Tag: community

Being a regular

When I first moved to Raleigh some twenty years ago now, I was living in a tiny room in a rooming house, and I needed a place to write. On the third day, I wandered into The Morning Times, a coffee shop downtown, and the barista asked my name. The next day when I came back, she used my name to greet me when I came in the door. After that, The Morning Times was just my coffee shop. Over the next 12 years, I imagine I spent well over $5,000 there.

It was part of my routine—I would get there about 10 minutes to nine most days. Because I was a regular there, several neat things would happen. For example, I got to know the staff, and they got to know me. We weren’t going to each other’s house for dinner or anything, but they knew the coffee I liked and how I liked it. It was generally the same crew working, so I knew their names and we laughed at common jokes, and doesn’t that make the world a little better?

Other people on the same schedule as I was would also be there every morning at 8:50 AM. The professor from the college around the corner. The slightly smarmy businessman standing in front of the building, waiting for his 9:00 AM meeting to show up. The young mom who showed up with her 3-year-old, and every morning they would have long, endearing discussions in line about what he was going to order when it was their turn.

I try hard to be a regular at places. I am all for exploring, but there is something to be said for being a regular part of someone’s day, and they are a regular part of yours.

These days, I’m not in Raleigh anymore. Now I live in a ranch house on a wooded lot in a good neighborhood in Jackson, MS. My office is in the bedroom on the northeast corner of the house, and most of the coffee I drink is made by me.

But I still fight to be a regular at places.

There is a family-owned hardware store near my house where the owner knows my name and asks after our cats. The Asian restaurant where, when we show up, the owner updates me on her son’s grades in school. The coffee shop where I have meetings, and the barista knows my name and order. The Mexican place in the suburbs where they know our likes and preferences.

One of our traditions is to eat out on Friday nights, and we have about six restaurants in rotation, all of which we are regulars at. When we try a new place, one of our criteria is if we liked it enough for it to be a place where we would want to be a regular.

I write a lot about place and community, and almost always, comments on social media say something about how hard it is to build that community.

If I were to move tomorrow to some place where I didn’t know anyone, I would immediately begin looking for places where I could be a regular. I don’t know of any activity that so quickly makes you feel you belong to a place and its people.

Because I’m a regular at the hardware store, I want them to succeed. If they close, it isn’t just inconvenient for me; it harms Carla and her family. And I’m sure they voted for different people than I did in the last Presidential election, but I will tell you that when one of their employees said something that was offensive to me, Carla heard me and took action, because I matter to her, too.

Because I’m a regular at several restaurants run by immigrants, it forces my attention to politics that do not directly affect me, because it is no longer theoretical. And while it may be true (but I do not concede the fact) that in other cities they may have tamales that are better than Jose’s or bookstores nicer than Lemuria, the entire time I am in those foreign to me places I only think of how nice it will be to be home and see the people at the places where I am a regular.

Looking for place

A few years back, I was at home for our annual family reunion. It happens every Easter—we Hollowells gather, and we bring food, and we hide Easter eggs, and we ooh and awe over people’s kids, and tell each other it’s been too long. They began doing this when I lived away, and now that I live much closer, I try to go every year.

I was standing down by the pond, watching the kids fish, when one of my many cousins moved up beside me and said he had heard we live in Jackson now.

You should know that Jackson is not only the capital of Mississippi, it is also the largest city as well. In fact, it is almost twice the size of the second-largest city. That all sounds much more impressive than it is; Raleigh, NC has suburbs that are larger than Jackson. Even so, relative to the rest of Mississippi, Jackson is huge.

And so, to my family back home, the big city often seems like a hotbed of crime and terror, whereas to me, it just feels like where I live.

So, I confirmed he was right: we live in Jackson now.

“No way would I live there,” he told me.

“Well, you have a great life here,” I told him. “We like it there, but I enjoyed living in Raleigh, too, and I enjoyed living in Memphis, and I enjoyed living here back when I did. I’ve just learned that you can always find a reason to love a place if you want to.”

“There’s something to that, I guess,” my cousin said before he went in search of another hot dog.

The other day, somebody I recently began working with on a project said, out of nowhere, that she loved how important a sense of place was to me. And while it’s true that I feel place deeply, like I told my cousin, it has always been like that.  

I cannot describe to you how important the cedar trees on our place were to me growing up, how much I enjoyed the small creek that ran through our property, the sounds of the mockingbirds as I walked through the woods.

But it was like the way I felt a decade later as I rode the bus down Poplar Avenue in Memphis, watching the cars go by and the high-rises downtown become shopping centers and then mansions as we headed east. Or the way I felt as I walked in Tom Lee Park and watched the river roll by, or how proprietary I felt when eating dry-rubbed ribs at Interstate BBQ. I would visit Wild Bill’s juke joint on Vollintine, bobbing my head to the music and drinking a 40 and feel like this was home.

In Raleigh, I would walk the streets and pass the restaurants and the clubs and the shops and feel a sense of ownership, and a desire to protect the people there, as well as the people who were believed not good enough to be there.

And yesterday, as I walked the streets of downtown Jackson, the city I have called home for over seven years now, I saw all the ways beauty sneaks into what is a hard city to thrive in, and I felt a huge sense of pride for us, and for the resilience of the people here.

I guess I am just saying that what I told my cousin is true: there is always beauty wherever you are. There is always something to be proud of, something to notice, something that needs improving, and something to celebrate. And I have found that looking for a thing increases your odds of finding it, whether that thing is a reason to love where you are, or reasons to hit the road the first chance you get.

A Dark and Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

I’ve always wanted to start a piece that way. Of course, I’m stealing it from Snoopy, who in his guise as a World Famous Author always began the story he was writing with those words.

In a more serious vein, Madeline L’Engle began A Wrinkle in Time with that line, although it is generally agreed that she was somewhat winking at the audience as she did it. It had already been a cliche for a long time by then.

But yet, right now, it IS a dark and stormy night. At least, it is here, as I sit down to write this.

Some days, the words just don’t come. As I sat down to write this, I just learned that there has been yet another school shooting, where 14 students and their teacher are dead. I don’t have anything to say about that. Even the standard platitude of “thoughts and prayers” is hollow, as there is something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem you are unwilling to solve.

And that is just one example. A week ago there was a racially inspired shooting, where 10 folks died in the grocery store. And COVID has killed a million of us here in the US alone. And inflation is pinching us and lots of folks are barely making it and meanwhile, billionaires travel in space for fun.

I want to write an angry post right now. I would feel better, and you would share it and nothing would change except that my blood pressure would be higher. That sort of anger almost killed me once, and I’m no longer willing to sacrifice myself or my health to make people on the internet like me.

* * *

The air conditioner went out in my house yesterday. AC repairs always scare me, because most AC work requires specialized tools, and the repairs tend to be expensive and so when I need AC work done it stirs up fears around money and career choices I have made and drags up all of the old anxieties I had hidden away when life was going well.

Last night I sat on my deck (because it was hot and stuffy in my house) and heard frogs having a party in the new frog pond I’m building, and the sounds of frogs singing and the water bubbling soothed my anxieties and I slept a hard 7 hours, and woke up this morning to find frog eggs in my pond.

And then I went for my walk before it got hot, and I saw the flowers abloom and the neighbors waved and I came home and drank a cup of coffee made exactly the way I like it, and I sat on my deck and watched the water splash in the frog pond and I thought how fortunate I was, even if my AC didn’t work.

But then I called a man that someone in my network recommended, and he came out and fixed it quickly and it cost a mere $100 and I recognize that my community saved my bacon once again and I can leave my anxieties about money and careers and productivity on the shelf for now, to be examined later.

And that is where I am right now, on this dark and stormy night, enveloped by the pain of the world.

I believe it’s bad. I believe that our community can save us from all of this. And I believe we have to find the beauty and the joy that exists in the midst of it all if we intend to survive until it does.

Connection

I spent this past weekend in one of my happy places – the mountains of North Carolina. I love it there, even if it is not home in the way the hills of my native North Mississippi are home to me. But it feels in some ways closer to home than the subtropical prairie of Central Mississippi where I live now. Geography is a funny thing.

But the thing that drew me back there this time was not geography, but people. This pandemic has been hard on this sociable introvert, and my experience of the pandemic has been a conservative one: Because of Renee’s heart transplant, which renders her severely immunocompromised, we have been more careful than most careful people, which means lots and lots of distancing ourselves from others.

I drove the 9 hours – I’m not ready to risk getting on a plane yet – and got in late at night, and was warmly greeted by an old friend. He’s the sort of friend with whom you sit until long in the night, catching up and sharing stories from your lives that are too granular to include in the periodic phone calls, the sorts of things that don’t make the curated feeds of social media. The conversation ebbs and flows, the silence is comfortable when it happens, the topics are wide-ranging, and suddenly you realize it is two AM.

Over the next few days, I spent time with several old friends – people I knew from the Before Times. Not just before-the-pandemic times, although that is true, but also from the before-my-life-was-what-it-is-now times. They knew the angry Hugh, the impulsive Hugh, the Hugh that burned out. They knew him and his faults and loved him anyway. And it was delightful to be back among people who truly knew me, in a way I have not been known by anyone since moving back to Mississippi.

That is no reflection on the people here – it’s mostly about time: The people in the mountains have known me for more than a decade. We worked together on various projects together, we made things together, and together we traversed tragedy and joy -divorces, deaths, weddings, and babies, all together. When I fell, they picked me up and loved me – hard. In short, we had opportunities for connection I have not had here, where ⅔ of my time has been spent trying to survive a pandemic in front of a Zoom screen while wearing sweatpants. It’s not the same thing at all.

An old friend who has drifted out of my life would say, when I would do or say something that indicated I truly knew her likes and dislikes, her fears, her quirky guilty pleasures, that it felt good to be known.

And that’s truly it, isn’t it? The desire to be known fully, to be understood, to be seen and heard, to be acknowledged and remembered. This is, at its core, why I write.

* * *

I find myself these days craving connection. My old friends are laughing at this, as I am horrible at staying in touch with people I love. Some of this is my ADHD, as a common thing people with my type of brain do is find that the thinking about a thing feels to our brain as if we did it, so my remembering my friend Kim and thinking fondly of her elicits the same feeling in my brain it would if I had sent her a text or note, so having had the memory, I no longer feel the drive to act on it. Of course, this does nothing to let Kim know that I was thinking of her, but here we are.

I also wonder though, how much my paralysis around reaching out to people isn’t so much my paralysis, but unreasonable expectations set up by technologies that are less than a generation old. As late as the 1990s, most of us had a relatively small group of people about whom we knew what their day-to-day life was really like. In 1998, one might know from an email – or a decade earlier, from a phone call or letter – that a cousin in a distant town took their family to the amusement park, but now we know that their eight-year-old threw up on the roller-coaster, that the six-year-old hates corndogs, that they lost their car in the parking lot, and everyone got sunburned.

And we know that level of detail about hundreds of people, regularly.

There is a phenomenon on social media where, although I am writing a public post, which theoretically can be seen and read by anyone on earth with an internet connection and a browser, in my mind, it is actually only intended to be read by a select few. I don’t parse my words as if it is a broadcast to the planet, but rather as if it is more like a Christmas Newsletter, going out to people I love.

But the inverse is also true – when we read other people’s posts, it is perceived by our brain as if it is written to us specifically, which is one reason we take it all so personally. I saw a post from someone I don’t really know where he was complaining that people were shoving their love for the 2022 Superbowl Halftime Show down his throat, when in reality nobody had addressed him specifically at all – they just had opinions that they posted on their own wall, which he could see. But to his mind, they were all addressed to him.

Because of this, my brain tells me that all my friends are sharing many details of their lives with me, and I am not reciprocating at their level, so the relationship feels imbalanced in my head. But they are many, and I am one, and so their collective flood of sharing is naturally dwarfed by my own output. In other words, it is an ever-escalating race that is unwinnable.

The people I saw this weekend in the mountains – some of them I have not seen in the three years since I have been gone, but we did not lack connection. The sporadic emails, texts, and glimpses into their life on Instagram were enough to sustain the relationship until we could sip tea together in the same room, rehash the old stories, and tell new ones.

The truth is, I could be better about calling and writing, but the bigger problem is my definition of connection is probably skewed by unrealistic expectations because of stories I tell myself about myself.

* * *

None of that diminishes the very real longing I have for the deeper connections here, where I currently live. The additional friction created by the pandemic – the uncertainty of who is safe and who is not, the difficulty finding a place to meet where one feels safe, the second-guessing and cultural gaslighting – are all real factors that make this really hard.

But I find myself these days eager to do the work it will take. I have lunch and coffee meetings (on patios, in places that require masks, with vaccinated and boosted people) scheduled. I’m trying to regulate my social media usage in a way that makes it a servant instead of a master.

And I’m trying to be honest about what I need and to state my needs. And what I find myself needing these days, more than anything else, is connection.

A Crowded Table

Our dining room table will seat 8 comfortably, 10 in a stretch, and we have squeezed 12 in on at least two occasions.  It’s not a pretty table – it’s that honey oak popular in the eighties – but one day, I will build a better one. This table’s primary selling point when we bought it was that it was cheap and big. We scrounged yard sales for extra chairs, to expand the capacity from the six that came with it when we bought it. These chairs sit empty these days.

When we bought the house, it was suggested that we knock out a portion of the wall between the kitchen and dining room to make a more open floor plan – but we are the weirdo’s who don’t like open floor plans. Having a kitchen open to the table means looking at dirty dishes when you are eating supper with people you love. So we have a large dining room, with a large table, between my office and the kitchen, which holds our huge table, empty chairs, and some of our favorite artwork from friends.

We have a guest room, with a queen sized memory foam mattress that has been slept on 3 times in 22 months, a record all-time low.

This house, which we love, was purchased based on some assumptions: That we would entertain regularly, that we would routinely have guests in from out of town, that cooking for other people would be a thing I do regularly, that hospitality was our primary spiritual practice. None of those things are happening, and haven’t been done with any normalcy in almost two years and that shows no sign of changing soon.

This virus, and our national lackluster response to it, has stolen so much from me – hell, from all of us. If I were to make a list of things we used to do often, but no longer do, it would be a lengthy list. But other than eating with people, the thing I think I miss most is the lingering. When I have met folks face to face, it is a rush to be done, to get out of the place, to be done and get back to safety. I miss just being in the part of town where a store was, and deciding to pop in and just see what they had new. Of having a free Saturday morning, so you decide to hit up some antique malls just to see what was out there. It’s been so long since we just “killed time.”

My favorite part of any meal with other folks is the lingering – when the meal is over, the dishes are empty in front of you, and yet the conversation continues, ebbing and flowing. Perhaps there is a cup of coffee in front of you, and occasionally someone will munch on a roll or decide in favor of another piece of pie, but mostly you are just relishing each other’s company, and it all feels so right and comfortable and safe, and no one dares end it by getting up.

I miss that. I miss the joy of cooking things that would make people happy, of getting to share my gifts and the stories behind them with people who sat at my table, in my house, and telling them the stories of why we eat this dish this way, of who painted that picture on the wall, of why that drawing is important to us. I miss hosting a crowded table.

One day, it will be like that again. One day, I will cook stockpots full of food again, one day we will have overnight guests regularly again, one day, we will have crowded tables once more, and for me, when that happens, the world will feel more right, more just, more hopeful than it does right now.

Take care of yourselves, and your families. Get vaccinated if you are not, and get boosted if you can. We need to get to the other side of this – I am so looking forward to regularly hosting a crowded table once more.

Friends who disagree

I’m blogging every day of November, with each day being a post about a thing for which I am grateful. – HH

On the fifth day, I’m grateful for people in my life who disagree with me and yet try to stay connected with me.

I am a passionate person. I feel things deeply. I have a highly developed sense of empathy, and so I feel what I perceive as injustices to others viscerally. I don’t bend easily. I look around at the world as it is, with all our problems and it feels unbearable to me.

This runs a lot of folks off. And that’s regrettable, but I get it. There are some people who I so disagree with I cannot stand to be in the same room with them. So for the ones who try hard to stay in the room with me, I really appreciate the effort.

The other night, I was talking to someone I went to high school with, but hadn’t talked to since 1990 or so. Things have changed a lot since then (I probably had a Bush/ Quayle sicker on my car in those days) and I was trying to catch her up. She was someone whose essential convictions had not really changed – she was a progressive teenager, and is a progressive adult. I was just right of center on a lot of things, and moved dramatically left.

How did that happen, she asked?

I explained that moving away and meeting all sorts of people who were different than I am was a big part of it. As my relationships changed, my beliefs had to run to catch up with my relationships. In short, I changed because my relationships changed.

For me, it’s all personal. It’s all extremely personal.

I’m pro-choice because of the people I know and love. I’m pro LGBT people because of people I know and love. I’m a Universalist because of the people I know and love. I’m for Civil Rights because of people I know and love. I’m for the South because of people I know and love. I’m for working-class folks over Billionaires because of people I know and love.

And this extrapolates, too, to issues where I don’t know anyone personally involved. Because people I know and love have been on the wrong end of the Powerful, as long as there are people on the bottom of class and power, I’m for them, regardless of the particular issue.

I agree with Eugene Debs, who said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Every single bit of who I am and fight for is personal.

And all that happened because the people I ate with, the people I had conversations with, the people who fed me, the people who held me, and the people who loved me, changed. And when I was confronted with ideas from those people that challenged me, I didn’t run away, but I tried hard to understand, because they mattered to me, and I wanted to stay connected to them. And so I appreciate the people who disagree with me, who I make uncomfortable, who struggle to stay in the room with me, but do.

I think that ultimately, nothing has more potential to impact us and the world around us – for good or ill – as much as our relationships do. And for the people who disagree with me but try real hard to stay connected to me, I’m grateful for you. I see how hard you try, and it means the world to me.

Don’t do it by yourself.

One of my favorite stories:

A salesman was driving through the country on his way to his next appointment. He took a curve too fast and ended up in the ditch.

He had no cell service to call AAA, and was cursing his luck when he looked over the field next to the road and saw an old man and a mule, plowing the field.

He walked over to the man and asked for help. The farmer unhitched his mule and together they walked to the car.

The man hitched the mule to the car, told the salesman to stand back and gave a mighty holler.

“Sam – Pull! Mikey – Pull! Davey – Pull!”

And then the mule leaned in, and pulled, and with a creak and a groan the car rolled onto the road again.

As the farmer unhitched the mule, the salesman stood there in disbelief.

“I don’t understand”, he said. “You called three names out, but you only have one mule. What was that about?”

The man smiled. “Oh, that was to trick Davey here into thinking he wasn’t trying to do it alone. If he thought he had to do it by himself, he wouldn’t have even tried.”

* * *

When we know we have a team of people with us, we can accomplish things we never would have dreamed of taking on by ourselves.

Don’t do it by yourself.