Hugh's Blog

The First Tree

It was a cold day, as I remember it. We had more of those then, and they came earlier in the year, too. You could see your breath that day, and I pretended I was smoking a cigarette, holding a stick between my fingers the way my Aunt Louise did. Well, I did that up until momma caught me doing it, and then I had to hurry up and get in the truck after hearing a sermon about the evils of smoking.

We lived on 30 something acres in the hills of North Mississippi, and had carved a few acres out for the house and yard, and the rest was fenced off scrub oaks and pines and cedar that we let a cousin lease and he ran a few cows on it. When Daddy put the chainsaw in the back of the truck, I knew we were up to something good. Then he put the old single barrel shotgun that had been his daddy’s behind the seat and we set off.

The truck was an old Ford dad had bought from work when they finally decided it was too ragged out to make sense to keep fixing it. It was red, like all their service trucks were, and had a vinyl bench seat with cracks in the vinyl that hurt your legs if you were wearing shorts, and if you were wearing jeans, like I was on this particular day, then bits of the yellow foam that was beginning to deteriorate would stick to your pants.

We drove up the path, along the massive ravine that ran down the middle of our property that had more than one junked car pushed off into it, past thickets filled with elm seedlings and blackberry canes and sedge grass. Our property was on the southern side of a massive hill, and our house was about midways up it. This day we were headed uphill, to the area at the edge of our property, next to the old cemetery where generations of Black folks were buried, and whose origin story nobody ever told me.

Because that is where the cedar trees were.

Later, when I was studying such things, I would be fascinated to learn that they weren’t cedars at all, but Juniperus virginiana, also known as the Eastern Redcedar. Several years ago, after having learned this, I told Dad they were Junipers and not cedars, and he said, “Not here they aren’t. Here, we call them cedar trees.”

I guess that settles it then.

We were out on this cold Saturday afternoon hunting for our Christmas tree. We understood that there were people that lived in cities that bought trees out of a parking lot, and we also knew some rich people that had artificial trees. But being neither of those, and having 30-odd acres full of cedar trees, this is what people like us did.

Up by the cemetery was a huge field, perhaps 5 acres wide, of nothing but sedge and cedars. And daddy stopped the truck, told momma to look for a tree she liked, and he took the shotgun and my hand and we headed into the woods.

“What are we doing, Daddy?” I asked.

“Hunting”, he said.

This excited me to no end. All the old men I knew hunted, even though Dad did not.

“Are we hunting quail”, I asked?

“No, son. We’re hunting mistletoe.”

Mistletoe is a semi-parasitical plant that grows in deciduous hardwoods, like pecans, hickories, and oaks. And in the wintertime, after the leaves have fallen, you can see it in the treetops. You can, if you are a bit crazy, climb up in the tree and cut it down, to hang in your Christmas decorations.

Or you can be like Dad and just shoot it out of the tree with birdshot.

When we got back, me holding the mistletoe (after a warning to not eat the berries) and Dad holding the shotgun, Mom was standing beside a tree about six feet tall.

“Is that our tree?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Mom said.

As we rode back down the hill to the house, Mom was holding the mistletoe in her lap and me, I was on my knees looking through the rear glass at the tree I had “helped” cut down, holding on to the back of the seat and swaying as the old truck jostled.

I couldn’t wait for Christmas to arrive.

I still can’t.

Southern AF Cornbread

There are people out there making cornbread for the holidays with sugar and flour. One woman even said on Facebook that she uses Jiffy Cornbread mix to make cornbread dressing.

Some folks just want to watch the world burn.

It’s easy to be critical of other people’s food choices, but I find it helpful to remember that not everyone grew up with the advantages I have, and just don’t know any other way. In light of this, and wanting to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, I have decided to share my Southern AF cornbread recipe that uses neither flour nor sugar with the world. And if it matters to you, It’s gluten free,

This is everyday cornbread. This is why I keep a jug of buttermilk in the fridge. (If you don’t have any other use for buttermilk, you can buy powdered buttermilk in the baking aisle of your store, which keeps forever).

I will be the first to say there are other recipes out there – especially hot water cornbread made when money is tight and buttermilk is a stretch, but I don’t particularly enjoy it, so we will talk of it another day. This is the perfect thing to serve with pinto beans. In fact, growing up beans and cornbread were practically one word.

What you need:

1 cup cornmeal. (Now, white is traditional down here, but yellow is easier to get, and I can’t tell a taste difference. I can tell you that you can fancy this up with using stone ground meal here, but it’s real good if you use generic yellow meal from the grocery store, too.)

1 tsp baking powder. (Some people put more to make it rise more, but I like a denser bread.)

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk (If you don’t have any buttermilk, you can make do by adding two tablespoons of lemon juice to a cup of milk and letting it sit out about 15 minutes. You just need an acid to react to the baking powder.)

1 large egg

2 TBS butter, margarine, or bacon drippings (Honestly, they all work about the same. Follow your budget here. We tend to use butter, because we don’t keep margarine in the house.)

1 8 to 10-inch well-seasoned cast iron skillet (I mean, if you are not at a place in your life where someone loves you enough to have given you a cast iron skillet and taught you how to care for it, you could use a cake pan, but it will crust up better in a cast iron skillet.)

What you do:

Preheat the oven to 450.

Put butter in the skillet, put skillet in the oven.

Then mix the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Add egg and buttermilk to the dry stuff, and mix until the batter just has an even consistency. Don’t overmix this – it isn’t cake. Use a spoon, not a blender.

Remove skillet (be careful, it’s hot!), swirl the melted butter all over the skillet, then pour the melted butter into the batter.

Pour batter into the skillet, and jiggle it to evenly distribute the batter.

Put it in the oven and feel morally superior.

It will be done when golden brown on top, the sides are coming away from the side of the skillet, and a knife blade comes out dry from the center.

An 8-inch skillet takes about 20 minutes, a 10 inch one about 17.

We just cut it into wedges and serve it from the skillet – when we were growing up, momma would invert it on a plate and serve it upside down, which bothered me in ways I cannot fully describe. But you do you.

Further notes:

This is a basic, make 30 minutes before supper, all purpose cornbread. This is also good dressing cornbread, if you are making chicken and dressing, but you will want to make it the day before so it can dry out for that. I have, on occasion, added two tablespoons of sugar to this and made muffins with it to save my marriage. Other ways to fancy it up involve adding a half cup of shredded cheese, a handful of frozen corn kernels, or a small can of green chiles. But don’t go too close to the sun here: This is working people’s food.

A Poor Man’s Feast

Last week, my local grocery store had their hams on sale for Christmas, so I bought a small butt ham that weighed about five pounds. I roasted the ham, which was amazing, but I will tell you how I did that another day. The point is, after slicing the ham for sandwiches and breakfast meat and dinner, I was left with a nice bone and some scraps of ham meat, fat, and skin. But not a lot, because I love some damn ham. Because I know somebody is going to ask, I weighed it, and had about half a pound of loose meat left, plus whatever I couldn’t get off the bone. I stuck it all in the fridge.

A few days later, it was cold outside, and I didn’t have a lot of work commitments, and felt like it would be a perfect day for a pot of beans and cornbread. I took a pound of pinto beans and poured them out on a cookie sheet, looking for rocks and dirt. You just pour them out and sort of pick through them with your fingers, shifting them around until you make sure they are clean. Then put them in a large pot and put cold water in the pot until you have about two inches of water over the top of the beans. They need to soak in the water a few hours, and it works better if you stir the soaking beans every once in a while, to make sure water and oxygen gets everywhere.

Now, you don’t have to do this – the soaking I mean. But they taste better if you do. The fresher your beans, the less essential the soaking is, but dried beans look the same whether six months or six years old, and so I always soak them. But don’t soak them overnight, like some folks do, or they will break down too much. Four hours is plenty, two is sufficient, and in a pinch, again, none is probably acceptable.

When they are done soaking, pour the water off the beans, and then put more cold water in the bean pot, again about two inches over the beans. Don’t drown the beans – this isn’t soup, and it isn’t mush, this is beans. Put your ham bone and ham scraps, including the skin and fat, in the pot too, and don’t worry too much if the water doesn’t cover every little bit of the bone. Turn the heat to high.

As an aside – some folk are going to panic about the mention of ham skin going in this. Just cut it into small pieces and go with it. Most of the fat and collagen is going to dissolve and turn into flavor.

While you are waiting for the water to boil, get the rest of your ingredients ready. You need a small onion, maybe the size of a door knob. I like a sweet yellow onion for this, but I imagine any onion is better than no onion. Peel it and cut it into long strips from pole to pole. Peel a large clove of garlic. Put the onions and the clove of garlic (whole) in the water with the beans, and add ½ a tablespoon of salt and ½ a tablespoon of sugar.

I admit the sugar and garlic are controversial choices, and ones I did not grow up with, but choices that dramatically elevate the dish. Also, the beans will probably need another ½ tablespoon of salt later in the cooking, but a lot depends on how salty the ham was, and you won’t know for a while. As my momma is fond of saying, it’s easier to add it than to take it out.

After your beans get to a rolling boil, you want to back off to a medium or low – whatever it takes to do a slow boil, just a bit more than a simmer. You want this to go on, with your pot covered, for about an hour, but stir the beans every 10-15 minutes. If you are doing other things, just do it as you pass through the kitchen – no need to set a timer or anything.

After your hour passes, turn it lower to a simmer and stir every so often. You will also need to check to make sure you don’t boil all your liquid away. I end up keeping a glass of water on the counter by the stove when I’m making beans, and I add a bit from time to time, always making sure to not drown them. Again, this isn’t soup. You want to keep an inch, no more than two, of water over the top of the beans.

Two hours in, check for salt, and most likely, add another half tablespoon. This is one of the danger points – too much salt makes them not fit to eat. By now, the broth is brown and has a filmy appearance to it as the meat and marrow dissolves into the bean juice and makes something amazing.

I don’t know how long this dish takes to make – there are a lot of variables. Fresher beans cook faster than older beans, and temperature settings like High and Medium are subjective. And I haven’t ever cooked on your stove. But between two and a half and three hours, take a couple of beans out and mash them between your fingers. If the bean splits in two, keep cooking. But a perfect bean will be slightly firm, and yet mash evenly between your fingers. Think of the difference between a raw potato and a baked potato. We are going for a baked potato here. If nobody is looking, you can eat a few and see how they taste. The meat will, by this time, have fallen off the bone and left it clean.

When you plate it up, make sure you put some meat pieces in each serving. The meat is very much part of this dish, as is the cornbread that traditionally is served with it. I like it in a bowl with lots of broth to sop up with my cornbread, but some folk like it on a plate. Either way, I am fond of putting some pickled green tomato relish (we call this relish chow-chow, but I understand people from north of here put cabbage in their chow-chow, and I don’t know how to feel about that.) on it, but my Dad always put pepper sauce on his. I knew one guy in the Marines that put ketchup on his beans – I never did trust that guy. Let your conscience be your guide.

You should, I am convinced, always have some dried beans in your pantry. Beans are cheap – a pound of pintos is roughly a dollar, give or take, and will feed six people. Four if they are hungry. They keep for ages. They are a wonderful source of protein. And they taste amazing.

You were probably with me up until that last sentence. But they do – correctly seasoned, like these are, beans are a miracle food that have kept many a poor person nourished and fed and happy. They are, done right, a poor man’s feast.

State Your Needs

While in Raleigh last week, a friend asked me to join Marco Polo, so we could send each other video messages. And because this friend is important to me, I did.

And since then, she has sent me three messages, and I had sent her one that basically said, “I am trying this thing out”. So this morning she sent me a message that said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I read all your blog posts, and I do that because you are important to me and that is how you prefer to share what’s going on. This is how I prefer to share what’s going on with me, and I hope that matters to you.”

Typing it out, that sounds harsh. But it’s true. This matters to her – to me, not so much. But it’s how she feels loved, and she matters to me, so I will do it, and find ways to make it a habit.

This is the same friend that revolutionized my life one day years ago, when I was complaining about a work relationship that wasn’t working out, and she told me that it was my fault my needs were not being met, because I wasn’t communicating them to the other person – I just sort of expected them to understand what I needed from them.

“State your needs, Hugh!”.

It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But I often find it really hard. And that is what my friend was doing this morning – stating her needs. The honesty was refreshing. I have come to love it when people tell me how to love them, even if I sometimes struggle to do it myself.

Ever since Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages came into prominence years ago, the idea of love languages has been in the popular vernacular. The idea behind the book is that different people have different ways that they feel love and express love, and if you don’t understand that, then your partner may not feel loved, despite your trying really hard.

Chapman’s model is primarily based in romantic love, and has five “languages”: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. So, if you show love by physical touch, and your partner feels loved by acts of service, she is pissed you don’t do anything around the house but want to cuddle all the time. Meanwhile, you are feeling like she is nagging you and distant.

I want to say up front that Chapman comes from an Evangelical Christian background, and while he is a pretty easy read, you should probably know that if you engage his work. But this isn’t really about his book, but rather the concept behind it: That different people feel and show love in different ways.

I believe this to be true, and would extend the concept beyond romantic love. Today, in response to one of my Facebook posts, a friend said that cooking for people was her love language. It’s one of mine, too. I feel loved when people read and engage things I write, or when someone really listens to me and I feel like they are paying attention to me. I show love by giving you books, cooking you a meal, and fixing your dishwasher.

I have another friend who loves to send text messages. I really don’t. But because he is important to me, we text regularly. And he is far away, and so I can’t fix his dishwasher. But even if I can’t show him love in a way that moves me right now, I can do things in a way that move him.

So I don’t know what your love language is, but I know you have one. Maybe it’s, “Share TikTok videos” or “Make me spaghetti”. Or maybe it’s “Help me do chores” or “Listen to me nonjudgmentally when I’m down”.

I know this all may seem somewhat self-evident, but as a pastor, I cannot tell you how many relationships I have seen fall apart because the people involved don’t know how to love each other. Let the people you are in relationship with know how to love you.

And state your needs.

Solstice

It was cold.

The sort of damp cold you only get in the American South – the sort that penetrates your defenses and goes down deep into your joints, and hurts.

The small crowd was a ragtag bunch – men who had no homes to go to, social workers, shelter employees, pastors and church volunteers, and some people who had lost people they loved that year. And most of us were in more than one category.

And we held candles, and we stood in silence as someone called off a list of names – names of people we all knew, and missed, and loved.

It was the annual memorial I went to every winter solstice when I lived in NC, a night where we honored the memories of those who had died while experiencing homelessness; done each year on the longest night, a night when one who was sleeping outside had to endure the most darkness, and had to wait the longest before the hope and safety that comes with the dawn.

For most of my career, winter meant death. Every year, I would bury people I knew and cared about who had died outside, alone, in the cold. But now I do different work, and while it doesn’t stop, it does slow up in the dead of winter, and there isn’t the frantic rush, the life and death struggle to get the blankets in time, the urgency to have hot coffee when you open the doors, the critical work of begging for dollars to buy hand warmers and sleeping bags to keep people alive.

So now, the days are short and the nights are cold and I sometimes feel stressed because my body knows I should be busy, my adrenaline surges because of the weather reports, my nervous system is geared up. Cold weather and short days are a legit anxiety trigger for me.

And then last year I spent the whole winter in a deep depression. And as I have come, slowly, out of it, I am trying to reboot myself, to feel things but also to look at what lies beneath he feelings, and to learn how to embrace the seasonality of it all.

This year I have sort of looked forward to winter, and have, more than any other year, tried to build a plan for it. I have a workshop now, a place I can go and do creative things in comfort, even when it is dark and damp outside. And my garden and yard got away from me this past year because of the depression, and so I look forward to the weeds dying and giving me a fresh start in a few months. And having a strong routine in place and a gym membership, where I can move my body independent of the weather has been crucial, too.

But mostly, I’m trying to live into this time of darkness being not a symbol of death but a symbol of dormancy, a time to rest and build up our inner resources, to embrace and own the hard work of survival we did this year, and to dream of the longer, brighter days to come.

Happy solstice, friends. It only gets brighter from here.

Habits Are Things You Get for Free

Yesterday, my friend Don told me that he admired my output since I began daily blogging. What he didn’t know is that if I don’t do it daily, it pretty much won’t happen at all. I write every day, because if I only write when I get in the mood, I will write never. In the first 9 months of 2021, I wrote 9 blog posts. Since October 1^st, I’ve written 72, and since November 1^st, I’ve written one every day.

Today I have written more than 2500 words, between two very rough draft blog posts, a newsletter, and this blog post. I have written about 25,000 words in the last 30 days, which is about half the number of words in The Great Gatsby, by writing every day. That is 25,000 more words that I would have written had I written when I felt like writing.

I publish newsletters on Monday and Friday, every week. As a result, I have sent hundreds of newsletters to my lists in the last 5 years. When I had a newsletter that I sent when I had something to say, I sent perhaps 3 in two years.

I was talking to a friend this morning as I was on the way to the gym to swim.

“I really admire your regularity. It’s impressive,” she said.

I told her that regularity was sort of my super power. Regularity can make you unstoppable. My ADHD brain thrives on structure, but has a really difficult time creating structure. Like many ADHD folks though, I thrive in structured environments, because it drastically reduces my choices, and choices are paralyzing for me.

That is why, for example, I wear the same clothes day after day. I don’t wear shirts with letters or graphics. I tend to wear earth tones, and literally I grab whatever shirt is on top of the pile. When I wore suits for a living I did the same thing, only with blue and white shirts, red ties, and blue suits. I don’t have to worry about what I will wear, or if it matches or is appropriate. I have casual clothes and work clothes and dress clothes and there are rules for all of them, and I only own clothes that follow those rules. As a result, I bet I spend less than two hours a year thinking about clothes.

Some people exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I would exercise Monday, Wednesday, and the forget and it would be Saturday and I would get mad and then forget Monday and say to hell with it.

Doing it every day means you don’t have to remember. How much time do you spend thinking about brushing your teeth? None, because it’s a habit. And as the writer and activist Corey Doctorow said, “Habits are things you get for free”.

I have a habit of exercising, whether that is a walk or a swim, every day. A habit of working in the shop after supper. A habit of reading before bed. A habit of writing. All things I get for free.

In fact, it’s the parts of my life I haven’t figured out how to create structure around that give me fits.

But I’m trying.

The Lemonade Stand

There is a neighborhood not far from me that is the “old, nice” neighborhood. For example, Eudora Welty once lived there. They film movies there sometimes. Think large houses, large lots, lots of trees.

I look for their curb alerts on the local listserve because these people throw away better stuff than I can afford to buy. For instance, not long ago, I got a Webber gas grill for free off someone’s curb in this neighborhood because it needed a $6 part.

A while back, I knew I would be going through this neighborhood, so I checked to see if anyone had recently put anything out, and fortune had shined upon me: Someone had posted a picture of some concrete yard art – cherubs, mostly – that would have worked perfectly in the crazy cottage garden I am building. So I set my course on Google maps and headed that way.

When I pulled up, I saw the cherubs sitting on the curb as promised, and across the street were two small children with an honest to God lemonade stand, complete with a homemade sign listing their hours of operation (1PM to 5:30PM) and everything.

I have a rule: I support motivated kids. Kids who cut grass. Kids who want to rake your leaves. Kids who sell things that benefit them (I do hate school fundraisers though). A kid who starts a business or has an interest in a hobby? I am a soft touch for all of that.

So, walking by the yard art on the curb, I walk over to the lemonade stand. The girl (age 6, I would learn) was already pouring me a cup.

We start talking. The little boy (age 4, but he turns 5 next June and so we talked about both having June birthdays) asked me how old I was. I told him 49, and he looked me up and down and then said, “Wooooow”. I resisted asking if he was concerned or impressed, as I feared I did not want to know the answer.

He had lots of questions. Where did I work? Did I have any little boys? Did I like my lemonade? I finished my cup while he was asking the questions, so his sister poured me another, and as she handed it to me reminded me that would be another 50 cents. Apparently, there are no free refills on this block.

I told them I had to leave, and the girl told me I should buy another to take home to my wife. I had a long day ahead of me before I would get home, though, so I bought another lemonade but asked them if I could come back and get it later. They readily agreed to this plan.

As we are talking and these kids are plotting how to ensure I am leaving them both broke and diabetic, a large, nice car pulls up and stops in the middle of the road. The little boy says, “Yay! Another customer!”, but it was not to be. This lady with improbably large hair got out of her car, walked over to the yard art, and put it all in her trunk while I am just standing there, holding my second lemonade and reconsidering my life choices.

“I guess she doesn’t like lemonade”, the girl said, as the land yacht pulled away with my yard art in its trunk.

I guess not.

Nostalgia for a Different Past

I don’t know if you have spiritual practices that others don’t view as spiritual practices, but I do.

One I have is looking at my Facebook Memories. It is like a perpetual journal, where I can see what was on my mind on this day for each year for the 14 years I have been on that platform. And sometimes I cringe at what I said, and sometimes the urgency of my post is lost, and now it just seems inane, but always I end up with things to reflect on in my quest to find healing for myself.

And recently I have been reflecting on the lost relationships I have, most especially with the people I grew up with. I saw where a person with whom I had went to High School had commented on something of mine from 10 years ago, but they are no longer my Facebook friend. And then I noticed they were Facebook friends with other people from my childhood that I didn’t know they knew (from a different circle of friends) and that made me reflect on A) How small the world of my childhood was and B) How shut out of that world I am now.

As a child, I had the curse of being the kid who read, and while that helped me substantially with trivia contests and ACT scores, it also made me dissatisfied with the small world in which I lived. It gave me a desire to see more of the world than the 33 acres on which we lived after inheriting it from my grandmother, and the small church with my grandfather’s name on the cornerstone as the chair of the building committee, and the sure thing job I could have had as a lineman for the Power company my cousin was the head of.

So, I left. In fact, I once overheard my mother describe me that way to a friend – Hugh was the one who left. I didn’t really have a plan, and it showed. I was a Marine for a while, and did all sorts of jobs from lineman to firefighter while I was a wandering scholar for a while, and I was a husband for a while until I wasn’t, and I sold securities and a hunk of my soul at a chance at the brass ring, only to find it was bitter in my mouth and required copious amounts of alcohol to make it palatable to me.

But all of that happened because I was the one who left.

I could have stayed. I would have had a good paying job. I had a ready-made social circle, and a name that in that community meant a level of privilege I have never felt elsewhere. My world would have been smaller but more comfortable, and definitely easier. I would most likely have married someone I had known for years and years, have bought a house not far from mom and dad, most likely have ended up on the best end of the Republican party (but maybe not, as my home county went for Obama, Clinton, and Biden in the last three Presidential elections), and been an active member of the Methodist church of my childhood.

But none of that happened, because I was the one who left. I met, and knew, and loved people who were different than any of the people we knew growing up. I read books that wouldn’t have been permitted in the small library of my home town. I saw parts of the world that are a mystery to some of the people I grew up with, and I knew both plenty and want, and learned from both experiences. And because of all of that, I came to care about things that were not concerns of the world in which I was raised.

I am the product of Scots-Irish honor culture, and we tend to feel strongly about things. For some of us it is the rights of the unborn, and for others the rights of LGBT folk to marry those they love, and for yet others it is SEC football, but we all feel strongly all the same. And because I was the one who left, I learned to feel strongly about things they did not.

And because we all feel strongly, it often leads to feuds at worst and passive aggression at best, and it meant that I wasn’t a member of those circles any more. I will never again spend a crisp morning in a deer stand with people I have known my whole life, or have a job in the community that nurtured my family for almost 200 years, or be welcome – fully welcome – in the church of my childhood.

I like being me. I love my life. But sometimes I wonder what it would have been like had I not left. Had I been content with where I was from, and decided to lean into being a member of that community.. If I had 5 acres with a horse in the back lot and a workshop and a pick-up truck, if the only wine I had ever drank was Boone’s Farm, if going to Memphis was as far as I would travel most years, if I was just an active member of a church where my kin were buried in the cemetery next door.

A friend, who also left, says that I am romanticizing what it would have meant to stay. But I just think I am having nostalgia for a different past.

Keeper of the Pictures

I am the keeper of the family photos. I think most families have someone like that – I have a dusty suitcase filled with snapshots of people I do not know.

I also have a hard drive full of photos Dad had started scanning, as well as the pictures from his iCloud account I downloaded when he died. There is no organization at all.

My dad liked to take pictures. Of everything.

When he was young, his pictures were more artistic. He wouldn’t have used these terms, but they were his creative outlet – his art, if you will. We were poor as dirt until I was a teenager, so money spent on film and developing was money that took from other things.

As he got older and digital cameras became common, he moved more into documenting in addition to creating. So I have countless pictures of some store he visited on a road trip. Or a piece of woodworking he admired and thought he might want to try some day. Or receipts he needed to submit for reimbursement.

I have like 30 Gig of pictures I need to sort though, most of which aren’t important at all. It’s a little overwhelming.

But I get the urge, sometimes, and I decide that the first thing I will do is just delete the photos that nobody will ever, ever need.

Pictures of receipts. Odometers. Random signs. Such as that.

Last night, I got such an urge and was clicking through them, deleting with abandon, when I came across a picture that stopped me cold.

It was a row of bottles of juice of various kinds: Orange, grape, apple. No context. No captions. Totally random.

But it wasn’t random to me. I know what’s going on here.

A thing you have to know for this to make sense is to know that Mom was in a bad car wreck 25 years or so ago, and it hurts her to stand for long periods of time. So, when there was something where you had to stand in line, often Dad would do it for her.

I said no context, but that’s not totally true. It was one picture in the middle of a bunch of pictures from about 10 years ago, when he and Mom went on a trip to Texas for a family reunion for Mom’s family. And the picture before this one was of a serving table full of food, like you would see at a potluck.

So what this picture tells me is that he stood in line to get them some food, and when it came time to pick a drink, he didn’t know what she would have wanted. So he took this picture to take back to her so she would know what juice options were available.

It’s the most Dad thing ever. He wouldn’t have wanted to make a mistake. And Mom isn’t predictable like that. So he took a picture so he could let her pick.

I have seen this exact scenario played out dozens of times. I can write the scene; I know it so well. He was so kind he wouldn’t want to take a chance on getting something this small wrong.

And just like that, I realized I wasn’t ready to delete this picture. Or any pictures.

So I close the folder one more time. I’ll try again later.

Maybe.

Independence Day

On this day in 2009, at 11:51AM Eastern Time, I went on Twitter and changed my world forever.

I had been bothering over something all morning. I had read an article about a church in Michigan that had disbanded their ministry that gave food to people experiencing homelessness rather than serve people who were LGBT.

This really pissed me off. On multiple levels.

I vague tweeted about it earlier in the day.

Again, the church that claims the name of Jesus would rather be right than compassionate. I love the church, but they don’t make it easy.

You have to understand that up to that point, we had been largely supported by Evangelical churches – not because our theology agreed with them, but because they said yes. Every Mainline or left of center church we approached either demurred or tied me up in committees for months. The Evangelicals would say yes quickly.

And I learned how to dance. I would couch what I said to them in ways that made them think I agreed with them, or at least, that they would not disagree with me. I once joked and said that fundraising in those days was like being a phone sex operator. I made the noises they wanted to hear, and then they gave me money.

But it was grating on me. I argued I was doing good work with their money – and I was. But more and more I came to see that the church was my actual “mission field” – that if the work of conversion needed to be done, it was converting those who would erect barriers to keep people out, who would gate keep love, that would put limits on God’s love and grace.

So it wasn’t so much this article I read itself, but more like it was the final breaking point. I decided, in a fit of anger, that I was done with dancing. I didn’t consult anyone. Didn’t warn anyone. Didn’t even really think it was going to be as bad as it was.

I tweeted the following post from the Twitter account of the small scrappy Christian Ministry I had started a few years before. And almost instantly, my world changed.

We will feed anyone, regardless of who you pray to or who you love. And we welcome ALL people of faith or no faith to help us.

I hit send on that tweet and set off an absolute shitstorm.

I lost two advisory board members that day. Over the next three months, I would lose most of the Evangelical churches that supported us. Three other folks who had been with us from the beginning left. Half our income was gone inside a month. I got a job selling hotdogs late at night outside a local leather bar to pay my rent.

I had, at that point, been married for just over a month.

I was terrified. We barely survived. I questioned my call to that work, my suitability to that work, and many other things. But I never regretted sending that tweet.

And I learned some things that year.

I learned who my friends were, and made many new ones. Queer folk rose up and saved us, promoted us, and fought for us.

I learned that I could look failure and fear in the face and survive.

I learned that if I don’t take your money, you don’t get to tell me what to do.

And that everything I wanted in life was on the other side of my fears.

But the most important thing I learned is that by planting a flag and loudly declaring my position, I made room. By declaring our position loudly and unequivocally, I used our privilege to create space for people who felt they had no space, and thus made room in a previously closed off space for them to be all they were made to be. And along the way, this also opened us up to far more opportunities and alliances than I ever imagined possible.

And I have never looked back.

It was my Independence Day.

NB: I don’t deserve a cookie for finally doing the right thing. If anything, I deserve condemnation for the years when I bowed and scraped for funds from people who, if they had known the truth, would not have funded us. By doing that, I centered the comfort of those with resources rather than vulnerable people, and I regret the years that happened, and have worked ever since to never do that again.