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.

Closed For Maintenance

Like I do most days, today I rode my bike to the gym. I don’t ride for exercise – I ride to get places. But the four miles of riding round trip do me no harm and help both the planet and our budget as gas continues to hover around $4 a gallon here.

It was a lovely day – the sort of beautiful spring day one gets in Central Mississippi that makes one temporarily forget the swamp-like August that will come. Early April is a lovely time here – the daffodils are still in bloom in places, the azaleas are a riotous mass of color and the wisteria runs along the fence rows, and red buckeyes and white dogwoods and spiderwort punctuate every thicket.

Today was a yoga day, and leaving after the 45-minute class, I heard a classmate – a woman in her early 70’s – say that she felt “noodley” and I thought that sounded about right: Supple, loose, and flexible. The tension had left my body and I felt wrung out like I had left all my frustrations on the mat.

And frustrations have been frequent of late. I’ve had tech problems galore over on the newsletter side of my writing business, costing me both weeks of time and hundreds of dollars, only to have it all dissolve in a vat of sunk costs that forced me to reconfigure and end up not far from where I started.

And after months and months of relative solitude, I have been thrust into the public eye again, with a steady stream of public meetings and actions and presentations. I feel like The Bride in that scene in Kill Bill when she wakes up after being in a coma and has lost the use of her legs to atrophy. My people muscles have atrophied, and while still there, they are not what they once were, and I leave most meetings exhausted.

And in multiple areas of my life, I am engaged in projects that are taking much longer than I anticipated, that are costing more than budgeted for, and that involve parts of my brain that are not best suited for that work.

My work has a lot of moving pieces, and pieces that should be moving and are not, and as I rode my bike to the gym this morning, my back was a mass of knots. I think I left them on the mat as well.

And as I rode home, passing under the fragrant wisteria and waving to my neighbor getting her mail and coasting down the hill like I am nine and carefree again and not 49 and full of responsibilities, I uttered a small prayer of thanks for the rejuvenation I can find in movement and in nature, for the clear skies and the beautiful flowers, and even the schedule flexibility that allows me to enjoy it all.

I’m taking a few days off from both social media and the blog. I’ll be back on both on Tuesday the 12th (both newsletters will publish as planned).

I need a little time away for both sanity and perspective. I’ve been publishing each weekday for more than five months now, and while I derive a lot of pleasure and benefit from the daily practice of releasing more than 700 words into the wild each day and have a very loyal readership, the reality is that readership isn’t really growing. It seems I like to write the sort of things people like but do not share, and rarely tell their friends about. Is this the best use of my time? Would I be better served to write one story a week, but make it amazing? Do I have the patience for that? Are there other options?

I just don’t know. But right now I’m too busy publishing every day to think about it. As a buddy once said, when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget your job was to drain the swamp.

I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get back. But I don’t have to know – at least, not right now. I just know that I will be back, in some way, next Tuesday, and I hope you will be here when I come back. I appreciate you, and your readership, and I hope you have an amazing weekend.

The Arrival

My mother’s father lived in Cooke County Texas, 50 miles or so from Dallas. He had retired there after he left the Navy, and bought some land just up the road from his own parents. He lived in a doublewide trailer, with a lean-to addition tacked on the back that was a combination TV room and guest room, as that was where the foldout couch lived, and so thus where I lived when I stayed with them.

There were times the dual roles of this addition – TV room and guest room – were at odds with each other. God help you if you were tired and wanted to go to bed while Walker, Texas Ranger was on. You might as well just settle in because you were going to be there a while.

The annual visit there was our default vacation plan – every summer of my childhood we would load up whatever car we were driving that year with sandwiches and thermoses of coffee and bags of snacks and we would hit the road to visit PaPaw and Granny Pat. Dad would work all day the day we would leave, and then come home and pack and load up the car. They planned our departure to be somewhere around 8 PM, and in those days of 55 MPH speed limits, we would roll into PaPaw’s around 6 AM.

Dad liked to drive at night when there were three kids in the car because we would rapidly fall asleep and he and mom would take turns driving in relative silence, with the windows down and the cool night and the radio fading in and out of range as you drove west into the night. 

I loved those trips. You would sit in the backseat of the station wagon – the passenger side was my favorite because that let me watch the scenery better – from where you could see the landscape change from urban lights to Delta fields, clothed in utter darkness pierced only by lights twinkling in the distance, signifying a lone farmer’s home on the far edge of the rice field. You cross the Mississippi River in Memphis, and since the AC never worked on our cars, the windows were down and the bridge framework combined with the doppler effect to make its own sort of music.

On either side of the bridge, the river rolled under you but from where you sat, it was just darkness – endless darkness on either side. Around Little Rock I would fall asleep, my resolution to stay awake the whole trip forgotten and my eyes would surrender. I would wake up when we stopped at the truck stop in Texarkana, where Dad would refill his thermos and I would go to the bathroom. That was the first place I ever saw condom machines in the bathroom, and that led 9-year-old me to look up the words French Tickler in the dictionary as a result.

But after Texarkana, I was out again and would stay out until usually not far from their house. We would be on a lonely road, with horse farms on either side of the road, and scrub oaks punctuating the fields to give the livestock shade to rest under on the hot days. And it was that liminal time, neither dark nor dawn, where the brightness can be perceived but it’s not yet sunrise, giving everything a honeyed glow.

And we would pull into the driveway and all of us would pile out and Dad would stretch like a cat and Mom would make sure the kids were all up and PaPaw would come out onto the patio by the driveway and ask how our trip was and Dad would remark how many hours and minutes it took as if we were in a race, and PaPaw would call Mom “Tadpole” and give her a hug and we kids would be swamped with hugs and the attention of his Border Collies and we would take our bags inside.

Granny Pat was already up as well, and they had coffee going, and she would make breakfast – always sausage patties and scrambled eggs and whop-um biscuits – and we would eat our fill, and then Dad would lay down for a nap.

The rest of the trip would vary, but the arrival was always special. They must have set the alarm for enough time to prepare for our showing up, in those days before ubiquitous cell phones, back when you just told someone when you would show up and that was it.

And the knowledge that people love you and have missed you and have prepared for your arrival and are waiting for you to show up? There is no feeling like that in the world. 

All the Confidence in the World

It was sometime in the first week of August of 1990, and I was a guest of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, on a small island off the coast of South Carolina for what they euphemistically called “Recruit Training”, and what the rest of the world called Boot Camp.

It was a hot and muggy day and the combination of the physical exertion and the extreme heat and the overwhelming humidity left your uniform soaking wet all the time. Then you would get chaffing on your inner thighs from the wet uniform always rubbing, and if you were not careful, you could end up with an, um, inner-thigh infection. I went through baby powder like it was water in the desert.

After a long day of classes and physical activities and then marching hither and yon and the evening meal, we came back to the barracks and took a super-fast shower, and then enjoyed our daily hour of “free time”. The name “free time” might conjure up images of playing poker and telling jokes, but alas, we were not the Air Force. Instead, we were to speak in low tones, write letters home, study our sacred texts, or polish our boots. And during the midst of all of this, we got mail call.

Mail call was the best. Dad had been in the service, and he knew. So my parents took it as their mission to write to me every day and to get as many people as they could to write to me. Dad used his new (remember, this is 1990) PC to make labels with my address that he blanketed our hometown with. I got a lot of kidding because I always had so many letters at mail call, but that was just jealousy.

It turns out there’s a little bit of jealousy in the best of us.

Anyway, I know it was 1990 because that is when I was at Boot Camp. And I know it was the first week of August because that was the week before we went to the rifle range, and I remember this happened right before we went. And I remember it was hot and muggy because it was always hot and muggy.

Always.

And so, this particular day, I am sitting on my footlocker at the end of my bed, in my underwear and t-shirt, polishing my boots when my name is called out and I run “with a sense of purpose” in my flip flops to the front of the squad bay and get my four letters. One of them was from Dad.

Mom would always handwrite her letters, but Dad’s were always written on his dot matrix printer. And on that night, I read the words he had never said out loud:

“I have all the confidence in the world in you. I know you can handle it. Sometimes I have not told you how proud of you I am of you. I really am. I know that sounds mushy, especially in a letter, but take it any way you want.”

I quietly got up and walked to the bathroom, where I sat in a stall and cried and cried. Because in 18 years I had never been the sort of person anyone had confidence in, and he had never told me he was proud of me.

I mean, I knew he was. He told other people he was proud of me, and they would tell me how proud of me he was. But he never told me. In later years, that changed. He told adult me any number of times, and not in a letter, but face to face.

But that was the first time. The first week of August 1990, when I was 18 years old, far from home and sent to learn how to kill people in the Marine Corps Approved Manner.

I don’t take praise well, and sometimes I wonder if it’s because it was so rare growing up. I was always the kid who had amazing grades except for the C or D in math class or the kid who read a lot but had terrible hand-to-eye coordination. Any accomplishment I had came with a caveat – always.

And so last night when my friend Amy complimented me on my writing in front of other people, my first instinct was to minimize it. To downplay it. All my old fears about imposter syndrome kick in, and I feel like any praise I am getting will inevitably come with a caveat, with an asterisk beside it, will somehow be less than genuine, or at least not the whole story.

I don’t hold it against my Dad that he didn’t know to tell me he was proud of me. He had been left fatherless in a man’s world at 7 years old, and when I was born he was but 20 himself, and children raising children is never a good recipe. They did the best they could with what they had, and again, to his credit, he worked hard to make up for it late in life.

When he knew better, he did better.

But there are some cycles it is up to us to break, so I try hard to accept praise when it’s handed out to me, hard as it is for me to believe.

But more than that, I hand out praise like it’s cotton candy at the carnival. Yes, I want to see your poems and artwork. Yes, I want to hear your dreams. Yes, I want to know what you’re working on. Yes, I want to know what your big scary plans are, how you want to change the world, or at least how you want to change your world. Even if I barely know you, I want to be your biggest fan. I see you doing hard things, and I’m damned proud of you for making it this far.

I have all the confidence in the world in you.

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.

 

The Movies I Can’t Watch

The longer I am away from doing work on the streets, the more I realize how traumatic that work actually was, the ways it impacted me and my brain, and the very real ways it continues to show up. Here’s a small example:

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but if I had to guess, it was probably in 2016 or so, when the worst of the burnout was coming on. It was probably inevitable, spending as much of my time as I did cleaning up messes other people had made because of their bad choices. But somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to watch people engage in self-destructive behavior. Even if they are only actors, pretending to do it.

For example, last year, we watched the movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday. It was a masterful movie, brilliantly shot. And I got up and walked out of the room at least five times. If you don’t know, a central theme of the movie (as well as a central theme of Holiday’s life) was her recurring bad choices around drug use.

It’s not the drug use itself that bothers me, really – it is seeing her have a way out, and making a choice you will end poorly. It’s like the opposite of empathy, or perhaps more like negative empathy – I understand what she is feeling, I just reject it. And I can’t watch it. I literally feel anxiety at watching people make self-destructive choices. And sometimes, it’s so bad I have to leave the room.

Or another example: I recently discovered the British crime drama Unforgotten, which has five seasons of back issues on Amazon Prime. Each season follows one storyline, and the idea is that we are following a police unit that deals with murders that happened 20+ years ago. Now that the murders are being investigated, all the people who were involved and haven’t heard anything about this case in forever and went on with their lives now have this all dredged up again. It’s fascinating and very well done.

But in season two, a character makes recurring bad decisions that are self-destructive, and the choices could impact a child. I had to stop in episode 4, and just skip on to the next season. I couldn’t watch someone make self-destructive decisions.

Unfortunately, people making self-destructive choices is a major plot device in TV and movies.

Take people who cheat on their partners, for example. I can watch a movie where that happens, as long as there isn’t a scene where they consciously make the decision to do it. I’m Ok with people who live a life of crime, as long as there isn’t a scene where they consciously violate someone’s trust, like stealing from Grandma to fund their addiction. If there is a scene where they appear to be making a choice, and they choose a self-destructive option when they had a healing one available to them, I will probably get up and leave – at least for a while.

These things are legitimately triggering for me. And there isn’t an easy shorthand explanation for the specific trigger. So, I get caught by surprise a lot, which makes watching anything other than kids cartoons pretty hard.

It is similar to the way I can’t handle being around people who are drunk, but it’s actually worse. I feel dread and a sense of doom for the people engaged in self-destructive behavior. I feel – literally feel, in my gut, in my bones, even – what I imagine they should feel, but don’t.

Brains are strange, though. Because I saw two violent murders happen in front of me in the years I did that work, and while I don’t particularly enjoy realistic violent movies, they don’t bother me in the same way that movies about drug use or self-destruction do.

That’s the thing about trauma – you don’t know where it will show up until it does.

Creamed Chicken

They say smell is the oldest of the five senses we humans have. I certainly believe it – There have been times I haven’t smelled a thing in 30 years, and then I do, and I’m instantly taken back. It’s as if the smell is somehow a shortcut to the exact spot in my brain where that memory hides.

I will always remember that hot summer night on Parris Island whenever I smell rotting fruit. I will always think of my Great Aunt’s bathroom when I smell rusting metal. The smell of strawberries instantly transports me into a walk-in cooler in Byhalia, MS, where 16 year old me would hide when I should have been working and would eat the Louisiana strawberries that I should have been putting on the store shelves.

And the smell of hot tuna always transports me back to my momma’s kitchen on a day in 1980: A day I should have been in school, but was home instead, sick.

It was a cold day, and I had been running a fever all night and so Mom let me lay on the couch and watch The Price is Right on TV instead of going to school.

I had dozed off, somewhere before the Showcase Showdown and she gently woke me. The TV was off, and I felt a bit better, and she sat on the couch beside me and asked if I was hungry.

“I’m about to fix some creamed tuna over toast,” she said.

I told her I didn’t know what that was.

“I know. But I love it, and your dad doesn’t – he calls it cat food – and since it’s just us today, I thought I would make some.”

We walked into our small kitchen, and I drug a chair over to the stove, to watch.

She got out a small pan and drained a can of tuna. We only had the kind packed in water, because Dad was watching his cholesterol – and she heated up a can of cream of mushroom soup and stirred in a can’s worth of water, and added the tuna to it while it heated.

In the meantime, she put four slices of bread in our toaster, and when the toast was done, she tore it into small pieces, which she placed in the white Corelle bowls with the small blue flower trim they had gotten as newlyweds. She set them on the oak table that my grandfather rescued from the fire in the 1930s.

She took a serving spoon from the drawer and spooned the tuna mixture over both our bowls and then stirred it well, to coat the chunks of bread with the ersatz roux.

The kitchen did smell vaguely of cat food, to my dad’s point, but not obnoxiously so. At that moment, it just smelled good, and safe.

I still love it – creamed tuna over toast, even if I don’t make it that way anymore. I would learn, later, about bechamel sauce and seasoning and the value of aromatics. But that would all come later.

Mom and I didn’t have a lot of things that were just ours – we still don’t, actually – but our love of creamed tuna over toast was one of them. And to this day, when I don’t feel particularly well, I will make a version of this dish and just know everything is going to be OK.

I want to go on record that there’s nothing wrong with making it the way Mom did. I mean, if you are sick, or have been pulling lots of shifts, or just don’t have a lot of energy, spending 10 minutes dumping two cans into a pot and then pouring it over toasted bread may be all you have the energy for. And if that’s true, then go for it.

But, if you find yourself with 15 minutes and a smidgen more energy, you can make something remarkable. These days, I often make this using chicken, because my wife shares my dad’s feelings about seafood, and I want to keep living here. But you can replace the chicken in this recipe with tuna and it still works.

Everything you will need for this is in your pantry, or at least should be. Bread. Flour. Butter. Some leftover chicken. Salt. Pepper. Chicken broth, An onion. Milk. Love.

Before you get started, let’s talk about chicken. You can use leftover chicken of any sort. White meat. Dark meat. Canned chicken. Leftover rotisserie chicken. Chicken legs you bought on clearance and poached specifically for this dish. It doesn’t matter. Really. They all have different flavor profiles, but they are all good. You will need to shred it up, and you need about two cups of it.

You want to start with two tablespoons of butter, which you put in a medium-sized saucepan over medium heat.

While it’s melting, take a small onion, and dice it fine. You don’t need a lot of onion, and if I’m feeling fancy and it’s after payday, I would probably use a large shallot for this, and if it’s a few days before payday, I would probably use the 1/2 an onion sitting in the crisper drawer in a ziplock bag leftover from God knows what.

Sweat the onions for about five minutes in the melted butter – don’t let them burn, and this means you may have to reduce the heat. Then put in two tablespoons of flour, and, using your whisk, get the flour coated in the melted butter. Just like when you are making milk gravy, you don’t want this to burn. This is a white sauce, so all you want is the flour and oil to be mixed well.

Slowly add a cup of half and half, a 1/4 cup or so at a time, whisking all the while, until it’s all mixed in. Then do the same with the chicken broth – add it slowly, while whisking, until it is a lovely velvety smooth, and probably slightly yellow. That color is one of my favorite colors. The smell right now is something else, too.

If you are feeling fancy, this is where you throw in about half a cup of what we called English peas, and you probably call green peas or sweet peas. Little green round peas, preferably frozen, is what we’re going for here. And then add the chicken, stirring it all in, so the lovely creamy sauce covers the chicken and peas, and the peas look like little green islands in a light yellow sea.

You want this to simmer for about 5 minutes, to both warm up the peas and chicken, and to thicken the sauce. If it gets too thick, you can drizzle in a bit of hot water while stirring, and also remember that it will thicken a bit as it sits and cools.

While the sauce is simmering, start making toast – two to three slices per person is about right. When the toast is done, I like to rip it into rough chunks about 2 inches square. Then pour a generous half cup of sauce over the top, and if you have any, sprinkle the top with fresh chopped parsley.

This is one of my favorite meals. There are variations galore. This will serve two hungry people or 4 polite ones, but it scales up perfectly – 2 tablespoons of fat and flour per cup of broth and cup of dairy.

This is also lovely over biscuits, served like you would sausage gravy, or over plain white rice, which is how I serve it for supper or when company would show up unexpectedly in the before times.

Go buck wild and use whipping cream or half and half if you are a generally optimistic person, but whole milk is what I use most often. Some of you are scared of your food and will be tempted to use skim milk, and while I would discourage you, I can’t stop you.

Some people, I have learned, just want to watch the world burn.

Poverty Charges Interest

The ways having grown up in poverty affects your brain, even when you are no longer in poverty, often feels unreal. Decisions you inherited from other people affect how you interpret things, feel things, and perceive things for the rest of your life.

Like the feeling of fear when you see a truck from the water department rolling slowly down your street when you KNOW you paid your bill and you are sure they are not coming to your house.

The shame you feel in the pit of your stomach when the register is broken and your card is declined at the store and you know to the penny how much is in your account and you KNOW it isn’t your fault.

Then the shame you feel when you realize it declined when you are buying a bottle of wine and some nice cheese for a party at your house, and you wonder if people in line behind you, who see all of this, are judging you for what you are trying to buy. Because how dare you, poor person, enjoy things!

The panic you feel when you are getting low on food, even though you have money in the bank and live near the grocery store and you are in no danger whatsoever of going hungry or even being uncomfortable.

That you will, for the rest of your life, always prefer mushy green beans from a can instead of the much healthier frozen or fresh green beans, because that is what you grew up eating, and the frozen beans taste “weird” to you.

Having grown up poor means berating yourself for buying the good olive oil instead of the generic, even when you can afford it. It also means feeling a little guilty about buying olive oil in the first place.

And we won’t even talk about how hard it is to pay for butter instead of margarine.

The constant feeling that if there is money in your checking account, it is because you have a bill you have forgotten to pay.

Having grown up poor, you will often have a strong resistance to paying for quality. Yes, you know the more expensive, better quality item will last longer and is thus a better value. But you also know the comfort of paying $30 for a thing, instead of paying $65 and having $35 more dollars in the bank. Because there have been times in your life when you had a problem that $35 would solve.

Despite the reality being that you are no longer living in poverty, you feel relief when you automatically sort by price. You find yourself judging people who shop in stores you can afford, but don’t believe people “like you” shop in because in your head you are still the kid who got made fun of because he wore girls’ jeans to school. And for the rest of your life, despite your circumstances, you will always feel slightly uncomfortable, like you are wearing someone else’s clothes.

So instead of buying the more reliable car, you buy the cheaper one, which is less reliable and requires expensive repairs. Or you buy cheap clothes – almost certainly made from oppressive labor practices, which only drags others into being victimized by your experiences. Or your reluctance to pay for good, quality food leads to dental work, diabetes, or other health problems. Or you buy the cheaper technology, which isn’t exactly what you need, but close, so you are always just off, a little behind, a little less than what is needed.

Like the payments on your student loans, whose principle you paid off a decade ago but the payments resulting from the usurious interest rates continue to decimate your budget month after month, the after-effects of childhood poverty linger long after the original deprivation is gone.

Poverty charges interest.