Hugh's Blog

Letters From Strangers

Since 2015, I’ve been publishing a newsletter every Monday morning. In the world of newsletters, it’s small, but there are a few thousand folks who faithfully read it, and while I have never really marketed it other than occasionally mentioning it on my social media accounts, I try hard to do a good job with it.

Over the winter, I began to consider what it would look like to be more intentional with making money from my publishing projects (including this blog) and asked myself what it would look like to take the newsletter seriously. To be intentional in how I do that work.

I knew from a recent survey of my readers that for a lot of people, my weekly emails end up in Google’s promotions tab, so I thought that since I am sending an automatically generated “You’re subscribed” email anyway, why not put the instructions on how to keep the email that matters to you out of that folder and in your inbox in that email too? So I did.

And people started responding. I mean, like writing back to the automatically generated email. With how they found the newsletter, how they heard about me, and where they lived in the world. That had never happened before. Ever.

I guess my new email was just personal enough that it no longer looked like a “form” email. So, not wanting to be rude, I wrote back. I thanked them for writing. I told them I looked forward to writing for them.

If my transactional form email was getting responses as if it was a personal email, what if I cranked that up just a bit and made it more personal, and invited responses?

So now, if you subscribe to my newsletter, you get the following email a few hours after you subscribe:

Thanks for subscribing to Life Is So Beautiful!

Hey there!

Thanks for signing up for my newsletter, Life Is So Beautiful! I appreciate it.

Every Monday (barring US Federal Holidays), I send out an email with a short essay on where I found some beauty in the world that week and links to five things I discovered that week that I thought were beautiful.

And now you are on the list!

I think I have some of the best readers on the whole Internet, and more than anything else, I believe that writing is a relationship between the writer and the reader. I am a pretty personal writer, sharing a lot of “me” in this newsletter.

So I can get a better sense of who is reading my stuff, just hit reply to this email (or email me directly at hugh@hughhollowell.org) and let me know something about you, like:

What is your hobby is
Where you live in the world
What your favorite thing to do to recharge is

Don’t overthink it – anything you want to share is fine.

This lets me do a better job of writing things that make sense to you, and also, I just think the world is a better place when we are more personal and less formal.

Thanks again. And welcome!

Hugh

PS: A few things you might want to know:

Emails for the newsletter will come from this email: hugh@hughhollowell.org. It would be best to add it to your email address book or contacts. If you haven’t gotten it by noon this Monday, check your spam filters.
If you are on Gmail, you may find it gets shunted to your Promotions tab. (How rude is that?) Instead, you can drag it to your Primary tab. Then Gmail will ask if you want to make that change permanent. (Of course, Google! How silly.)

About 10 percent of the people who get that email respond. Like, with letters. Real, engaging letters.

They don’t just say they live in England, but rather that they live in Hertfordshire, just north of London, in the UK, with their husband and two daughters. Or that they live in Durban, South Africa, though they will likely soon be moving to Toronto, Canada this fall. Or tell me that they have been single their whole life, but recently met a potential partner who makes them swoon. Or that they read Victorian lit and live in Dehli, India and help run a food bank there. Or they explain, with links, what netball is, and why they love it so.

I make sure to reply to every single email. Sometimes it takes a few days for me to get to it, but I always respond. I make it a point to use their name, to discuss something they said in their email to me, and to thank them for writing.

Some of them write back. The longest exchange thus far is more than 10 emails long. And then some of those same people kept writing after each issue of the newsletter is sent. They tell me what they liked and send me submissions and in general, become highly engaged.

It shocks me that the emails are as personal as they are. After all – these are people I don’t have a relationship with at all. They just subscribed. But I think we are all hungry for connection these days and have a deep desire to be known and seen. I’m glad I get to play my small part in that.

Building a Birdcam

Over the last few weeks, I have been pretty focused on building a camera set up so I can monitor the wildlife that visits my yard.

I have a pretty exacting set of criteria.

It needs to be affordable. I know affordable is a squishy term because what may be affordable to me may not be to you. But I really wanted this to be a less than $100 project, at least to start out. I am a big believer in starting a new project with the minimum viable setup, and then, if we decide it’s worth pursuing further, then I can spend some money. But to start, less than $100.

Then it needs to be simple. I didn’t want to run wires, set up networks, or learn new technologies to set this up. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them is that just like I didn’t want a large upfront investment of cash, neither did I want a large upfront investment of time. I was willing to spend an afternoon setting this up, at least to get started.

And then, what result did I desire? I wanted to be able to have videos of the animals that visited my yard that I could download and share on social media. A bonus would be still photos, but if I had video, I could always capture stills from that. I knew these wouldn’t be award-winning photos, but I wanted to have proof of concept before I figured out something better.

And I wanted to not have to go out to the camera and retrieve an SD card from the camera like I would if I used a trail cam. I should be able to do this over the internet.

I could do almost all of this with a simple trail cam, like this one. The two big things I didn’t like about the trail cam idea is that I had no idea what I had taken pictures of until I pulled the SD card and took it inside to my computer. The other is that the video quality wasn’t all that great. (I’m aware that higher dollar cameras have solutions to both of those issues, but not under $100.)

In the end, I bought a Blink outdoor security camera. With the required sync module included, I paid around $75, but the price fluctuates on this all the time between $50 and $125. They go on a huge sale on Amazon Prime days as well. The camera is small – about 3×3 inches. It’s battery-powered and uses wifi, so no cables are needed.

The Blink outdoor camera is designed to be a security camera, so it’s motion-activated. I have it clamped to a board in front of a saucer of sunflower seeds, and so when a bird (or lizard or squirrel) gets in the saucer, it automatically records up to 60 seconds of HD video and then uploads it to the cloud. From there I can review it when I want, download it to edit elsewhere, or share it on social media directly from the app.

Each day it syncs with the sync module and downloads the day’s history, so I also have a local copy of all the videos recorded that day.

It’s not a perfect system. I almost went nuts until I figured out how to urn off the notifications. It says you will get 2 years of use from a pair of AA lithium batteries, but by the 3rd day, I got a warning that I was using it more than planned and my battery life would be shorter. The stills are not as good as I would like, and the framerate is a little slow for my purposes.

But overall, I’m really happy. I have begun to upload some of the more interesting ones to YouTube. I’m investigating feeder types, to attract even more birds. I’m putting in a water feature over the next few weeks, because birds love moving water, especially in our heat. I’m going to set up a solar collector, to get around the battery life issue.

And, God help me, I’m looking into setting up an always-on livestream on YouTube. Which does involve cables and money and new technologies.

But wherever this ends up, it all started with $75 and an afternoon.

Temporary Closed for Maintenance

Hey ya’ll!

I’m taking the week off from publishing on my blog. I have a pretty hard writing deadline for a big project I’m working on and need the several hours a day I spend working on the blog to work on the other thing (announcement coming soon!)

I’ll be back to writing regularly here next Monday, the 16th.

Y’all take care of yourselves.

Antique Roses and Native Plants

It’s been a long day, and I’m beat. But the yard is really starting to wake up, so here is what’s in bloom this week.

Since the overwhelming goal of my gardening efforts is to make a happy habitat for all the animals that live here (including those of us with two legs), I have some plants that serve no purpose other than they are, to my eye, beautiful.

Like my antique roses. These are ancient, hardy roses that grow neglected in cemeteries and along fence rows, that nobody waters or prunes, and are all well adapted to grow and bloom with zero care. Zero care is sort of a specialty of mine.

Like this Mutabilis rose. It goes back to before 1894, blooms from spring to fall, and has beautiful flowers that start pale pink (like this one), and then get darker and darker until they turn crimson. I just planted this one a few weeks ago, and this is the first bloom.

Then there is Peggy Martin, the so-called Katrina rose. They call it that because a woman who had a huge rose garden had to evacuate because of Katrina, and her yard was underwater for two weeks. When the water went down, the only thing still alive was her Peggy Martin rose. If it won’t die with being underwater for two weeks, I am unlikely to kill it.

It’s a vigorous climbing rose, so I planted it at the corner of the vegetable garden, so it can run along the fence. I planted it over the winter, and it is blooming galore. The blooms fade fairly quickly in the hot sun, but more just come along.

Also, I planted it before I finished the fence, because of lumber prices. But now it’s starting to grow, and I have to hurry up and finish the fence to have something to trellis it on.

This rose isn’t an antique but is extremely special. When The Boy lived with us in 2020, he loved the color orange. We were in Kroger, back before the pandemic, and he saw a “miniature” rose with orange blooms in a pot in the floral department. He wanted it so bad. We bought it and planted it in one of the flower beds.

The whole time he lived with us, he watched it like a hawk, with near-daily reports to us on the blooms that appeared. When we planted it, I didn’t have high hopes of its survival. Such plants are usually pretty tender, sold to folks who manage to kill them pretty quickly. But he liked it, and it was less than $10, so why not risk it? Well, it survived the two winters since and is now in full bloom and I miss that kid something fierce right now.

Because of reasons, I didn’t put in a spring vegetable garden this year (lumber prices, for me to finish the raised beds, mainly). It’s not a huge deal – we can plant tomatoes here as late as the end of August and still get a crop. But anyway, the sage in my herb garden is blooming.

I love coneflowers. These are all varieties of purple echinacea or Purple Coneflower. Yes, one of them is white. It’s a variety bred for that trait. Coneflowers are native here, which means the pollinators love them and they are near bulletproof, but there are some native plant types that will lecture you about planting native plants that are bred to purpose (so-called nativars), like my white Purple Coneflowers. But we won’t invite those people over, anyway.

The pure species, with some tickseed in bloom behind it, and a slew of rudbeckia seedlings.

I need to do a whole post on our chickens. But here is our coop – my Mom says it’s the nicest chicken coop she has ever seen, but to be fair, she doesn’t get out much.

Last fall, a new neighbor moved in next door and cut down all the trees in his front yard. (I have opinions about this, but that’s another post). As a result, the whole north half of my front yard is now in full sun, so I put in blackberries and blueberries, among other things.

Ms. June is an 89-year-old lady who lives up the street, and who has an amazing shade garden in her backyard. She gave me these Indian Pinks, which are just showing out. I don’t have a good picture of it, but I also got a Japanese maple from here, which the Indian pinks are planted under. In 4-5 years, that’s gonna be nice.

Firehouse Soup

While I went to college, I worked a few years as a firefighter for the City of Memphis. I learned many things there, but the biggest impact it had on me long-term was how it taught me to think about food.

The deal was that you worked every other day for three days, and then you were off for four days. So, for example, you may work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then you would be off until the following Wednesday, when the cycle started all over again. And each shift was 24 hours long and began at 7 AM. Depending on what fire-fighting equipment was housed at your station, you could have anywhere from four to 12 people on each shift, and you always worked with the same people.

It was like a second family you lived with 1/3rd of your life. We had laundry and showers and we cut the grass and, of course, ate together. And while there was a kitchen and equipment such as pans and knives provided, the actual food was not, and was up to you. Some people brought their own food, but you didn’t if you wanted to be trusted by the others on your shift. To be trusted, you needed to belong to the syndicate.

I worked at several different houses during the years I was on the job, and the syndicate always worked the same way. There was one member of the shift who kept track of a pool of money, and that was used to buy groceries for your shift. Each shift had its own refrigerator and cupboard, which were kept locked. At each meal, you were either “in” or “out” for the meal, meaning you intended to eat the food bought from the pool of money, and you were “charged” your pro-rata share of the groceries that went into that meal. And on payday, you settled up your bill, which replenished the pool of money, and it started all over again.

So, every day you worked, you had to figure out who was cooking three meals for your shift. Some shifts had 1 person who just loved cooking, and they took it on as their responsibility, but most times we would ask who wanted to cook each meal, with the others doing cleanup. Breakfast was usually fixed – eggs, bacon, biscuits were common, most often with gravy – and lunch was often caught as catch can, but the big show was supper.

A cool thing about this system is that you had a diversity of cooks, with each bringing their favorites to the table. Tom was in his 20s and could run the grill, but not much else. Curtis loved to make spaghetti. Stan made round steak and gravy, with mashed potatoes and English peas so good that my mouth waters just thinking about it.

And John always made soup.

John was nearing retirement after nearly 30 years on the job. He had been divorced for nearly 20 of those years and most of his off-work meals were either sandwiches or dinner fare. But his one claim to culinary fame was his soup.

I probably ate it two dozen times and watched him make it half of those times, and it was never done exactly the same way twice. It was more of a technique rather than a recipe, but what it always was, was good.

As an example, I will share how I made it last week, but everything in this recipe is up for negotiation.

Dice a small onion into small pieces, and dice two cloves of garlic while you are at it. In a large pot, crumble a pound of ground beef, add your diced onions, and sprinkle some salt on top of it all, and then, over medium heat, begin to brown the ground beef. Stir it all around until the meat is no longer pink and the onions are translucent, then add the garlic and let it sweat a bit, but don’t, for the love of God, let it burn or you just ruined the whole thing. The garlic will be flavorful and ready in about a minute.

Pour in three and a half cups of beef broth (or water plus an appropriate amount of beef paste) and a 12-ounce can of V8 juice. Using a spoon or something, scrape the bottom of the pan to make sure all the bits are off the bottom of the pan and it’s all mixed well.

To this, add a 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes (Rotel is another option here, but it obviously changes the flavor), a couple of tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (easy for you to say), and 2 teaspoons of Italian seasoning. We only had a few spice jars at the fire station, but Italian seasoning went into everything. Let it come to a boil.

While you are waiting on that, peel and dice 2 potatoes of whatever kind you have around – I had Yukon Golds. Add it to the pot, along with a pound of frozen mixed vegetables. (I know that sounds vague, but that’s what they are always called at the grocery. It’s generally green beans, carrots, and English peas.) Let it boil, then bring it down to a simmer for 15 minutes.

NOW. You can let it simmer for another 15 minutes and have a perfectly acceptable soup to serve with your dinner. Or, you can do what I did and add a cup and a half of elbow macaroni and another half cup of beef broth and THEN let it simmer for another 15 minutes and have a hearty, filling soup you can eat for diner all by itself.

Beef or shredded chicken. V8 or Tomato sauce. Beef broth or chicken. Macaroni or spaghetti or even instant grits (trust me on this). Tomatoes or Rotel. White potatoes or sweet potatoes (What? Yes.)

It’s all up in the air. Mix and match. Live a little.

You deserve it.

I Know.

Hi there.

Can we talk? I just wanted to check in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know all those stories and more.

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

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

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

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

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

Not a single goddamned thing.

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

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

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

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

Your friend,

Hugh

The Bad News

It was perhaps six years ago that I found myself at the hospital. It was, to be fair, a nice hospital, as hospitals go. I didn’t have clergy credentials at this one – my people almost always ended up at the much less nice county hospital. But still, here I was – well, me and my buddy Shelden. He was good as gold, Sheldon was, but his missing teeth and unkempt afro garnered some stares from folks in the lobby.

Shelden had come to me earlier that day and told me that his brother was in the hospital with lung cancer. And then he asked if I would go with him to see his brother.

I said that of course I would, but that I didn’t even know he had a brother. Sheldon said something about his own brother had acted like he didn’t have a brother. I didn’t push it. When you don’t have a home, sometimes family dynamics get complicated.

The first clue that something was wrong was at the front desk when Shelden asked for his brother’s room number. The receptionist looked at the computer and then picked up the phone. A cryptic exchange happened, then she hung up and said, “You need to go to the nurse’s station on the fourth floor, they will tell you where to go.”

So we go off in search of the elevator. We get lost and wind up on the wrong elevator, and at the wrong nurse’s station. We ask for his brother’s room.

The nurse looks up the name, makes a bit of a face, and then picks up the phone. And that was when I knew this is not going to end well.

She sends us to the other end of the fourth floor, to the correct nurse’s station. Shelden starts that way, while I linger.

“He has passed, hasn’t he?” I ask the nurse.

She looks at me with sadness and nods, probably violating eight different privacy laws.

I take a huge breath and then hustle down the hallway to catch up with Shelden, who is shuffling along, head down. There are no rules in such a situation, other than to take care of your people. Actually, that is really just a good rule any time. Figuring that it’s better for him to hear this from me than a nurse, I stop him in the hallway and, for probably the 10th time in my life, I told someone who mattered to me that someone who mattered to them is dead.

The hospital staff had been watching us, and when Shelden broke down in the hallway, they were right there with a chair and a wet rag. They assured him his brother had gone easily in his sleep that morning. One, in such a scene that only happens in the South, told him his brother was “with the Lord now.”

Fifteen minutes or so pass, and we’re handed more wet rags and ginger ale and boxes of tissues and Shelden gets hugs from a few nurses. Then he looks at me and says, “Can we get out of this hallway?”

We go to the chapel to sit for a while. That’s the nice thing about hospital chapels – they are almost always empty.

Again – no rules. We sit. He cries, and at his request, I read “some stuff from the Bible.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 8:37-39

He asked me what I thought that meant. I told him that it meant that there wasn’t a damn thing that could keep God from loving us. He nods.

We sit and time passes. A few more tears. Then he is ready to go. It’s almost dark as we walk to the car. I ask him where I should take him. He asks to be dropped downtown, where he can hang out until he finds out if he has a bed for the night at the shelter.

We stop at the big park downtown – the one that had the statue of an acorn in it – and we get out, the wind whipping at our cheeks. It’s not bitter cold yet, but it’s down in the fall and the wind makes it a little uncomfortable. I hugged him and told him I loved him, and that I want him to come by my office tomorrow and we will see what needs to be done about the arrangements.

And then he headed toward the bus station, hands in pockets, head hung low, and I got back in my car and drove home to get ready to meet friends for dinner.

The Half-Acre Habitat

I know how to get six-pack abs. I have had them – for about 2 weeks. But since I like to eat, that is hard for me to sustain over time. But in terms of what is sustainable over time, things like being flexible, having good cardiovascular health, and good blood pressure and glucose readings are far more sustainable markers of health.

When you see people who have defined abs, cut muscle striations, and low body fat, what you see are people who went to extreme lengths to look that way. That’s fine if that’s your goal. I don’t want to harsh anyone’s thing. But it’s not mine. I have better things to do with my time than to calculate protein grams and intermittently fast and figure out if this is the day I spend 3 hours in the gym or the day I spend 2 hours in the gym.

For most people, such a life is attainable – but not sustainable. I want both. And not just in my health goals, but in my whole life.

That’s also my approach to my yard. I do not have a manicured lawn. I do not have a raked lawn. I don’t even have a lawn – I have a yard. It’s mostly green. Its primary use is as a habitat for the creatures who live here – including us.

So I have vegetables and greens we like to eat. I have flowers for the bees and butterflies. I have plants that grow food for the chickens, which then provide us with eggs. There are plants here that exist for no other reason than bugs like to eat them, and the birds like to eat the bugs, and I like birds.

I haven’t really talked about my yard here much. When we lived in NC, I had a raucous, out-of-control cottage garden on a fifth of an acre that was in bloom 10 months out of the year.

We moved here and bought a house on a half-acre lot, which makes gardening harder, not easier. Then there were two years of foster parenting, two years of the pandemic, a bunch of people I love died, and a long year of pretty deep depression (all of which overlapped at various points), and so, we are 3.5 years in our new home and it’s nowhere near where I had planned for it to be at this point.

In the old house, we lived there for a bit over five years, and at the end of our time there, the one thing I wish I had done was document it more. What flowers are these? When did I plant the peach trees? What was I thinking when I planted those? How long did that mulch last? Are these plum blossoms early this year, compared to last year?

Since this blog is, at its core, about how to live a good life, and I need plants for me to have a good life, I plan to do a walk around the property each Saturday and take photos of what’s in bloom, as well as things that catch my eye. I might tell you about a thing I’m working on, or I might just let the pictures speak for themselves.

Anyway – welcome to my little half-acre habitat.

A Closet Full of Grief

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

Grief is like that, sometimes.

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

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

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

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

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

The Accent

The High School from where I graduated – one of 75 or so people so honored in 1990 – was literally in the middle of a cow pasture. Like, literally. The land for the school – 10 acres or so – was purchased from the farmer at some point in the distant past, and they built a school there. At lunch, you would see cows hanging their heads over the barbed wire fence, hoping you would give them your apple. Cows love apples, and since these were Red Delicious apples, we did not. We figured somebody ought to eat them.

In any event, this isn’t a story about the apples. Rather, I tell you about where my school was located to let you know that I am the educational product of rural, southern America. And the South is not monolithic. North Carolina is the South, and Central Mississippi is the South, and neither of them is like the other, and neither of them is like Virginia or Central Georgia.

But all of those places have produced educated people. People with an accent like the one I have.

Well, not exactly like the one I have. The Central Mississippi accent that I hear all the time here is not quite like the Northern Mississippi accent I heard in the hills growing up, and neither of them sounds quite like a Charleston, SC accent, and nobody sounds like New Orleans.

There was a teacher in my high school who prided himself on his academic rigor. For a while, he taught our AP English class, and when that happened, Holy Hell but he declared himself the arbiter of the English language – not only grammar, which could be argued was in his bucket, but also diction.

He routinely made fun of our accents. Humiliation was his primary pedagogical technique. There were students who liked him – but they were generally the popular students. He seized on social insecurities and would call you out publicly for an error with glee. He routinely called me Hugh Hollowhead in class because I once froze when he asked me a question because I had been daydreaming. This gave the bullies in my world a new, previously unthought-of nickname to call me.

But I can forgive him that. What I haven’t managed to forgive him for was making me ashamed of my accent. He had me stand up and say “Nice White Rice” to the class, and then he mocked my pronunciation.

”They aren’t all the same sound, Hollowhead!”

Everybody laughed. Well, everybody but me.

I could have killed him right there. There was not an ounce of Christian compassion in my body for him at that moment. None.

But he was an advisor for the Beta Club. Taught the AP English class. Had a Master’s Degree. And all I had was the ghosts of working-class people who had lived in one place for 170 years. Everybody I loved talked just like I did. The people who taught me about Jesus, who baptized me, who raised me, who taught me to fish and how to make a cane whistle and how to drive a tractor all talked just like I did.

And for the record, I would later learn that, when William Faulkner gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, Norway, he talked like I did, too. If you listen to the recording, the rhythms of North Mississippi pervade that speech.

But I didn’t know that then. I just knew that this community that had always been safe for me now felt less so.

He wasn’t the last person to make fun of my accent. In college, it would happen. Eventually, I got something of a complex about it and began reading Time magazine into a tape recorder, over and over, trying to smooth out my diction. As Don Williams sang in Good Old Boys Like Me:

But I was smarter than most and I could choose
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news

In the business world, this was rewarded. When I began preaching, this also was rewarded. People do make judgments about us, based on the diction we use.

Imagine you are telling a joke, where one of the characters is stupid. What does he sound like?

That’s right. You made him sound Southern.

They won. I no longer have my accent. It’s gone. I mean, I have an accent, but it’s not the one I grew up with. It’s not mine. It’s studied, and while there is some Mississippi Hills in there, and a mixture of formal and informal usage, there is also some Piedmont North Carolina and some Tidewater Virginia and a little bit of whatever the people on the news sounded like when I was learning how to talk the way they wanted me to.

When I’m very tired, or if I’ve been drinking, or talking to someone from home, it comes back – but I don’t know how to make it happen. It’s just gone, another casualty of the insistence on our being homogenized and any difference stamped out. In the end, I guess we will be assimilated. But the first thing they took from me was my accent.