And diction. I use several tools, including spell check and Grammarly, to do final passes on anything I send out into the world to make sure I got all my subject/verb agreement and tenses correct. And the fights I have had with the punctuation robots over how many commas should be in a sentence are legion. Generally, the robot thinks I should use less, errr, fewer, unless I don’t think I should have one, in which case, it thinks I am wrong.

To be clear – I see them as advisors. “Here is a potential problem,” they say, and then I decide on whether to take the advice. I do perhaps one time out of three.

In almost every paragraph of any length, it will highlight at least one sentence and tell me that it is too wordy and should be rewritten. (Ironically, including the one you just read.) But the grammar robots do not understand that brevity is not my goal. Telling a good story is.

A good story needs to be understood, and proper punctuation and grammar can aid in that understanding. But it is far from the only requirement.

A good story should connect with the emotions of the audience. It should be an invitation into empathy, a connection with what is important in our humanity, a point of sameness that we can alight on together in a tumultuous world. It’s hard to do that when reducing the word count is your primary aim.

Recently, the James Webb telescope released pictures from deep space, showing us galaxies and solar systems we did not know existed. The picture accompanying this post is one of them. Here is how NASA described the picture in the Alt-Text, which is the description it provides for screen readers:

The image is divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest of these appear larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved with 8-point diffraction spikes. The upper portion of the image is blueish, and has wispy translucent cloud-like streaks rising from the nebula below. The orangish cloudy formation in the bottom half varies in density and ranges from translucent to opaque. The stars vary in color, the majority of which, have a blue or orange hue.

The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks, and valleys – an appearance very similar to a mountain range. Three long diffraction spikes from the top right edge of the image suggest the presence of a large star just out of view.

I have two things to say about that description. No, three things.

  • Whoever wrote that cared about the reader. It’s stunning in its description and care.
  • It is not brief. Most alt-text is a sentence or two long.
  • The grammar robot freaked out over that paragraph of text.

People love to harp on Strunk and White’s admonition to omit needless words, but who decides if they are needless? I think clarity and connection are much better goals than brevity.

Clothes Shopping

It was just after lunch. I had been at a funeral that morning, and rather than go home and change, I just went back to work at the day shelter I ran at the time, planning to get some paperwork done. I was wearing a dark sports coat, slacks, and a white shirt. As was always the case since 2003, I wasn’t wearing a tie. I do hate ties.

I no sooner walked through the day room on my way to the office than the comments started. As someone who did front-line work in the homeless community, I wore a t-shirt and jeans most days. If I had a meeting planned, I would wear a polo shirt. The sports coat was for funerals and weddings and court.

But this day, I wore the sports coat and slacks to work, and folks didn’t know what to do. One guy came up to me and asked if I had caught a charge. I assured him I had not.

“No offense, Pastor Hugh. But the reason I ask”, he said, “is because when I have to go to court, my lawyer makes me wear clothes that aren’t mine, too.”

Once upon a time, I was in financial sales. And when I was, I was expected to wear a suit and tie to work. As a working-class kid who was making what seemed like an obscene amount of money, I bought good clothes and wore them well. I learned about the outlet stores where I could buy Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren suits for about half off. I owned three Hermes ties. I wore Gitman shirts. Clothes were important to me.

Later, I would walk away from that whole scene. I had an epiphany where I realized that I didn’t like who I had become and did not like who I had to pretend to be in order to do that work.

The money was nice, but it cost too much.

I sold my watches and ties and nice clothes. I wore scruffy sneakers and faded jeans and t-shirts and would only own one tie that I wore on occasions that absolutely required a tie, but I also learned that those are far fewer occasions than society generally believes requires ties.

Now, I mostly wear the same thing every day. I own at least 10 gray t-shirts. I don’t wear clothes with logos. I don’t want you to know anything about me because of what I wear. I don’t want you to judge my finances, my politics, my relationships. These days, I want my clothes to be a non-event.

For the last five years, I have gotten by on occasions requiring something more than my standard jeans and t-shirt, with two oxford cloth shirts, two blazers, and some khaki pants.

But then I went and lost more than 50 pounds. These days, when I put on my old clothes, I look like I must have driven there in the clown car.

To make matters worse, I am involved in some political work right now that requires me to occasionally attend “professional” meetings. Before it is said and done, I suspect I shall even have to buy a suit.

I feel all sorts of way about this.

In the first chapter of Walden, Henry Thoreau warned us to beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. Henry knew that clothes serve as a cover story of sorts. All too often, we use the quality of the clothes as a proxy for the quality of the wearer. Which is, frankly, classist as hell.

I never liked how when one of my guys who lived outside would get in trouble, my showing up in clean clothes and looking respectable made a difference in how they were treated. The most honest man I know wore dirty clothes home from work every day, and the biggest crook I have ever met wore a suit to work that cost more than my car is currently worth.

So, I am doing serious clothes shopping for the first time in over a decade. I think I can get by with blue oxford shirts and good khaki pants, and a blue blazer, for the most part. This is the South, after all, and we are admittedly less formal than other parts of the country. But then I need a blue or gray suit. And then that requires suit shoes. And I’m probably going to have to get at least two ties.

Crap.

The Cat with Magic Ears

It was the middle of July in 2016. I had just walked in the door from work. Renee was 11 months out from her heart transplant, and I was running a day shelter I had founded. It had been a particularly bad day. I had a lot of them that year. I was getting something to drink in the kitchen when she called me into her studio.

“I want you to hear me out before you say no,” she said.

Over the winter, our orange tabby Tony had caught a blood clot in his legs, and we had to take him to the vet in the middle of the night and have him put down. Tony had been Renee’s cat – they even shared the same heart disease, called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is very common in cats and very rare in humans. In the days after her coming home from transplant, Tony had laid in the bed next to Renee as if he knew she needed more comfort than normal. His loss had been felt very keenly.

So she had been crawling the pages of the local no-kill shelter, looking at orange tabbies. It was just window shopping – we knew we lived in a small house, and the two cats we had were already pushing our limits.

She showed me a picture of the most bedraggled orange cat ever. He had deformed ears and terror in his eyes, and his hair was thin. He looked like a stuffed cat that had lost half his stuffing. She told me his name was Pepe, and he had been at the no-kill shelter for more than a year. Because he was ancient and ugly, nobody wanted him. He also had a healthy dose of anti-social behavior.

I reminded her that we had said we were a two-cat house, and we already had two cats. Since he had been there a year, she asked me if we didn’t adopt him, who would? I think he might be a lost cause, I said. That has never scared you off before, she said.

I asked what the fees were. She told me that she had already reached out to the shelter, and since Pepe had been so hard to rehome, they would waive all the fees if we came up that Friday.

So that Friday, we went to pick up Pepe, the cat with the magic ears.

If anything, he looked worse in person. He was so skinny, and his fur was patchy. He and several other cats had been dropped off at the shelter the year before. At some point, Pepe had a horrible ear infection that ate away at his ears and damaged his hearing. He had been covered in fleas when they left him at the shelter. He was afraid of people – the shelter folks believed he had been beaten in his past.

He lived in a giant walk-in cage with other cats but was cowered under some boxes, hiding. He looked virtually catatonic. He didn’t want to be held or petted or played with. He came out of the boxes long enough to eat the snacks we gave him, and then he went back into hiding.

The shelter tried to be realistic with us.

“He has been horribly abused. He doesn’t like to cuddle, and he isn’t really affectionate. But he is special and needs a home where people will love him.”

So we signed the papers and agreed to take care of him for the rest of his life. Our first clue to how hard this was going to be was fighting to put him in the cat carrier and his screaming once we shut the door. We had to wrap the carrier in a towel to calm him down, and while most families have pictures of the adoptive parents holding their new kitty, we have one of us holding a towel-covered pet carrier with dazed looks on our faces.

We gave Pepe his own room at the house, with a closed door so he could be comfortable before we introduced him to the other cats. He promptly found every hiding place in that room and spent much time just staring into space. If you tried to pet him, he would attack your hand and then go hide again.

It went like that for about four months. But in the mornings, we would find his toys scattered, and his food had been eaten, so apparently, he was having a ball when we weren’t looking.

Eventually, things changed. He began to come out of the room, began to play with the other cats, and even would sit on the couch with us. He was our very introverted kitty – he wanted to be near us, but not actually touch us. As introverts ourselves, we understood this.

He was still very shy when we loaded all the cats into cat carriers two years later and moved 12 hours away. But I swear Pepe in Mississippi was a whole new cat. He was no longer the tentative, shy cat. He was full of confidence in our new home. Instead of hiding in the corners, he would lay in the sun on the rug in the middle of the floor. Our vet suggested that moving had put all the cats on an equal footing n the new house. Literally, the pecking order had changed.

In any event, for the next year, Pepe thrived. He gained weight, his coat filled out, and he would even climb in your lap and purr. The cat they warned might never love us back was affectionate and loving. It was the best year.

Things started to go downhill in the fourth year he was with us. His personality was still the same, but he wasn’t eating. The vet told us he had a horrible infection in his teeth and gums, and because of his FIV, he didn’t have the resources to fight it off. They gave him antibiotics and hoped for the best.

He recovered – for about six weeks. Then we had to go back for another round of shots. Each round, he had lost more weight, become more lethargic, and ate less and less. In the summer of 2020, it became obvious we were fighting a losing battle.

We had a foster son living with us at the time. He identified heavily with Pepe, and while the other cats would run and hide from him, Pepe tolerated his hugs. The night before Pepe died, we all sat with Pepe on the floor of the living room, and we petted him and told him we loved him; and that night, when I tucked the boy in bed, we talked about how when you love something or someone, you have responsibilities as a result. We had promised to take care of Pepe, and helping him die well was part of that.

I told the boy that you have to do the right thing for those you love, even when that is not something you want to do.

The next day a neighbor watched the boy while we went to the vet for Pepe’s last visit. He was purring in our arms when he got the shot. At that point, he was skin and bones, less than half his body weight when we had gotten him.

That was 23 months ago. A few months after Pepe died, the Boy went back to his family. Pepe is buried in the backyard, under a headstone Renee and the Boy made together.

I think about Pepe a lot. This cat that they told us would never have the tools to love us ended up loving us after all and taught us a lot about love along the way. He taught a hardened, traumatized boy in the foster system how to love, and he purred in our arms as we watched him die.

Shortly after we got him, when he was having such a hard time adjusting, we decided that if all he gets is to spend his remaining years in a loving home filled with kitty treats and toys and with people committed to loving him even when he doesn’t have the resources to love us back, that is a lot more than he would have had in the first place, and a lot more than any of us deserve. But for a few years, we got a lot more than that, and so did he.

Things That Endure

Jerry was a salesman of the old school, straight out of an episode of Mad Men. He was dapper as could be, with creases on his pants that would have cut you, and I never saw him without at least a sports coat, even that time I met him and a client at a ball game.

Jerry was my mentor when I was in financial sales, and he took my somewhat more casual approach to my appearance as a personal challenge. He also tried to teach me the finer points of the business lunch.

Jerry was a big one for lunch. We always lunched together on Fridays and always at one of several restaurants at least as old-school as Jerry himself was. They all had bars, tended to be dark paneled, and had pretty waitresses and generous bartenders. And, without exception, the food was always good.

I remarked on this once when we went to a somewhat shady-looking oyster bar whose dated decor did not fill me with high hopes going in.

“Of course the food is good! I’ve been coming here for 30 years. That doesn’t happen if the food is crap. You have to respect things that endure.”

One of Jerry’s favorite places was Mr. B’s. It was a steak and seafood house in Germantown, an affluent suburb of Memphis. The walls were raw brick, with a small bar along the wall, and the steaks were huge, and so were the cocktails.

Mr. B’s made their reputation on supper but had a strong lunchtime crowd, and being early in my career, my budget leaned more to the blue plate special than it did the porterhouse steaks. And one of the things they did really well was their country-fried steaks.

At least, that is what they called it. If you are used to a large piece of meat deep fried until crispy and then covered in milk gravy such as one may eat at a Cracker Barrel, this was not that.

Instead, it was a tender piece of beef, obviously pounded thin, then fried in a thin batter, and then cooked in a thick brown gravy until it practically fell apart. It was my favorite thing on the menu.

When I was a little boy, the elderly lady next door made something she called steak and gravy that my mom tried and tried to replicate but could not. This was very close to that.

We don’t eat a lot of beef – mostly because of the cost. But also, because we didn’t eat much of it growing up, it just isn’t something I crave. But the other day, the meat department at Kroger had their cubed steaks on clearance, and so I decided to whip up a batch of steak and gravy for dinner one night.

I got home from my last meeting today at 4, so I decided to make today the day it happened. I got out the deep skillet and put four tablespoons of shortening in it to melt and turned the oven on to 350 to preheat.

While waiting, I put a half cup of flour in a shallow bowl and added a teaspoon of black pepper, a teaspoon of salt, and a half teaspoon each of garlic powder and cayenne pepper. I stirred it well.

After dredging the cubed steaks through the flour mixture, I put them in the skillet to brown – about two minutes a side until the flour had formed a crisp crust, but the interiors were still not finished. I did them in batches, putting them on a cooling rack as they finished.

In the melted shortening still in the bottom of the pan, I sauteed a small amount (maybe 1 /4 cup?) of diced onion until brown, then added a few tablespoons of the flour dredge that was left over. After it was all browned, I added enough milk to make a thin gravy, into which I slid the breaded steaks. I put a lid on the skillet and slid it into the oven, where it sat and bubbled away for an hour and a half.

When I pulled it out, the gravy had separated – a danger of using milk gravy for something like this. I removed the steaks, put the skillet on the stove again, added a bit of half-and-half, and whisked quickly until the gravy was thinned out and reconstituted. I slid the steaks back in and let them simmer over low heat as I set the table.

Had I served it with mashed potatoes and English peas, this would have been my favorite meal of my childhood. But instead, we served it over white rice, making it my favorite meal today and still damn good.

My Favorite Sandwich

Until my late teens, my Dad worked for a propane company.

He literally sold propane and propane accessories.

In rural Mississippi, propane is a big deal. I live in town now, and we have natural gas piped in, but folks who live out in the county buy propane, and a giant truck comes out to your house and fills up a huge tank, and that is what fuels your water heater and your cookstove and your heater. Every small town in Mississippi has at least one propane dealer, and in my hometown for most of my childhood, that dealership was run by my daddy.

Now, they sold propane, but the propane accessories was where the money was. The showroom at the front of his building had propane cook stoves, propane fish cookers, and propane grills for sale. The markup on these was high, and after all, the more things you owned that used propane, the more propane you would buy. So every summer, they would have an Open House of sorts, where they would do some sort of sale and set up a grill in the parking lot in front of the building, and there might be balloons and, to highlight the cooking ability of this grill, Dad would put a couple of pounds of bologna on the rotisserie.

It was smart on a number of levels: Bologna was cheap, so this promotion was low cost. It highlighted a rotisserie accessory, which most folks didn’t have, and so they couldn’t replicate it without buying one. It smelled amazing, so it intrigued people who stopped by. And it just tasted good.

It wasn’t complicated: He went to the meat counter in the Big Star grocery and bought a 5-pound chub of bologna, which is just bologna that hasn’t been sliced. It looks like a huge hot dog more than anything else. It has a red plastic skin, which must be peeled away. Then it was threaded onto the rotisserie spit and scored about a quarter inch deep along its length in a criss-cross pattern. Then it was cooked for a good hour or two over medium heat and was periodically basted with a cheap bottled barbeque sauce.

The heat made the surface split along the score marks, and the sauce would seep into the cracks, and the barbeque sauce would sort of candy on the surface. He would keep one going all day, and would have another cut up into small chunks, which were speared on toothpicks for the customers to try as samples. But one advantage of having a dad who was the manager was that you didn’t just get the small samples: You got a barbeque bologna sandwich.

It involved a hamburger bun, toasted. On it, you put a dollop of cheap bottled sauce, a half-inch thick slice of barbeque bologna, all topped by a generous scoop of cole slaw. It won’t taste right unless it is served on a cheap paper plate, accompanied by a handful of Golden Flake potato chips, and paired with an ice cold Coke in a glass bottle that was purchased for a quarter from the cold drink box in the warehouse.

And for best results, it should be handed to you by someone who loves you.