Hugh's Blog

Road Trip

When I was in my mid-twenties in the 90’s, I had a job working as an account manager for a national janitorial company. We would contract with someplace like Best Buy to clean all the stores in a given district, and then find local folks to subcontract the individual stores to. We made money on the spread between the amount we got and the amount we paid the subs.

Because I am pretty good at de-escalation and have good people skills, I would often be used as a trouble-shooter on troubled accounts. There was much I did not like about this job: Many of the subcontractors were undocumented folks we were taking advantage of; Our entire business model consisted of paying as little as we could to small business so we could make as much money as possible; and we always took the side of the clients over the workers. Always.

When I first started troubleshooting, I was told by the CEO of our firm that his technique in these situations was to do a site visit, assemble the cleaning crew, tell them their performance had been unacceptable, and then fire half of them right then.

I asked how he knew which ones had been causing the problems.

“I don’t,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. They don’t speak English, so you couldn’t find out anyway. Just fire half of them, and the rest will be so scared they will do whatever you tell them.”

Then he invited me and my then-wife to come to the Christmas pageant at his church.

“The choir is so good. It just really makes you feel like Jesus is right there, you know?” he told me.

See? There are reasons this was not to be my career.

Anyway. The one thing I did like about this job was that I traveled a lot. I would fly into Flint, Michigan, for example, and then rent a mid-sized car and spend a week visiting every Best Buy in the state – I think there were 14 of them at the time. I might drive 5 hours, and then visit with the store manager and do a tour and makes appropriate noises and then drive 3 hours and do the same things in a different store, and then rent a room at whatever motel was by the store and eat at a decent chain restaurant and then go back to the room and crash, because I needed to be up at 4AM to see the cleaning crew, and then keep repeating that until I had seen the whole district.

I don’t like driving, but I like solo road trips. I like the meditative aspects of the roadside passing by, the sky unfolding in front of you, the hum of the tires on the asphalt, the feeling of vastness that is this country.

This Thursday, I’m renting a mid-sized car and driving 12 hours to Raleigh, NC for the memorial service for my friend Blugh. She died way too early, for reasons that make no sense to anyone, especially not her partner and kids.

When I met her, she was homeless but getting clean after years of a heroin habit. Eventually, she got and stayed clean and came to work with me as a Peer Support Specialist, helping people who were still using or who were experiencing homelessness get access to resources they needed. She was so good at that work – it was as if she had been made to do it.

Even after I moved away we still talked on the phone once a month or so, and back in October, she asked me if I thought she should keep doing this work. She was in a rough patch, and she was considering giving it up. I told her that she was incredibly gifted at this work, but that one doesn’t win wars by dying for your country. I wish I had advocated harder for the “take care of yourself” camp.

I’m giving myself 24 hours to do a 12-hour drive so I have time to be alone with my thoughts. I might drive straight through, but also might just stop at a motel along the way if I get tired.

In other words, it’s pretty unstructured. I need the alone time to think, time to remember my friend, and tell myself that none of this is my fault.

Eventually, I may even believe it.

Kindness

When I was 5 years old, my best friend in the world was a boy named Paul who went to kindergarten with me, and who lived a mile and a quarter up the road from our house.

Paul was adopted, and his parents had been around 50 when they adopted him as an infant, so Paul always had the “old” parents. By contrast, my parents were 21 when I was born, so his parents were nearly 30 years older than mine.

His father was a tall man, who worked in a warehouse and had thick ropey muscles in his arms, and a silhouette of a naked lady putting on her panties on one forearm, and an anchor on the other – vestiges of his time in the Navy. At the time, it was the coolest thing in the world. I remember asking him if the naked lady was Paul’s mom, and he just giggled.

He also had an old Ford Falcon that he had turned into a pickup truck with the help of a cutting torch and some plywood. If there was anything cooler than having a naked lady tattooed on your arm, it was making your own pickup truck. I thought Paul had the coolest parents in the world.

Anyway, it was Paul’s birthday, and I was invited. It was a beautiful spring day, and there were lots of kids there. Paul’s parents didn’t have a lot of money and they lived in a small single-wide trailer with one bathroom. And so, predictably, when there were suddenly 10 little boys in the house, a line formed outside the bathroom. And I suddenly had stomach cramps.

I was hurting bad. My stomach was churning and there was this long line to the bathroom and suddenly my intestines exploded and then there was warm diarrhea running down my legs inside my Sears ToughSkin jeans. I was mortified. But, as often happens when you get everything out of you, I felt so much better, other than having a pants load of poop, that is.

I went and found Paul’s mom, but I couldn’t tell her I had crapped my pants. So I told her I wasn’t feeling good, and asked if somebody could please take me home. Paul’s dad was pressed into service. I climbed into the cab of his homemade pickup truck, with a cloud of putrid funk following me. He gets in, looks at me, and rolls down the window. We head to my house.

At the stop sign, he said, “So, you are not feeling good?”

I replied that I was not.

He said, “You know, it smells like you messed your britches.”

I sat silent, mortified.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

When we pulled up in the driveway, Dad was outside, working on the car. Mom came out when she saw us, and I ran to her and hugged her legs. Paul’s dad explained that I said I wasn’t feeling well, and he and Dad talked about whatever was wrong with our car while Mom took me inside, her nose telling her exactly what the problem was.

She asked what had happened, and I told her, and she told me it was OK, and asked how I felt. I told her I felt wonderful, now. She asked if I wanted to go back to the party. I assured her I did. She cleaned me up, we put on new clothes, and I ran outside and told Paul’s dad I felt much better now and asked if I could go back to Paul’s with him when he went.

On the way back, he looked at me, and said, “So you feel better?”

I assured him I did.

“I’m glad.”

And the rest of the way in silence, and everyone welcomed me back when we pulled up at Paul’s house, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

There were so many ways that could have went differently. He could have made a big deal out of how much I stunk. He could have laid out plastic for me to sit on, or demanded I answer him when he asked if I had soiled myself. I was already embarrassed beyond belief – he could have made it so much worse.

But he didn’t. Instead, he tried to empathize with me, and normalize what I was feeling.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

I think about that story sometimes, about just how… kind he was in that moment to a mortified kid with poop in his socks.

Kindness counts.

Grief: A metaphor

It’s been a rough week.

A friend died earlier this week, very suddenly. She had overcome a lot, had provided hope to a lot of people, and now she’s gone.

I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet.

But it stirred up some thoughts about Dad’s death last year.

A friend who lost her dad a few years ago and I were talking this morning about Dad’s death, and she asked how I was coping.

I told her that if was as if when he died a piece of glass shattered, with sharp edges and jagged pieces everywhere. And for weeks, these pieces just tumbled around, slicing and stabbing. It was really bad.

But as time went on, they rubbed up against each other, and eventually the edges wore smooth. They are still there, easily observable, but for the most part, they are softer, less abrasive, almost beautiful, like sea glass.

But every once in a while, you find a sharp edge. It catches you by surprise when it happens.

It happens less often than it did. But it still happens.

Hope is a choice.

I met a new friend today. At least, I think we will be friends.

It was one of those conversations where you just agree to meet up for coffee and before you know it, three hours have passed and you have talked about 5 or 6 different things, and the conversation flows easily from one thing to the next. Those are rare for me, but I love it when they happen.

And one of the things we talked about was how change happens. I have these conversations a lot these days. We look around us and feel like things are bleak and divided, and we wonder if there is any way out. If those who work to oppress others, those who would take rights from others, those who work for their own self-interest even when it hurts others, and we wonder how we get them to change.

My new friend was somewhat cynical. “I think I have given up on their changing,” she said. “I mean, I want to believe they can, but it doesn’t feel like a real possibility”.

I told her I didn’t have enough self-esteem to believe that people can’t change.

She was puzzled. So I explained that I once believed very different things than I do now about… almost everything. I used to be an Evangelical who wanted to save your soul from Hell, and now I’m not. I used to believe God did not love Gay people, and now I don’t believe that. I used to chase money, and now I chase relationships. I used to want to distance myself from the South, and now it’s a core part of my identity.

“But here’s the thing: In every one of those instances, I didn’t change because I accidentally had a change of heart, but because of a relationship I had that caused me to reconsider my position. I changed because who I knew changed, and I changed because my ideology had to follow my relationships. My heart changed, and then waited for my head to catch up.

The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel said that when it came to God, there were no proofs, but only witnesses. In other words, some things can’t be proven but only experienced. I believe people can change because I have changed. A lot. I can’t prove that people can change, but I am a witness to the fact that they do.

And I don’t believe I’m special. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not. I’m pretty mundane, actually. And if I can change, as un-special as I am, then pretty much anyone can, given time and the right relationships. Or else I have to assume I’m so special that I think I can change, but they can’t. And I don’t have enough ego for that.

“That is… hopeful. Maybe more hope than I have right now,” she said.

“Oh yeah. It’s hopeful as hell. Because I want things to change. And I believe that the only way things will change is because people change. And if I thought people couldn’t change, then what choice would I have but despair? So I find myself having to choose between hope and despair.

“And I choose hope.”

Reflecting on 30 Days of Gratitude

“Twenty Twenty One hasn’t been so bad,” she said. “It just feels like… Groundhog Day, maybe. Every day is the same. Lots of uncertainty. We are both home pretty much all the time. Going out feels unsafe, but you see lots of people acting like 10,000 Mississippians didn’t die in the 18 months.”

It was the end of October, and Renee and I were sitting at our kitchen table, having just eaten one of perhaps a dozen meals that we have in rotation right now – meals we can fix with little mess and fuss, that don’t require much creativity or fresh produce. We think of it almost as a pandemic playlist, but for meals.

And that is what so much of my life is like these days – hoping for a time beyond this current uncertainty, and yet realizing we are going to be here for a really long time. If I still drank, a drinking game where I take a shot every time someone says “the new normal” would wreck my liver in short order.

I just happened to be on Facebook on November the 1^st when someone posted their first post of “30 days of Gratitude”, a popular Facebook meme where you post a thing each day for which you are thankful.

Honestly? These things suck me in. My ADHD brain loves structure – but my executive function is such that my brain can’t manufacture it. So, 30 days where I don’t have to think about what to write about is a gift. So I decided to use it as a prompt.

I made some rules.

Other than Renee, I couldn’t write about being thankful for a living person. That was mostly to avoid leaving people out.

I had to have an original picture I took or owned to illustrate or accompany the post. In other words, no stock photos. The only time I broke that was the Doctor Jabbour post.

I have a complicated relationship with my past – I know a lot of us feel that way. But I also have come to recognize that the things for which I am grateful have come out of my past – that I am really the product of my stories. So each post needs to have a story in it.

I had to write it every day. I broke that rule once, writing Thanksgiving’s the day before, but I was on the road 10 hours out of 36 during that time, so if I didn’t do it the day before, it wouldn’t have happened.

And it needed to be at least 500 words. To put that in perspective, this post you are reading now is at 450 words at the end of this sentence.

And after a year of writing about Dad, I decided that no single post would be about him.

There were days I had no idea what I was going to write about. Some days I wouldn’t know until I was halfway through the post. Some days I thought it was going to be about X, and it ended up being about Y. Sometimes I narrowed it down while writing: The post about Heather started as a blanket post about my LGBT friends, the same way I wrote about my atheist friends. The post about friends who disagree with me started about a particular person, but he was still alive, and the more I wrote I realized he was one of several in that position.

And I think that is the thing I liked most about it – in fact, it’s one of the things I like about writing: The discovery. That you learn something you did not know before as you write.

Having grown up evangelical, every time someone mentions the word accountability, I think it means somebody got caught with porn. But the accountability of knowing that people were expecting me to publish something each day mattered, even if nothing would happen if I had missed a day. The truth is, I am more afraid of letting you down than I am letting me down.

The last 20 months or so have been horrible. But this month I learned that I have much to be grateful for, that there are things in the midst of a pandemic for which to be grateful, and that the common thread that runs through all of the things for which I am grateful is the relationships that have, formed me, held me, and given my life shape and meaning.

I’m not sure what to do next. I don’t really want to break a now 31-day streak, but I don’t know what I can write about tomorrow. But hey, I’ve been there before.

Regardless, thank you for reading my stuff, for sharing it, for commenting and interacting with it. It’s good to be known.

You.

On the 30^th and last day, I’m grateful for you. Yes, you, who is reading this post.

A long time ago, I knew a poet. Like, a real poet. She is published these days, and went to school and got her MFA at a famous university and introduced me to Phillip Larkin and Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. But this was before all that.

We had similar, blue collar roots, but she had just a bit more direction and management than I did, and even though she was much younger than I was, and even though when I knew her she was living in genteel poverty and making minimum wage, I aspired to her life. We shared books, and stories, and walks along the Mississippi river on Saturday afternoons.

At this point in my life, I had written nothing in a decade, since a horrible encounter with an English professor that tried to squash my dreams. But I remembered the joy that came from sitting down and opening yourself up to the universe- the ancient magic that happens when you show up, ready to write, and the universe gives you the words.

One day, looking over the river, I asked her, “Why do you write?”

I have heard many people try to answer this question. Often they say something about how they can’t avoid writing, or they have to write, or something like that. But her answer stuck with me, and has rung true for me.

She turned her back to me and walked a few steps away, looking down at the ground, hands in her pockets. Then she turned around. “Why? Because I want to be understood. I’ve never made sense to any of the people who knew me – not even to the people who thought they loved me. I write because I want someone to read it and understand who I am. I write, Hugh, because I want to be known.”

Instantly, I knew the truth, and like the old story goes, the truth set me free.

I too write because I want to be known. Because I have never made much sense to the people who know me or love me, and I want them to understand. I write because I have stories that have shaped me and changed me, and I’m conceited enough to believe that if you knew them, they may change you, too.

There are people who write in a journal, with instructions that it be burned after their death. They are an audience of one, and they write as a way of understanding themselves. But it is not lost on me that it took the invention of blogging to get me over my self-imposed writing embargo. It wasn’t enough for me to have the means – I also required a reader.

Often when I write, I imagine a particular person reading it, and I write it as a personal communication to them. I have six ideal readers, all actual people, even though none of them know, and two of them are now dead. But when I write, I write it to one of them.

For more than 18 years now, I’ve been writing down my stories, my ideas, my discoveries, sharing them in various places. It’s like we’ve been on a journey together, you and me, and I’m sharing what I learned along the way. And sometimes you are going someplace I have been before, and I know where the pitfalls are, and might be able to save you some steps.

I’m constantly amazed that anyone cares at all about what I have to say. Every time something I write travels at all, it is a shock. People often will reach out and tell me how something I wrote a decade or more ago changed their life. That never ceases to move me, and to remind me of the importance of story.

At the end of the day, dear reader, I’m just a working class kid from rural Mississippi who realized one day that the things he felt and that seemed so huge were things we all feel, and we are all just searching for language for those things. The highest compliment someone can ever give me is when they read something I write, and they say, “This is how I feel too, but I didn’t know how to say it.”

Because in that moment, they know more about me, yes, but feel known, too. They know then that they the things in their head and hearts are not worthless or pointless or known only by them, but are human things, and they feel a little less alone, a little bit more understood, a little bit more emboldened to share their own stories, and a little less shame, perhaps, over the late night fears that greet them in dark places.

In other words, I write because I want to be read, and what’s more, I want to know you and be known by you. And for almost 20 years, you have kept showing up: Reading, sharing, interacting, telling me your stories in response. You are the most important part of this operation, and I couldn’t do any of it without you. You make my life more than I ever dreamt possible, and I’m grateful for you beyond words.

For slow mornings

On the 29^th day, I’m grateful for quiet mornings.

The house I grew up in was 1050 square feet – three bedrooms and one bathroom. One tiny bathroom. Mom, Dad, and three sons – I am the oldest. And there was never a time, it seemed like, when someone wasn’t in the bathroom. In the evenings, we stacked up like cordwood, just waiting on the person in front of you to take a bath or shower, and while being the oldest meant I got to stay up the latest, it also meant there was no hot water to be found when I got in there.

So somewhere along the way, I decided to start waking up early and taking a shower then. It was lovely – take as long as you want, run the hot water tank dry if you want, because it’s an hour at least before anyone else will need the hot water. And the house was quiet and still, making the gentle sounds a house makes in the dark: The hum of the refrigerator, the rhythmic whir of the ceiling fans, the soft padding of the cat on the tile floor.

I came to look forward to that hour that was just mine, alone in the house before anyone else stirred. It was a sort of freedom.

In Boot Camp, your time was scheduled from the minute they woke you up until the moment you got in bed. We showered by the clock, peed by the clock, put on our socks to the sounds of Drill instructors counting down from 5. You were never, ever alone.

Every night, Marine regulations required there be two people on watch all night, from lights out to lights on the following morning. We took one hour shifts, and the watch roster was posted. By the end of the first week, I would look to see who had the watch the hour before lights on, and ask them to wake me up 45 minutes early. I would then take a long, slow, comfortable solo shower, shave my face with care and attention, and then slip back into bed 5 minutes before the lights came on, Drill Instructors screaming for us to get up.

Again, getting up early had saved my sanity.

Even when I lived alone, getting up early, before the world is moving, was always my happy place. I can write uninterrupted, nobody is going to call me, nobody expects anything from me.

But the favorite thing I love about mornings is what I think of as the reset button. My energy peaks about an hour after I wake up, and then it’s a slow downward taper the rest of the day. But that first hour is slow and gentle. It’s like someone reset the etch a sketch. It’s a blank slate, a clean sheet of paper. No mistakes made yet, nobody yet disappointed, no balls yet dropped. No matter how horrible the day before was, I wake up each morning excited because it’s a whole new chance to be my best self.

I will get up in my quiet house – houses make more noises now than they did when I was a child, what with air conditioners, computer fans and the gas hot water heater, but still – quiet house sounds. I pad into the kitchen, bleary eyed: These days it seems like it takes longer for my eyes to focus than they did when I was younger. I will turn on the electric kettle and lean against the counter, and perhaps check the headlines on my phone. I make a cup of coffee, and then pad into my office, where I will fire up MS Word and write.

After an hour of writing and coffee I will rustle up some breakfast, and maybe I shower then if I didn’t the night before and my day begins like everyone else’s. But that first hour, alone in a quiet house, is always the best part of my day.

For second acts.

I’m grateful for second acts.

I’ve debated which story to tell to illustrate this concept, but here is one example:

I have friends who were pressured as kids to be certain things – their future already set out for them, as clear as a road map. They were not children, but future accountants, future farmers, future lawyers, future truck drivers. I knew lots of people with that story – but it was never my story.

My parents never pressured me at all.

I went through a phase when I was about 9 years old where I decided I was going to be a superhero when I grew up. And because I am me, I had elaborate plans – I mean, actual plans – I drew blueprints to my Fortress of Solitude, which would be hidden behind some trees on the back of our property by the hay field, because that was where I went when I felt overwhelmed.

I went through phases – I was going to be Thor at first, and went around telling my family I was a Norse God and was now immortal. Then Dad had me look up the definition of “Norse” and “Immortal”, and I decided to be Cat Man instead.

It was all consuming. I built grappling hooks and climbed trees with them and once fell off the roof of the shed when nobody was looking while “training”. I must have been exhausting. They would patiently sit and listen to my latest schemes, Dad would answer my questions about what type of rope had the most strength for the least amount of weight, and how to make grappling hooks and I got Mom to commit to helping me sew my costume, even though I never saw my mother sew anything more complicated than a hem on my church pants.

They never told me it was impossible. They never told me to be realistic. They never ridiculed me, and if they told their friends, it was never in my presence. I felt 100 percent affirmed, loved, and believed. And that was pretty much the story of my whole childhood.

Lord (and the therapists) knows my parents got some things wrong, and I have no idea how some first time parents in their twenties in the early years of the Reagan administration in Byhalia, Mississippi had the emotional intelligence to know that their quirky, introverted, nerdy bookworm kid needed them to embrace his weirdness, but they did.

But what I also needed, and they didn’t have the tools to give me, was management.

There is this lovely scene in the original Rocky movie, where the boxing veteran Mickey is trying to explain to Rocky why Rocky needs to hire Mickey as his manager. Mickey tells of how he never got the good shots because nobody explained the facts to him, nobody watched out for him, and so he took the easy money instead of planning for his future.

“I had no management, kid!” he tells Rocky.

Well, the downside of being raised the way I was is that I had no management. Nobody explained to me that I really should have taken algebra in 9^th grade, instead of the general math class I was allowed to take. Nobody in my world explained that I really would want to go to college. Nobody in my world sat me down and explained the long game to me, explained how college aid worked, that I didn’t have to risk being sent to a war zone in order to get college paid for.

I’m not blaming my parents – it was the whole system. We had a guidance counselor at school – she basically pushed poor kids into the service and richer kids to college. I didn’t understand how financial aid worked. I scored in the 98% percentile in Mississippi on the ACT – not only did nobody really explain that I could have went to any state college for free, there was nobody recommending that I go to college in the first place.

It was as foreign a concept to me as if you recommended I consider going to the moon. I accept that some people have done that, but I have no idea how to go about getting there, or how to pay for it, or what the process is.

So instead I went in the Marines. And there I learned that college was probably a good idea, but I was years behind by the time I got out. And because I didn’t take college prep courses in high school, the first year was virtually all remedial, non-credit classes. And I had to work while going to school, so it was a lot of night classes and summer seminars. I never lived in a dorm, never pledged any Greek organization, never met with any industry recruiters, never went to a college sports game, never went on study abroad trips. Every single thing you liked about college, I didn’t do there. The totality of my college experience was to write them checks and take tests and fight traffic leaving the parking lot before going home to collapse in bed, exhausted.

I would flounder for more than a decade. Before I was 35, I would quit three different jobs that dumber people than me have made good, lifelong careers doing. I made good money at times. I got married for bad reasons, took jobs for bad reasons, quit them for bad reasons, got divorced for questionable reasons, got into relationships that dead people would have known were doomed for failure, and generally drifted. I first read Kerouac because a woman I dated said I reminded her of him. It took some time before I realized she was not complimenting my writing style but instead meant I was drifting and goalless.

When I was 35, things both fell apart and came together. I moved to a new town, took up a new course of study, met new people, and reached out to people who were successful at what I wanted to be, and I learned from them. I had direction, goals, and mentors. It’s like a whole different world.

I have read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in one of his essays, he said that he used to believe there were no second acts in American lives. I did too. But I had one, all the same.

I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like if I had been more directed as a kid. If I had had people in my life that valued formal education. If that guidance counselor had done her job. If my 98th percentile ACT score had attracted the same sort of attention from college recruiters that my 99^th percentile ASVAB score did from military recruiters. If I had gone to Ole Miss right out of high school? Majored in English and learned to write when Willie Morris was still there? How would it all have come out? If I had gotten not only a degree at college, but a network and a fraternity and mentors as well?

I will never know. That wasn’t how the first act played out. But I’m really grateful for the second one.

Heather

On the 27th day, I’m grateful for Heather, and the things she taught me.

A long time ago, I was a 19-year-old Marine, and I was in love with a fellow Marine named Heather. We were an unlikely pair. She was a liberal Catholic from Montana. I was a conservative Methodist from Mississippi.

We were inseparable. One weekend I brought her to Byhalia, to see where I grew up. We then went to Oxford, where The University of Mississippi is, and talked about how cool it would be to live there when we got out of the Marines. For 28 years now, I can’t go to Oxford without thinking about walking across the grounds of William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak with her that crisp fall day. She was filled with derision at the monument to the Confederate dead that was on the town square, on the lawn of the courthouse. As an aside, that monument finally came down last year.

We talked a lot about children, and figured between my round head and her dimples, we would make some pretty babies. We talked about marriage, and she told me about the examples of strong women she had in her life, and that I shouldn’t expect her to be June Cleaver sitting at home making dinner.

When we were dating, Heather drank. A lot. And the closer we got, the more she drank. It was a huge problem in our relationship. Drinking has never been really important to me, and drunk people annoy me in the way they can only annoy sober people. Her birthday was coming up, and I had planned a great day for us to spend together. We would go to the art museum, then a picnic afterwards.

She didn’t show up. She had gone out with her friends the night before to celebrate and gotten incredibly drunk, and then overslept. Actually, that isn’t quite true – she just didn’t remember that we were doing anything. I was, in a word, forgotten.

It’s hard to remember what life was like in those days before cell phones. Her roommate told me what happened and that Heather was passed out in their barracks room, and that she would tell Heather I had called when she woke up. I sat in the lobby of the barracks, waiting for her to show up. Just after lunch, she showed up, looking like hell.

She apologized profusely. I was royally pissed. But I could never be mad at her for long. We went for a long walk, and then I took her back to the barracks and we agreed I would take her to the art museum tomorrow instead.

And we did. It was a lovely fall day. We walked through the museum grounds, hand in hand. I saw my first Warhol that day. And when we were in the parking lot, she told me she had something she wanted to talk to me about. We went to a diner she liked and that we ate at a lot, and then she took my hand and told me she wasn’t going to be able to marry me, because she was a lesbian. She had seen how much she had hurt me the day before, and knew that if she didn’t tell me now, it would only hurt me more later. I had been her last shot at trying to be straight, she said, and apparently, wanting to be straight wasn’t enough.

I wish I could say how accepting I was. I wish I could say I saw her coming out to me as the gift that it was, that I recognized she was putting her safety and her career in the Marines in my hands, that she loved me enough to tell me the truth about who she was.

But I didn’t handle it well. I mean, I am Southern enough I wasn’t rude, but I was hurt and confused by it all. It wasn’t just breaking up with someone. Instead, it felt like they were gone forever.

When we got back to the barracks, I went for a long walk to process. Everything I knew, everything I had been taught about sexuality told me that being gay was a sin. Everything I knew about Heather told me she was one of the kindest, best people I knew. It was my first real ethical crisis – do I stay true to the religion I grew up in, or do I stay true to the person I knew and (still) loved?

In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there is a point where Jim, the escaped slave, is captured, and Huck is faced with a choice: He can break the law and go against the everything he had been taught about religion, morality, and racial norms and try to rescue Jim. Or he can be safe, and follow the things he had been taught, and let them take Jim.

He knew what he had been taught. He knew what the preacher and the Sunday School teacher would have told him the right thing to do was. But he also knew he loved Jim, and that Jim loved him. And he believed that to throw in with Jim would damn him to hell forever – it would be the point of no return.

He came to a conclusion: “Alright then. I’ll go to hell!” And he helped Jim escape.

I decided that I was throwing in with Heather. I knew her, had loved her, and would support her, even if I would not be able to be her partner or her lover. And if it meant betraying the religion I grew up with, then so be it. If I was going to Hell, it was going to be while loving Heather.

I went back to the barracks and told her I loved her, that I would always love her, even if it meant we couldn’t be together, and that I would always be on her side.

Over the next six months or so, she introduced me to her friends – other Marines who were also lesbians, people I had known but who were not out. This was the first circle of LGBT folks I had ever been invited into. They were so accepting of me, answered so many of my questions – even the ones that were unintentionally rude – so loving toward me. I think I freaked some of them out, but they knew I was important to Heather, so I was accepted.

Our marriage plans ended the day she admitted to both me and herself that she was a lesbian, but our friendship stayed intact. She and I were the same age, and we watched each other celebrate milestones – she had first a partner, then a wife and then children and grandchildren.

She continued to struggle with alcohol the whole time she was in the Marines, back in those days when being Queer and in the Marines put you in danger of being arrested, but after she got out, she eventually got sober and became an EMS worker, then went back to school and got her RN and eventually fulfilled her dream of becoming a trauma flight nurse on the air ambulance.

The last time we saw each other face to face was in the early 2000’s, but we stayed in touch – first by email and then Facebook. When I was in NC, she supported my work there as a monthly donor – one of the first, actually.

About 5 years ago, she ended up with breast cancer. They did all the right things and the normal treatments and it went into remission – and while she was in remission her granddaughter was born.

But it came back. She died in December of 2018.

Heather was my first of so many things: My first liberal friend. My first feminist friend. My first Catholic friend. My first Queer friend. And the beginning of the end of the religious certainty of my youth.

For friends from other cultures

On the 26^th day, I’m grateful for other cultures, and how they have influenced and shaped me.

In the 1830’s, Jonathan Hollowell and his wife Clara and their children Edwin and Calvin moved to Marshall County, Mississippi from around Goldsboro, North Carolina. They were one of many families that moved here after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, which removed the Choctaw and other tribes from the State and across the Mississippi River to western territories.

In other words, I am a Mississippian directly because my ancestors profited from the coerced removal of a culture and a people.

I grew up in Byhalia, MS. I had friends who lived in Pontotoc, MS. Went to Senatobia, MS all the time. They are all Chickasaw names. I never learned anything about the Chickasaw people in school. Never knew a Chickasaw person.

The main street of my home town was actually part of the road that was the Trail of Tears. I learned about the Trail of Tears in school. I did not learn it happened less than 500 yards from where I sat.

I learned I was not guilty. I did not yet know that I was, however, responsible.

Growing up, my world was very Black and White. Literally. I knew a (very) few Latinos, and no Asians. We went to Memphis occasionally, and there was a Chinese restaurant Dad liked up there, and he would eat with chopsticks like he learned how to do when he was overseas in the Air Force.

We ate Mexican food, but really, it was the Old El Paso taco kit with ground beef and refried beans from a can. That and bean burritos from Taco Bell was the limits of our ethnic food.

Of course, that wasn’t true. We ate copious amounts of sweet potatoes, summer peas, and greens, all cooked in ways passed on to White people like me from enslaved Africans generations ago. Likewise, the chitterlings and fatback and blackstrap molasses were all foods enslaved people ate because the wealthy landowners didn’t want it. The turnips we prized were originally food for pigs, but enslaved folks learned to make them taste great, and they taught the rest of us.

We didn’t count any of that. It was our food now.

I was sixteen and in Tulsa Oklahoma on a school trip before I would ever have a real conversation with someone who was not Black or White. She was Chinese, and was there from another school up East.

Mark Twain said something to the effect that travel was fatal to prejudice, and while I want to argue with him, it certainly helped me. As I traveled and met and worked with Mexican and Guatemalans and Brazilians and Serbs and Croats and Indians and Chinese and Koreans, I learned we are far more alike than different, and that at the end of the day, we want the same things: To be safe, to take care of our families, to have hope tomorrow will be better than today, to leave a legacy in the hearts of our loved ones.

My curiosity has served me well, and my desire to hear their stories. To learn about their lives, to eat their foods, to share mine with them. This requires a level of intentionality: I have a relation who lived with her husband for 2 years in Germany while he was in the service, but she learned zero German, only shopped and ate American food on base, and used every chance to tell the rest of us about how much she hated Germany.

I don’t ever want to be like that.

A few years back, I spent a week in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I would love to go back and explore more, but one thing that struck me was how they actually had an indigenous culture there – White culture was not the default. The beauty, diversity, and richness that came about as a result of that was striking.

I have come to believe that all of us are smarter than any of us, and to be grateful for all my friends from cultures different than mine, who took me in, who fed me, who loved me when I made that hard, and who have enriched my life in innumerable ways.

Thank you.