Hugh's Blog

The First Time

I was 15 years old when I wrote my first short story. I have no idea what the impetus was for choosing the short story format, but if I had to guess, it would be because it would have seemed like less work since, you know, it was short. I wrote most of it in Study Hall and finished it at lunch, so, perhaps 2 hours was spent on this.

The experience was magical. Scenes and words were in my head and flowed from my fingers, pouring out like a gushing stream. I was so proud, and I showed it to three adults, all of whom I trusted, and all of whose remarks involved how violent it was, and I was made to see the guidance counselor as a result. I had no management.

I wish I could talk to 15-year-old Hugh. I wish I could tell him, as someone whose writing has appeared in magazines and newspapers and published books and other esteemed places that he had really good instincts. That his 800-word story that involved *checks notes* three scene changes, drug use, three homicides, teen pregnancy, and suicide was probably a little ambitious for his skill level, but that the plot was great for a first time effort, and that the plot twist at the end was ambitious as hell and something he should be proud of himself for trying.

I would tell him that he told when he could have shown, and that if all his knowledge of drug culture came from Miami Vice, maybe that shouldn’t be central to the story. I would also say how proud of him I was that he took a moral position in his writing, even if it is heavy handed, and that giving the drug dealer a Hispanic name was a bullshit move, but was no doubt also learned from Miami Vice.

Then I would have hugged him, and told him he could, at 15, do things and see things other people couldn’t, and that he could already tell a good story; that the people we trust don’t always know what to do with people like us who make things, and that sometimes they are afraid of us, and sometimes they are afraid for us, and because of that, we have to be careful who we let see the things that matter to us.

But mostly, I would have told him to keep going.

Content Warning: The following story is pretty violent to have been written by a 15 year old virgin who couldn’t bring himself to write out the word “fuck”, even if that is clearly what he was thinking, and involves depictions of murder and descriptions of suicide, but is pretty tame by modern movie standards.

* * *

David had been my best friend since kindergarten and I am a senior in high school now. David’s and my parents were out of town together and left us there so we could go to school Friday.

It was Friday night when, after drinking a ton of beer, David told me about his “enterprise”. He was taking cocaine and cutting it with roach poison so he could make more profit. I was appalled. The very idea of drug use repulsed me, let alone something as deadly as this. I knew David had been doing coke since 10^th grade, but I couldn’t have believed him to be capable of so sadistic a crime as this. However, out of ignorance or fear, I ignored it.

Saturday afternoon, I went to his house and then we went over to the mall. That night, about 1AM, we pulled into a Circle K for gas.

“You pump the gas, Johnny,” he said. “I’ve got to use the john. Pull up and wait for me when you’re through.”

I pumped $10 worth and pulled up to the front of the store to wait for David. Rstless, I got out nd was pacing in front of the store when a move caught my eye.

Why was the store owner holding his hands in the air? Why was the woman screaming? WHY GOOD GOD? Why was David holding a gun? The old man handed David a wad of money, and David shot him in the forehead. His wife never stopped screaming. Wet sticky pieces ofher husband’s skull sliding down the wall and all this woman can do is scream.

“Shut up!” David yelled.

The woman continued to scream.

“Shut up, I said!”

David emptied the gun into her chest. The woman, not willing to die, lay writing on the floor.

I know all of this could not have taken more than 5 or 6 seconds, but everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.

David hopped in the truck.

“Drive, dammit! Drive!”

David gave me directions to his “place”. As I drove, my sphincter muscles were clenched tight with fear. Here I was, sitting next to a double murderer, who was calmly sitting there. Every time I would look at David, I instead would see that old woman, writing on the floor, spitting up pink blood.

David’s place was an old beat up shack at the old railyards I had heard about it for years, but this was the first time been there.

David was bad off. It had been six hours since his last hit and he looked pretty bad. He was shaking and breathing fast. Even though it was November 8^th he was sweating like a cold water pipe in the middle of July.

“Did you see them? Did you see that woman scream,” David asked?

David had went pretty far before, but this was it. He had done the unthinkable. He had killed 2 innocent people in cold blood. I made up my mind. In the morning I was going to call the cops. I had a load of scholarships, and I did not want this to mess them up.

“Johnny”.

He was whimpering, crying with joy from the money and pain from his habit. It was too much. I flew into him.

“Dammit, why did you rob that store?”

“Why not?”

“You killed 2 people for…” I counted the money “245 dollars. Why?”

“I needed the money to buy a rock. I can make over $2,000 with that.”.

“Damn.”

I was disgusted. Then it was about the same old thing. Money.

“Look Johnny. Go to the mall. Just outside the door is a guy named Ramone. Tell him it’s for me, and give him the money. He will give you a package, OK?”

Why I agreed, I’ll never know. Maybe I was still in shock over what happened. Or, maybe I already had an idea of what would happen.

Well, I went to the mall and got his package. I also stopped by the hardware store.

I went into the shack. David was sweating bad. I gave him the package and he tore it open like a kid at Christmas. He cut a line and snorted his life-giving powder. Revolting how one’s life could be dependent on something so terrible.

He stood up, euphoric, for about 30 seconds. Then he toppled, fell, face first onto the floor, writhing and hacking at the fluid in his lungs. Amazing what effect roach poison and coke will have on a person.

If I live to be 100, I will never forget how he looked at me as if I had betrayed him. Well, maybe I had, but what I have done is wipe a little of the scum off the earth. Is that so bad? I know I must answer in hell for what I’ve done, but my girlfriend is pregnant, and I want my kid to grow up in a decent world.

The above was the author’s last words, found in a sealed letter beside his body. He shot himself through the head at approximately 4AM Sunday morning.

The Woo Woo

I tend to be very pragmatic. It’s not that I don’t have room for the supernatural: It’s just that it has, in my experience, often been used as an excuse by people who don’t really want to actually take tangible action.

Many is the time when I have been faced with needs that surpassed my abilities and have asked for real, tangible help – Help me get this person fed. Help me pay this person’s light bill. Help me get this person a job. Help me get this person some clothes. – and I have been assured of their prayers.

They often reply to my Facebook request with a hasty “Praying!”, apparently in such a rush to get on their knees and beseech the Almighty on our behalf that they can’t use sentences. The fervent prayers of the righteous may avail much, but in my experience, landlords require negotiable tender.

My friend Kathy once wrote a fundraising letter, and when someone replied that they were praying for her organization to have the resources they need, she replied back that their prayer team was full, and they really just needed somebody to write checks.

That said, I have had experiences I cannot explain pragmatically. As my buddy Brian said, I hate it when my experience of God contradicts my theology. So, I try to be open minded, especially as I strive hard to not yuck somebody else’s yum, and I never want to take away something that brings somebody comfort.

This has led me to interesting places over the years. Meditation retreats. Sweat lodges. Pentecostal worship services. Folk slain in the Spirit. Other folk speaking in tongues. Prayer walks. Beads. Dream catchers. Familiars. Teas and tinctures. Spells. Healing services. Oil anointing. Tibetan singing bowls. Sitting with the dead.

All of which is a preamble to my friend Amy, who several weeks back mentioned she was starting up a book group around The Artist’s Way, and did I want to be part of it.

Which is how I have ended up writing three pages longhand every morning for the last two weeks as I lean into the program, which involves, among other things, writing three pages longhand every morning, in a ritual they call Morning Pages.

Now, I will confess, it seemed somewhat silly to me, but I am doing it. And because I have learned that rituals are important, and the more I take a ritual seriously, the more value I will get from it, I have tried to ritualize it as much as possible.

The same time, every morning. The same notebook, that I don’t use for anything else. I bought a special pen that I use for writing these pages, and I always start them the same way. In short, I am taking it seriously.

Now, I don’t know if this will “work”. In fact, I am unsure how I would know if it did work, or define what I expect it to do. But I can tell you that somewhere after day 7, it ceased to be a chore, and now I actually look forward to it. And the other day, I kept going after my three pages were done, because I had more stuff still waiting to come out. And Friday morning I had an idea for a book come to me while I was doing it, for which I have since done a rough outline.

And I’m just getting started – I committed to another 13 weeks of this. And while I can’t make a pragmatic case for it, I guess it doesn’t hurt to be open to the woo-woo, either.

Being Creative

For a while in my 30’s, I lived in Midtown Memphis. It was a magical place, and still the best “scene” I have ever belonged to.

I had friends who were authors, musicians, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, poets, and gallery owners. I routinely went to art gallery openings, CD release parties, and book signings. For part of that time I owned a small coffee shop, and on Saturday nights we would have live music, so I came to know jazz piano players, bass guitarists, and plain old rockabilly vocalists.

And one of the people I knew was an Elvis impersonator.

Now, I don’t know what your mental framework for an Elvis Impersonator is, but he probably wasn’t that. For one thing, he didn’t look terribly much like Elvis, and he preferred the title “tribute artist”, anyway.

But man could he sing. He had the whole range, so he could do Hound Dog, or Jailhouse Rock, or Blue Christmas, or even In the Ghetto. He was pretty popular, and stayed busy enough that he made a living from his performing, which few folks do.

He never performed at my shop – we were too small for him – but he often came by if we had a band in, and one night he hung till we closed the doors. He and I closed the place down that night, sitting in the corner table, drinking red wine from plastic cups and soaking the night in, neither of us willing to break the spell and have it end.

He told me about his career – how he had tried to make a living as a singer-songwriter, and had almost had a record deal, when the guy he was dealing with committed suicide and it all went away.

“And so now you make a living singing someone else’s songs.” I said, sounding more judgmental than I meant to. “Does that ever bother you?”

“Most people sing other people’s songs,” he said. “The difference is, I make a living doing it, and most of them don’t. And I get to make a living making people happy, and using my voice, and it’s lovely. It isn’t what I had planned, but it’s good. And besides – it never works out how you think it will, anyway. And that’s OK.”

There is a long list of things I cannot do. That isn’t negative self-talk – it’s just the truth. My attempts at drawing have always fallen prey to my hand-to-eye coordination, and my mental box of colors is the 9 color box of crayons, not the 64 crayon box. Grey literally is my favorite color. I cannot sing or, heck, carry a tune. I’m tone deaf.

In short, visual and musical arts are both closed worlds to me. I don’t understand them, and I mean that literally. When my wife listens to music, she actually hears things I do not. When I was about 8 years old, my mom’s friend offered to teach me the piano, and that lasted 3 lessons, until my tone deafness became obvious.

And so, I came to believe that I was not “creative”.

Which is, objectively, silly. I mean, just today, on my day off, I have drafted a synopsis and first draft of an outline for a book I want to write. Then I spent time building out a new website to sell the items which I hand carve, and then went to the church to sketch out plans for part of the renovation there I am spear-heading. I came home and planted a rose bush, which will be the cornerstone of a memory garden I am planning, and I’m now writing a blog post, which will contain a story and which will finish out around 700 words, and what’s more, I’ve done more words than that daily for months now. And after I eat, I will go out to my workshop and carve some spoons and spatulas of my own design, which people will pay me money for.

I’m creative as hell. I’m just not a musician.

I guess what I’m saying is, it doesn’t always work out how you want it to. And that’s OK.

Names Matter

She looked tentative and uncertain, like she wasn’t sure she was in the right place.

Hell, I wasn’t certain I was either, to tell the truth, and I was allegedly the guy in charge.

I had just preached at the chapel service of the small homeless ministry I ran at the time, and the service was now over, and I was doing that sort of thing I do after I preach where I am already thinking about how I can retreat and hide and recharge, yet recognize that some folks need to metaphorically touch you after they heard you speak, often as a way of processing it.

“I’ve never been here before…” she starts. But I knew this. Anyone who watched her body language would have known. Besides, I knew why she was there. She had been part of a group of students who had volunteered with our meal program the day before, and had heard me talk about our little chapel service, and she was one of several people who had come to watch.

This often happened, and we never really knew what to do about it – we welcomed everyone, but it was always a bit weird knowing people were there to watch you work. There were times it felt like being in a zoo, only we were the attractions.

“But something just happened, and I want to talk about it.”

I encourage her to go on.

“All my life, I’ve prayed for those who were homeless. But today, y’all named people who were homeless. All my life, I have prayed for people who needed jobs. You named people who needed jobs. I’ve always prayed for people to be safe in the cold weather. You named people who sleep outside in the cold weather. It was the first time I have ever prayed for people who are poor by name.”

Names are sacred things. Names matter. Names contain magic. In the story in Exodus, when God sends Moses on a mission to free the slaves, Moses wants to know God’s name before he will do it. You can’t set off on a mission of that size just because some no-named bush that was failing at burning in the desert told you to.

The Jewish writer Martin Buber wrote about “I – it” relationships and “I – thou” relationships. In short, I-It relationships are relationships where the proper name of the persons involved do not matter. I do not need to know the name of my server in a restaurant to have a pleasant dining experience. Any competent server would work, and if one was out sick, another could fill in.

But there is a Chinese restaurant we like to go to not far from our house. It has a thriving takeout business, but few people eat in – so we do. In these pandemic times, it is a way for us to eat in a restaurant, and yet because the space is practically always empty, we feel very safe while we are there. Because of this, we get special attention and always tip well.

And the owner of the restaurant has a ten-year-old son named Lucas.

Lucas is big for his age. I would have put him at 12 or 13, and he looks like he would rather be playing video games, but his mom says he is her apprentice, and she stands by him as he takes the orders, and nudges him we he doesn’t say “Thank you”, and he brings the food out on shaky arms, but the whole time, you are just rooting for him.

If I went in there tomorrow and Lucas wasn’t there, I would ask about him. Lucas matters to me in the way the anonymous server in a place I am not known does not. I mean, I care about the no-named server in the abstract, but I care about Lukas specifically. Lukas and I have an “I-thou” relationship.

When we know names, it changes the dynamic completely. I once planned on cutting down a tree in the backyard of a house I owned until I learned the tree was an elm tree, and having learned about Dutch Elm disease, it felt sinful to cut down a tree that had thus far beaten the odds.

Somehow, knowing it was an elm made it different than knowing it was a tree. The specificity mattered. It having a name mattered. Because the tree was an elm, I knew things about it I didn’t know when it was just a tree. I knew it was a native, and part of the food system for the local habitat, and endangered, and however annoying, was worth protecting.

Because I knew its name.

Giving it 80%

In 2012, I spent a week at Mepkin Abbey, in South Carolina. Mepkin Abby is a Trappist monastery, and they invite folks to come and stay with them as a form of retreat. A friend I really respected did it on the regular, and encouraged me to do it as well.

I really enjoyed my week there. It was lovely, and the campus is beautiful, and it’s right on the Cooper River, where you can sit on the bluff and watch the boats roll by. The campus is filled with Live Oaks that literally drip Spanish Moss, and the silence there is magical, punctuated by the chanting of the monks seven times a day.

You are also invited to eat with the monks, and they have a simple, vegetarian diet. Again, one of the struggles those of us with ADHD have is the inability to create structure, so a simple diet with simple rules appealed to me, and I think there is definitely an ethical argument that can be made for not eating animal flesh. So, when I came back to the “real world”, I decided I would be vegetarian.

I lasted strictly about six weeks, and gave up trying completely within three months. Because it was easy to fail at being vegetarian, and when you have the sort of life I do, where lots of people want to feed you, and a huge part of how you expressed your spirituality involved eating with others, it became super complicated, super-fast. In the end, it just wasn’t sustainable for me at all.

My last few days have been chaotic. I went from having a week in front of me with virtually no outside meetings planned to having my entire week scheduled almost instantly. Which is fine – in the work I do these days organizing Faith Leaders, it is like that sometimes – you are forced to react to something someone else does and then your whole schedule changes.

But what that does mean is that my whole routine is thrown off, and instead of cooking dinner for my family like I do most nights, this week I am eating a lot of sandwiches and take out, and because I am living on the phone when I’m not in front of a Zoom camera or at City Hall, I had to miss going for a swim today.

Most of my career has been filled with reactive crises like this, and in the past, I have often used that as a reason to not prioritize my health, and to not eat well. But these days, as I prioritize my health and try to avoid returning to the burnout that almost took me out, I am seeing things differently.

I want you to pay attention to what I did there – it literally is about seeing things differently – I am looking at things through a different lens, and it has made all the difference in how I view the world in general and my health in particular.

If you get ill and, as a result, don’t take a shower on a given day, you didn’t fail – you just didn’t do something you normally do. You don’t decide that because you failed at cleanliness you will henceforth renounce soap. You don’t decide you will now sleep in a mudhole. The next day, you take a shower again and you are back on track.

And tomorrow, I will be back at the gym. I didn’t fail at being healthy. I didn’t fail at anything. I just didn’t do what I normally do. But tomorrow, I will. Because this way of life is sustainable, and I don’t fail if I don’t do something just one day.

It’s easy to fail at “Being Vegetarian”. Hell, it’s easy to fail at “dieting”. But it’s almost impossible to fail at “focusing on my health”. Saying I am focusing on my health recognizes that it’s about what I do most of the time, not what I do one time, that will make a long term difference to my health and my life.

I tend towards extremism – again, my brain loves simplicity – but I am trying to remind myself these days that even though I can’t give it all I have, if I can give it my 80%, then that’s enough.

The Notebook

There are some authors who were made for audiobooks. They are more spoken word artists than true writers.

Rick Bragg is one of them. Another is David Sedaris.

Like many people, my introduction to Sedaris was through This American Life, when he reads excerpts every Christmas from his essay The Santa Land Diaries. At the time, I lived in Raleigh, NC, where he grew up, so there was the additional level of cool because I knew many of the places he mentioned, and often ate at the IHOP where he stayed up late and wrote while in college.

As someone who writes and tries to tell stories, another thing I like about David Sedaris is that he basically writes about himself. He does do occasional fiction, but it isn’t his strong suite by any means: He is at his best when he is talking about himself, and the world as he observes it.

In his essay Day by Day, found in the collection Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, he lays out his process:

Keep a notebook with you all the time, and make notes about things you find interesting.
The following day, refer to your notes to write a diary entry, fleshing out details while it’s still fresh in your mind.
Periodically review the entries for items that merit fleshing out into stories
In front of live audiences, read the stories out loud and get feedback, which you use to edit the stories.

In short, it all starts with a notebook.

Trying to blog daily while living with ADHD in the middle of a pandemic ain’t no joke, y’all. I will have really cool ideas while on a walk, or while doing something else, and will think, “That’s it. That is what I will blog about. But then I sit down in front of my computer tomorrow to write one of the 8 things I have committed to write this week, and suddenly, I got nothing. It’s like every single thing I wanted to talk about is gone.

So, I bought a notebook.

It’s a simple pocket notebook, roughly the size of an index card, which I carry in a leather wallet I bought for the purpose. There’s room for a pencil in there, too, and when inspiration hits me, I stop and make a note. But really, I think any sort of notebook would do, as long as you remember to carry it with you. Thus the wallet, as I need my license and debit card, so this way it’s all together.

Should this notebook ever be stolen, it will make no sense to anyone. For instance, the entry that led to my post I called No Man’s Land literally says:

Pool, skylight, abundance

20, 21, 22, Thunk!

Guy splashing in next lane

And that’s it. I sat down in the locker room at the gym and scrawled it down as soon as I got back in from the pool, and the next day, that was the backbone of my entry.

So, that’s what I do now: I scribble in a notebook. Yes, I know you could do this on your phone, but I really hate writing on my phone. Like, really. I also forget it’s there. All the apps on my phone – it’s like they are not there – that whole object impermanence ADHD thing. But with a wallet in your pocket, it’s somehow more real, and I don’t forget it.

Yesterday, I was thought about something else to write about, and when I pulled my notebook out, I thought, “I could write about this notebook habit!” And wrote the following entry:

Carrying a notebook!

And that is this post.

The Apocaloptomist

It was Thanksgiving morning in 1986, I think, that my Daddy’s friend got gunned down in a trailer park by his cousin. There was liquor involved, and a shotgun, and much screaming, and my Dad’s friend, who had tried to get his cousin to put down the gun and go sober up, was instead shot down and left to bleed out on the gravel in front of his house.

I remember it was Thanksgiving because we were getting ready to go to my grandmother’s when Dad heard the news. He told Mom he would be back soon, and then hopped in his truck and went over to see the family. It was a dirty, shabby story, with no way to clean it up or make it make sense. It was the sort of tragedy that happens when families squabble and there is both alcohol and guns involved.

Eventually, Dad came home, and we went to my grandmothers and ate, while Dad pushed the food around on his plate, and then got up and went for a walk, leaving us all at the table.

In the weeks that followed, I heard Dad and others talk about the man who had died. He had been a leader in his small community, had served on the Volunteer Fire Department, and was generally seen as someone to look up to. That he died trying to de-escalate a bad situation only added to his personal legend.

It was the first time I really thought about what people would say about you after you were dead.

* * *

A while back, a friend sent me the Urban Dictionary entry for an Apocaloptomist and said, “It’s you!”

I looked at it and realized, sadly, that it was. I do believe the world is going to shit, but still at least hope it turns out OK. I am inordinately hopeful, in the midst of overwhelming evidence that the world is crumbling around me.

I’m not some Pollyanna – In fact, I’m somewhat resigned to the facts: The world is getting warmer, the systems that hold us together are failing us, and our politicians have sold us out for campaign contributions. But if the world is ending, well, what sort of person do I want to be when the world ends?

Do I want to be the guy on the jet, eeeking out every bit of hedonistic pleasure, or the person committed to the very end to hold on as long as possible, to scratch and scrimp to save as many people as possible for as long as possible?

“What sort of person will I be when the world ends?”

I think about this question all the time. Not the specific form, but the general: What sort of person will I be when X happens?

What sort of person will I be when the supply chain runs out of food? Will I be the sort of person who had enough food to share with their neighbors, or the sort of person who sits on their roof with a gun, to defend their homestead?

When I am old and my grandchildren learn in school about the Obergefell v. Hodges, the same way I learned about Brown v. The Board of Education, what sort of story will I have for them when I get asked about where I was? What sort of person was I in the years up to Obergfell v. Hodges? In the years after?

When I am “…layin’ on [my] back, lookin’ at the roof of the church / Preacher tellin’ the truth and it hurts”, to quote DMX, well, what sort of person do I want them to say I was? What sort of person do you want to be when you are dead?

I don’t believe in the great man theory of history – that some are born great, waiting on history to recognize them. Instead, I believe history is made by those who show up, who decide to take a stand, who, when given a choice to do something or to do nothing, choose to do something.

And I will, as long as I can, be the person who does something. And I know I’m not alone in that. It doesn’t all depend on me – there are lots of us that choose, in the moment of truth, to do something.

And maybe, together, we can change things. We can definitely try.

And that gives me hope, in spite of the facts.

Sitting in The Dark

It was Tuesday morning when I got the call.

It was Nessie, Lena’s daughter.

“Momma died this morning, Hugh. Can you come over to the house? We are waiting for the funeral home.”

It’s never convenient. It’s never easy. It never fits in your plans, and it is always emotional and difficult. It isn’t happy.

That’s why I call it sitting in the dark.

* * *

I met Lena shortly after moving to Raleigh, NC, nearly 15 years ago. I had only been in town a few months, and was just getting to know people.

Lena was short and stocky, a Black woman with a huge grin and a near toothless lisp who acted like a momma to many of the folks on the street.

When we first met, she was only a few weeks sober after a lifetime of drinking. She had woken up in the hospital after a blackout, and the doctor told her if she drank again, she would die. This was complicated by the fact her husband also drank, and refused to quit. So she left. She chose life.

Lena struggled to find employment, and bounced around the shelters for a while, but eventually she got a small duplex apartment and a job at a dollar store. Things were going pretty good.

It was sometime around the end of that first year when she ran into me in the park.

“Hugh, I need some help. I was sick last week, and missed some work. Now I don’t have any money to pay my light bill. Can you give me the money to pay it?”

I had only been in Raleigh a little while. Eventually I would develop a network of agencies, colleagues and friends who could help with a $75 shortfall like this, but back then, I had none of that. I was barely surviving myself, and I just couldn’t do it.

“I’m sorry Lena, but I just can’t do it.”

Lena’s smile turned into a tight-lipped frown, and she put her hands on her hips.

“I thought you were my friend! And now you won’t even help me?”

I got pissed. I was trying, you know? I didn’t know what to do, and felt helpless.

“Dammit, Lena! I am your friend. I don’t have any money, and I can’t keep your lights on. What the hell do you want me to do?”

Lena looked at me with sadness, and resignation, and no doubt, fatigue.

“I want you to come sit with me in the dark.”

Damn.

It would be several weeks before Lena could get her lights turned back on. And nearly daily, we would sit in her cold, dim living room on a couch of questionable provenance and tell stories. She would tell me about her two adult children, about their own drinking problems, about her son’s time in jail, about her ex-husband. She would tell me about the preacher she was convinced was a hustler, and the drug dealer on the corner, and her landlord who she was convinced was also a pimp. I told her about why I had moved there, and about Renee, who I was dating at the time. She wanted to know when we would get married, and why I lived in the “hood”, and what my life had been like growing up.

“I know you grew up poor. I can tell. You aren’t scared of poor people or Black people.”

I would often run into Lena at the Salvation Army’s soup kitchen, and she would introduce me to folks. Lena is one of maybe three people who made it their mission in the early days to show me around, tell me how the streets in Raleigh worked, and gave me credibility among the folks who live outside.

I remember when I told her Renee and I were getting married.

“Hugh, I’m happy for you, but you need to get that girl a good place to live. I know you’re a hood rat, but she’s from Arkansas. You need to move into a good neighborhood. Trust me on this.”

For the next few years, Lena was one of the constants in my life. We were, in every sense of the word, friends. I owed her so much – she had taught me who I was meant to be.

* * *

Eventually, she got her disability approved and got into income-based housing, and I saw a lot less of her. I would visit her apartment, but she didn’t get out as much as she used to; avoiding the riff-raff, she called it.

One day, her daughter called me to tell me her mom was in the hospital with breast cancer and was in a dark place. Could I come visit?

Of course I can. Lena had taught me all about sitting in the dark places.

The next few years was the battle with cancer. First a lumpectomy, then a double mastectomy, then chemo for a while. I probably made 10 hospital visits for various things.

I was stuck at the office a lot in those years, so when she was feeling OK, she would come and see me to catch up. We would talk about her noisy neighbors, and she would ask after Renee, and she would talk about her fears around dying and her regrets about her children not getting along.

Around January of 2017, Lena got the diagnosis that her cancer was not only back, but had spread all over. She had maybe six months to live, at best.

I wish I could tell you I visited her daily during that time, but I didn’t. I would go by periodically, and she would come by, but it wasn’t anywhere near as often as I should.

When I had gotten back from being out of town and the staff told me she had come by looking for me, I meant to call her back, but I forgot, honestly.

So when I got the call from Nessie that fall morning telling me she was gone, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

“Please come, Hugh. The funeral home is coming for her. Sit with us.”

“I will be right there,” I said.

I was feeling regret and sadness and powerless, but sitting is something I know how to do.

* * *

Lena and her son were living in a rooming house on a narrow side street. A house designed to have two bedrooms had been cut up and partitioned into seven rooms, all of which were rented out by the week, with a common bathroom at the end of the hall.

When I arrived, there were a ton of neighbors on the porch. The hospice nurse was on the porch, just finishing a phone call.

“Are you the preacher? They been waiting on you.”

We went in together. The house smelled of sweat and fear and cabbage and desperation, the narrow hallway lined with flake board walls pressing in on us as we moved to the back of the house and entered a crowded 10×8 room.

Lena’s son was there, a huge man with tears running down his face. He grabbed me in a bear hug and thanked me for coming. Nessie’s son was there too, a 14-year-old boy Lena never tired of talking about. And on the bed was my friend, Lena, who had fought a long time for dignity and respect and sobriety and later, her own life, and who had been tired and was now at rest.

The hospice nurse asked me if I would say a prayer, so I did, and then I read from the Bible on Lena’s nightstand:

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

For the next 20 minutes or so, we stood around her bed and told stories, and remembered her boldness, her sassiness, her big smile and her determination.

And then it was time. The funeral home guy showed up, and Nessie, her son and I went for a walk while they took Lena’s body out of the house, because there is no way she should see that.

Then there was paperwork to fill out, and things that needed my signature as a witness, and then the car with Lena’s body in it left and we were left in an empty room that contained nothing but a twin bed, a loveseat, a tv and some memories.

Nessie and her brother and I walk to my car.

“I’m glad you came this morning. You been part of our family for a long time. It was right that you were here.”

Her brother hugs me again, and thanks me for coming.

And I get in the car and drive away, having sat in the dark with Lena for the last time.

The Box at the Side of the Road

It didn’t look like much, sitting there on the side of the road, sticking out of a box along side a broken air popper and a lamp with a missing lampshade. But you couldn’t fool me – I knew what it was.

My brother-in-law was visiting us – this was in the before times – and had gotten up early and went for a walk in the neighborhood. When he came back, he had told me that a few streets over, someone had set a bunch of trash at the curb.

“And sitting right on top of it all is a cast iron skillet.”

I drove over to check it out. It was, in fact, a cast iron skillet; a 10 inch one, to be exact. It wasn’t any collectable brand; just a no-name workhorse of a skillet, the sort that used to be in every southern kitchen, and still hangs on the wall of mine.

But, it had been a long time since somebody loved it. It was filthy, and covered in rust. I put it in my shed to “deal with later”. And then a few weeks later, a global pandemic happened, and my mind became filled with other things.

But last week, I came across it again, as I was moving some things about, and decided it had been neglected long enough.

In the book Hannibal, the author Thomas Harris has Hannibal Lecter write a letter to Clarice Starling, in which he says the following:

“Do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl; I can’t imagine you would not. Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights.

Look into the skillet, Clarice. Lean over it and look down. If this were your mother’s skillet, and it well may be, it would hold among its molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love.

Sit down at the table, Clarice. Look into the skillet. If it is well cured, it’s a black pool, isn’t it? It’s like looking down a well. Your detailed reflection is not at the bottom, but you loom there, don’t you? The light behind you, there you are in a blackface, with a corona like your hair on fire.

We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You and the skillet and Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet. It’s all still there. Listen.”

I love that. Cast iron is sacred to me, in a way other skillets are not. They have soul, personality, character. Perhaps it is the vibrations in the carbon. In any event, it was time to make things right.

There is a lot of mythology around cast iron, but it isn’t rocket science. It requires a modicum of care, and there are rules to its use, just like there are rules to how to use nonstick.

So I ran a sink of hot water and dish soap, and scrubbed it down with a Scotchbrite pad. I scrubbed the grease and the rust off, and when it was done, it was a pale grey with some splotches of rust here and there, but clean. I then poured white vinegar in the pan and scrubbed the rust, adding kosher salt to make a paste.

With cast iron, your two enemies are acid and water. But the dose makes the poison, and first, we have to strip it down before we can season it.

After it’s clean, I turned the burner of the stove to low heat, and then set the skillet on it for 10 minutes or so. I want it dry as can be, and the heat drives the moisture out. While that’s happening, I turn the oven on 450 and let it heat up, and get out the vegetable oil.

There is a lot of mythology around seasoning the skillet, but it’s just that – myth. All you are going to do is create a thin coating to protect the skillet. And virtually any oil will work. The old folks used lard, because that is what they had, but plain old vegetable oil will work a treat. What we are going to aim for is 4-5 thin coatings. You don’t want one thick coating, because it will glob up and get sticky.

OK, now your skillet is on the burner, and dry and scalding hot. Pour a small dot of oil in the skillet – like, twice the size of a quarter, maybe. Then put on an oven mitt and, with a pair of tongs and a folded up paper towel, smear a thin coat of oil over the entire skillet, inside and out. I can’t emphasize how little oil will be on the skillet at this point – a thin coating, with no oil remaining when you are done smearing. Your skillet will look the same as it did before, only slightly darker from the oil.

Now put it in the oven upside down and leave it there for 30 minutes. It might smoke a bit – this is not failure. Using your oven mitt, take it out and repeat. Small dollop of oil, smear it all over, thin coat, put it back in the oven for 30 more minutes. And again. And again. Do it at least four times.

You put it in upside down to keep any oil from pooling. There shouldn’t be any oil to pool, if you used as little oil as I told you to, but still – better safe than sorry. The fourth time, just turn the oven off and let it cool, with the skillet in it. And when it cools, you are done.

It’s now ready to use. You don’t have to be precious with it. Use it to fry bacon, make cornbread, or really to cook anything, although you should probably avoid heavily acidic dishes like spaghetti sauce. And when you are done, use a scrubby pad to clean it with a little soapy water – the no soap thing is another myth – dry it off, and put it away. I usually dry mine by putting it over low heat for a minute or two to drive the moisture out, then wipe it down with a few drops of oil.

And that’s it. Using it continues to season it naturally, and your drying it and wiping it with oil protects it. Keep it dry and it will, properly treated, outlast the kitchen in which it is stored. I do not, however, recommend storing it in a box at the end of the driveway.

No Man’s Land

The pool at my gym is in a huge room, with a knotty pine ceiling, pierced by large, square skylights. The room is at least 20 feet tall, and the skylights are at least 15 feet across, so you feel like you are under the open sky if you look up. Or, if you are like me, prefer to swim the backstroke.

I say prefer there, like I have a quiver full of strokes available to me, but swimming is a skill I learned as an adult, so it’s pretty much backstroke, breaststroke, or sink. But it’s fine – I like the backstroke and the relaxed pace it forces upon me. It’s hard to stress about much when you are in the rhythm of the backstroke.

The guy in the lane next to mine, however, was doing the freestyle crawl, and he had lots of gear with him. He had a person who was timing his laps, and while I’m strolling along, leisurely stroking (Tickle, T, Touch. Tickle, T, Touch…), he is powering through. It’s obvious he is preparing for some form of competition.

I decidedly, am not. As I make my slow way down the lane, he passes me multiple times. Part of me feels some form of atavistic urge to accelerate, some concern that he is doing better than I am, that he is somehow superior to me, somehow more masculine than I am.

As I swim down the lane, I am looking at the sky overhead – another reason I prefer the backstroke in this pool. The clear blue sky with traces of white clouds sail by, and the 25-meter pool has two and a half skylights under which I will pass as I swim each length. As the swimmer next to me flails past, I suppress the urge to push ahead, to be faster, to engage in some futile attempt at competition, and instead notice, high above, a jet airplane headed west, away from the airport.

I wonder briefly where they are headed, the people on that plane. Are they on a business trip, the fate of the account depending on their being sharp at the meeting to which they are headed? Is it for pleasure – perhaps a trip to see grandma, after almost two years apart because of COVID? Or an emergency trip home, because someone’s unvaccinated parent is about to be taken off the ventilator?

This passes through my head as I count my strokes, while Greg Louganis in the next lane is splashing for all he’s worth, and the time keeper shouts encouragement. I have to count my strokes, because this is not a pool designed for races, and thus has no row of flags near the end of the swim lane. Which means that if you lose yourself in your thoughts while doing the backstroke, you will smash your head into the wall of the pool.

As a person with ADHD, I have before described my inner monologue as actually like being in the electronics department at a store, where there is a wall of televisions, but all with the volume up and all tuned to different channels. At times I can tune into one, while the others drift into the background, but it always requires concentration to do, and if I relax too much, it all becomes just noise.

So here I am, counting my strokes – I hit the wall somewhere between 21 and 23, so at 21 I become careful. But while I’m counting my strokes, I’m also aware of swimmer guy in the next lane, and also balancing my urge to compete with my awareness that the vast sky is above me, seemingly going on forever (12, 13, 14). And it occurs to me that competitiveness is based on scarcity – the certainty that only one of us can win, that there are only so many ways to win, that the person in second place is the first loser, and all that – while the unfolding blue sky is a sign of the abundance that exists all around me, and (16, 17) there is no reason to think that I should be denied participation in that natural abundance.

THUNK!

I hit the wall. Hard. And not for the first time in my life, I reflect on the balance that I came up against in that moment, in the deep end of the pool, as I thrash about for air. The desire to live in my head, where I feel connected and integrated, and the necessity to maintain an awareness of the world around me so I do not hit my head on the wall, or lose my license because of a forgotten ticket, or watch undocumented folks get scapegoated.

That no man’s land on the border, between the aspiration of what could be and the stark reality of what actually is, seems to be my lot in which to dwell, and so I find myself here in the Deep South, living between Humidity and Hope.