Tag: Aunt Louise

My workshop

On the 12th day, I’m grateful for my workshop.

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my dad’s Aunt, Louise. Her husband, Lonnie, had died right before I was born, and so he was someone whose shadow loomed large in my childhood, but who I never met.

Uncle Lonnie was Louise’s second husband (y’all gonna make me devote a whole one of these to her before I’m done), after she divorced the drunk sign painter. Lonnie worked for Ford Motor company as a machinist, and had a good union job with benefits, but the thing that made him remarkable was that he was also a mechanical genius.

I don’t say that lightly – there were cars in the 60’s that rolled off Ford’s assembly line due to his patents (well, that Ford owned, that whole work for hire thing, you know). He wired the houses of pretty much everyone I knew growing up. He could plumb, do electrical, weld, build with brick, concrete or wood – he could do it all.

He had a workshop behind their house – a small 10×16 or so shed he had built, with his tools lined up above his workbench, a drill press and a lathe on the other side. And Aunt Louise told me that when he got home, he would eat supper, and then he would go out to his shop and work.

As a ten-year-old boy, I would go out to his shop when I would stay over at her house. It was dusty, having not been used since he died. The tools were gone, but the racks were still there, and so was his workbench. The lights he had wired still worked, and the fixtures he manufactured out of pickle jars still did what he had intended. It was a magical place. I would sometimes just sit there on a milk crate, soaking it in. I have, as an adult, been in gothic cathedrals and felt some of the same feeling, like I was in the presence of some higher intelligence just out of my reach.

Uncle Lonnie was the dominant man in my dad’s life after my grandfather died when Dad was 7.

My dad was a tinkerer – an inch thick but a mile wide when it came to skills. He could rebuild your engine, wire your house, fix your radio, cut down your tree, repair your air conditioner, weld a trailer, build a house. He wasn’t amazing at any of that, but he could do them all, and perhaps most importantly, he wasn’t afraid to try something he hadn’t done before.

He told me once that it had all started when he was 8 or so – his father had passed away the year before, and his mom was working at the grocery store on the corner for a dollar an hour – money was hard to come by, and there was none for frivolities. A lady at the church had a bike her daughter no longer used, and was going to throw it out – Dad took it and he and Lonnie rebuilt it.

“It was a girl’s bike, and it was in bad shape when I got it. But I didn’t have anything to lose, so I figured out how it worked, and then I asked him for help, and we fixed it. It was having that bike or have no bike, so I was motivated,” he told me once.

But Dad never had a workshop when I lived at home. We lived in a 1,000 sf home, the five of us, and there wasn’t room for things like that. And there wasn’t any money for things like that, either.

So, his projects would live on the kitchen table, or on the porch, or on the tailgate of his truck as an impromptu workbench. But he really wanted a workshop.

A few years before he died, he finally built one. He knew retirement was coming up, and he planned endlessly for what life was going to be like after he retired. He would build furniture, he would do blacksmithing – he had hundreds of pictures of pieces of furniture he saw out in the wild that he wanted to capture because he liked the way it was shaped, or fastened or was built.

But the shop just filled up with things  – projects he intended to work on in retirement – tools he got on clearance he would need in retirement – bargains on materials he would need in retirement.

My Dad was supposed to retire in June, but then the pandemic hit and he didn’t feel he could ethically leave his job as Emergency Management Director for his county at such a bad time. He died in October, from COVID.

He never got to retire, never got to build things in his shop, never got to while away an afternoon there, never got to actually use it, in any real sense of the word. His shop is nice, and a lot of thought went into it, but it doesn’t feel like anything to be in it, because he didn’t get to really make it his. It’s just a building he built.

After Dad died, I inherited some of his tools. Like Dad, I have always wanted a workshop. I always have projects going, and tools scattered everywhere and…

Then we bought a house. And a pandemic hit. And my Dad died having never used the workshop he longed for and looked forward to.

So this spring and summer, I built a workshop.

It’s small – 10×16. But I mostly use handtools, and I don’t use it for things that aren’t a workshop (like, this isn’t where the freezer or the bikes go), and so it works for me. I also like to tinker, but mostly I’m a woodcarver and small wood furniture maker, and for that it works perfectly.

In some ways it’s nicer than either Dad’s or Lonnie’s. It’s insulated, and I have a window unit air conditioner in it, and led lights and Wi-Fi and clerestory windows and a small TV and an Alexa for music. I really wish Dad could have seen it.

Mostly, I’m glad I get to use it while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. I’m glad I get to actually use it, get joy from it, and get to have a creative workspace that I don’t have to clean up when we need to set the table, a space that is mine to shape and be shaped by.

It’s not perfect yet, and in some ways is still unfinished. But most evenings after supper, I go out to the shop and work.

Why I Stay in the South

I am a child of the Southland. I love it here, and I grew up here, in a childhood filled with honeysuckle, sweet tea, fishing, lightning bugs and church potlucks.

The earliest memories I have involve table fellowship with other folks, of lessons drummed into my head about hospitality and being told to “remember who I was”. I have vivid memories of elderly, blue haired ladies telling me they knew my grandma (who died when I was very young) and my daddy and that they knew I had been “raised right”.

In the South I grew up in, I was taught we had to take care of each other, because none of us had much. So my Daddy would miss supper sometimes, because after working more than 10 hours that day crawling under houses in a shirt with his name on it for barely over minimum wage, he would go straight to the volunteer fire department to get trained on some new piece of firefighting equipment. Because of this, I learned that love – for a place or a person – can’t be divorced from responsibility.

I learned that the things that make for a good life involve other people – the people who bring you a casserole when you are sick, the rounds you make at Christmas, as you take tins of fudge to old ladies who would wipe the snuff off their mouth and say with amazement, “I’ll swan…” as they bit into that creamy goodness. The neighbor who knows your daddy is sick, and comes down and cuts the grass and stacks the firewood for your family.

My grandmother’s sister Louise – my great-aunt — was a fierce lady. Born in 1907, she had been divorced in the 1930’s, when that was rare. She told me her first husband was a drunk, and “damned if I was gonna do all the work and watch him drink”. She told me that she might go to hell for it, but she had been in hell for the years she had been married to him, so she knew how to live there. She refused to take the Lord’s Supper at church, because “I am lots of things, Hugh, but none of those things is a hypocrite.”

In a small brick church that had my granddaddy’s name on the cornerstone, I learned about Jesus, who told us to love each other, and who had long hair, but that was OK, because he was God and, most important, he didn’t live in my daddy’s house. God was the Father, and demanded obedience – which made sense to me, as my own father demanded obedience. I figured Jesus had been told, ‘Because I said so!” any number of times as a kid.

But more than theology, in that small church I learned about community, about being a part of some people who would cut the articles about you out of the local paper when you won the spelling bee and put them on their refrigerator and pray for you every night. About casseroles when you’re sick, about not noticing Mr. Hayes sang off-key, about celebrating small victories and going to every funeral.

I learned other things too. I learned that we were poor, but proud, and that we were expected to work hard, but that didn’t mean we had to like it. But I also learned that some people would look at your Black friend’s hard work and tell you he was “a credit to his race”. And that would confuse you, but not as much as trying to understand why he wasn’t allowed to spend the night at your house.

As I grew older, I learned that complicated lesson that the very people who taught me to love can be, themselves, unloving to others. That the people who taught me to be hospitable can themselves be inhospitable. It means coming to terms with the knowledge that the people who loved me into being are flawed, and fall short often of the ideals they gave me.

Being a child of the Southland means feeling things fiercely, and so I learned that you stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves, and I learned that I had responsibilities to my community. That I learned to draw the circle of community larger than my people did is not my fault but theirs, and was somewhat inevitable: After all, they are the ones who taught me that “red and yellow, black and white – they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

They taught me that, and I believed them.

Being in and of the South while being a progressive white straight male means your liberal educated friends from North of here will watch how your state votes and will call your friends and family things like “inbred” and ‘hillbillies” and “white trash” and ask you how you stay there.

And sometimes, when you have the energy and the notion, you tell them those people are some of the kindest, best people you know, but folks in power have made them afraid in order to maintain power. That your people have been played and told that their diminishing paychecks and their insecurity and their inability to keep the land their granddaddy farmed and got 49 harvests from – that all of that is the fault not of the people who are in power, but of people who have black and brown skin and less power than even they do. And your people believe it, because scared people will believe anything that will make them less scared.

And sometimes, when you have the energy and the notion, you tell your friends from elsewhere that you stay because you love it here, and that you are not just from here but of here, and your roots run deep here, and one day you will be buried here amongst your ancestors. And that for them to ask why you don’t leave means that you are supposed to believe that there is a separation between the values you learned as a child and the values you have now, when the reality is, the person you are now is just the person you were taught to be then, only writ larger.

And for them to suggest you leave is to suggest that you cannot be the person who longs for table fellowship and church meetings and the smell of cape jasmine and the delight of sweet tea and cornbread and also be the person who fights for justice for your community and who yearns for the day we can all sit at the same table and eat cornbread and sweet tea together.

And that is not true.

Because the truth isn’t that I can be all of who I am and also be Southern – it’s that I am all of who I am because I am Southern. And to suggest I move and give up on this place and these people is to suggest I deny all of that, and that I deny them. And that I cannot do. I will not do.

Because I am lots of things – but none of those things is a hypocrite.

Storytelling

On the 9th day, I’m grateful for being able to tell a story, and to have stories worth telling. Although I have learned that the latter is less important than the former.

I grew up among storytellers.

Like my Aunt Louise, my dad’s aunt, who was a fierce woman, a divorcee who refused the sacraments, who drank Jack Daniels, drunk dialed her friends, packed a pistol in her purse, and made coffee every morning for her dogs.

And she could tell a story.

She died when I was 12, but she must have told me 100 times about how when Dad was a baby and would stay with her, he slept in a drawer in the dresser, because she didn’t have a crib. Her telling of that story took 20 minutes, and I knew exactly how it would end, and I was on the edge of my seat anyway.

Or the time her and her second husband moved to Ohio and had never driven on the 4-lane highway before, so they rode through all of Tennessee on the shoulder of the road, because the sign said for slow traffic to stay to the left.

Or the time my Dad’s older brother yelled at the lady at the table next to them in the restaurant who was slurping her soup, “Hey lady – I hear you like soup!”

I knew all those stories like better kids knew the Bible.

Then there were the retired farmers next door who told me why you plant leafy greens in one phase of the moon, and root vegetables during another. The story I was told when I was standing in the window during the lightning storm about her brother whose cap was knocked off his head when he was struck by lightning.

The preacher who had a sermon illustration about every damn thing, that always started with, “There was a man I knew who…”.

And then there were the stories I had read – because I loved books.

By the time I was 14 or so, my head was filled with stories. Then I discovered stand-up comedy, because I would catch the Tonight Show when I came home from working at the grocery store. And what is stand up, but stories?

In the summer of 1988, I entered a talent contest in Byhalia, MS (population 830) designed to raise money for, I think, the Lions Club. I did a 4-minute bit – my standup debut. It was also the last time I did stand-up. The mic didn’t work, so nobody past the first three rows heard me. One judge, a local celebrity who had been an actor in the original Chorus Line Production on Broadway, told me I was good, but a bit too advanced for Byhalia.

I really was just happy to tell stories that connected with people.

My sophomore year of High School, an English teacher submitted one of my writing assignments into a statewide contest, and I won second place. It was the first time anyone official said I was good with words. I knew I could make people laugh. I knew I could tell you a story. I just hadn’t known the stories would also work if I wrote them down.

I probably wrote 50 short stories in high school after that. Lots of murder stories, vigilante stories, drug dealer stories, hero stories where the protagonist does the right thing, even if it cost him the girl. Often with lines like, “He knew this would end badly, but he had no choice: It was foredestined that he would walk a lonely road.”

I had decided I would be a writer. I write all during my time in the Marines. I kept a journal in BootCamp, thinking I would do an updated version of Biloxi Blues when I got out.

I probably would have been a professional writer if it hadn’t of been for college.

The way it happened was like this: I had gotten a D on a Freshman comp paper, so I went to office hours to talk to the teacher. Let’s call her Ms. Edwards.

“I want to be a writer,” I told her. “It’s all I want to be. And If I can’t do better than a D when I am trying really, really hard, I don’t know what to do about that. Should I just give this dream up? Am I deluding myself? Am I wasting my time?”

She said absolutely nothing encouraging in that meeting. Nothing. Instead, she recommended I “think twice” about “wasting my time” on this “writing dream” and figure out how I am going to make a living.

“I am never going to tell anyone what they can’t do, Hugh. But I think you will be happier if you give up this writing dream. You don’t have it in you to do this, I don’t think. You just don’t have the tools.”

So I did. I didn’t write a goddamn thing for pleasure for 10 more years. Why bother, since I didn’t have it in me to be a writer? If I didn’t have the tools?

In late 2003, a friend was telling me about this new thing he had, called a ‘blog. He had a small following, and he wasn’t even that good of a storyteller.

I can do better than this guy, I thought.

Blogging saved me. Writing for an audience, the immediate feedback, the community of bloggers back in those early days – had it not been for all that, I would never have written another word. Then I read Anne LaMotte, and learned about shitty first drafts, and Stephen King, and learned about rewriting, and Carolyn See, and learned about creating your own magic. And one day, I decided I was a writer, and Ms. Edwards could go to hell.

But here’s the secret: I’m not. Not really. Because inside, I’m not so much a writer as I am a storyteller. Every time I sit down to write, I imagine I am telling one person a story, and I just type out the story. Every word on this page is just how it sounds in my head.

But however it happens, it always feels like magic, and I’m glad I get to do it.