Hugh's Blog

The Church of the Diner

I wrote most of this in the Before Times. I have not hung out by myself in a diner in almost two years, merely one of a long list of things this pandemic has stolen from me. I miss it tremendously.

* * *

A few years ago, I was in Baltimore to watch some friends get married, a city I have never spent any time in. So, being in a strange town all by myself, I did what I always do – I found a diner to eat breakfast in.

I have eaten in diners in, I believe, 28 states and they are always the same. In a real sense, they are like churches, with a public liturgy, a crowd of regulars, a common text and while there are many choices, we all have our favorites.

You have your 23rd Psalm, I have my ham and cheese omelet with a side of fruit.

Like churches, which are easily identifiable as such, there is a common architecture for diners as well: Formica tables and broad expanses of glass facing the street, a counter that serves the single folks, the pot of coffee, the orange juice machine.

The elements of the service are similar from place to place, too. Just like a chalice or altar is immediately recognizable, so also are the thick white china mugs in a diner, perhaps the most perfect device ever invented for consuming coffee. Coffee tastes better from a heavy porcelain mug with a thick lip, and if the server is on it, she will run hot water in it first to warm the mug up, keeping your coffee warmer longer.

In the Church of the Diner, they welcome regulars, but are happy if today is the only time you come in. Unlike most churches I have attended, they welcome newcomers with no expectation you will ever return. They are content for you to join their community just for today, to participate as much or as little as you want, and trust you will leave happier than when you arrived.

“I don’t know you or your story, fella, but you look hungry. Come on in,” they seem to say. And so I do.

As a child, I was castigated for bringing an outside book to read during church, but at the Church of the Diner, my book is welcomed, as is my scruffy, unshaven face and my coffee stained t-shirt.

They were not offended that day in Baltimore when I did not want to be part of the crowd, but instead was content to sit in the corner with my book, drinking coffee and periodically staring out the rain-streaked window as I watched the world come alive.

I have long thought that Diners are one of the last bastions of egalitarianism left in this country. The Judge will sit in a booth next to a plumber who sits in the booth next to a homeless man who is buying his coffee with spare change given him by a kind soul.

As I looked around, I wasn’t proven wrong. The other diners are diverse. There is the shift-worker eating a meal before heading home. A sex-worker sitting at the counter, drinking coffee. A table of rowdy folks in their early twenties haven’t made it home yet after a Saturday night out. A collection of old men sit at a corner table, flirting with the waitress and occasionally laughing a bit too loud – a scene you get the feeling has happened daily for years.

Everyone is welcome at the church of the diner.

* * *

At a diner near my old house in Raleigh, a server passed away suddenly. I did not really know her – she had waited on me several times, and we passed the time of day, but at diners I am often just the observer, sitting in the corner with a book, listening to the ambient chatter, soaking in the presence of others. So I did not really know her the way other regulars did.

On the counter near the cash register was a picture of her, a candid snapshot downloaded from her Facebook profile, because who has actual paper photos of anyone these days? And in the weeks after her death, a jar sat there, taking up a collection for her funeral expenses. I always added my change in the jar, and sometimes, an additional 5 or 10-dollar bill. After all, in the Church of the Diner, we take care of our own.

There are faded newspaper clippings on the wall near the cash register: Obituaries of regulars, commendations received by police officers who are regulars, a spelling bee victory by one of the kids who come in with their parents.

Like any church, they have their nutjobs. The people who can’t make it through the day without a drink, the people who take advantage of community to hustle and scheme. The annoying person who won’t leave you alone, when it is obvious you want to be left alone. Amazingly, there are diner fanatics as well.

There is a woman who regularly came into a diner I used to frequent. I was there once or twice a week, at random times, and she was there fully 50% of the time. She knew the names of all the servers. She had the menu memorized. She had, a server told me, been coming in for years and had applied to work there many times, and never got called in to interview. But she was undaunted, and kept coming back. That was some years ago, but in my head, I imagine her still devoutly going into that diner on New Bern Avenue in Raleigh.

A mentor once told me that communities eat together, celebrate together and mourn together. And he told me that while we were sitting in a diner.

Vernacular shelving

Who invented the table?

Who was the first person to make a chair that looked like a chair?

Think about the first person who made a box. Did they have any inkling of how virtually all furniture in the future would be based on their design?

The idea of a thing like a chair, which exists in some form in every culture in the world, having been invented seems strange, because tables and chairs and boxes and shelves and stools didn’t have a singular inventor – they were simultaneously developed by many different people all over the world, and then traveled, infecting others with their designs. And until very recently, most furniture was made by the end user, or at least by someone in their family or village.

Most furniture that has existed in the world was utilitarian in form – they built a chair because they needed a chair – not because they needed something to put in the corner to balance the plant stand in the other corner. And it was made by the end user because until very recently in human history purchased furniture was the province of the very wealthy. Most furniture was made quickly and in a utilitarian manner because the person building it was one bad harvest away from death by starvation.

Utilitarian furniture made by the end user is called “vernacular” furniture by people who study such things. And you need not think it strange that most people could build their own furniture – until a generation or two ago, nearly every house had at least one person in it capable of making a full sit-down supper each night. These are just skills we lost.

But like cooking, they are skills we can reclaim.

I am renovating our 70-year-old unretouched pantry/laundry room right now, which is the first part of the larger kitchen renovation I am planning for this summer. And we needed some new pantry shelves for canned goods. They don’t have to be Instagram-able. They need to hold up cans of food. They need to be painted, in order to protect the shelves and make them easier to clean. They need to be strong.

I need vernacular shelves.

Yesterday afternoon I knocked them out – 60 inches long, 42 inches high, to go under a window in the laundry room. I made them from 1×8 Southern Yellow Pine, the wood of Southern vernacular furniture for generations of my people, acquired from Home Depot. Southern Yellow Pine is stronger than Maple when it has fully dried, and it has a pronounced grain pattern that some people love.

The shelves are spaced 9.5 inches apart, so two normal tin cans will fit on each shelf, stacked on top of each other, and they are 7.25 inches wide, so two cans will fit front to back as well. The top shelf is five inches under the window sill, so the top shelf has room for only one can in height. I used some 3/4inch quarter round as cleats to hold the shelves in place, which were then glued and screwed in place.

Tomorrow I will caulk and paint them so they can cure over the weekend and I can load them up next week.

Literally the only tools it took to make this was a saw, a speed square, a pencil, and a drill/driver, some 2 inch screws and wood glue (These are all simple tools you should probably have as part of a basic DIY kit.). It took an hour to build. It will theoretically hold 266 standard cans of food in a space previously unused, taking up less than 3.5 square feet, and the total cost, not counting paint, even in these inflationary times was less than the cost of a single Billy Bookcase from Ikea, and it will last the rest of my life.

Writing Hopefully

I was afraid I had lost my voice.

Three and a half years ago, I walked away from a ministry I had founded and built for 12 years because it was killing me.

The Rabbi Abraham Heschel said something to the effect that the Biblical prophets were enraged by things everyone else assumed were “just the way things are”. For the first 12 years of my career, I was enraged all the time. If someone died in the woods because there was no trans-friendly shelter for them, I not only became angry – I took it personally. I saw it as a personal affront to me and my work.

That sort of rage is… useful. That sort of rage helps you win fights, helps you change things, and will give you focus and clarity when everyone else is in a fog. It also makes you hell to be around, will risk your deepest relationships, will drive you into deep depression from which you may not survive, and is generally unsustainable.

The worst problems to have are those that are destructive, yet socially reinforced. In our social media driven world, the sort of rage I used to have is celebrated and applauded. We love people who are angry like that, who are “passionate” and “vulnerable” and who “tell it like it is”. On social media, anger is celebrated and reinforced.

I used to routinely “go viral” writing about things that made me angry. And I was good at it. There are people who ended up with large book deals that are worse at being angry on the Internet than I was.

But the depression that follows long periods of unresolved anger almost killed me. Literally. So, I have spent the last three years trying to not be angry. Oh, it still happens sometimes, and all the old anger comes back and my body knows what to do – the flared nostrils, the tingle in the upper back, the accelerated heartbeat, that vein that pops out on my right temple.

When it happens, it’s like like welcoming back an old friend – but the old friend you used to get high with when you skipped work and cheated on your spouse, who met your emotional needs but in a way that was corrosive and slowly suicidal.

It feels good to be angry. And it scares the hell out of me.

That was part of my blog silence until this Fall – having written perhaps 5 things in the prior two years, and having nothing I’ve written published since I left. I didn’t know how to write when I wasn’t angry, and was unsure if I had anything to say if I wasn’t angry. And I can’t do that again. I’m not interested in being that guy any more. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t survive being that guy, actually. And I want to stick around.

I was afraid, though, that I had lost my voice. I didn’t have any words. And God almighty, the world needs words right now. There is a lot to be angry about these days. And my personality type is such that I will always have a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and will dream of the world as it could be, and will work to build that better world. But it’s a quieter, more gentle anger these days.

And slowly, the words have been coming back. I’ve been learning that hope is also an emotion, and one worth sustaining and building on. I like me better when I’m hopeful. And if I can’t write things that make people angry in ways that make me popular, perhaps I can write things that make people hopeful in a way that makes the world better.

Cooking From The Pantry

I believe in having a certain amount of food on hand. Generally, two to three months’ worth of regular, everyday food, not dehydrated tofu you keep in a bunker out back.

Before the pandemic, this might have led you to believe I was some sort of doomsday prepper, but after the supply chain shortages of the last two years, I just feel like I am a realist. I actually have a whole series of posts planned for some point about what reasonable food reserves look like, and how I do it, but today I want to share another benefit of having a deep pantry – the ability to create a good dinner quickly without leaving the house.

Tonight I came home and it was 5:30 and I realized I had forgot to set anything out to thaw for supper, and what’s worse, I had forgotten that I had a meeting at 7 I couldn’t miss.

So I looked in the pantry for inspiration, and saw a couple of potatoes that were in danger of going bad, so I needed to do something with them. We have chickens, so we always have eggs on hand. But even if I didn’t have chickens, eggs last a really long time – much longer than you think – in the fridge. So I pretty much always have lots of eggs on hand. And we always have lots of canned and frozen vegetables.

So I peeled the two potatoes and then sliced them on the mandolin about a ¼ inch thick. I took down a 10-inch nonstick skillet and put it on medium heat, and then added a tablespoon of olive oil to it. Now, you could use any fat here – butter freezes like a dream, by the way, and I probably have 10 pounds of it in the freezer and there is always a jar of bacon grease in the door of my refrigerator – but I like the flavor of olive oil on potatoes and I have a bottle that lives on the counter by the stove.

Take the potato slices, and place them in the oil so they overlap and cover the entire bottom of the skillet. Add a generous portion of salt and pepper. Again, here is a place you could make changes – I have been known to use a big shake or two of Creole seasoning here, or seasoning salt, or, like I did tonight, just salt and pepper. All depends on what sort of mood you are in.

I like chicken stock, and make it when I have bones to use up, but for things like this, I just keep a jar of the good bouillon base in the fridge (and another, unopened one, in the pantry). Before I peeled the potatoes I had turned on the electric kettle that lives on our counter, and so I added 1 teaspoon of chicken base to 1 cup of boiling water and whisked the hell out of it, to get the base to dissolve. I then pour the cup of stock in the skillet and partially cover it, letting it simmer a few minutes.

While it’s simmering, I open a can of whole kernel corn and reserve the liquid, but then dump the corn in the skillet, spreading it around so there is a layer of corn on top of the potatoes. By now, the potatoes should be getting soft and the liquid boiling away, but if it is boiling away too fast and your potatoes are not yet soft, then add some of the corn broth to the skillet for the additional liquid you need. If they are softening fine, keep it going until the chicken broth has mostly boiled away.

What you are going for here – and it will take you somewhere between 10-15 minutes – is for the potatoes to be soft, and for the liquid to be 90% gone.

While it’s cooking away, you should get out 5 eggs, and scramble them with a whisk until smooth. Then either shred some cheddar cheese, or, if you got some on sale cheaper than the block of un-shredded cheddar, get out a half cup of shredded cheese. (As an aside, if you do get a bunch of pre-shredded cheese, it also freezes well, and still works for the things it is good for, like this.)

Now your potatoes should be soft, and the liquid mostly cooked away. Before the next step, turn your broiler on high and let it warm up. Then pick up the skillet and shake it a bit, making sure the potatoes haven’t stuck to the bottom of the pan. Then pour the eggs over the contents of the skillet, then sprinkle the cheese all over the tops of the eggs. Then take a spatula and gently lift the edges of the potatoes, so the egg mixture slips amongst the potatoes.

After it has begun to set, constantly moving your spatula around under the edges so it doesn’t stick, then slide the skillet six inches under the broiler and let the top of the egg mixture cook and bubble until it turns the lightest of browns. Pull it out and set it on a trivet to cool while you set the table, then cut it into 4 wedges. It actually plates up better if you let it cool 10 or 15 minutes before you serve it, but I often eat it hot and let the plate be a little messy. I put hot sauce on top of mine tonight, but sometimes do chow-chow or salsa instead.

The worldly among you will recognize this is a sort of a frittata if you are Italian, or a tortilla if you are Spanish. I ate them for years without knowing they were European. This will serve two people for supper, or four people for lunch. It’s free of meat but has 44 grams of protein, and if you used vegetable broth or the juice from the can of corn instead of chicken broth, it would be full-on vegetarian and, of course, it’s gluten free. And it only messed up one skillet and a bowl to scramble the eggs in, only took 20 minutes start to finish to make, and I didn’t even have to have a plan.

The Journal

My Dad was a quiet man. He seldom raised his voice. He virtually never cursed.

And he was an intensely private man. You would never know who he voted for – you might suspect, but you would not hear it from him. He never, ever, put a bumper sticker on any car we owned.

He shunned the spotlight. His goal was to be both indispensable and invisible, content to do his work well and sure it would shake out in the end. As he told me once, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

He probably had undiagnosed ADHD, I am diagnosed, as is my niece, his granddaughter, and it is hereditary. And he bore lots of the signs, if you knew what to look for. And for many of us who have this diagnosis and yet manage any degree of effectiveness, it is because we have developed coping mechanisms.

And one of Dad’s coping mechanisms was his journal. We didn’t really know it existed. I mean, Mom knew he kept notes of things – sometimes she would come in the room and he would be typing on his phone, and if she asked what he was up to, he would say, “Just writing something down before I forget it.”

It was a simple program he kept on his phone, where most days, he would put anything he wanted to remember later. I found it when he died, when we were going through his cell phone. From July of 2013 until two days before he died, there were notes for nearly every day, and some days had multiple entries. Sometimes there were multiple paragraphs, and other days merited a single sentence.

On July 20, 2013 he changed the oil in the tractor, and there was 695 hours on the engine. On August 25^th of 2013 he wrote “Hugh Jr was nearly arrested in Raleigh yesterday for feeding the homeless.” For their 48^th wedding anniversary, he noted they ate Chinese food at Hunan’s, and another entry that day mentioned he topped off the freon on the AC. They would rent cars to go on trips out of the state, and I know now that in November of 2017, they rented a 2017 Ford Fusion Hybrid that got 43 MPG on the trip to see Mom’s family in Oklahoma.

There were notes related to work – contracts he had signed; purchase agreements he had entered into. The weather figured prominently, as did the grandchildren. We know how much the drill he bought at the pawnshop cost, the interest rate on the truck loan he had been quoted, that Lowes screwed up his order for a new dryer for the house in 2016.

If these seem innocuous, that is largely because I am sharing the non-personal ones, but you get the point. He recorded birthdays and what gifts he bought, where they ate dinner when he and mom went to town, major news events. He noted (without comment) both the election of Trump and the removal of the Confederate emblem on the state flag of Mississippi, the record low temperatures in the winter of 2014, the time my brother’s son was the scripture reader in church, along with the notation that he did a good job.

In short, they were the record of how he spent the last seven years of his life. And it was a tremendous gift to us, even if he had no reason to expect anyone but him would ever see it.

I downloaded the file to my laptop, and the formatting was horrible as a result, but I spent the last six months or so, in odd snatches of time, cleaning it up, and then had it bound for Mom. I gave it to her for Christmas this year.

I don’t know that I really needed to know that Dad had a coupon for Taco Bell that day in 2015, or that the belt for the lawnmower in 2018 cost him $34, or that when the tornado hit our county in 2015 and he worked 3 days straight on virtually no sleep that he kept a record of which reporters he talked to, but I’m glad I know those things now. I feel like I know him in a different way than I did before. There were no revelations, but lots of confirmations. Countless times as I was working on the formatting, I would read an entry and find myself nodding my head, as if I saw that coming.

So, one of the habits I have now is that I put Evernote on my phone, and every morning I open a note with today’s date, and throughout the day I jot down anything I want to remember, in either sense of the word – things I need to have a note of, or memories I don’t want to lose.

We don’t have kids, so I don’t know who will read it, or if anyone ever will. But after seeing Dad’s journal, and the gift it was to us, it just made sense.

Rituals Hold Us Together

In the Before Times, I used to travel to New York City a great deal, and a thing I love to do when alone in a different place is to explore its churches. I’m weird like that. And Manhattan has some amazing churches.

In the church world, churches that have a lot of order and structure to their service (imagine robes, chanting, and incense) are called “High” churches, and churches that do not (imagine a preacher in jeans behind a lectern) are “Low” churches, and most churches find themselves on a spectrum between those two poles. I grew up in a “Low” church environment – my people tended to distrust things like written prayers and creeds and robes.

So anyway, most of the churches I would explore in Manhattan were High churches, which always felt like a different world to me. And sometimes, there would be a service going on when I was exploring, and so I would watch. And on the particular day I want to tell you about, I was in a large Episcopal church that was mostly empty of people when I walked in, but people slowly began to trickle in and sit down in front of the altar, and so I sat in the back of the room to watch.

It turns out they were there to baptize a baby. And the couple and the godparents went up to the front, and the priest came out in his robes, and on the front row was what were obviously the grandparents, or maybe even great grandparents, as they were very frail. And on the end of the row against the wall was an elderly lady who was obviously in some sort of cognitive decline so severe as to be nonverbal.

I tried not to stare, but I found her fascinating. Because while she was obviously confused by her surroundings, she did not miss a cue in the service. When the priest began the Lord’s Prayer, she mouthed along to it in perfect timing, despite the fact that 30 seconds before she appeared to not know where she was. It was as if the ritual of the decades of recitation had worn a groove in her brain that the dementia could not erase.

Yesterday, my mom and brothers came to my house for our Christmas celebration, which we did a week later than normal because of some scheduling problems. It was the first Christmas we celebrated together as a family since Dad died (we couldn’t gather in 2020 because it was before the vaccines were available). His absence was constantly noticed, of course, and his name came up perhaps 50 times in the four hours or so we were together.

I have been dreading it for weeks – not seeing my family, who I love – but the shadow that would be over the gathering with Dad’s absence. But yesterday I realized a thing I had known, but not formulated before: Rituals hold us together.

We ate the foods we had eaten when Dad was alive. My nephew, the family pray-er, said Grace before the meal, like he did when Dad was alive. We sat in the living room after the meal and passed out presents, the way we did when Dad was alive. We told stories to the younger generations of our childhood, the way we did when Dad was alive. In other words, it was a lot like every single Christmas we had when Dad was alive – but Dad wasn’t alive.

It’s not that he wasn’t missed – he was tremendously missed. But the rituals we have developed over time gave us structure and routine that was independent of Dad being there. The rituals gave us things to hold onto, so when we didn’t know what to do, we just did the thing we normally do.

The rituals held us together.

I think about the rituals that we have in our cultures: Easter and Christmas and Passover and Ramadan. Harvest festivals. Graduations. Baptisms. Bris. Bar Mitzvah. The recitations that give us structure: The Apostles Creed, The Shema, The Lord’s Prayer, The Pledge to the Flag.

The times may be good or bad, the fortunes around us rise or fall, but the rituals persist, and adapt, and sometimes shift around the edges, but remain fixed points in a changing, fluctuating universe.

The rituals hold us together.

Why Do You Like to Cook?

Kaylee, age 13: Uncle Hugh, how often do you cook?

Me, age 49: I cook something almost every day, and some days I cook two or three times a day. Why?

Kaylee: Well, I could tell by the way you stirred the food around that you know what you are doing. Do you like cooking?

Me: I do. I really do.

Kaylee: Why?

Me: Hmmm. Well, there are several reasons. The first is that when I left home, I could suddenly eat anything I wanted. But most of the food I could afford and had access to wasn’t very good. So learning how to cook was a way to be kind to myself. I deserved to have good food, and the only way I knew to get it was to cook it myself.

But more than that, it was that there were people in my life that I dearly loved, and now they were gone. And when I thought back over my memories of them, most of those memories involved food. Like today, we ate chicken and dressing. I can never eat chicken and dressing without thinking of Aunt Louise. But how often in your day-to-day life do you get to eat chicken and dressing? But by knowing how to make it, I can feel that good feeling any time I want to. Knowing how to cook is like having a photo album filled with people you love, that you have an opportunity to see any time you need to eat, which is multiple times a day.

Another reason I like to cook is that most of my adult life has been trying to solve unsolvable problems. Like, no matter how hard I work, people are still hungry, still homeless, still lonely, still addicts. You can work hard all day, all week, all month, even, and at the end of that time feel like absolutely nothing has changed.

But I can have some rice and some sausage and a pepper and an onion and a few other things, and it doesn’t look like anything at all, but if you know how you can turn that pile of random things into jambalaya. I can start with chaos and end with something that tastes good, that reminds me of people I love, and that makes other people happy and fills your belly in the process. It’s the one part of my life I can fix. I can turn the chaotic into something good, and I can usually do that li less than an hour. How cool is that!

But my favorite reason? Today. We sat around a table, and we ate food that was good, and we talked about stories from our past, and people we missed who were not there, and the food reminded us of meals we had had like this before, and the people who had been there, and for a minute, we all felt very loved. I love knowing how to make that happen.

2021

I was talking to Renee today about how weird 2021 has been.

Nothing really bad happened to us, personally, this year. But the general anxiety of living through the second year of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people has been exhausting. In some ways, the day to day of this year, where we are in a constant state of expectation and shifting boundaries, has been much harder to navigate than 2020 was, where the boundaries were more clear.

I was elated when, in February, we drove 2 hours in the snow to get Renee her first vaccine shot. I literally wept at the relief. Finally, I thought. This will all be over.

But it wasn’t over. It still, 11 months later, isn’t over.

Early on, I predicted this was going to last for years and years. I hoped I wasn’t right. But I was right.

Like many of you, we spent this year trying to figure out how to live in this new reality. We spent a lot of time at home, although not as much as we did in 2020. We stretched by traveling, albeit travel with lots of precautions. We ate out more, mostly outside or in empty restaurants. We saw three movies in empty theaters. I met people for coffee. It felt, for a minute, almost normal between the variants.

I became more distrustful of people this year. Instead of being potential allies and friends, they became potential disease vectors. Crowds are unsafe places in this new world in which we live, and people who intentionally seek out crowds became unsafe people. Millions of my fellow Americans intentionally chose not to get vaccinated, placing my immune compromised wife at risk. I am as yet unable to forgive them for that.

This year I prioritized my health in a way I never have before. I committed to daily physical activity – 2.5 mile walks or 30 minutes of swimming nearly every day. I began eating consciously, and along the way lost 48 pounds. I have a set bedtime, and fight hard to get at least 7 hours of sleep.

I built a workshop over the summer, where I now spend my evenings making things that make me happy. It is an extravagance, that creative space, but it makes me happy.

In 2020, I wrote 2 blog posts on my personal blog. This summer I built a new website, where I blog daily and since September 1^st have published 84 posts and more than 60,000 words.

I leaned in this year to my identity as a writer, as now I make a not-inconsiderable portion of my income from writing related activities, and in addition to this blog I also publish two newsletters each week (this one and this one.)

So, while a lot of good things happened this year, it was all fought for and won reluctantly.

As I have said before – I don’t set goals. But I do intend to lean further into my identity as a writer and Internet publisher in 2022. I intend to lean into my identity as a craftsperson more in 2022 – expect an online shop where I will sell some of my wares, and more writing about craft. I intend to lean more into my identity as an organizer, as I continue my work organizing faith communities here to make a better Mississippi. But mostly, I intend to continue to believe in a better world than the one in which we currently live, and to strive to live as if that world was already a reality, and by so living, bring it a little closer to fruition.

Happy New Year, friends. I wish you every good thing.

On Branding

People who know me well know how much I love Jacques Pepin. If you do not know, he is a classically trained French chef, who began his apprenticeship in France at the age of 13, who worked in Paris and the was personal chef to three French Presidents, including Charles de Gaulle. Eventually, he would move to the US in 1959, would work at La Pavilion in New York City, and was offered the job as chef to John F. Kennedy when he was President.

Pepin turned him down, and instead went to work designing menus for Howard Johnson’s. which was then the largest chain of sitdown restaurants in the country. Imagine turning down the opportunity to be the White House Chef to work at Applebee’s, say.

When asked in an interview why he turned it down, he said, “Be chef to a President? I had already done that. I wanted to do something new.”

I’ve always admired him for that. To not take himself so seriously. To be willing to put aside the accolades and to be so self-confident that the prestige doesn’t matter to you. To be content to have “done that” and to try something new, something that isn’t what people expect from you.

I have blogged, off and on, for 19 years, for myself and for organizations and companies I ran. Then since 2007 I have been active on Social Media, for the last 5 years or so most heavily on Facebook. And all of those forms of online expression benefit you most when you “brand” yourself. When I started blogging, I ran a small bookstore, and so I wrote mostly about that, and so I was branded as a “bookseller”.

When I moved to North Carolina to start a homeless ministry, I wrote about issues of homelessness and faith and issues like LGBT rights and racism that intersect with homelessness, and became branded as that guy. The last 3-4 years I did that work I had begun to be sought after as a trainer and speaker on those issues, and was pastoring a weekly worshipping community made up of people experiencing homelessness, and someone called me the “pastor of last resort” and I got branded as that.

But even normal people get branded these days. I have a friend that curses like a sailor in person, but she won’t use swear words on Facebook.

“People wouldn’t expect me to do that there”, she told me.

In other words, it would be off-brand.

An early influence on my understanding of ministry was a white Mississippi Baptist preacher named Will Campbell. He was one of those larger than life characters that thrive in the Deep South, a Baptist preacher who smoked cigarettes, drank bourbon and cursed a blue streak. But he also did some of the most important behind the scenes work in the Civil Rights movement, and wrote a book that called out the mainline white church back in the early 1960’s.

In an article about Will in Rolling Stone back in 1990, there is this paragraph:

He does not like to be called the Reverend Campbell because “it sounds condescending and a bit imperialistic. Some people call me a counselor,” Campbell says, “but it’s such an arrogant concept—like I can do something better for you than you can do for yourself. I’m not a reverend, and I’m not a counselor. I’m just a preacher.” Even the word ministry gives him trouble. “I don’t really have a ministry,” he insists. “I have a life.”

Over the last month, I have blogged every day, without a theme. Some days I talked about my struggles with ADHD, and other days I shared a childhood memory or talked about Southern food traditions or shared something that happened to me that day or wrote something somebody found inspirational or just told a funny story.

If I were smart, I would only write 3 times a week about, say, Southern food, and have beautiful images and printable recipes and put together a collection and then a cookbook and start a podcast where I interview other white dudes (because aren’t most podcasts basically white dudes interviewing other white dudes?) about food, and before you know it, I would be a “brand”.

I watched a YouTube video the other day where some influencer was tending to his backyard chickens, and his 10-year-old daughter was with him, and he put the camera in her face and she knew exactly how to mug for the camera. She was being trained to be a brand at 10 years old.

But in a world where everyone is trying to put a label on you and put you in a box, to refuse to stay in their box is a political action. I keep a file open on my computer, and most days I jot things in it. Like a running journal. On January 1 of 2021, I wrote:

I wrote exactly 2 things on my blog last year. Just 2. Part of that is Facebook cannibalized my blog, part of it is that the newsletters took another part of it, but mostly it was that I was unsure what to write about. Branding and all. So to hell with branding. I will write about walks, and spoons, and woodworking, and gardening, and depression, and food, and sermons and all of it. I don’t have a ministry – I have a life, as Will C said. Publish and be damned.

It took me a while to get there, but this blog is the result of that entry. This blog is intentionally unbrandable, because it is not a brand – it is my life. I am funny, and angry, and sentimental, and Southern, and opinionated about cornbread and beans and a sucker for Christmas and cynical of all of it. This blog is about all of those things, because it is the story of one guy who is trying to live a good life.

To paraphrase Will Campbell, I don’t have a brand. I have a life.

A Bowl Full of Luck

Saturday is New Years Day, which means it is time for my people to eat black eyed peas and collards. For luck, you know. And growing up in and shaped by the hills of North Mississippi, and loved and fed by people who were children of the Depression and grandchildren of Reconstruction, we ate simple food, and the food of our celebrations was also simple, although given a bit more time and intention.

Now, all food is regional and cultural. And I know up North it’s corned beef and cabbage, and in the Low Country of the East Coast they eat Hopping John, but this is what my people eat for luck. That we live in a historically and persistently economically depressed area that has been perennially unlucky is not lost on me, but what are you going to do?

SoI don’t know that eating black eyed peas is actually lucky. But I do know that I love them, and will make any excuse to eat them. And besides – if we engage in pleasure when times are hard, isn’t that a sort of making your own luck? While my parents were not big eaters of greens, the old people who cared for me were, and so eating greens reminds me of happy times and the purest love I have ever known, so I make a spot for them, too.

If we want to keep traditions alive, we have to make room for them. And any tradition that involves sitting down to a meal, made with care and love, that marks the entry point into a new time of with hope and intention is a thing worth preserving.

So on New Years, we eat Black Eyed Peas and Collards.

Black eyed peas aren’t peas. They’re beans, and they have to be cooked like beans. In fact, you can cook them just like pintos and have a fully acceptable dish. But you can elevate it a bit, too. And since this is New Years after all, I tend to fancy it up. The collards are an accommodation because I’m the only person in my house that likes them, and so cooking up a large pot doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Now, doing it this way makes enough for 12 polite folks or eight hungry ones. But it halves perfectly if don’t have a lot of people to feed.

What you need:

To do this traditionally, you need the ham bone leftover from your Christmas ham with about two pounds of meat. If you didn’t save leftovers and the bones from your Christmas ham, you can (and should) buy in two pounds of smoked ham hock, or if you find yourself in a part of the world where you can’t easily buy ham hock, dice up a couple of pounds of bacon.

Two pounds of dried black eyed peas. The thing about black eyed peas is, they’re beans. So you should soak them, but you don’t have to. They don’t need a lot of soaking, and some folk don’t soak black eyed peas at all. But I generally soak mine for a couple of hours. Just spread them out on a cookie sheet, sort through them for dirt and debris, then put them in a stockpot with enough cold water to cover them by about two inches.

Salt. People get fancy with their salt these days, but I use kosher salt to cook with and iodized salt for the table. You do you – salt is salt, and best done to taste anyway.

A large onion, as big as your fist.

Cloves. You only need a couple, so see if you can borrow some from a neighbor, but if not, buy the smallest container you can. You want whole cloves here, and you might have bought some for the Christmas ham.

A bay leaf. I feel like this can be left out, but I love this dish so much I’m afraid to try subtracting things.

Ground black pepper. Just like you have in the pepper shaker.

Allspice. This is something I picked up a few years ago and I love the depth it adds to the dish. I doubt my ancestors would have tried this, but I recommend it.

Vegetable oil

Four nice sized garlic cloves. Honestly, the four is a guesstimate. I mean, I would use at least four, but sometimes the spirit catches me and I might go as high as six or seven. I do love some garlic.

Crushed red pepper

Two bunches of collard greens. My people would just say “a mess of collards”, but I’m assuming you are going to the store, and they will look at you funny if you ask for that. The stores tend to sell them in 1 pound bunches, and you need about two pounds of greens. Also, if you are two good to eat collard greens, get over yourself. Kale and Collards are practically siblings and are both just unheaded cabbage. If you can’t get collards, you can use kale for this, because they are so similar. But collards is traditional, and if you are too snooty to eat them and end up unlucky this year because you did it wrong, don’t come crying to me.

What you do

Drain your peas and put them back in the stockpot. Dice up your meat (including the skin and fat) into pieces about an inch or two in size, and add them and the bone to the pot. If you are using the bone (and you should) don’t worry about cleaning it off – the meat will fall off it as it cooks. Some folk are panicking over the mention of ham skin here, but trust me on this – it will melt and meld into something approaching heaven before we are done. Put in enough cold water to cover the beans about two inches and set the heat as high as it will go.

While you are waiting for it to boil, peel your onion and stick 2 cloves in it. Cloves are pointy, and you can just push them into the onion like thumbtacks. You will remove the onion later, and this makes it easier, but I have also just tossed the cloves in the pot and sliced the onion fine and left it in and that works too. It’s largely a matter of opinion, and this way involves less chopping and tears. Add the onion, ½ a teaspoon of allspice, ½ a teaspoon of the black pepper, the bayleaf, and a teaspoon of salt to the water and bring it to a boil. We will probably be adding more salt later, but depending on what meat you used, it may already be salty, and too much salt will ruin a dish.

After it comes to a boil, turn your heat down and let it simmer. Stir them every 10 or 15 minutes, just as you pass through the kitchen, and check your water levels at the same time. The water will cook away, so keep adding water to always keep at least an inch of water over the peas.

Cooking times will vary depending on how fresh the peas are, and how your stove cooks, but after about an hour and a half, start checking to see if the peas are tender. They generally take me about two hours to be right. They are done when a pea will mash evenly between your fingers. If nobody’s looking, you can taste it – they shouldn’t be crunchy, but firm. Nobody wants mushy peas. The broth will be rich and dark, and should be tasted at this point for salt – I often put about another two teaspoons in here, but go by taste, adding a bit and stirring a bit and tasting as you go.

Remove the bone and the onion, if you left it whole, and discard after picking the bone clean.

About an hour and a half into the beans cooking, it’s time to make the collards. Rinse them off, and cut out the big pieces of stem and discard. Take the leaves and roll them like cigars and then slice into one-inch-wide strips. Shake the water off them, but don’t dry them in a salad spinner or anything – they need some moisture to cook. Peel and mince your garlic now as well.

In a big (at least 10 inch, but 12 is better) skillet, add your vegetable oil and coat the bottom of the skillet with it, turning the skillet one way and another. Then put it over high heat and watch the oil – when it turns wavy it’s time to cook.

Add your garlic and a ½ teaspoon of crushed red pepper to the oil and sauté it around, letting it sizzle – but don’t let it brown. After 30 seconds or so, when it smells amazing, add in the collard greens and stir them around in the oil, so they get coated. I sprinkle about a ¼ teaspoon of salt on them now, and then add a cup of water, stirring the greens around in it. This will begin to wilt the greens, which is what we are going for. Turn the heat down to medium and then put a lid on the skillet, leaving it slightly cracked so steam can escape. Let it cook for about 20 minutes, softening the greens, but not disintegrating them.

To plate it up, I put the black eyed peas and meat in a bowl with lots of broth, and then scatter the greens over the top, but this is controversial. Some folks prefer them served on a plate, drained, with the collards to the side. Either way, I would serve some cornbread, usually made in muffins because we are celebrating, alongside this, with some pepper sauce on the table.

I’m wishing you lots of luck and joy and wonderful meals this coming year, friends.

Happy New Year!