Posts – Page 21 – Hugh's Blog

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

Planting as resistance

I went tree shopping today.

We live on half an acre, in a former suburb. The house was outside the city limits when my neighborhood was built, but it would be annexed just five years later while the Korean War was smoldering.

It was nearly a blank slate when we bought it nearly three years ago, with a beautiful southern magnolia in the front yard and seven pine trees scattered around the lot and not much else. It was a great house with good bones, not looking its seventy years. It had been a church parsonage for its whole life before we bought it, which meant it had been cared for but never loved. We decided to love it.

Along came the pandemic, and then we endured hell as foster parents (not from the kids – from the system) and then my Dad died from COVID and then we had a damn insurrection in Washington and through it all, the old house began to love us back.

It’s easy to anthropomorphize things like a house. Heck, I just did it in that last paragraph. But it did seem like the house was happier being cared for, like it liked having the perennial bed planted in the front yard, liked the new deck we put up after cutting down the overgrown wisteria crawling all over the back patio. It’s like it knew we were looking out for it when we fixed the leak in the roof and replaced the sewer pipes.

But it isn’t just because we love the house.

One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers… Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” – Leonard Wolf, in Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939

So I went tree shopping today. I’m currently looking for a particular crab apple tree, one that has edible fruit and long blooms and is disease resistant and can put up with our severe summer humidity. I love crab apples – I planted three at our last house – but here I am going to try growing apples as well, and I need the crab for a pollinator, in addition to its being beautiful and a gift to the wildlife.

By next spring, we will have 2 apple trees, a crab apple, six plum trees, a peach, two figs, 10 blueberry bushes, four blackberries and two muscadine vines. The apples and crab will go in this fall, and the peach is currently sitting in the driveway waiting for me to plant it.

It’s not just the fruit. It’s that planting things that will endure are acts of resistance to a world gone mad. It’s a form of resistance against all the forces that try to harm us, that try to drag us down, that try to dehumanize us.

Growing fruit is a long-term commitment to a place. We will have figs and blueberries next year, but it will be at least 3 years before we have peaches, and perhaps five before we have apples. But they will feed people long after current politicians are long- dead, they provide us nourishment and flowers and pollen for the bees and food for the birds and perhaps most off all, they are our vote for a future that looks very different than the present.

They are living, growing monuments to hope, to the future, to a world that will long outlast the one we have now. They let me remember who I am and what I hope for in the midst of a world gone mad.And while I don’t think you have to plant trees – maybe you plant iris instead, or flowers, or raise children – I’m all in favor of planting something.

Do you have practices that sustain you in the midst of all this? If so, tell us about them in the comments below.

Photo by Jacob Farrar on Unsplash

A Good Walk Shared

I went for a walk this morning. That isn’t unusual – I walk about two and a third miles most mornings, rain or shine, and have done for more than a year.

What made it notable this morning was that I walked with a friend. Normally, my walking is a solitary pursuit, but my friend Jill is wanting to get back in the habit of exercising, and asked if she could walk with me this morning.

It’s a great walk, with gentle hills, through a midcentury neighborhood with ranch houses and mature trees and a creek, with surprises around many corners, like the airstream trailer or the bridge over the creek or the hedge of azaleas that is a wall of pink in the springtime. It is the high point of my day, this walk is, and I was glad to share it with someone else.

As we were walking along, I couldn’t help myself – I kept pointing out things that I was excited about. That live oak, the ways this house had renovated their garage, the unusual plants these people had in their side yard, the vintage car in the driveway. All things I knew to expect, because I have seen them every day for months.

I also took delight in showing her the house that really went all out for Christmas, and the house where you will see a giant inflatable bunny rabbit come Easter, and the house that put up the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag after the insurrection back in January. Sigh.

Really, it almost felt like hosting a tourist in your town – like I was the guide, giving the history of the houses, letting her know where the famous author had lived, I pointed out when we passed the home of the former governor, showed her where the city limits had been in the 50’s.

It was a lot of fun, this playing host. I had not realized how much of this walk I have internalized, how much I had soaked in, how well I knew this stretch, and how fascinated with it I was.

Some things are better when you share them.

Don’t do it by yourself.

One of my favorite stories:

A salesman was driving through the country on his way to his next appointment. He took a curve too fast and ended up in the ditch.

He had no cell service to call AAA, and was cursing his luck when he looked over the field next to the road and saw an old man and a mule, plowing the field.

He walked over to the man and asked for help. The farmer unhitched his mule and together they walked to the car.

The man hitched the mule to the car, told the salesman to stand back and gave a mighty holler.

“Sam – Pull! Mikey – Pull! Davey – Pull!”

And then the mule leaned in, and pulled, and with a creak and a groan the car rolled onto the road again.

As the farmer unhitched the mule, the salesman stood there in disbelief.

“I don’t understand”, he said. “You called three names out, but you only have one mule. What was that about?”

The man smiled. “Oh, that was to trick Davey here into thinking he wasn’t trying to do it alone. If he thought he had to do it by himself, he wouldn’t have even tried.”

* * *

When we know we have a team of people with us, we can accomplish things we never would have dreamed of taking on by ourselves.

Don’t do it by yourself.

The myth of inevitable progress

Our species has been on the earth for more than 200,000 years. 30,000 years ago, there was a sort of explosion of art and cave paintings showing up on multiple regions and continents. 12,000 years ago we began to build settlements and plant crops. We have a long and vigorous history as a species. But much of what we expect life to be like is based on less than 100 years of our history.

Like the idea that you can retire. Or that you will make more money as you get older. Or that children will not work to support the family. That you will have access to clean water to drink. That you will be in love with the person you marry. That home ownership is normal and expected. That working for someone else for pay is normal and expected. And my favorite: That p is inevitable.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, however. After all, my grandfather was born in 1886. His son died in 2020. Two lives, during which time we went from horse and buggy to railroad to airplanes to visiting the moon to exploring Mars. My grandfather grew up in an age where a rusty nail could kill you, and in his 30’s would live through a global flu pandemic that killed millions. By the time his son was born, there were antibiotics and then polio took out most of a generation and then there was a vaccine and nobody died from polio and rarely did they die from the flu.

If all you knew of human history was the last 150 years, you would be convinced progress was inevitable. That over the long term, optimism is the only realism. That you should always be bullish.

But history tells us otherwise.

I love to grow things, and there are natural rhythms that occur you can depend on that guide our world. Like the last frost date in the springtime, the day on which your danger of freezing is gone and thus you can put out your tomatoes. But in 1815, there was a volcanic eruption in Bali that led to global climate impacts that lasted more than a year, including frost in Virginia in August. People starved, there was massive upheaval, and Mary Shelly was driven indoors and wrote Frankenstein as a result.

Life is not ordered – it is chaotic. Sometimes, the stings of good runs last a long time – but they are still strings, and not chains. And if you think that every day in the future will be like all the days you have had before, you will be OK… until you aren’t, and then you may be wiped out.

I no longer believe in the inevitability of progress, even if our economy is predicated on it. But nothing grows forever – things get sick and sometimes things die, and eventually, everything does.

Don’t mishear me: I’m not advocating for a survival bunker in the basement full of guns and body armor. But I do think it make sense to include in your plans the probability that things will not go according to plan.

Another time, I will talk about what I think a healthy amount of preparation looks like at the household level. But more important than any individual thing you do is, I think, the mindset with which you approach it. I don’t think things are guaranteed to get better or easier, which is why I have to learn how to get stronger and more resilient.

Unitize your time.

Those of us who are in the helping professions seldom end up having 40 hour, structured workweeks. Instead, we are often responsible for creating our own schedule, which always involves other people’s schedules, which can lead to long, unstructured days.

For instance, I have an office, but am only in it three to four hours a day, with the rest being nighttime meetings, breakfast meetings, coffeeshop meetings, or time spent out in the field. And I still have paperwork to do and writing to do, and all the other sorts of things people expect me to do.

If I’m not careful, I can end up having a day where I have a breakfast meeting at 7:30, get to the office at 9:00, have a lunch meeting at 1:00 PM, spend time in the field until 6:00, where I grab something in the drive thru on my way to a seminar I am supposed to teach at 7:30 PM, and finally get home at 10:00, exhausted.

And for many of us, this sort of thing happens all the time. It is really easy to have a workday that spans 12 or 14 hours, and we wonder why we are exhausted and burned out.

Or maybe we are really good at sticking to eight hour days, but we end up giving up our days off to “just catch up”.

A technique I have learned that has really helped planning my days and weeks. It goes like this:

Your day is split into three units: Morning, afternoon, and evening. You have two goals – don’t work more than two units any given day, and don’t work more than 12 units in a given week.

For the days, you shouldn’t work all three units in a given day. So, if you know you are going to have night meetings, schedule your day so you are not working that morning or afternoon. If you have a full day packed from 9-5, don’t schedule anything that evening.

For the weeks, if you know you have to work Saturday morning and have a presentation Tuesday night, you are already starting the week with two units filled. Throw in a Thursday night meeting and we are up to three, which means, if 12 is our goal, that we can’t work full days the rest of the week.

I find this much more helpful (and realistic) than counting hours. It is easy to wrap my head around, easy to plan around and imposes structure. It turns your calendar into more than a device for recording your appointments and meetings, but rather a framework for structuring your life.

30 Days of Spoons

A few weeks ago, pandemic isolation was getting to me. But then again, the dead of winter is always hard on me. First there is the lack of sunlight. Seasonal affective disorder is real, and does my depression no favors.

Then there is the damp cold weather that I feel in my joints, reminding me of my misspent youth. I just ache all winter. I ache less in Central Mississippi than I did in North Carolina, but I still ache.

My primary depression management strategy has always been making. Whether gardening or cooking or building a chicken coop or deck, turning a pile of chaotic parts into an ordered result hits my soul in all the right places.

But the reality is that pretty much everything I love to do is off limits in December and January, except cooking. And this year, I’m cooking for two of us, just like I do every damn other day of my life.

Add a global pandemic and political chaos into the pile and you get a perfect shitstorm inside my head.

So I was racking my brain trying to find a way to make things that I can do inside (where it is warm and well lit) and that challenge me, yet are not projects so huge I lose interest in them. I decided to try making some spoons.

Why spoons? Well, they are relatively quick to make, and yet require a bit of skill to do. And it’s something I’ve never done before, and if I were to do a number of them, I would probably get better over time. And, to satisfy my Protestant guilt, they are useful to boot!

I had a nice gouge to carve out the bowl, and bought myself a sloyd knife for the hand carving. I will write a post later on the technique, but to begin with I watched a few YouTube videos and was on my way.

The first one turned out OK (that is it up there at the top), especially for a beginner effort, so I did another.

And then another.

Then I decided I would make a spoon a day for 30 days. Today is day 12, and I’m posting each day’s spoon over on Instagram.

Whatever gets us through, right?

When your routine is off.

I am a creature of routine. This shocks people, but it’s true.

I wear the same four shirts over and over. I have two pairs of pants I wear almost every day, unless I wear shorts that day, when I will wear one of two pairs, or if I have to dress up, in which case I wear that nicer pair of pants I own. I alternate between two pairs of shoes, no matter the clothes I have on.

I drink my coffee from the same mug nearly every morning, wake up at the same time nearly every morning, eat one of three things for breakfast, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to quote the king.

Flaubert said to “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I like that a lot.

But sometimes things throw the routine off. Like right now, Renee is out of town to visit her family, so three cats and I are living the bachelor life here in this tiny apartment.

Which is fine – I lived by myself for a long time before I got married, and I do all the cooking anyway, and while I struggled a bit with wondering what sort of cat food we buy for the cats and where we keep the trash bags, I am doing fine.

Except that the routine is off, and things fall through the cracks, all of which makes me feel mega uncomfortable, like I am wearing someone else’s clothes.

So this morning when I woke up feeling off, I just put it down to the routine and the changes and got up to make my coffee the same way I do every morning. And in making the coffee I moved something on the counter and saw my pillbox – the one with the daily little boxes for each day of the week that I use to track the medication that keeps my depression at bay – and that it was amazingly full.

It seems I had not taken a single pill since Monday morning. In other words, I missed three doses. No wonder I am off.

Before you ask – I’m fine, and in a good place and not really depressed, just off – again, like I am wearing someone else’s clothes. But it does feel a bit disorienting. It’s the most doses I have missed in a year.

But one side effect of all of the mess that is my head – the ADHD, the chronic depression, the learning disabilities I have and all of that – is that you tend to blame yourself when things like this happen. Instead of thinking, “Of course you are disoriented – your life is a bit chaotic right now”, which is what my counsel would be to anyone else in this situation, you tend to see it as a personal failing. Like you don’t want to be healthy enough, or you are not trying hard enough, or maybe you just are not enough.

All of that to say, I cannot wait for my wife to return. I cannot wait to move into our permanent home, and I cannot wait to have a regular routine again. For me, it really is a matter of life or death.