Imperfection – Day 2

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

I’m grateful for having had parents that encouraged me to be bad at things.

My dad was a pretty good photographer. He was a pretty good woodworker, and a pretty good carpenter, and a pretty good electrician. He wasn’t amazing at any of them, but better than most.

And he was OK with doing it less than perfectly.

In the dining room of our current house, the doorway has a piece of trim I put up and the miter is imperfect. It’s noticeable, but really only if you are looking for it. Of course, the first time they came over I pointed it out, embarrassed.

Being Dad, he told me not to worry about it, and then told me about a friend of his that studied how to make furniture.

“He would take all year to make a bookcase, but when he was done, it was absolutely perfect. But I wanted to know how to make a bookcase, and how to make a cabinet, and how to wire it for lights, and how to fix the engine on my car, and how to carve a whistle. He could make a bookcase better than me, no doubt. But he only knew how to do one thing perfectly, and I learned how to do lots of things imperfectly.”

I was never pressured to be perfect. I was never pressured to fit into their idea of what I should be, and it was fine for me to bring any grade home as long as it was a C or above.

“Because C is average, and you are not below average.”

Or this exchange I will never forget, when I was about 12:

Dad: Son, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Me: I don’t know Dad. What do you want me to be?
Dad: Happy, son. I want you to be happy when you grow up.

The week of emotions

I tend to think in terms of weeks. Days are too short, and months are too long. But weeks are just right.

When I lived in North Carolina, my favorite week was the first week of April, as the dogwoods were in bloom and all of nature seemed to be showing out. In the winter I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s, as no work gets done and it seems a time of reflection on the year that is ending and limitless hope for the year ahead.

This week we are currently in, the week between the 17th and 24th of October, will forever be my emotional week.

Today is Tuesday. A year ago this past Sunday, my dad called me to let me know he had tested positive for COVID. He was unsure how he had gotten it, but he was the Emergency Management Director for his county, and was responsible for getting PPE and emergency supplies to all the first responders, so he no doubt got it at work. He never ran a fever, he never lost taste or smell. All of his symptoms were primarily gastrointestinal and trouble breathing. When he tested positive, they got Mom tested.

A year ago today, my mom’s test results came back that she too was positive for COVID. It’s hard to remember now, a year later, but at that stage of the pandemic, three day turnarounds for test results were pretty standard. When they called to let me know, Dad was a little short of breath but otherwise sounded good. In a typical dad move, he was worried about how the county was managing without his doing his job.

A year ago tomorrow, our foster son was unexpectedly sent back to his family against pretty much everyone’s recommendations. After living with us for 9 months, we had less than an hour to pack all his things and to say goodbye.

I will have more to say about our experience with the foster system later, but the short version is that the system all that happened in was horrible for everyone.  If you were to design a system to traumatize children, break the spirit of people who want to help children, and demoralize social workers, it would look a lot like the foster care system in Mississippi.

A year ago this Thursday, my dad died just after lunchtime. My brother called me and told me while standing in the yard with his children, watching them take Dad out of the house, and while watching Mom see Dad leave the house for the last time, with everyone appropriately distanced because the consequences of this virus were obvious and were going down the driveway in the back of an ambulance that had the lights and siren off.

Later that day Mom’s oxygen levels would drop, and the ambulance would take her to the hospital where she would have been admitted except they had patients on gurneys in the hallways because there were no beds. They had a waiting list to get a gurney in the hallway. Instead they pumped her full of oxygen and fluids and then sent her home.

My brother drove her home at 2AM, with her in the backseat and the windows down and everyone wearing masks. She slept that night, or tried to, in the small house I was raised in and that her and Dad lived in for more than 40 years, in the bed they had shared, knowing that if she survived this virus she faced a lifetime without him.

My Dad and I shared many attributes in common, but what tenacity I have, I get from Mom. Her strength amazes me constantly.

A year ago this Friday, I would get up early and drive three hours to drive to my hometown to see my mom and brothers. We were all distanced and Mom moved slowly to sit on the porch. No one could help her, and there may be more compelling definitions of hell, but watching your mother sit on the porch 15 feet from you mourn the death of her husband and your father and not be able to hug her or even physically touch her is as close as I’ve personally come. Driving back home that night, I wept, off and on, for three hours.

And then, 12 years ago this coming Sunday, I married Renee, which has consistently been one of the best decisions of my life. No rational person would have thought us likely to make it, and we were the opposite of “financially stable”. When we woke up the day of our wedding, there was less than $20 in the bank account. I had this vague “ministry” thing I did that paid me less than a thousand dollars a month and Renee was on disability for her heart condition. For our honeymoon, we stayed in a borrowed condo a friend owned at Carolina Beach.

We are, on the surface, an unlikely pair. But it works out more often than not, largely because we decided it will.

And that is how I got through this week last year, and how I will get through it this year and all the years in front of me: I have decided to. I have lightened my commitments and given myself permission to be absent from things and told friends I may need more support than normal. And, importantly, I’m sharing this with you folks.

A paradox of life is that sharing things that make us joyful increases the joy, while sharing our burdens makes them lighter.

I can’t explain why it works that way, but I’m really glad it does.

 

 

My Dad

In October of 2020, my dad died from COVID. Dad was the Emergency Management Director of his county, and so he was constantly on the front lines, getting his rural community what they needed to get through this pandemic.

Back in February, I was told the Chamber of Commerce of his hometown was considering him for a posthumous award as the “Pandemic Hero” of 2020 in their annual award celebration. I was asked to write his official nomination submission, and it’s as close as I have come to writing his eulogy.

Here is my nomination letter in full, written by a grateful son who, when all is said and done, just misses his Daddy something fierce. Thanks for indulging me for putting it here.

# # #

To the nominating committee:

My father, Hugh Hollowell, died on October 22nd of 2020, from COVID. He had lived and worked in Marshall County his entire life, barring four years in the Air Force. He raised three boys on the land he himself had grown up on, and he taught them about what it means to belong to a place and its people.

His main teaching method was his example. He served for more than 7 years as the chief of the Watson Volunteer Fire Department, coming home from long days crawling under houses as a gas company repairman to wolf down a sandwich and go back out to attend some class that would teach him how to make his community safer.

In 1989, he began a career transition to Emergency Management, when he became the first Fire Coordinator for Marshall County, and began to work for the County full time as their Emergency Management Coordinator in 1996. It was then, at 45 years old, that my dad began to flourish.

My dad had an almost superhuman ability to remain calm when everyone else was losing their head. He could diffuse anger and had the ability to make everyone feel heard, an important skill as he navigated the world of politicians, EMS frontline workers, volunteers, and career civil servants.

He was set to retire in June of 2020. He was at our house Christmas of 2019, and it was a topic he talked a lot about. He had long dreamed of travelling, but budget constraints and the responsibilities of his work and family had prevented it. He and my mom would buy a camper and drive out west and see the wide open spaces of my mother’s childhood and my father’s dreams.

When the pandemic hit, I was glad he was set to retire. I saw the way in those early days it made this 68-year-old man tired, and the fatigue in his voice was obvious over the phone. He had long been able to handle a crisis – tornados, fires, storms, bad wrecks – but this was a crisis that did not stop, and he was the person who was responsible for making sure people were protected.

He felt that responsibility heavily.

That is another thing he taught us – what it means to be responsible: To your family, to your job, to your community. So I was saddened but not surprised when he told me that he had chosen to not retire in June as he had planned.

“I can’t do it to them. I can’t leave the county in a lurch. I’m going to get them through this year, and then retire in January.”

The pandemic got worse, of course. When I would call, he would be in the truck, on his way to pick up some PPE or just coming back from delivering it to the hospital or one of the fire departments. His emails came at odd hours – 4AM, or 11:30PM, as he grabbed snatches to time from a packed day. He lamented the weight of the boxes, saying that it bothered him that he wasn’t as strong as he used to be, and he was really, really looking forward to next year, when he could finally retire.

“I’m just tired,” he said. “I’m really, really tired.”

To those of us who knew him, it wasn’t a shock he would give up his own comfort and pleasure, that he would postpone his rest if it let him make sure the community he loved was safe. When he called me on October 17th to tell me he had tested positive for COVID, he tried to keep the focus off himself and on his concern for who would do the work of making sure the county had what it needed to stay safe while he was out.

I last spoke to him on the 20th. Predictably, he spent perhaps 2 minutes talking about his own condition and 10 minutes talking about how the virus had affected others and the county.

“You know,” he said, “I always joked that I would rest when I was dead. As much sleep as I’m getting right now because of this virus, I have to tell you, I am tired of resting. I want to get back to work!”.

He died around lunchtime on the 22nd.

My father was not perfect, and as a child I often resented the ways that his love for and sense of responsibility to this community took him away from me. The Thanksgiving he missed because of a shooting, the Christmas he missed because of the house fire, the evenings spent away from us to be in the company of others where he could take yet another class instead of spending time with me, the endless fundraisers for the little fire department that was all that protected my community.

But as I told a friend after his death, the hardest part of it is that there is no one to be mad at in this. I wish there was. It would make it all easier. But he died protecting the community that had raised and protected him when he was the child of a middle-aged single mom, who had made sure they had enough when that was far from certain, who had given him the means to earn a living, to raise a family, had given his life meaning and purpose, and that taught him along the way that your community contains all the things you need to have a good life. It is the only way his story could possibly end that would have made sense, given who he was and how he lived.

He was not a demonstratively emotional man, but he loved this town, this county, and the people who lived there. He would not want to be called a hero – he would maintain he was just doing his job. But one of the roles community plays is to tell us the things we cannot know or admit about ourselves, and those of us who knew and loved him know the truth.

Respectfully submitted,

Hugh L. Hollowell, Jr.

The important people

My father and I never had one of those father-son pissing contests that so many seem to have. Growing up, I thought (and still do) that the sun rose and set upon my dad.

Mom would often go to bed early, to lay in bed and read (I got that from her) and Dad would stay up and watch the news. I would stay up with him – just to be in his presence, uninterrupted. And sometimes, not often, and you could not plan a thing so important, but sometimes, we would get into a discussion after the news that might go for hours. The best memories of my childhood are of us sitting up late at night, discussing things – the future, my hopes and plans, how things work.

He would sit in his recliner and I would lay on the floor and I felt so proud to sit at his feet, to learn from this man who showed me that true greatness comes from serving others. He seemed ancient to me, but he was actually only 36 or 37 – four years younger than I am now.

The summer I turned 16, we sat up several times to discuss my job hunt. I had been offered a job at the grocery store in the nearby small town for minimum wage ($3.35 an hour in those days) or a job on the right-of-way crew for the power company, clearing brush away from the power lines for $4.50. I had a preference, and it revolved around the money.

Dad, however, advised against it. He told me that if I took the right-of-way job, at the end of the summer, I would know the other two guys on my crew really well, but that would be it. But, he said, if I took the job at the grocery store, I would meet a wide range of people. I would make some people really happy and upset others. I would see people at their best and at their worst, and I would know a lot of people at the end of the summer that I didn’t know now, and make lots of friends.

“And the only wealth in this world is friends,” he said.

So, I took the job at the grocery store. And it was a good job, and I stayed there until I graduated high school. But none of that is the story I wanted to tell you.

See, it was near the end of that summer, and I had been working at the grocery store for a few months. I had just gotten in from work and Mom was in bed and Dad was watching the news. So I sat on the floor at his feet and watched with him. And I knew, just knew, one of those treasured conversations was about to happen.

He turned off the tv when the news was over, and he asked how work was going.

“It is going great!” I said. “I am finally at a point where I know who the important people are.”

His whole body changed – I don’t have the tools to describe it. He looked overtaken by a wave of sadness.

He got out of his recliner and sat down on the floor next to me. He looked me in the eye, put his hand on my leg and said “Son, they are all important people. Every single one of them. Don’t ever forget that.”

I never have.