Category: Posts

Hey there

Hey there.

Yes, you.

How’s it going? I mean, for real?

Yeah. Me too.

It’s exhausting. All of it. Like, so many good things are happening, and new possibilities are opening up, and also the world is a damned dumpster fire, and the rights we have fought for are being rolled back and democracy seems so fragile and COVID numbers are rising again and people I love keep dying and … it all seems too much.

I feel constantly behind right now. Like, there are so many things I need to be doing and I have no energy for any of them because I am just watching the world collapse around me and I told someone the other day it was like the collapse of Rome, but with Wi-Fi and Netflix.

I’m not sleeping well. I mean, I fall asleep OK, but I wake up at 4 AM and about half the time can’t go back to sleep. I just lay there and think about all the ways I am behind and the despair of it all and finally, I just get up and make breakfast because at least that is something I can focus on and accomplish.

The world is opening back up, but that doesn’t mean it’s wise to do it – people like my wife who don’t have functioning immune systems and kids under 5 who aren’t vaccinated, and oh, by the way, lots of folks still aren’t vaccinated and I guess they’ve just decided to hell with those vulnerable people.

So yeah. I get it.

What’s keeping you going these days?

For me, it’s nature. Every morning I make my coffee and go outside and walk around my yard. I look at what’s blooming and take pictures and watch the birds play at the feeder and I make gardens in my head. Later I will probably go for a walk – I like doing that more than swimming, now that it’s warm again. I love strolling through the neighborhood, checking in on my favorite trees and flowers, getting harassed by a tiny, but very vocal dog at the end of my street, and waving at people I do not know in their cars who wave at me first. It all makes me feel connected to the world, a part of something bigger than myself.

Oh yeah – I’m building a pond. Can you believe that? I mean, it’s a small pond, 6×10, but it is shallow – more of a huge birdbath, really, The birds love moving water – hell, so do I, when it comes to that. I am looking forward to watching the water splash on the rocks in the evening, after supper, when the sun is going down and the birds are singing. It won’t be long now.

Anyway. That’s what gets me through. Birds. Water features. Building gardens in my mind.

It’s my birthday in a few weeks – June 5th. I’ll be 50. That doesn’t make sense to me at all. But that’s probably a whole other letter.

But basically, I just wanted to check-in. To let you know that I know it’s hard right now. I see you, doing the best you can. I see you, hanging on.

I wish I knew something pastoral to say when it feels like the world is crumbling around you, but I don’t. At least not anything I haven’t said before.

Stay hydrated. Get plenty of sleep. No, more sleep than that. Eat good food, and preferably with people you care about.

Don’t let them steal your humanity – look for opportunities to help others, even if on the smallest of scales. Find humor where you can, and laugh as much as you can.

In the midst of powerlessness, search for things you can still control, and do that.

And remember that love always wins in the end. Always.

And if it seems like love didn’t win, it’s only because it isn’t yet the end.

Don’t give up, and don’t give in. And love really, really hard.

HH

I Know.

Hi there.

Can we talk? I just wanted to check in.

For some of you reading this right now, I know the stories about your decision to terminate your pregnancy.

I know, because I was the person you called when you were assaulted, and I waited in the ER while they did the rape kit.

I know, because I was the person you talked it over with when you saw no way forward, and the dad no longer returned your calls.

I know, because you trusted me enough to tell me about the shady guy who date-raped you.

I know, because I drove you to the clinic, then sat in the clinic waiting room, then walked with you through the mob of protestors afterward, and then drove you back to your house because no one else would.

I know, because when you had nightmares about the so-called Christians who called you a slut and a murderer, you wanted to scream and yell at a preacher and I was willing to let it be me.

And I know because you wrote me long emails after hearing me speak somewhere, and you wanted someone, somewhere, to know why you did it.

I know all those stories and more.

There are others of you, reading this right now, whose stories I do not know. But I know you are out there because almost 1 in four women in the US has had an abortion by age 45. And I know that the recent uptick in anti-abortion conversation on social media must be triggering.

I know that the people who are calling people who chose to end their pregnancy “sluts”, “murderers”, and “whores” don’t realize that they are actually talking about people they know. That they are talking about people like you. Because they don’t know your story.

I don’t blame you for not telling them, by the way. They obviously aren’t safe people to share it with. It’s always you who gets to decide who you share that with.

But even though they don’t know your story, and you know they didn’t mean you, specifically, when they said those things, I know how much it hurts to hear those things from people you love. I know it brings up all the old wounds and makes you ask all the old questions.

Whether I know your story or not, please know this: You are loved by God, without condition, and without exception. The mere fact of your existence makes you valuable, and there is nothing you could do to separate you from the love of God.

Not a single goddamned thing.

There is much in this world I am unsure of, but I am certain of that.

I know how hard that decision was, and I know how brave you were for making it. So if all of the recent news has drug stuff up and you want someone to talk it over with, someone to yell at, someone to just listen and hold space for you, if you don’t have anyone else, I am willing to hold your story.

I will listen. I will not judge you. And I will never tell a soul.

But mostly, I just wanted you to know that God does not judge you, and neither do I.

Your friend,

Hugh

A Closet Full of Grief

In the Looney Tunes cartoons we watched on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, there was a recurring gag where there was too much stuff in the closet. Someone would open the closet and more things than should fit in a closet that size would fall out, burying the person who opened it.

Grief is like that, sometimes.

It’s overwhelming in the beginning. You give some of it away and learn to live with some of it and the rest you don’t actually deal with right now, but instead, in order to function, you put it in the closet and it won’t really fit so you stuff and punch and contort and finally, you get the door closed so you can keep going with your life because we live in a capitalist society and your mortgage doesn’t go away just because people you love died.

So it’s all stuffed in that closet. And because you stuffed it in there – I mean, it may have taken a few weeks or even months to get it in there, but it was in there, and you had to lean against the door to get it shut – but because it’s stuffed in there, it was hell to get it all to fit. But you did.

And life goes on and most days everything is fine and sometimes you are whistful and sometimes you miss them and sometimes you walk by the closet and see the door and remember what’s in there, but you know it’s going to be a mess if you open that door, so you keep on moving.

But the problem is that we don’t live in a vacuum. Other people are moving around in our life as well, and one day, with no ill intent at all, somebody or something is gonna open that door and it will all fall out, but instead of burying them, it buries you. And when that happens, you have no choice but to sit in the midst of it and pick it all up again, handling each piece, looking at it this way and that, as you put it all back in the closet.

This is why this afternoon I was driving down the Interstate, tears streaming down my face. An old song came on the radio about a child’s love for his father and, without warning, ripped that door off its hinges.

Debits and Credits

When I was in my 20s and hated my job, I would sometimes hide in the casinos outside of Memphis in Tunica, MS. They were all still pretty new then, and it seemed fancy and exotic, and there were good shows at night and they were liberal with the comps.

As an aside, if you ever want to hide, or develop a drinking problem, casinos make excellent places to do it – you can get $30 of chips and bet sixes and eights on the pass line at the $5 craps table for hours and hours. They also bring you free drinks. If you wear a suit to work (as, say, an investment advisor), you can also wear it to the casino without changing. It may be different if you are a plumber, although the things you could get away with at a casino in Tunica Mississippi in the late 1990s would fill a book.

There was a man I knew at the casinos – we all just called him Mr. Daniel. He was a retired farmer, and he lived near the casinos, and he dressed like a retired farmer: khaki slacks, tan boots, a plaid shirt, and a baseball cap. He called the cocktail servers, all of whom were young and shapely and female-bodied, things like honey and darlin’.

Every day, he came to the casino and played craps. He arrived at 9:00 every morning, like clockwork. Like it was his job. He stood in the same place each time, and always ordered the same thing to drink- Diet Coke with a lime wedge. Every third drink, he tipped the server a $5 chip.

Mr. Daniel would show up every day and would always throw three $100 bills on the green felt, and say “Change Only” and take the $300 in $5 chips, and then he would play very safe bets, and when he had doubled his money he would quit for the day. Sometimes he was done by 10:30, and most days he was done by 2 PM, but still other days he was still there at 5 PM when he would quit for the day. If he ever got down by $100, and sometimes it happened, he would quit for the day. And either way, tomorrow morning he would be back at 9 AM with $300 and do it again.

If you figured he made an average of $150 a day, accounting for losses and weekends off and so on, he cleared more than 40K a year. Not bad for retirement money in the late 1990s.

I liked Mr. Daniel. He would talk to you if you asked him questions, and we sometimes would eat in the casino’s steakhouse if he was done for the day. The casino was just fun for him. He won more than he lost, but he was wealthy, and this was just a distraction from the sameness and boredom retirement was for him. As someone who was supposed to be trying to sell rich people things, I asked Mr. Daniel lots of questions.

A thing he told me was that most of life was just money management. Most of life, Mr. Daniel said, was just money management. Deposits and withdrawals, credits and debits.

I never got rich gambling. And no, I never got Mr. Daniel as a client, although I tried, hard. But the metaphor of debits and credits has served me well, especially when it comes to relationships.

We make deposits and withdrawals into our relationships with other people. I smile when you walk in? Deposit. I share something you wrote on Facebook? Deposit. I help you move? Big deposit.

We have a disagreement? Withdrawal. I ate all the chips and didn’t tell you? Withdrawal. I don’t show up for our lunch date? Withdrawal.

We all do this. We all have debits and credits with each other, and while we don’t keep score, per se, we all know the person who only makes withdrawals. We avoid those people. We get tired of them quickly.

The truth is, some people only withdraw. The guy who only calls you when he needs your help. The person who only critiques your work, but never affirms it. The guy who “just wants to play devil’s advocate.”

Those people are not automatically bad people. There are probably lots of accounts they routinely make deposits into. But that account they make deposits into isn’t your account. In your account, they are overdrawn.

The Man in Gray

When I was five, we built a new house, just 20 yards in front of the house in which my father was raised. Eventually, it would get torn down – some family friends tore it down in exchange for the wood, but for a few months, we lived sort of in both of them, as we slowly moved things from one house to the other.

I had watched them build it – we basically paid someone to dry it in, and then we completed the inside ourselves. I say we, like I played a part, but believe that 5-year-old me was always in the middle of whatever was going on. And Mom and I would walk around the house, being built, and she would tell me that this was the kitchen and that was the bathroom. And this one? This is your room.

And when we get moved in, we will paint it whatever color you want.

I told her I wanted it painted red. You see, red was my favorite color. But we ended up compromising. Instead of the whole room, my bed frame was painted red, Dad painted the door to my room red, and I had red pajamas and red sheets. If it stood still long enough, it ended up red.

But somewhere along the way, I shifted, and suddenly, my favorite color was now blue.

Blue is a good color – non-controversial and can be professional or fun, can be the color of swim trunks or a tuxedo, and, perhaps most importantly, somewhere around the age of 14 or so, a girl told me that blue accentuates my eyes. I had no idea what that meant, exactly, but she seemed to think it was a positive thing.

I wore blue almost exclusively through my twenties. Blue suits. Blue shirts. Blue accents in my ties and show hankies. I owned three different blue cars.

But increasingly, blue didn’t make sense. It felt way too festive, too bright, too colorful. The best way I can think of to describe it is that when I wore blue, my insides didn’t match my outsides. And in my mid 30’s, as I began to become more and more aware of the pain in the world, I started to wear more muted tones.

And one day, I woke up and realized that I was now the sort of person who not only didn’t wear bright colors – I was known as someone who wore gray.

This week I was at the courthouse, wearing a black polo shirt and khakis. A colleague said I looked dressed up, as he rarely ever saw me not wearing a gray t-shirt. I just checked, and I actually own 9 gray t-shirts, and three different shades of gray are represented in the drawer.

The people who bought our house in North Carolina are bright color people. When they walked through, they remarked that they had never lived in a gray house before. I informed them it was a bright gray, though. They laughed nervously.

It’s not that I don’t like bright colors – I do. They just don’t feel right when I’m wearing them. They are no longer me. In a world that’s gone crazy, it feels almost crass to wear bright colors. Like I’m not paying attention to the despair and pain around me. Like having Harlequin perform your funeral – it feels disrespectful, somehow.

Johnny Cash famously sang that he wore black because:

I’d love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything’s okay

But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

‘Til things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

I still own some blue shirts – if I preach at your funeral or wedding, I will probably wear one, because it’s more muted than white, and there aren’t a lot of other good options. But it’s always brighter than I feel.

Until things are better, I guess I’ll be the man in gray.

Children and Ancestors

When I was doing homeless work, there were children everywhere.

I knew children that lived in cars, who got cleaned up in gas station restrooms, and who wrote their school papers on old cellphones that were submitted using the wifi stolen from a Mcdonald’s parking lot. There were children abandoned on literal church doorsteps. Children who ate cold hotdogs for supper, while watching porn with their Dad. Children who had multiple diagnoses, but no services. Children on a rash of medications. And children who had executive function skills off the charts. The latter were often the oldest child, who had to step in as surrogate parents for their younger siblings because their parents were dysfunctional.

So many children.

And then there were the pregnant people. Many of whom were, in fact, still children themselves, having ran away (or were kicked out) when they told their parents they were pregnant. The women I took to the gynecologist’s office. The women I took over to Chapel Hill to the Planned Parenthood office after they made difficult choices. The women I was the only person there when they came out of labor. The women I stood with when the state took their babies away.

There were children everywhere.

One of the biggest populations of people who were experiencing homelessness I came across was people who were anywhere from 18-25, who had been children in foster care, and who had aged out. This means that they had turned 18 and, being adults in the eyes of the law, their foster parents would no longer receive stipends toward their care, so they got kicked out. So many people I knew who were homeless had aged out of the system.

A coworker was pregnant with her first child, and I asked if she was nervous.

“Absolutely”, she said. “There are so many ways to screw this up, it feels like. However, working here makes me feel better, ironically. You see this many babies and you realize there is a wide range of conditions under which humans can grow and develop.”

It’s true.

I am incredibly lucky in so many ways. My parents were just children themselves, having had me when they were but 20. My grandparents either died or were hundreds of miles away when I was very small. We had very little money. And yet I had parents that taught me to love books, encouraged my creativity and curiosity, gave me independence and that loved me without question. It truly was like winning the genetic lottery, without buying a ticket.

A critique of my writing is that I romanticize things about the past. But I don’t see it as romanticizing as much as I do curation. I am really clear I am who I am because of who I come from – because of who my people are. Had I been born under different circumstances, in a different place, to different people, I would be different. Heck, my two brothers and I are all very different, despite having grown up in the same house, with the same parents, and gone to the same schools.

Last week, while in the mountains, some friends were talking about my writing, and they said the thing they connected with the most was my hopefulness that doesn’t attempt to minimize the very real horrors of the world.

There are so many ways people maintain their resilience in the light of the chaos of the world. Some focus on self-care. Some drink. Some become jaded and hard.

I have, on various occasions, done all of those, and more.

But the sustaining belief I hold onto – that allows me to be hopeful in spite of the facts – really comes down to children and ancestors.

When I say children, I recognize that not all of us are bio-parents, nor can we be. But we can all put creative effort into the world, we can all leave legacies behind, and we can all be generative and supportive of people that will outlive us. Many of us have raised babies we did not give birth to. What are children but an investment in the world after we are gone? And all of us can make such an investment – not just those of us who have biological children.

If there is such a thing as a chosen family – and there is – then I can have chosen children.

But if we can all have children, then we are all ancestors. And more and more I resonate with the words of Jonas Salk, who said that our greatest responsibility was to be good ancestors. I am who I am because they were who they were. I am because of them.

Much like the quote credited to Gandhi about being the change we want to see in the world, I believe we have a responsibility to be the person for young people that the younger version of us needed. Even if we didn’t get it ourselves. Probably especially if we didn’t get it ourselves.

By doing that, we are bullish on the future. We are rolling the dice in favor of a better world, we are modeling the world we want to see, and living in such a way that is a defiance of the present darkness that surrounds us. By focusing on being the best ancestor I can be, I deprive the bleak reality of oxygen.

So that’s it, really. The source of any hope I can muster is that I have a responsibility to my ancestors as well as to my chosen children to be an ancestor, and what’s more, to be a good one.

Someone To Call

Two stories, perhaps 10 years apart:

Her name was Peggy. She was in her early forties when I knew her, but I only knew that because I had helped her get her birth certificate. She looked like she was in her late 50s, but life on the street makes you hard that way.

She was a Survival Sex Worker, which just means she sold sex to people – generally men – for money in order for her to have the resources to survive. There are lots of different sorts of sex work, from pole dancer to cover model to call girl to streetwalker, and all of it is actual work, but the distinction is important to the story.

As one might expect, the sort of people who pay people like Peggy for sex are sometimes not nice people. She also had a drug addiction – if I had her life, I would not have wanted to be sober for it either – and sometimes she traded sex in exchange for drugs. Those people tended to be even less nice, and would often refuse payment after services had been rendered, and Peggy, who had a mouth on her, would protest, and more than once she ended up in the hospital as a result.

Perhaps six months or so after I had met her for the first time, my phone rang at 5:30 AM. The caller ID said it was from the Trauma Center, so I answered.

“Hey Hugh!” she said. “It’s Peggy!”

Peggy tended to talk in exclamation marks.

In my groggy, barely alive state, I asked what was going on.

She said, “I’m at the emergency room, I’m getting stitches. I was on a date last night and he beat me up.”

Now, you should know that I knew she was a sex worker, and she knew I knew she was a sex worker, but we maintained the fiction that I didn’t know. It helped her maintain dignity, and I respect that.

So, I knew she hadn’t been at the steakhouse, sipping red wine over dinner when the “date” went south, but anyway, here we are.

I told her I was so sorry, and that I would be up there in about 20 minutes to sit with her. That was a big part of my life in those days – sitting with people.

She said, “Oh, no, You don’t have to do that. They’re about to release me.”

So, I said, “Well, no offense, but why are you calling me then? You could have just let me know when you see me later today.”

And that’s when she told me that the last time this had happened, the nurse in admission had asked her if she wanted to call anyone.

“And Hugh – I didn’t have anyone I could call. But this time, I did. I could call you.”

# # #

Earlier this week, a teenager who was once one of our foster children sent me a text. We had been in touch several times last year, but then her number changed and we didn’t have a way to find her, and so she disappeared. We hadn’t heard from her in perhaps six months.

“Hey, Mr. Hugh. It’s me!” the text said, but also gave her name, which I’m not sharing with you because of boundaries.

“I was afraid we had lost you,” I told her.

“Haha. No chance.”

When she and her sibling had left our care, we made them a scrapbook of their time with us, and she had one of my business cards taped to the inside.

“I’m sorry I changed my number and didn’t tell you. You told me when you gave me your card that now I always had someone I could call, no matter what. So I wanted to make sure you had my number. So you had somebody, too. ”

 

 

 

Shame Spirals

This past weekend, we went out of town. We went to the mountains of North Carolina, one of my happy places. But we almost didn’t make it.

The plan was to rent a car for the trip. Our car is fine, but it was going to be more than 1,000 miles round trip, and our Escape is great for short trips but not extremely comfortable for long ones, so getting something more comfortable and new sounded good. I went on Priceline and found a full-sized car with unlimited miles for $45 a day, and jumped at it.

We were heading out Friday morning, so at 6:30 AM I was at the end of our driveway, waiting for Tony the Lyft driver to take me to the airport. Tony was a big man, with lots of jokes and way too happy for it to be that early in the morning, but he got me there safe and sound.

When I walked in the door of the airport, there was a moderate line, but it moved quickly, and then it was my turn.

“I’m here to pick up a car. My last name is Hollowell,” I said.

She clicked lots of keys on her computer and made a face.

“Can you spell that?”

I did.

That was when she told me that I did indeed have a car reserved, but for next Friday, not this one. I had booked the car for the wrong date. And my rental was non-refundable because it was such a good deal. And they had no cars now.

We had friends meeting us there that afternoon. We had a room reserved. We were supposed to be leaving any minute now. I had screwed all of this up. And wasted $200 on top of everything else. I swear I almost burst into tears, right there at the counter.

It must have shown on my face.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” the kindly Black woman working the counter told me. “But you have to step aside now.”

“Next.”

I was in shock. I had screwed this up. I didn’t know how I did it. I was at the airport, with no way home, no rental car, and I had to call my wife and tell her we had no rental car, had wasted $200, and also, I needed her to come and get me.

While I waited for her, a nice man named Reggie with Priceline informed me that I had chosen the cheaper, non-refundable rental, and had not paid for travel insurance, so while I couldn’t get a refund, I could certainly come back next Friday and get the car then.

Thanks, Reggie.

We ended up taking our car after all. And it was fine. I mean, more or less.

We were three hours later than we had planned, and out $200, and most of all, I felt crushing shame, for not the first time in my life, that I sometimes can’t manage to do something so simple that it seems everyone else on the planet does OK.

This sort of shame is a common thing that those of us with ADHD deal with. I wish I could explain the shame I felt in that line on Friday. Shame that I had cost us money, shame that we would be late, shame that I looked foolish to the lady at the rental agency, shame I had to admit to my wife what I had done.

The worst is when my failures to executive function affects others. I go into a shame spiral.

On the way home from the airport, Renee, who read my mood perfectly, told me that everyone makes mistakes.

This is true. But most people don’t make them all the damn time.

No matter how often you repeat to yourself, “It was an honest mistake, it could have happened to anyone”, you never believe it. I have been living like this for nearly 50 years. And while it doesn’t happen as much as it once did, it will still keep happening. It’s safe to assume I won’t get better. It is what it is.

And what it is is exasperating.

The Happiness of Lower Standards

A gift that ADHD brings is that, if it interests you (and granted, that is a huge precondition), you can bring near super-human powers of research to the table. And if it interests you, you can fall deep into a hole where you want to know everything about a subject.

Everything.

I currently own at least 200 books on gardening and horticulture. More than 150 on woodcraft. Perhaps 800 theology texts. Yes, I have read all of them. Many of them multiple times. Because it’s hard for me to explain to you how much more I want to know when I’m really interested in something.

It doesn’t always look like books – that’s just my particular poison. I know kids who will watch literally every TikTok on a given subject. A niece went through a Japanese phase and watched Japanese movies, ate sushi, learned to eat with chopsticks, and even ordered Japanese socks and pencils off eBay. I will say that socks take up much less space than books do.

But my point is that there is the desire – an overwhelming desire, to know literally everything you can on a subject in which you are interested. The list of subjects I can have an intelligent conversation with an enthusiast is large and unwieldy: Knights, dinosaurs, electricity, carpentry, horticulture, permaculture, aquaculture, southern culture, native plants. Asian plants, the military, pacifism, religious cults, religious orthodoxy, brick making, bricklaying, martial arts, and climate change have all grabbed my attention at various times, and that was a list generated by not even trying.

If you ever eat a piece of wagyu beef, it will forever ruin your beef eating experience, because what you previously thought was an excellent piece of meat is now just ordinary. Your standard for “good beef ” is now much higher because you know better. And if you compare every piece of beef to the wagyu beef, you will forever be unhappy.

Likewise, when you spend a deep dive into, say, karate, and you learn that much of modern karate is less than 110 years old and owes its origins to a man named Gichin Funakoshi who founded and systematized Shotokan Karate, but he was actually trained in Shorin-Ryu karate, which is much older but less formatted, and thus less easily teachable, and that much of what passes for karate today is really just people ripping off Funakoshi, then you don’t want to go take karate at the Y, or in the storefront school. You want to take Shorin-Ryu karate, where the modern karate movement started.

But if you didn’t know any of that, you would most likely be happy at Uncle George’s Karate Dojo and Storm Door Company. Which you might as well be because nobody in your state teaches Shorin-Ryu anyway. Instead, 19-year-old Hugh searches for the real true karate instead of, actually, you know, studying any karate at all.

Or in my 20’s when I was weightlifting, I didn’t just want to lift weights – I wanted to do it the “best” way. I read at least 100 books. Got countless magazines. Tried literally hundreds of workout routines. Totally wrecked my shoulders along the way.

So, those are examples of how ADHD makes you unhappy. Because you know too much. And because you do, your standards are impossibly high. The inverse is also true, of course – there are huge sections of human endeavors about which you know nothing because they did not interest you at all. But that’s another story, for another time.

One thing I’m trying to do these days is to lower my standards as a source of happiness. Or try to care less about doing it the “right” way or the “pure” way, and just do it at all. Like when I began walking regularly last year, I literally bought books on walking – a thing I have been doing most of my life, quite well. But I only began to get real enjoyment out of it when I gave up trying to do it well and just focused on doing it.

And recently, my back and shoulders seem a bit stiff, and I have considered going to Yoga classes. Of course, I read a lot of books, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and learned about the various lineages, but this time I just bit the bullet and went to the free “yoga” class my gym has on Monday during lunch.

Other than the teacher, I was the youngest person there by a good 10 years. The moves were slow and graceful, and only one pose was recognizable. I think there is a 50/50 chance that the soft background music was Kenny G. Really, it was more of a stretching class than anything else. It would have met no purity test at all. And I had a blast.

The little old ladies ooohed and ahhed over my being there. An older gentleman advised me to take an aspirin before I went to bed tonight. The lady to my right said she hopes I come back because they need “younger people” (I’ll be 50 in about six weeks). But still. It was great.

And most important is that I did it. I stretched. And Thursday, I’ll do it again. Not because it’s pure, or because it’s the best, or because from it I can learn to be the best. But when the choice was to do nothing or to do something, I did something.