Hugh's Blog

Credit

In the fall of 1969, my mom and dad were newly married. They were home one night, no doubt staring lovingly into each other’s eyes when the phone rang. It was my grandfather, Mom’s dad, and he needed a ride.

My Grandfather was a retired Navy man, and after he retired, he went to work for a munitions company. This was at the height of the Vietnam War, so business was booming, no pun intended.

He was an executive of some sort and often had to “entertain” people after work. And he sometimes drank too much at these meetings, as he had on this night. And on those nights, he called Mom to come to get him.

It would be a quick 20-minute trip these days, what with the new interstates and all, but in those days it was two lanes and traffic lights all the way, so it was an hour’s drive, easy.

Mom and Dad set off through the hot sticky night to pick up my grandfather and drive him and his car home.

My grandfather was six feet tall and had long ropy muscles that looked like the metal cables that ships tie to the dock with. His cheekbones were prominent, and he had eyes that would stare a hole in you. He had been a Frogman in WWII, and then was shot down over Korea during that war and was lost behind enemy lines for more than a week with a broken arm before he fought his way out to the DMZ and was found. He did not suffer fools, and he had not wanted my mom to marry my dad.

But this night was different. The business meeting must have been a good one, as my grandfather was in a good mood, and apparently felt generous.

He was a social drunk. When in his cups, he was always full of advice, and this night was no different. He wanted to stop at a diner and get some coffee and food, to “settle his stomach”. After they ordered, Mom went to the bathroom, and my grandfather began to hold forth on Dad, giving my newly married, 18-year-old father life and business advice.

He watched Mom’s back as she walked to the back of the diner and disappeared into the bathroom, then leaned back in his chair, holding his cigarette between his fingers, and turned to Dad.

“Young Feller, let me give you some advice. If you ever want to get anywhere in this life, you got to get noticed. People need to know your name. Hopefully, it’s because of something good, but it’s even OK sometimes if it’s for something bad. But if you are gonna get ahead, you have to get noticed. They have to know your name. People can’t help you if they don’t know your name.”

When Dad told me this story, he laughed at this point, because he said that about then, Mom was coming back from the bathroom, and my grandfather suddenly straightened up and changed the subject, as if they had been swapping dirty jokes unfit for mixed company.

* * *

One Saturday in August of 2013, I, along with some other volunteers from a local church, was threatened with arrest for giving food to hungry people on a sidewalk in Raleigh, NC. It’s a long story, and one I’m tired of telling, but I got a lot of media attention really fast – Time, Newsweek, NPR, and Fox were all blowing my phone up, and the city got a lot of negative attention. The week before, Forbes had named Raleigh, NC the most hospitable city in the nation, and then this happened.

The city made a few missteps, strategically, and one of them was when the Mayor called me and asked me, point blank, what I wanted. Up until then, I had not realized we were negotiating. I just wanted to be left alone, so we could keep giving hungry people food. Had they apologized and told us to carry on, we would have. But, I figured, if they were asking what I wanted? Well, I had a list.

Eventually, much of that list got implemented. It cost the city more than $5 million dollars. Policies got changed. Programs got funded. Buildings were built and people got hired. But all of that was later.

There were endless meetings in those days – I made the rounds, meeting City Council folks, the mayor, police officials, the talk shows, and reporters. It was my first real immersion into political life. Baptism by fire.

My Dad was back in Mississippi, where he worked for the county as their Emergency Management Director. His whole life was politics – he had to get budgets passed, and he had to advocate for Federal dollars – both to the Feds to give them to his county and to the politicians in his county to accept them. He had to work with people who were different than him and thought differently from him.

“You can’t always control who you have to work with, but you have to find a way to work with them just the same. In both poker and life, Son, you have to play the cards you are dealt, not the cards you wish you had.”

The weeks this fight with the city was going on was one of the times I felt closest to my Dad. We talked on the phone often. He was my coach through this world of politics and relationships, my wartime consigliere.

My notes from those conversations are filled with soundbites.

“You have to let them think they won. That doesn’t mean you can’t get what you want, but they can’t think they lost.”

“You have to give something up, so they are happy. So ask for things that will never get approved, so when you give them up, they think they beat you.”

“They have to justify whatever happens to the people who elected them. So make sure they have a story that makes them look good.”

“If you are going to keep living there, you have to be able to look these people in the eye when this is over and work together on the next thing.”

“This stuff affects people personally, but these folks don’t treat it as personal. It’s just another day at the office for them. Next month they will be working on other things that people feel just as strongly about as you do this. Their lack of involvement emotionally in this is an advantage for them. Your passion is an advantage for you. But make sure your passion doesn’t eat you because you don’t win a war by dying for your country.”

But my favorite conversation, and the one that stuck with me the most, was the night before the big Council meeting deciding if the $5 million dollar package would go through. I was on the rocking chair on my front porch. It was an unseasonably warm night in late fall. We were months into this campaign. I was on my phone to Dad, while watching my inner-city neighborhood come to life as it often did around dusk. I was nervous.

It was then that he told me the story about my grandfather and the advice he had given him.

“I think he was right, in one regard. Folks can’t help you if they don’t know who you are. Nobody’s gonna speak up for the redheaded guy with the nice smile. One day, bad things will happen, and when that happens, you will need friends and people who know your name.

He chuckled at this point. “I’ve seen the news stories. You have that part covered, it seems.”

“But I’m older now than your grandfather was back then, and I would say that while it’s important that people know who you are and what you can do. I think that if you work hard to be good at your job then you don’t have to rub it in people’s faces. They will know.

“Work hard to be indispensable to the work, and invisible to the process. These politicians aren’t going to tell their people how awesome you are, because then their people will start thinking maybe they should elect you instead of this politician. But they will know. And they will remember.

“Some work needs doing. And it’s easier to get it done if your name doesn’t have to be attached to it. You can accomplish great things if you don’t have to be the one to get credit for it. The people who need to know will know, and if they don’t, the people who know your name will tell them.

“So let them have the headlines, and while they are flashing those around, you get your $5 million dollar package passed.”

* * *

I’m an organizer these days. I am the invisible man, off to the side in the group photos. If the press prints my name, that’s a failure, because this work is not about me, but the people I work with. My work is to find out what issues are important to the people I work with, and then we develop strategies for them to get what they want.

I hold press conferences where I’m not in front of cameras – I’m the guy with a clipboard writing down what media responded to the press releases I sent out. I draft op-eds that get published under other people’s names. And when our people ask me what we should do, I ask them, instead, “What do you think we should do?”

Because some work needs doing, and it’s easier to get it done if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.

Friction | Weeknotes – 3/31/2023

(This is a weeknote: a weekly update of the behind-the-scenes work and thinking that goes into being an independent web publisher. You can read past weeknotes here)

In Consistency is Easier Than You Think, CJ Chilvers writes about how consistency wins, more often than not. What I love, and what I have been wrestling with on my own work, is his thinking about the things that get in the way of his publishing on his blog consistently. He makes a list of things that get in the way of a regular publishing schedule that is pretty much the same list I have in my head.

Strip everything away that poses a threat to consistency.

Photography decisions

Design decisions

Aggregation decisions

Over-editing

Content length

SEO considerations

Email deliverability optimizations

Social integrations

What’s personal vs. what the audience wants

The last two weeks in particular and this year in general have been about paring down my online work.

It’s worth noting that virtually none of these were problems in 2005. Back then, we just posted things on our blog. Maybe 3 sentences. Maybe a picture. People read via RSS, or they just periodically checked in, as we do with social media now.

Social Media is a hellscape that has a lot to answer for, but one thing they have done remarkably well is reduce the amount of friction in sharing the things you make.

I moved my blog earlier this month from Humidity and Hope to the oldest URL I own – hughlh.com. I got a Twitter account sixteen years ago this month, back when it was easy to get the username you wanted. I got hughlh, which has been my preferred username ever since. I bought that domain name shortly after.

I shut down the site Humidity and Hope because it was limiting – I want to write about more than how to live a good life in the Deep South, which had led to my creating other sites and platforms, but each of those demanded maintenance, so they became chores and added friction to the process, which meant I didn’t write…

So, right now, my online platform looks like my personal website, this blog, and a weekly newsletter. Blog posts are crossposted to a variety of platforms (see the list in the sidebar –>). Right now, some posts will be published in full on my personal Facebook page, but you can’t count on that. If Facebook is your primary platform, you should “like” my professional page over there, where each post is autoposted.

I have had things hosted at Name.com for years, but over the last few years their customer service has gone way down. They hid the phone numbers, email tickets take days to get a response – not ideal when you have an outage – and God help you if you try to use their chat with an agent feature. When they screwed up something as simple as a URL redirect, I had had enough.

I moved my blog’s hosting over to Namecheap, which has 24-hour chat and their WordPress hosting packages still give you FTP access, which name.com didn’t do.

There is a lot of information out there in the world about hosting options if you want to spend real money, but we small-timers don’t need much beyond a shared hosting account. Namecheap should do me fine until the New York Times links to me and I go viral and my whole website crashes from the struggle. I dream of problems like that.

Infrastructure

It begins with the best of intentions. You see something – say, a hand-turned wooden bowl, and think how amazing it would be to be able to do that. Or maybe you want to make a coffee table for your living room, a toy truck for your kid, or a ukulele.

Anytime you start a new endeavor, there is a period when you are acquiring the tools – the saws, the chisels, the workbench. This can be a rabbit hole.

As an aside, it’s best to just buy the tools you need for the specific project you want to make, and then buy the tools you don’t have for the next project, and so on. Partly because good tools are expensive, but also because when you just start, you don’t know what you don’t know.

It’s been almost 20 years and I still haven’t used that 3/8-inch mortise chisel.

But the other rabbit hole is infrastructure. The almost irresistible urge to work on projects to make your shop better, rather than to work on the projects you wanted to build in the first place.

You want to make bowls from firewood, so you need a lathe and turning tools and, depending on your skill, a faceplate or a chuck. But then you will be tempted to build a stand for the lathe, and a place to hang your face shield, and a spotlight mount so you can see better, and then a rack to hold the firewood as it dries, and a case for your turning tools, and before you know it you have a year’s worth of projects behind you, but you still haven’t turned a single bowl yet.

This is not just a thing that happens in the workshop. It happens with my writing, too. I want to write, which means I need a computer and a word processor. But then I can tinker with my routine, and of course, I need a good chair to sit in, and a quiet place, so I need an office. In the office, I need to hang up the right art to inspire me, and find a good playlist, and then do I have good enough speakers to make the music sound right?

It’s often hard to know where the balance is, especially for people with brains like mine. I want to do a good job, and I only have so much time, and oh yes, I’m a chaos muppet with ADHD, so things that make it easier for me to focus (like a good chair and art and music) are things worth spending time on. But eventually, you have to write. It’s easy to slip into hyperfocus as you research the “best” text editor to write on, so you have minimal distractions, and three hours later you have written nothing but downloaded 3 free trials of writing software and looked at pictures of meerkats for the last 20 minutes after following an errant link.

All of that to say that right now, I’m spending a lot of time on infrastructure to support my writing. Outfitting the office. Installing speakers and trying out playlists. Building routines. Trying out schedules. Designing workflows.

And then there is the infrastructure to promote and publish my writing. Social media. Email service providers. Website design and hosting and email templates. WordPress updates and figuring out block editing (a WordPress feature from hell) and so on. It’s fun, and it’s necessary. But none of it is writing. It’s easy to work at this gig all day and still not have written an original thought down.

Weeknotes

In my day job as a community organizer, we have a practice of writing a reflection each week to our supervisor. In it, we are encouraged to reflect on the week we had, and our plans for the upcoming week. To talk about what we are working on, what we are learning, and how we are thinking about our work.

It sounds sorta hokey, and I initially resisted it, but it works, in that it forces me to reflect and think strategically about what I’m doing. It moves me from inside the work to some point outside, to where I’m an observer of the ‘me’ that is doing the work.

My writing is a part-time job, funded by my Members who want me to put my work out in the world, and want it to be done so free of charge to everyone. That’s why there are no ads on my newsletter or on this website, no paywalls, nothing like that. Just me, writing, and anyone in the world with an internet connection or email can read it.

And so, as I was writing my morning pages this morning, I found myself wondering: If I think of my writing as a part-time job, what would it be like to write reflections on it? And would anyone find that interesting?

This made me remember that about this time last year, I said that I wanted to start showing my work – I wanted to do more of this work in public, so people could have a model for how to start their own blog, how to write their own newsletter, how to make their own cool thing.

So I’m going to start writing weekly notes every Friday. Some weeks will be more involved that others. Some weeks may be a little nerdy, as I explain the hours I spent looking for the right plug-in for a website, and other weeks may be introspective as I talk about the philosophy behind what I’m trying to do. And some weeks I may be so busy you just get bullet points. And because I try to be kind to myself, I don’t commit to doing this every week, but most weeks – just like I walk most days.

I don’t want fighting to be my default

From 2009 until 2018, I did a lot of work in what can best be described as the “Progressive Christian Influencer” arena. I wrote extensively, publishing articles in national publications and having chapters and essays published in books. I traveled a lot, speaking to audiences as small as seminary classrooms and as large as music festivals and youth conferences. It all seems surreal.

There is no such thing, really, as a “speaking circuit”. But, there is a small group of people who generally make a large portion of their living – directly or indirectly – from public speaking. They generally work in niches – like I was in the progressive Christian niche. And since there is a finite number of speaking opportunities in any given year, and since most events have multiple speakers, many of the folks who speak in a given niche know each other, if for no other reason than we share stages and events.

As I said, I pretty much quit that life in 2018. It wasn’t good for me – I actually think it isn’t good for anyone – and the healthiest thing for me to do was to walk away. But I still have a lot of friends I met on those stages. After all, when you are on the road, staying in a beige chain motel in a suburb of Toledo Ohio, having long conversations in the hotel bar (or, more likely, the motel doesn’t have a bar, so you end up in the Applebees in the parking lot) with other people who understand your life leads to lasting intimacies. Or, at least, it can.

So, a few weeks ago, someone I know well from that time was passing through Jackson. He lives on the other side of the country, and while we have stayed in touch, it had been years since we spent time together. So, we had lunch.

It was nice, catching up. Hearing the stories of his children, beyond what I had gleaned from Instagram. The work he is up to now, the new project he has started. His current interests and hobbies. Eventually, the conversation stalled a bit, and he looked at me. Like, really looked at me. Like he was actually seeing me, or rather, seeing inside me.

“Man, you’ve changed.”

“Oh? I have? How?”

“You’re… calmer? Less angry? Less intense? Something like that. That’s not quite it, but it’s close.”

I knew what he meant. I’ve felt it too. You can most tell it in my writing, I think. It’s not that I don’t have opinions – I assuredly do. And it’s not that I’m not passionate about the things that matter to me – I assuredly am. To be socially conscious and to live in a place like Mississippi is to be enraged nearly all the time.

But I’ve lost all stomach for fighting for the sake of fighting. And over the last few years, I’ve been doing a lot of self-work.

A thing I find helpful when examining a belief I hold is to ask myself what the world would be like if everyone held that belief.

If the answer is that things would be worse than they are now, I work to change that belief, because it doesn’t move me closer to the world I want to live in.

(This does require that you be willing to examine your beliefs in the first place.)

And I don’t want to live in a world where the default response to things that are wrong is that we fight.

An Inconvenient Truth

I want to tell you a secret. Or maybe “secret” isn’t the right word since it’s pretty evident when you think about it. Either way, virtually nobody wants to talk about it.

And what’s worse, they plan movements and actions as if this secret doesn’t exist.

Are you ready? Here goes:

If we are going to win, we have to convert people to our side who currently disagree with us.

We want to think this is not true. We want to believe that because of social media, the strength of our ideas, and the rightness of our cause that we can find what Richard Nixon called “The Silent Majority” that agrees with us but just is not being talked about or listened to.

But the truth is, that silent majority doesn’t exist. Because we have had the internet widely available to the public for more than 2 decades now, and they haven’t shown up yet. Just because you can find someone who already agrees with you in Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t mean you have anything like critical mass to change the outcome of an election.

No, changing the world will require the cooperation of those who currently disagree with you.

Let’s do an exercise. In your mind, imagine the last time you went to a crowded place – an airport, a bus station, Walmart, wherever. If it helps, and you are in a place where it’s safe to do so, close your eyes.

There are people everywhere. All kinds of people – some fat and some thin, some white and some people of color. Some gay, some straight. Some men, some women, some are older and others are kids. Republicans, Democrats, Independents. All kinds of people.

Got it?

OK.

Most of those people don’t want the better world you are offering. They don’t share your dream. Because they have a lot of things going on in their lives, and their own self-interests, and so your dreams are not their highest priority. Most of them, even if they like your ideas, will just find it easier to go along with the Powers That Be, content to live their life on default.

If your stated goal is resistance, then almost by definition, the majority of the world disagrees with your goal. Because if they agreed with you, then you wouldn’t need to resist.

Back to our imagination: you are surrounded, in a large public place, with people who, by and large, disagree with you. So my question is this: Let’s say you win. You get the better world you are wanting. What do you do then with the people who disagree with you in the better world you are dreaming of?

What do we do with them in this new world we are building? Because if we succeed in building this better world – and I’m planning on it – then we either have to learn how to convert them to our side, or… I dunno – lock them in a cage? I mean, seriously, what will their place be in this new world you dream of?

More than a decade and a half of building intentional cross-class and cross-racial relationships has taught me that people only change if they have reasons to change.

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are – we learn from others.

And if we are to have any influence in changing the minds of others, we have to learn what they want and find ways to show them how our goals align with their self-interest. Because people, by and large, are motivated by their own self-interest.

The world would be a much more fun place if we could just show up at marches and denounce the oppressor class and buy fair trade coffee and talk smack about corporate interests, but the reality is, to build this better world, we have to find a way to get others to buy into it. Because the better world we all dream is possible is only possible if we can all achieve liberation.

I’m writing.

At least, I think I am. I’ve applied my ass to the chair, I’m hitting the keys.

Yep. I’m writing. It’s been a while, and I was uncertain of the symptoms.

I’ve been sick – really sick and then low-grade sick – since Valentine’s Day. After two years and 11 months of dodging it, COVID caught up with our household. Fortunately, we both had relatively mild cases by COVID standards.

But sickness never comes at a convenient time, and so I was in the midst of moving my desk from the front room, where I posted up “temporarily” during the 20200 lockdowns, to a dedicated office I built for myself in a former storeroom in our carport. Right now I am functionally in both places, and thriving in neither. But yesterday I drew a line in the sand and said that today was the day I sat down in the chaos and started writing again.

And here it is, 6:30 AM, and I’m sitting at my desk, surrounded by various bits of debris, discarded cardboard boxes, and office implements that I am unsure where they will belong. I have soft, classical music playing on the small cheap stereo I rescued from the thrift store, and the window is open, and I hear the birds waking up outside. My chickens are playing in their coop, not 20 feet away, and they are fussing at each other as the sun comes up.

And I’m writing.

I have a timer on my desk, just under the monitor of my computer, that shows how much longer I have left to go on this session – right now it’s 24 minutes, the remaining time in red, and as I type the red diminishes with the passage of time. This is sort of an ADHD hack, a way of making something that is invisible to my brain, like time, visible, and thus real.

These are the sort of things I need to do if I’m going to be writing.

The office isn’t complete yet. It’s a narrow room, a former storeroom at the back of our carport that I began turning into dedicated office space over the winter. It’s a bit under six feet wide and 17 feet long, with six feet of the eastern wall devoted to windows that look over our back yard. It’s honestly one of the better views in our house, yet another sign that when this house was built it was built from a plan in a catalog and was divorced from the actual site. There is much I love about this house, but it’s lack of views and vistas is not one of them.

It is not a house built for writing.

As I said, it’s a narrow room, this new office of mine, and it has 10 foot tall ceilings, which emphasizes the narrowness all the more. A friend last night said it looked like a shipping container. The door to the room is in the middle of the long wall without windows, and my desk is to the right as you walk in the door. Immediately in front of you is a waist-high counter with cabinets underneath, where I have hidden my printer on a pullout shelf.

If you turn left as you enter, you face a blank wall and a space 5 and a half feet wide by 5 feet deep, which will eventually hold a bookcase along one wall and a chair for reading, because reading is an essential thing if you intend to be writing.

And I’m writing. In the debris, in an unfinished room, amidst the chaos, but I’m writing.

Listening

Earlier this week, I was sitting at a kitchen table in the North Mississippi Hill Country, sipping coffee and talking to someone who, on the one hand, was much like me: He was white, of my generation, married, had gone to the same sort of schools I had, and was baptized in the same sort of church I had been.

But we absolutely voted for different people in the last Presidential election and have very different views on most social issues. If they saw the bumper stickers on his Ford Super Duty truck, some people would consider me a traitor to them by even talking with him.

While we sat there, drinking good coffee and eating mediocre grocery store cookies, we talked of many things: People we had known who were now gone, lessons we learned from our ancestors, how the children in our lives were growing, and how proud we were of them. We also talked about politics, race, economics, and religion. Neither of us hid who we were, and neither of us got angry. When I had to leave to go to my next meeting, we both commented on how much we had enjoyed the conversation, and I have a standing invitation to come back and drink more coffee the next time I’m in town.

* * *

How do people change? How do bad ideas die, and good ideas grow in their place?

In 2018, after nearly 30 years away, I returned home to Mississippi, the land of my childhood, of my father, and of his father before him. We lived with my grandmother before her death, and 5-year-old me ate breakfast in the kitchen my grandfather had built. I climbed in the same trees my ancestors had played in, and like them, I was raised in the same culture of white supremacy.

The little country church in which I was baptized as a child, where we sang that Jesus loved all the children regardless of the color of their skin, where I learned about the love of God and the healing power of a potluck meal, had, two years before my birth, decided to leave its denomination rather than admit People of Color to membership. Or heck, for that matter, allow them to attend.

In the late 1980s, my high school had separate yet equal prom kings and queens and homecoming courts, and we students voted on which Black person and which white person was most likely to succeed or that we thought most beautiful.

A white farmer I knew had sent his daughter to Ole Miss, and she came home from school with a Black boyfriend. She was ten years older than me, and I remember that we were all excited she was coming home, and then we all hushed it up when the farmer disowned her, and she moved away. I never saw her again until after her father died decades later.

So white supremacy is not some novel idea I am learning about after my book club read Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was “borned to it,” as Huck Finn liked to say about his sinful nature. It was the water in which I was raised and, to all appearances, the natural order of things.

We did not think of ourselves as white supremacists. No, by all accounts, we believed we were good white people. We were not permitted to say the N-word. We had Black friends and co-workers. I went to a fully integrated high school.

In retrospect, we made the mistake many white people make when we confused racism with antipathy and believed our proximity and relationships absolved us of guilt. In reality, racism is not about feelings or relationships – it is about structure and power. But it would take a lifetime for me to learn that.

And what changed me was listening. Like I was listening at the kitchen table earlier this week.

* * *

We seem to have lost the capacity to listen. I’m not trying to sound nostalgic there as if I am mourning for an idealized past where everything was rainbows and kittens. Rather, it is harder to listen to other people now than it once was – largely because we have so many alternatives. Our hyper-connected world has made it easier and easier for us to find like-minded people, but also easier to shut out those who differ from us.

And because we do not listen to each other, we don’t truly know each other, and thus it is easier than ever for people in power to divide us. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Bill Moyers wrote about when Lyndon Johnson explained the tactic to him in the 1960s:

“We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. ‘I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,’ he said. ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.’ ”

Years of listening have taught me one critical thing: We are not nearly as divided as we think we are. Or, more accurately, we are not as divided as those who profit from our separation want us to believe we are.

NB: I have talked about this work I do before, and I tend to get two reactions:

The first is outrage because they believe I am discounting real injustices and injuries. I am not. There is a world of difference between saying that I agree with the ideology of a Klansman (which I don’t) and saying that a Klansman and I share some (but not all) of the same hopes and dreams and that if we made a list of our base motivations for how we move in the world, there would be an overwhelming amount of overlap. Rather than treating him like a strawman I can dehumanize, I am forcing myself to recognize he is a human with motivations, agency, and choice, who is also acted upon by outside forces, as am I.

The second is something like, “Teach me how to do this!” There are good people out there doing this sort of work – I used to be one of them – and it’s not hard to find if you really want to learn, but I feel somewhat pulled to write a bit about this over the coming weeks. So, stay tuned.

2005

The year was 2005.

Johnny Carson and Pope John Paul died that year, as did 1,392 people along the Mississippi Gulf coast due to Hurricane Katrina. Microsoft released the XBox360. Prince Charles finally married Camilla Parker-Bowles. The words “glamping” and “sexting” entered the common lexicon. And I went to the dentist.

I was recently divorced and living hand to mouth. I was living in a tiny attic apartment I was renting from a friend of a friend, and I owned a small bookstore I was trying to make work while also delivering pizza at night. Most days, I would stagger in late at night, eat some leftover pizza I had gotten at work, and then crash into bed. It was not the high point of my life.

But on this particular night, I had a rare night off, and a book had come in at the store I had wanted to read. I came home, opened a bottle of red wine, made popcorn, and curled up on the couch with my book.

That was when I heard the tooth crunch. I had bit down on an unpopped kernel and an old crown the Marines had paid for 13 years before finally decided it was time to go, taking part of my tooth with it. I felt parts of my brain, it hurt so bad.

I did not sleep that night.

The next day, I was telling a woman who worked at my store about it and how I didn’t know what to do because I was so broke. She told me I should go to her dentist.

“He always lets me make payments. He’s great. I’ll call him and make an appointment for you.”

On the day I showed up at the dentist, the staff was delightful and welcoming. I signed in, and nobody mentioned money. I went back and sat in the dentist’s chair, and the hygienist looked at my teeth – nobody mentioned money. The dentist came in and looked at my teeth – and nobody mentioned money.

I stopped him. I said that my friend had said he was her dentist, and that he always allowed her to make payments, and that money was tight for me, so I needed to know how much this was going to cost and that I would be allowed to make payments on it before he did any actual work. He waved it off.

“We’ll work it out,” he said. Reassured, I laid back down, and he went to work on my mouth.

I no longer remember exactly what he did, but I do recall that when I went to the counter to check out, they told me I owed more than $600. I almost fainted.

I explained that I understood I was going to make payments. They called in the office manager, who in a loud voice informed me they never took payments and that all money owed was due at the time of the service. To emphasize her point, she dramatically pointed at a front desk sign announcing this policy.

All of this happened in full view of everyone in the waiting room, who were now staring at me.

I absolutely hate feeling poor or stupid, and I now felt both of those things. Standing in that waiting room, belittled by the office manager, with a mouth packed full of gauze and a numb lower lip, and drool seeping from the corner of my mouth, I felt humiliated. People who did not know me were judging me, and while I had (barely) enough money in my account to pay the bill, it meant my rent would be late that month.

I paid the bill. I lived on ramen for a week, and the following week, I moved up to generic mac and cheese, subbing water for milk and butter. It didn’t taste better than the ramen, but it was bulkier. My rent was late, which started a riff with the landlord, leading to my eventually moving to even shittier accommodations.

And the dentist had told me at the time that whatever he did to my mouth was temporary, and on this, he told the gospel truth – within a year, parts of that tooth were crumbling when I ate tortilla chips. Luckily, this time, it did not hurt. I did not return to the dentist when this occurred.

In fact, despite the cracking and breaking of three more teeth, it would be 18 years before I would go back to the dentist. I hate everything about it. Although easily 90% of what a dentist does is confined to less than 15 standard procedures, there is no price list posted anywhere, and you have no idea how much it will cost before you show up. Will it be $65 or $6,000? Who knows? Not me, that’s who.

And whenever I would think about going back to the dentist, I felt stupid and poor all over again. I flashed back to standing at that counter, being humiliated by an office manager with a power complex. I remembered being stared at by the people in the waiting room and the hush that fell over the room as she berated me. I imagined the scene replaying, magnified by my even poorer teeth and inflation.

So, I didn’t go back for 18 years.

But these days, I’m trying to take better care of myself. It doesn’t hurt that I’m earning a living wage and have health insurance. So, a few weeks ago, I searched until I found a dentist in my town with a published price list.

This is why I finally had two rotten, broken teeth removed last Thursday, 18 years after my last visit to the dentist.

It only cost me $240. And 18 years.

Imagine

In the 7th chapter of the New Testament book of Matthew, there is a story about prayer where Jesus tries to tell people how much God wants good things for them. So, he asks the crowd some rhetorical questions.

“Imagine your kid asks for some bread. Would you give them a stone? If they asked for fish, would you hand them a snake?”

Then Jesus says that if even normal folks know how to give good things to their kids, then surely God is better than that. Surely, God wants to treat us better than we treat our kids.

Belief in a deity aside, I don’t think anyone of us would disagree that giving your hungry kid a rock instead of bread isn’t something you do for someone you love.

We all know how to treat someone we love. We strive for people we love. We make sacrifices for the people we love. We try hard to please the people we love and give them gifts we believe will excite them. We go to great lengths to show them how we feel, we try hard to show others how much we love the people we do.

We know how to love people. And we know how to show people we love them.

Right?

Now, imagine what would happen if you treated yourself the way you would treat someone you love.