Category: Posts

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).

Managing energy

I have spent the last 15 years working in the so-called “helping professions”. People like nurses, doctors, pastors, social workers, teachers… that’s us – the helping professionals. And for helping professionals, the main resource we use in our work is our energy.

And to make things more complicated – I’m an introvert. That doesn’t mean that I’m shy, or I don’t like people. It just means I derive energy from solitude, and I expend energy when I engage people. In other words, people are expensive.

In helping circles, a lot of time is spent talking about self-care, and it has even slipped over into mainstream conversation. But all too often, self-care is equated with doing something enjoyable: A spa day. An afternoon at the movies. Soaking in a hot tub.

Those can all be fun, but the real task of self-care is energy preservation and repletion. If energy is your single most important resource, a primary job of self-care has to be protecting and replenishing that resource.

I know a surgeon, and the list of things he just won’t do is long because he simply cannot afford to hurt his hands. They are the means by which he earns his living, and that is too important to risk on something like mountain climbing.

Or another friend who is a bartender, and she makes her living on her feet. The money she spends on shoes and inserts and care for her feet gives me chills, and she too has a long list of things she won’t do, because it could hurt her feet and impact her ability to do her work.

I propose we should take energy management exactly that seriously.

That sounds simplistic and privileged, and it is. But something can be both simplistic and true: You have to manage your energy to be in this fight long-term. This sort of work – helping work – is an endurance sport – a marathon, not a sprint, and we will not get the better world of which we dream by working 14 hour days on the regular.

And privilege is both a noun and a verb, and while energy management is a privilege in the noun sense, it is also something we must privilege in the verb sense – we must privilege it, make it a priority, in the same way we make eating a priority.

A big part of how we do that involves listening to your body, and then building your life around what you learn. The most important knowledge is always self-knowledge.

Here is a personal example:

Because I know myself, I know my most creative time of the day is early morning, that my least productive time is after 3:00 PM, that I really need 7 hours of sleep to be my best, and that more than 8 hours of sleep will not help me and actually hurts me. Carbs are not my friend, and sugar makes me tired. Exercise of any sort helps me focus. Mingling among crowds is exhausting, but being on stage is life-giving.

None of that is supposition or opinion: Those are facts, gathered over a lifetime. And because I have committed my life to build a better world, I have to manage my energy, so I have, to the fullest extent possible, sought to build a life that prioritizes those facts and takes them into account.

So only easy meetings get scheduled for after 3:00 PM whenever possible. I wake up as early as I can, which means trying to get to bed as early as I can (A friend once told me that going to bed early is how adults sleep in, and I can’t agree more). If I eat sweets at all, it is only after I am done with work for the day. I am more likely to accept your invitation to be a speaker than I am to attend your party as a guest. And I take daily walks that range from 20 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the amount of time I have available.

And I’m not perfect at this, in any sort of way. But I have found that doing something excellently 80% of the time always gives me better results than doing something half-assed 100% of the time. The things we pay attention to are the things that get better.

I’m not saying that any of these things are things you should be doing, but they are things that work for me, and allow me to be fairly good at my work, despite being an ADHD riddled, introverted, depressed Chaos Muppet.

I am saying, though, that you should pay attention to your body and learn how your body responds to things, and then build a life that focuses on preserving and maintaining your energy.

What have you found helps you with managing your energy?

Introversion and energy management

I am an introvert. This shocks a lot of people who know me.

“You seem so outgoing!”

“You are so engaged when talking to people!”

“You do so well on the stage!”

Introversion isn’t a synonym for being shy, or socially awkward, or withdrawn. There are introvert stand-up comedians, introvert actors, and introvert party planners. No, introversion just means you get your energy from solitude, and you spend energy on public interaction. As opposed to extroverts, who derive energy from interaction and spend energy in solitude.

So, as an introvert, I can have a very public facing job. It just costs me more energy to do it than it would if I were an extrovert.

Think of it like this:

Like a lot of people who work in the so-called helping professions, I don’t make a lot of money. I mean, I make enough to support my family and to pay my bills, but we have to be careful with our spending. Extravagances are rare, and splurges are just that – a splurge.

So, for example, if I want to go out and eat steak at a steakhouse, I can afford to do it – occasionally. Like, maybe once a month, if I plan for it. But I couldn’t do it every day. I would quickly be bankrupt and overdrawn, unable to take care of my obligations.

And if that happened, the problem isn’t that steak is expensive, although it is pricey. And the problem wouldn’t be my income, although things are tight. The problem is that I didn’t properly manage my resources. Because steak is expensive, and I do have a finite amount of money.

And for introverts like me, people are expensive, and I have a finite amount of energy, and that energy is a resource I must manage.

For example: Tonight I am going to the birthday party of a friend’s son. He is turning 12, and there will be a cookout and a bonfire and lots of kids and basketball and toasted marshmallows. And it will be expensive for me, energy-wise. But the kid means a lot to me, and the friend means a lot to me, and so I’ve decided it will be worth it. The same way you might save up to treat a yourself to a nice bottle of wine for a special occasion.

But just like me deciding to eat steak at a fancy restaurant, I can’t just do it whenever I want to. I have to save up for it. I have to plan for it. I have to look ahead and budget my energy around it. I knew I had this on the calendar, so I didn’t plan any in-person meetings this afternoon, and I don’t have any planned until lunchtime tomorrow.  I’m going to spend an hour or so before we go alone, reading, and when we get home, I will be exhausted, and will go to bed. But while I am at the party, I will see people, have fun, and the people I will interact with will think I am likeable and outgoing.

Because I am outgoing. And I will have fun at this party. It’s just expensive for me.

A further thing:

I recognize that the ability to arrange my schedule is a huge privilege, one that most people don’t enjoy. It has taken me until I am almost 50 years old to have this much control over my calendar, but it is something I have been fighting for my whole life. Once you know how you best work, then trying to make your life match up to that is a huge quality of life improvement, and very much worth fighting for.

When you can’t do the thing.

The city I live in now is notorious for its poor street maintenance, and sure enough, our first year here, we lost a tire on the hatchback when I hit a huge pothole. At the tire shop, I asked them to change the oil while it was up on the rack.

The mechanic told me that when I had hit the pothole, I had also dented the oil pan in such a way he couldn’t get the bolt out to drain the oil.

“You’re gonna have to get that oil pan replaced,” he told me.

Money was, at that particular moment, tight, and the tire was already an unexpected expense, and we were in the process of moving into our new home, and it wasn’t leaking, so I said thanks, and drove it home with no oil change, intending to replace the oil pan myself later when I had time.

For the next few months, I drive as normal. The oil in the car was synthetic, which can go much longer between changes than conventional oil, and it was hot outside, and honestly, my ADHD object impermanence kicked in and since I couldn’t see it, I more or less forgot about it.

Then we got foster kids, and started driving the SUV almost everywhere, and I started working from home more, and instead of driving the hatchback every day, it was only a couple of times a week, a few miles at a time.

Somewhere in there, I went to the parts store to buy a new oil pan for the car, but they didn’t carry it – I would have to order one from the dealer or off the internet, they told me. I thanked them and then promptly forgot about it again for a few more months.

Then in a fit of ambition, I ordered the part and the gasket off the internet, and bought the oil and oil filter – everything I would need to fix it once and for all. I put it all in the cargo compartment of the car and forgot about it again.

And then a global pandemic happened. Neither car moved for two weeks. Then I went for six months without driving in the dark. I began working almost exclusively at home. In that first year, we put less than 5,000 miles on our SUV. I put less than 1,000 on the hatchback. For the last six months, it never left the carport. I would crank it every month or so and let it run for a while, but that’s it. It got covered in dust and ick.

It just sat there, and since it was more than two and a half years since the last oil change, I didn’t want to drive it anywhere serious, and I couldn’t change the oil (which is something I can do practically in my sleep) without changing the pan, and so it became a “thing.” My car I loved, just sitting there, covered in ick, because the emotional investment in doing the thing was too heavy.

For us ADHD types, sometimes extremely simple things become overwhelming. The thing itself isn’t hard, but the energy and investment to do it is, so it becomes a “thing”. A thing that just taunts us with our inability to do it. Changing the oil pan had become a thing.

To be clear: I had the tools. I had the parts. It wouldn’t be a difficult thing to do – there are maybe 10 bolts, all easy to get to. It would probably take 2 hours to do if I wasn’t hurrying, including clean up. And during the time all this is happening, I had enough free time to built a huge deck for our house and a 10×16 workshop in my backyard. But I couldn’t do this.

But lately, I am working on a new project that will dramatically increase my time in the car, and so it would be good if both our cars were back to fully functional. Because I scheduled this week lightly, yesterday I had a free morning and decided to do the thing: I would replace the oil pan and change the oil on the car.

I got everything ready. I drove the car up the ramps. I crawled under the car.

There was nothing wrong with the oil pan. I mean, nothing. So I changed the oil like normal and was done in 20 minutes.

I don’t know if the original guy who told me it was dented was lying to get out of doing the oil change, or confused my car with another when he was telling me about it, or what. But I have been carrying around the emotional weight of this task I couldn’t make myself do for more than 2 years when it didn’t even exist.

This is a perfect example of what life with Adult ADHD is like. The object impermanence, the sense of overwhelm at a complex, multi-step operation that just looms larger the longer you put it off, the sense of shame you feel for not being able to do the thing, even though you know you can do the thing, the inevitable doing of the thing and then the sense of shame because it took you so long to do the thing when it was so simple to do.

I will, of course, learn nothing from this. Because “this” isn’t about my laziness, but about my brain, and how it functions. It really doesn’t matter how much I want to do something. It doesn’t matter how much I need to do something. There are things that just overwhelm my brain, and no amount of self-talk changes that.

And when that does happen, sometimes you can hack your way out of it – such as paying someone to do it for you, if you have the resources. And other times, all you can do is be as gentle with yourself as possible afterwards.

Use the good towels.

As a child, we had some neighbors – Montaree (we called her Montie) and Mr. Doc. They were retired farmers who had bought a few acres from us and built a small house to live out their retirement. They were surrogate grandparents to me, and I loved them intensely.

They were simple folks who lived in a simple house, and like many of the generation that had survived the Depression, were thrifty. They made do, or they did without. Nothing was wasted in that house, ever.

They had a son who lived in Jackson, three hours away, who always came for holidays. And as she prepared for their arrival, the threadbare sheets and towels were put away, and out came the beautiful, fluffy towels that had been in hiding since the last holiday. She had special towels for guests, or, as she called them, company. She had special dishes for when company came over too, and special silverware.

I asked her once why she didn’t always use them, and she said they were too pretty to use everyday, so they were saved for company.

Mr. Doc died in the summer, and shortly afterwards, things changed in the house. The everyday plates went away, and the good plates came out. The towels on the bar in the bathroom were fluffy, and the company silverware went into rotation.

I saw the good towels in the bathroom and asked her who was coming.

“Nobody is. After Doc died, I decided to treat myself like company.”

That is still the best self-care advice anyone ever gave me – treat yourself like company.

The never ending project

The last house we lived in was what is politely called a “fixer-upper”. Before we could move into it, we had to rip out all the carpet, put in new floors, renovate the kitchen and get all new (or at least, new to us) appliances.

But that was just the starting point.

It had been a low-income rental for more than a decade, and while the house itself was structurally sound, no one had loved it in a very, very long time. The yard was dismal. Hard, compacted soil, with desire paths across the yard where the neighbors would shortcut through it. A backyard that was filled with privet and briars and fallen trees.

Then there was the leaky roof, the sunken front porch, the rotten bathroom floor… It required a lot of vision to see what could be.

We lived in that house for five years. I ripped out the bathroom floor and tiled it. Renovated the studio apartment in the basement and rented it out. Put fencing and flower beds in the front yard. Built a porch across the front of the house. Built a chicken coop in the backyard. Put in a rose hedge along the road. Ripped out the privet and cleaned up the backyard. Pulled the aluminum siding off the front of the house, discovering shiplap siding in perfect condition underneath, which we painted. Replaced the leaky roof with a metal one. And lots of other, smaller things I am forgetting.

And along the way we hosted friends, had celebrations, had a niece live with us for 6 months or so, and my wife had a heart transplant. That house treated us very well. We loved it, and it kept us safe. And when we had to leave it, we were fortunate enough to sell it to a friend, who would love it too.

I have to confess: I didn’t have any vision. I just knew that this is what we could afford, and that if we loved the house and took care of it, it would take care of us. This is sort of my way of working – I don’t invest heavily in long-term plans. I usually just have a long-term broadly defined goal – in this case, a happy, safe, home that would serve as a sanctuary for us. And then, after setting that goal, I ask myself, what can I do now to move me toward it?

These days, we are in a different house, in a different state. This house was more or less move in ready when we bought it, barring some minor updates in the kitchen and a lot of painting. But this house has a ½ acre of yard, and it was a rental before we bought it. Again – structurally sound, but unloved for a long time.

And again, I don’t have a grand vision. I just want it to be welcoming. To be safe, and to keep us safe. To be a place of rest, of sanctuary, for both us and the birds and the pollinators and the other wildlife that share this place with us. So the question isn’t, “What is the next thing to do on this long list” but, “What can I do, in this moment, to move me closer to that vision?”

I find that empowering in many ways. The first is that I don’t always have $3,000 to build the workshop I needed in the backyard, but maybe I do have the $20 to buy a rosebush or native vine. Maybe it’s been raining for weeks, like it does in the spring here, and so I can’t till the new flower bed, but I can paint the hallway. And living in a place changes how you interact with it, which means that your first year in a house, you don’t know enough about the place to make a list of what you want to change about it.

It also helps me avoid the temptation to believe the false idea that I will only be happy when it’s finished. After all, if it has to be finished for me to be happy – well, that could take years. And science tells us that the anticipation of a trip brings more satisfaction than does the actual trip itself.

So, I don’t have a set date for completion. Instead, I choose to see my house and yard as works in progress, a never ending project, and thus, a never ending source of joy.

What do you want your home to be like?

My friend Ashley was the minister that performed our wedding, and when we were preparing for the ceremony, she asked lots of good, piercing, questions. But the one I remember best is:

“What do you want your home to be like?”

Not your house. Not where you live. Not your apartment, which was true at the time, not your dream house, not your future or your life or even your marriage, but your home.

Because houses change. Addresses change. The city you live in, the state you live in, the number of people you live with – all that can change. But home is never a location, but a space you carry with you. Sometimes, home is a person. But always, home is a decision you make.

I once knew a man who lived outside, in a tent beyond the city, and had done for 12 years when he died from lack of healthcare. At his funeral, we told stories we remembered about him, and one friend told of how a church worker had referred to this man, in his hearing, as homeless, and he interrupted her and said he had a home – what he didn’t have was a house.

Home is a decision you make.

When Ashley asked us that, all those years ago, we had no idea what we were in for. I had been working for a few years at that point with people who were experiencing homelessness, and was making virtually no money. The woman I would marry was on disability for a genetic heart condition, and many of our dates had consisted of sub sandwiches from the grocery store deli, ate in the park.

What do you want your home to be like?

I had grown up on the same land my father had, whose father had bought it for his young family for the marriage that didn’t work out, before he married my grandmother. I grew up one mile away from the brick church where my father had been baptized, where I was baptized, where my grandfather’s name is on the cornerstone. It is where dad is buried, where mom will be buried, and where there are generations of people with my last name in the cemetery.

Within 1 mile of that house I kissed my first girl, saw my first dead body, watched a friend die, learned to ride a bike, felt heartache and misery and ecstasy and joy. I have never felt as safe, as loved, as accepted as I did as a child in that house, in that community. It was the essence of stability.

My spouse had a different experience growing up. Her family moved a lot. A lot, a lot. We counted once, and she had lived in 25 houses by the time she was 29. Their fortunes changed several times during her childhood, shifting from comfort to scarcity and back again quickly. Her only constant, regardless of address or fortune, was her siblings, who to this day she talks to near daily. For her, home had less to do with address and geography, and was instead tied to who was with you wherever you happened to be sleeping tonight.

You really see the difference in our childhoods manifest itself when we travel.  When we stay at a hotel, I live out of my duffle bag. As soon as we get there, I set my duffle bag on the luggage stand and put my shaving kit on the bathroom counter and I am done. She unpacks, sets up her toiletries in a line on the counter, hangs up her clothes, even if we are only there one night. In my mind, the hotel is a resting place, but she is making it her home.

What do you want your home to be like?

It was interesting – Ashley asked us to answer it without consulting the other. In both of our responses, we mentioned the same word: Sanctuary.

I had been loved and nurtured in safety and stability, but worked daily among chaos. I wanted a place the outside world could not pierce, a place where the horrors I dealt with daily would not enter, a place where I had control of my environment, even if I had no control over the outcomes of the people I saw slowly killing themselves from addiction and alcoholism.

She had grown up loved and nurtured in the midst of chaos, and wanted the stability she had never known.

We both wanted sanctuary.

So our home has been designed, wherever we have lived, to do that. We eat together most nights while music plays. Our house, wherever it has been, is filled with books and music and plants, inside and out. We have comfortable chairs and lots of lamps and throw rugs and knickknacks that mean things to us, a refrigerator covered with pictures of those we love, and art on the wall that makes us feel things. Our cats welcome us when we have been gone too long, and the last two houses we have lived in have contained graves of our feline friends who left us too soon.

When our fortune’s improved and we were able, for the first time in our lives, to be able to pick out our house, we wanted big windows and room for guests and a big dining table, a yard that was ok for both playing in and growing both food and flowers, a house on a quiet street but with lots of birds and flowers and butterflies and a stately magnolia in the yard that reminded her of the one in the yard of the house she lived in when she was 12.

It was, and is, our sanctuary. It is the place we go to retreat from the ravages of the outside world, where we both know and are known, where we make beauty and a family, both of which provide us protection from a world that often seems like madness.

It is a thing we have designed and built, this home of ours. And like anything one builds, whether a house or a chicken coop, it requires maintenance and care and attention, lest it fall into disrepair and one-day collapse under the weight of the forces that oppose it.

And every day, it requires us to answer the question we were first asked all those years ago:

What do you want your home to be like?

A daily walk to everywhere

I am 49 years old. I know, I know, I don’t really believe it myself, but I have checked the sums and they line up.

Part of being 49 means realizing that I won’t live forever. Dad’s death last year especially made that hit home. He was only 21 years older than me – and 21 years doesn’t seem like all that long.

So, among other things, I have decided to take my health more seriously. Back in March, I took up two practices that have had a huge impact on my well-being: I walk every day, and I log my food. I have lost 41 pounds thus far, and while we know that weight is an imperfect proxy for health, they were 41 pounds I needed to lose.

I will talk about my relationship with food another day, but today I want to tell you about my walking.

The whole thing is pretty simple: I needed something that I could fit in my day, that was dead simple to do, that didn’t require new clothes or memberships (because COVID), that I could do at home (because COVID), and that wouldn’t get me in the hospital or have a high chance of injuring me (because COVID).

So I decided to go walking.

I used to be a runner. I ran in high school. I ran in the Marines. I ran 5 and 10K races in my 20’s. And then I got married and life got busy and then one day, I wasn’t a runner any more. I took it back up in my mid-forties, but honestly, it wasn’t fun anymore, and I hurt myself twice. When I moved to MS, it was one of the things that got lost in the chaos.

Which was a shame, because while I no longer loved to run, I loved how I felt having ran. I don’t mean immediately after, in the afterglow of the so-called runners high. I mean, regular physical activity makes my life better. I sleep better, I think better, and my body craves the routine.

Last year in the early days of the pandemic, my 7-year-old foster son and I would go for walks in the neighborhood as a way of seeking connection and getting his energy out. In those early, super scary, yet optimistic days (remember when we thought we could flatten the curve with a 2-week shutdown?), those walks were my salvation.

But this spring, I decided to take control of my health. My pants were super snug, I had been doom-eating all through the winter, and Dad’s death last October had sent me into a depressive spiral. I needed to move.

So I bought some $25 shoes at Costco and walked to the end of the road and back. The next day I did it again. And then again.

After a week I bought a fitness watch, to time my pace. That week I crossed the intersection at the end of the street.

These days, I walk to the dead end of our road, 1.25 miles away, wave at the lady who lives there and is always on her porch, chain smoking while doing something on her iPad while an old furry dog sleeps at her feet, and then turn around and come home. 41 minutes round trip, give or take petting a dog or chatting with a neighbor.

The ritual of it all is soothing. Put on the shoes, set the watch, walk to the end of the driveway and turn right. Some days I listen to podcasts, some days I listen to audio books from the library, and some days I am content to let the neighborhood remix of the birds, traffic hum and leaf blowers sooth me into a sort of hypnotic repose.

One added benefit of having a set route that I do every day is noticing the subtle shifts as the seasons roll through, the buds in the spring, the turning leaves at the beginning of fall, the pears that ripened on that tree on the corner, the persimmons that looked ripe last week but fooled you into biting it, leaving you with its astringent reminder that you can’t eat them before frost, no matter what they promise. The blackberry thicket behind the overgrown crepe myrtle, the mulberry tree whose limbs are *just* out of reach.

It connects and grounds me to this place, too. I know which house has the kids that leave their toys out, the house that supported the last President a little *too* fervently, the house that always has 5-6 wine bottles on the curb on Mondays, the house that has what appears to be a classic 50’s Chevy in their garage, and yes, my friend Beth, she of the chain smoking and the furry pup.

I know that Liz is working on a new renovation, that Evelyn got the water leak fixed, that Kam is doing well in school and that her brother loves to give high fives. Walking this street every day means I notice that people fly around that curve, that the potholes are really getting bad on Meadowbrook and that the abandoned house on that corner has been getting more and more ratty. Because I walk this road every day, I notice it in a way I never would at 45 miles per hour.

All of this local knowledge makes me love this neighborhood even more than I did, and for not the first time, I learn that what is good for me is also good for the world around me.

My Dad

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

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

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

# # #

To the nominating committee:

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

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

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

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

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

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

He felt that responsibility heavily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He died around lunchtime on the 22nd.

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

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

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

Respectfully submitted,

Hugh L. Hollowell, Jr.

Designing for Hospitality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Nick Hillier on Unsplash