Hugh's Blog

I’m rooting for you.

It’s probably the nicest pool I have ever seen in my life.

It’s the half-sized pool, 25 meters long, but so wide it’s almost square. Three walls of the room are floor to ceiling windows, and there are skylights overhead, piercing the knotty pine ceiling, flooding the room with natural light. When you speak, the sounds bounce around a bit, sounding unnatural and flat.

There is another pool in the room – a square heated pool they call the therapeutic pool, but they assure me that if no one is using it for a group, I’m welcome to use it, too. When I walked through this morning, it was in use by two women who appear to be around 80, talking in low tones while using foam dumbbells to exercise.

My focus this year, the year after my Dad’s death, has been on my health. My dad was only 21 years older than I am, and while his death from a virus says nothing about my own life expectancy, it does make one begin to count. I’ve been eating better, and logging my food. I exercise nearly every day. I prioritize getting enough sleep.

And this week, I joined a gym with a pool, because my joints are trash after years of abusing them.

This morning, I put on my trunks (which fit me perfectly 50 pounds ago, but are now relying more than they should on the drawstring to defend my modesty) and slid into a warm pool, and commenced to do laps – quiet, slow, trudging laps – the equivalent of walking as opposed to the running the speedo-clad twenty-something guy in the next lane is doing.

I can only really backstroke with any degree of proficiency, so I am watching the ceiling, following along under a wooden beam that spans the length of the room, keeping all the moving parts going the way I was taught all those years ago on Parris Island: Hands up along the sides to the armpits, then out, then down, hands cupped. My shoulder grates a bit, unused to this particular motion.

And in the aisle next to me is a Black woman somewhere in her late 70’s, with the foam dumbbells, raising them and lowering them in the water, all the while moving down the length of the shallow end of the lane sideways, back and forth. A woman I assume to be her granddaughter cheered her on, saying, “Good job, Granny! I’m so proud of you!”

I knew I was not moving quickly, but I have to admit I did notice when Granny passed me. Several times.

And I did think, briefly, that it is a crying shame that my swimming ability is so slow that an 80-year-old woman can walk sideways faster than I can swim. But as I swam, back and forth, slowly, like an impressionistic portrait of the athlete I used to be, I couldn’t help but think how awesome it is that she is doing the work, and how great it is that her granddaughter is spending time with her, and how much I wish I could spend that sort of time with the people who loved me into being.

And then I spent some time in what my Buddhist friends call an act of Loving-kindness, where I just took Granny and her family and focused on them and wished them every good thing.

I’ve never been good at competition. I almost died as a kid, and often in the years after it was an accomplishment that I showed up. I learned long ago that whatever motivation I have to have to get through my day is going to have to come from my own motives, and not what you think of me.

And can we be honest with each other a minute and admit to ourselves and to each other just how hard the last two years have been? There has been so much put on us that we had to just survive, so any thought of winning or not seems so secondary right now. If we just show up, that feels like winning to me right now.

Wherever you are in this whole thing, I’m rooting for you. I want us all to win.

So good job, Granny. I’m proud of you, too. And while you might get there before me, I’m glad you’re ahead of me, to show me the way.

Biscuits I have known

When I pulled out of the cheap motel I had spent the night in the outskirts of Charlotte, NC, I couldn’t wait to hit the road. But first, I had to refuel. I grabbed some gas at the gas station, and spied a McDonald’s across the way. Say what you will about them, but they are reliable, if nothing else. I grabbed a sausage biscuit and coffee and hit the road.

It wasn’t all that good. Again – reliable, though. Like, you know how bad it’s gonna be in advance, and can brace yourself for it. And as often happens when I eat a food that is filled with memories, I reflect on previous meals I have had with that same food. And perhaps no food has more memories attached to it for me, in as many places, as do biscuits.

My momma didn’t make biscuits. Heresy, I know, but she wasn’t a natural cook. She married way too young, after a childhood of moving often as part of a military family. She had no traditions when she married dad. Dad’s mom died shortly after that. And we had to make it on our own, with nothing but church cookbooks, Southern Living, some elderly neighbors that loved us, and the back of boxes to guide us.

Mom never really enjoyed cooking. It was a thing she did, but you got no feeling she derived any pleasure from the act, nor appreciated the attention that comes from doing it well. It was a chore to be done, like washing the dishes or sweeping the floor, and gave her about as much pleasure as either of those tasks.

But Dad – now Dad could make a hell of a biscuit. Big, fluffy cathead biscuits, big as your fist. He didn’t do it often, but when he did, they were amazing. I remember weekend mornings when Dad would make breakfast – rarely, because when he worked for the gas company he worked Saturday mornings, and up until 14 or so we went to church regular as a family (one day, I’ll have to tell you the story of why we stopped. Or maybe not – some things are best handled around a table, late into the night). But when he did, you knew you were about to get fed. As a child, he taught me to make biscuits and scrambled eggs, because then you could always feed yourself for cheap, he told me.

My mom’s stepmother was a tiny woman who had grown up in the city, and while she loved me fiercely, she couldn’t make a biscuit. When we would go visit them in the summertime outside Dallas Texas, she would make sausage gravy and whop-em biscuits – called that because to open the can, you whopped em on the side of the counter – and they were a novelty for us. They were the cheap canned biscuits, small and round and flat topped, with a layered nature one never saw in a real biscuit. It almost felt like eating desert.

In the Marines, the mess hall would have biscuits, but they were square, for some reason known only to God and the Commandant, and I’m sorry, but you can’t really enjoy a square biscuit, even if it didn’t taste of too much baking powder, which these did.

Some years back, Renee got a biscuit cookbook and learned how to make amazing biscuits, a lot like the ones Dad made all those years ago. And they are huge and puffy and have little peaks and knobs, and because they are made with love and practice by someone who loves me, I love them.

But my platonic ideal of a biscuit is none of those.

Her name was Montaree, but we all called her Aunt Monty (pronounced Ain’t Monny). She and her husband Doc lived in a 900 square foot house they built on three acres my grandmother sold them at a time when our money was tight. My Aunt Louise’s husband had built and wired the house for them, and it had pine floors with amber shellac. And growing up, they played the role in my life grandparents would have traditionally, had my folks not all died off when I was little.

Monty made biscuits every morning of her life up until Doc died and she moved to be with her son in Jackson. But that wouldn’t be until after I left – my whole childhood, she made biscuits. She had a five-gallon sized metal bucket, with a tight fitting lid, she kept in the cabinet under the counter that she kept her flour in – self-rising flour bought in 25 pound sacks made from cloth, that had a dish towel that came with it as a premium. I don’t think she ever had a purpose bought dish towel.

She had a large bowl not used for anything other than biscuit making, and she would scoop out flour from the bucket, and put it in the bowl, making a depression in the middle of the pile of flour, into which she took a small lump of lard in the winter (after hog killing) or shortening in the summer (after the lard ran out) and massaged it all in, so it looked like corn meal when she was done. To this she added sweet milk a splash at a time until it was right, and then massaged it into a wad of dough.

She then floured the countertop and patted out the dough until it was thin and used a tin can with the ends cut out (that resided in the flour bucket, along with the biscuit bowl when not in use) to cut out the biscuits. She would place the biscuits on a small cookie sheet, perhaps 8×16, that was so old its origins were lost to history, and before putting them in the oven would smear a light coat of whatever grease she was using, lard or shortening, on top.

I must have watched her do it a hundred times. There would always be scraps of dough left over, which she would fashion into a small freeform biscuit that was meant for me. These were not elegant biscuits. They were not even all that pretty. They were flat, perhaps ¾ of an inch thick, the size of a regular tin can, with none of the knobs and bumps of the biscuits Dad made, and which I saw in magazines. They were lightly browned on the bottom and golden on the edges of the top, and had a crumb that reminds one visually, but not texturally, of English muffins.

These were not fancy biscuits but daily biscuits, which fed a well digger for 50 years and were literally their daily bread. It was the bread with their meals – they were made fresh and eaten hot for lunch, their big meal, and leftovers were eaten cold at supper and for breakfast. I can close my eyes and smell the hot bread and the plum jelly, made from the wild plums by the clothesline, and feel the melting butter run over my fingers and drop off my chin.

I love to cook. I derive pleasure from it, and pleasure from being good at it, and while I can make a passable biscuit, I have never been able to make a biscuit like Monty’s. Lord knows I’ve tried. Hell, I’ve never even seen another one like it.

I guess those biscuits will just have to live in my memory. But this fall, I did plant some wild plums out by the fence line, so at least one day I can have some decent jelly.

The day I did not die

Content Warning: Descriptive narrative of a suicide attempt. Discussion about suicide and mental illness and depression.

I was 16 years old, and my parents were not home. I don’t know how to describe it – it was just a wave that came over me, and when it did, I was ready.

I was a smarter than average kid who looked differently than his classmates – I was scrawny, pimply, socially awkward and most of all, afraid. I was always afraid. These days you would say I was bullied. In those days, I would have said I was in hell. But that wasn’t the reason it came over me. But had I been successful, it would have been the reason ascribed to my actions.

I had read countless accounts of suicide – no mean feat in that pre-internet age. I had read all the dictionary entries, all the encyclopedia accounts. Then I researched famous suicides – Socrates, Hemingway, anyone at all who had made their way into the Britannica. I had a morbid fascination with death, and with suicide.

So when the dark wave came, I was ready.

I had received a shotgun for Christmas when I was 14. There were strict rules around its use, but it was unlocked. I sat on my bed and loaded it with buckshot. I took off my shoes, because I had figured out I could pull the trigger with my toe – a “trick” I had learned in a book I read about famous deaths. I put the barrel in my mouth – right now I can taste the bitter, acrid taste of the oil and the metal on my tongue – and placed my toe on the trigger.

And I sat there for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably 30 seconds or so.

And then I took the barrel out of my mouth, unloaded the gun and put it away. I don’t know why. The darkness receded, just like it came. I was horrified to find myself there. And it would be more than 10 years before I would tell anyone that it had happened.

I was on no list of people who would have been watched. I had a neurologist, but no therapist. No guidance counselor ever approached me. No teacher was concerned about me. I should NOT have had a shotgun, but in my world, people my age often did, and so nobody could have known. I was active in youth group, had been baptized, and would have strongly identified as Christian.

It wasn’t the last time I thought about self-harm, however. Once since then since then, I was as close as that day, and have been contemplative multiple times, although not for several years now. The darkness just comes on sometimes, and it seems an incredibly rational solution to end the pain. It is always late at night (more accurately early morning). I hate waking up at 3 or 4am – not because I am afraid I won’t go back to sleep, but because I am afraid of where my brain will take me if I stay awake.

Don’t mishear me – I have a good support structure in place. I have tools and strategies should things get scary, and I learned to recognize triggers, and avoid them. I have people who know my history, who love me, who I feel safe calling should I need them. There are people Renee knows to call if I scare her with my moods. Mentally, I am in pretty good shape these days. Or as good as one can expect given everything that has happened the last two years.

When all is said and done, most suicide is a symptom of mental illness. And mental illness is just illness, like pneumonia is illness, or cancer is illness.

I’m not saying nobody ever rationally decides to end their own life. The enslaved Africans who threw themselves into the waters of the Atlantic rather than be enslaved made a rational choice. Those who fell from the burning building rather than burn – I get that. People facing months and months of excruciating pain before their inevitable deaths – totally understandable. But we are not talking about those people right now.

People who appear happy can be mentally ill, and people who are bullied can be mentally ill, and people who have families that love them can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

Likewise, people who love Jesus can be mentally ill. People who go to church can be mentally ill. People who are clergy can be mentally ill. And all of those people can commit suicide, because suicide is a symptom of mental illness.

And when people die of illness, it’s horrible, but we don’t blame them for it. We wish it could have been prevented, and we seek to prevent other people from dying from it.

So, this is why we don’t have shotguns in my house – ever. And why every chance I get, I tell people that they need to take care of themselves, and be honest with the people who love them, and don’t be ashamed to ask for help. Because the world is a much better place with you in it.

If you feel like hurting yourself, please don’t. The National Suicide Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. And if you don’t want to call them, please call someone.

Grief (not a poem)

I don’t know how to explain
That it isn’t just that he died.
It’s that the world I lived in died too.
Because I have never lived in a world
That didn’t include him.
I don’t know how to explain
That sometimes the grief washes over me
And then I can’t breathe, I can’t function.
So the report doesn’t get written, the form not filed
And my dreams get deferred.
I don’t know how to explain
That it isn’t your fault I’m distant.
It’s not you – it’s me. It’s very much me.
I am learning how to live in this new world.
And I don’t like it here.
I don’t know how to explain it. So I don’t.

Dad and the pocket knife

One winter in the early 2000’s, I was practically penniless. I had gone through a career change, giving up my gig as a “Financial Adviser” in order to save my soul. A nasty divorce ensued, and I had been legally homeless for a few months earlier that year, when I lived in the backroom of the small (failing) bookstore I bought as my “second act”. I moved in with my girlfriend as a way of surviving that winter.

She invited my parents to Christmas dinner that year, without telling me she was going to. I was pissed – largely because my parents and I were going through an awkward phase after my divorce, but not the least of which was I had wanted to avoid having to buy them the sort of present you open in front of other people. You know – nice ones.

I honestly forget what I ended up buying Mom, but I knew Dad, and when in doubt, Dad was always happy to get a tool or pocketknife. I scrimped and saved, and believe me when I tell you I had no money, so I was waiting as long as possible in the year to buy him something. You would not believe how scarce money was for me that year.

Finally, 2 days before Christmas, I went into the small hardware store near our house to look at knives. I had, unfortunately, waited too late, and all the lower priced knives were sold out. But there was a large yellow handled Case XX sitting in the display case that was about $60, which was about $20 more than I would have paid elsewhere and about $35 more than I had planned on spending.

But when I turned 15, I had bought a hunting knife with my birthday money, and I had bought a Case XX, because Dad told me what a good brand it was. Dad told me at the time he always wanted a Case XX knife, but he couldn’t justify the money.

So anyway, here we are, some 17 years later, and I was feeling a lot like a failure and had just watched my life fall apart and everything was turning to crap, but I could buy my Dad a knife he would want and be proud of, and it would be from me.

So I bought the knife. He ooohed and awed over it at Christmas, and he was beaming. I was glowing, knowing I gave my dad something he actually wanted.

It’s been nearly 20 years since I thought about that knife. That girlfriend and I tried really hard, but it didn’t work out. Eventually I would close the store and move to NC to work out some crazy ideas I had about how we could address homelessness. It was there it all turned around for me.

And then last October, Dad died, and Easter Sunday of this year I was standing in their bedroom, going through a box of his things Mom had put aside for me to look through, and there was the yellow handled Case pocket knife.

It’s scratched up now, and the blades are worn from being run endlessly over an oilstone and there is some staining, but all of that is patina from use. You see, my Daddy not only liked my knife, but he used it.

Dad would never hurt someone’s feelings. Ever. If he hadn’t liked it, he never would have said anything, but he would have just slid it into a drawer and forgotten about it.

But no – he used it, he carried it, and obviously liked it. And now it is mine again, and it is far more valuable to me now than it was that Christmas all those years ago, and it has cost so very much for it to come back in my possession.

At the funeral home.

The slide show plays on the monitor on the wall, a large selection of pictures from her life on repeat roll past, with no pattern to the selection. Here she is in her team photo from when she played basketball in 1940, here she is in the nursing home, here she is at her second wedding 10 years ago, here she is at 17 doing a backbend.

We are gathered in a loose circle in front of the coffin that contains the subject of the slide show. We alternate between pointing out things on the slides, looking at the woman in the casket, and having snippets of conversation. We are participating in the “viewing”, a much more sedate version of the wake, where the body is on display a few hours so friends and loved ones can pop by to say a few words and pay their respects.

The slide show is a recent innovation.

As we stand there, someone says, “I bet she can hear us right now, and is laughing.”

Her granddaughter turns to me. “Can she?”

“Can she what”, I ask.

“You’re a preacher. Can she hear us?”

“Oh. I don’t know”, I say, quite truthfully.

A long pause ensues.

“I mean, I can tell you what the Christian tradition say – actually traditions, because there is more than one version. But nobody really knows.

“But I can tell you that she loved God. We are told there is no place God is not, so she was with God before her passing, and she is with God after her passing, and she is more fully in the presence of God now than she was before.”

“So she is in heaven.” Another lady chimed in.

“Again, I don’t know that she is in some specific place or what that looks like. Nobody does. But I do know she is no longer confused, and no longer hurting, and she had a long, hard life and is now at peace.

“Meanwhile, we have dozens of stories to remind us of when she was here and how much she loved us, and we have the opportunity every day for the rest of our lives to be the sort of person she thought we could be. And in turn, we pass those lessons on, and her influence and love will continue on for generations.”

Another long pause.

“I like that”, one woman says. “I like that a lot.”

Me too, I say. Me too.

Miracle Enough

I spent this morning among Pentecostal folk.

I have never seen a blind man regain sight.
I have never seen a cancerous tumor go away untreated.
I have never spoken in tongues.

When I prayed over the dying, they still died.
Despite intense prayer, my church still has a hole in its roof.
And praying in Jesus name has yet to bring me wealth.

But each day about 5PM, the birds gather
in the bamboo grove near my house
And sing songs of praise as they prepare to sleep.

And for me, that is miracle enough.

Indispensable and Invisible

Like many children, I ran away from home.

Not literally – I was way too chickenshit for that. I did dream of building a raft and going down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans on it after reading Huckleberry Finn, but it never happened.

No, my childhood was about wanting and desiring what I did not have, and rejecting that which I did have. And so as soon as I was able, I left.

One example of this is that while I am naturally like both of my parents – my mother’s boldness and passion, my father’s introversion and peacemaking – I saw those things as flaws to overcome, rather than gifts to embrace.

Our heroes often contain what we lack. How many bullied children have looked up to Superman and dreamed that they too could save the day and be respected for their strength? Our conception of God (or gods) often does too, but that is another conversation for another day. As the meme’s say, y’all ain’t ready for that conversation.

My heroes were rich. Assertive. Full of confidence. Respected for their business acumen. Donald Trump. Lee Iacocca. Gordon Gecko.

Or strong, physically. Lee Haney. Sylvester Stallone. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I had no heroes that worked behind the scenes for systemic change, who showed up and did the work and were respected for their work ethic, their persistence, and their wisdom. That isn’t to say I did not know such people: I did, and was raised by them. But I did not see those traits as traits to be admired.

So I ran away to become strong and rich. I was a Marine and then a salesman. I was strong and if not rich, I made good money and learned that lesson many people who aspire to wealth learn – how to fake it: You lease cars you cannot afford to buy, you buy your designer suits at factory outlets, you learn enough about wine to drop tidbits into conversations at dinner in the restaurant you put on your credit card.

But this post isn’t about that – I have covered that ground elsewhere.

Even after I walked away from that life, I still tended to approach things as someone assertive and full of confidence, full of privilege and assertiveness. Like, imagine Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, but after he joined a contemplative order of monks.

In some sectors of the Christian Tradition, they lift up aggressive voices that conflict with the status quo and call them prophetic, and if they are not honored, they are often respected. I often got put in this camp, and thus received social recognition and reinforcement for my privilege and brashness.

It becomes an endless cycle, however, and you have to keep amping up the aggressiveness or else you risk someone else being more aggressive that you are, and thus eclipsing you and then you no longer get the social reinforcement you crave and are feeding on. And then, like Icarus, you may end up flying too close to the sun and destroy yourself in the process.

When I moved to Jackson three years ago, I was exhausted after more than a decade of being the angry prophet that vigorously defended my community’s right to exist.

Exhausted.

The last three years have been a time of rebuilding and reflecting. Of doing good work that nobody on Facebook knows about. Of building local relationships. Of learning how to actually organize people to action, instead of just making them angry. Of learning how to change things when you are not the one in charge. Of learning how to take care of myself. A time of learning how to fall in love with a place and its people.

It is not lost on me that had I embraced the models I had at home, I could have saved myself a good 25 years of striving.

After I was an adult, my Dad once told me his goal over his career had been to be both indispensable and invisible.

“Son, if the only way people know you are important is that you told them you were, then you weren’t important anyway.”

I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying.

The world is listening.

When I read old novels from the turn of the last century, it’s a kick to see that they didn’t really have protocols in place on how to answer the phone yet.

Some of them answered with the name of the family that lived there: “Smith Residence”.

Some answered with their phone number: “4286”.

Some said, “What?”

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, favored “Ahoy” as his preferred answer.

When I was little, almost 50 years ago, our small town phone book had instructions in the front of the book for how to use the telephone, and it recommended you answer the phone with “Hello”. Which, I recently learned, was the protocol recommended by Thomas Alva Edison.

Anyway. My point is, it takes time to learn how to best use a new technology. And so when I get frustrated with the ways some people use Social Media, I try to remind myself that the medium didn’t really go mainstream until after the smartphone went mainstream – about 12 years ago. It’s a very young medium, and many people still don’t have intuitive ways on how to act there. I mean, my mom signs her text messages, for crying out loud.

Historically, most of us only had one on one relationships. I would talk to Bill, and then I would talk to Mary. I may, at a party or something, talk to both Bill and Mary. But mostly we talked one on one. We didn’t have many other options.

Some people had public relationships. Pastors come to mind, as well as teachers and of course celebrities – people who were watched, who had a platform and the capability of being heard by many people at once, and who were known by many more people than they knew.

But now many of us have these public relationships. And we are like the nouveau riche child stars who don’t know how to handle the sudden attention and so we act out and end up with the equivalent of a heroin addiction and a neck tattoo.

Because of the algorithms, despite the fact that I have more than 2400 Facebook friends and more than 1400 additional people follow me there, I really only interact with about 150 of them regularly. And so it’s easy to think that when I post something there, I only imagine I am only talking to those 150 people. But I’m not.

Instead, I have found it useful to imagine I am having a conversation on a live radio show, and I am broadcasting for all the world to hear. If you were having a conversation on a live radio talk show, you would comport yourself differently.

In any event, we are all still figuring this out, this mixture of public and private, and we all have different boundaries and lines. But it’s important to think about these things because right now, there is no “standard”, and the medium thus requires a level of intentionality that most of us are unused to.

Here is a concrete example that may be helpful:

It is not uncommon when someone dies for their friends or family to post it on Facebook. It makes a lot of sense to let people who you are not in regular contact with know what has happened.

Sometimes it is simple, like, “My aunt Mary died last night, the funeral is Friday.” And other times someone writes a formal obituary, such as you might have put in the paper in the past.

But the key is, and a good general rule on social media is, people get to decide how much they share. So when somebody posts that someone has died, please don’t ask how they died. If it’s important to the conversation, they will tell you. And if it isn’t, then that isn’t information they want to share.

When Dad died last year at the height of the pandemic and I saw lots of people acting like this virus was not serious, it was important to me that you know he died from COVID. That he was a First Responder and caught this virus while caring for people who were dying from this virus was important to me. So I made sure you knew, in everything I wrote, that he died from COVID.

But I, the author, get to decide.

If we were on a live radio show, and I told you my 17-year-old daughter died*, would you say, “How did it happen?”. I hope not. But some people have no problem asking that question on Facebook, while not seeing it’s just rude and inappropriate. Do you really want me to say, on a live radio program, “She killed herself, Karen”?

No, Karen imagines it is just us, one on one, chatting away in the living room, eating tea cakes and coffee. But it isn’t. We are on the air. And the whole world is listening.

*For the record, I do not have a 17 year old daughter.

The Bully

He was a nerdy kid. Let’s call him Brian.

Brian’s family had been living in England before moving back to the States. He didn’t really fit in.

To start with, he was very small. Like, much smaller than other kids his age. He was a year behind me when we shared Algebra II class, when I was in the 11^th grade. He looked like a 6^th grader when he was in the 10th grade.

But a well-dressed 6^th grader, because he wore a tie most days, and often a blazer. Our school was in the middle of a dairy farm, and smelled strongly of cow manure. Blazers and ties were seldom seen. We believed his clothing was a holdover from his time in the UK, but who knows. Not me, anyway. I don’t remember asking him much about himself. He also wore product in his hair, which he wore in a style reminiscent of something from the movie Grease.

Brian also spoke very properly, and sneered at our accents. He made us feel inferior – like he really knew he was better than us. Brian didn’t make it easy to like him, and we tended to distrust anyone who is different.

There was a Senior in that Algebra II class as well – let’s call him Steve. Steve was very popular. And attractive. And a cut up. Girls thought he was adorable.

I was not popular. Nor adorable. Nor attractive. In fact, the only thing I really had going for me was that Steve thought I was funny. It helped that we both were failing this class, so we bonded over that.

And for some reason, Steve seemed set to make Brian’s life miserable. I don’t think Steve really thought poorly of Brian – it’s just that Brian was easy to pick on, and was often the butt of Steve’s jokes. Brian had a last name that seemed tailor-made for making fun of. Steve was happy to oblige.

I was desperate to fit in, so I made fun of Brian too. This was another way Steve and I bonded – over our shared hazing of Brian. Once, I remember Brian falling asleep at his desk, and I tied his shoe laces together. Steve then slammed a book down, and Brian jumped up, and then fell on his face. We all laughed. The teacher laughed.

Brian didn’t laugh.

When I watch Back to the Future and I see the way Marty McFly’s dad acts around Biff – that good natured aww shucks sort of ingratiating thing he did – that was how Brian acted towards Steve and me.

These days we would say that Brian was being bullied by Steve and I. At the time, we made snide comments about Brian’s being gay, but he wasn’t – he was just different. I was different too, but I sought out someone who I could feel superior to so I could be assured that I was not on the bottom.

The way we treated Brian was wrong, on multiple levels. It was wrong, period, but I also hate that I did it in order to suck up to someone else. I was cruel in order to be popular. Several people that year mentioned, when they signed my yearbook, how funny I was in Algebra II class. In other words, I was funny and liked because I was cruel to Brian.

I only remember Brian being at school that one year. Some folks said his family moved to Memphis. I never heard from him again. Steve graduated and now is a truck driver. And I did lots of things before I ended up being me.

Recently, I wondered what became of Brian. I looked him up on Facebook. He had a very distinctive name, and so it didn’t take long to find him. He had gone into the Army right after high school, and there were lots of pictures of him still looking small, but otherwise very brave in his desert fatigues during Desert Storm. He then became a cop, and there are lots of pictures of him with guns, with “thin blue line” posters, pictures of him looking very serious and posed, like he is trying to convince himself that he was really strong.

There were pictures of him and his wife and their two kids. He apparently liked to hunt and had taught his son to hunt. There were lots of overtly patriotic imagery too. It seems as an adult, Brian liked to project an image of strength.

Two things stood out: Although we had gone to the same school, we had no shared friends on Facebook. And his last Facebook update was in the middle of 2018. I Googled his (rather distinctive) name and learned he had died from suicide in June of 2018.

A therapist who knew me pretty well once asked me what I was repenting of to live the sort of life I do now. I told her it wasn’t quite that simple of a story, but there were many stories. And one of those stories would have been about Brian.

There is no way to wrap this up prettily. I wish I could tell you that before he died, Brian and I had made amends. That I was able to ask his forgiveness before he died. That he had forgiven me for the way I bullied him in the fall of 1988 so popular people would like me.

I wish I could tell you any of that. But that’s the thing about death – it stops everything in its tracks. It takes away all your options. And if I have learned anything in life, it is the futility of wishing you had a different past.

But as long as you are alive, you can still have a different future.