Tag: Raleigh

Mike’s Bible

Today is Mike’s birthday. Facebook reminded me this morning, which felt like a punch in the gut. So, I thought it was fitting to tell you about Mike’s Bible.

The Bible itself is nothing to look at. If you were looking for a generic idea of what a Bible should look like, it would look like this one. It’s black leather, with gilt edges and a black ribbon to mark your place, and in gold script in the lower right-hand corner, it has Mike’s name embossed.

This Bible is nothing special on its own, but it is very important to me. Thoreau said the value of a things lies in what of we have to give up to obtain it. By that measure, it is one of the more valuable things I own–not from what I gave up, but what was given up for it to come into my possession.

It’s the King James Version – a no longer fashionable version first published in 1611, with archaic language that uses thee and thou as pronouns. In my experience, two kinds of people still use the King James Version. The first is people who grew up using it, who find the language comfortable and soothing, who relish the poetic notes as the language of devotion. The second is people who desire a scripture that is fixed in time, an immutable authority that does not change.

I am the first sort of person. Mike was the second.

He first came in my office about 13 years ago, just off the bus from Virginia. His marriage had ended because of his chemical addiction. He had an ex-wife and a daughter, neither of who would talk to him, and he had been raised by a grandmother, now dead. She had given him the Bible he carried everywhere, with his name embossed in gilt on the front.

Mike would come to the church I was at in those days and lead us in hymns he knew, which were the most strict sort, involving lots of blood atonement and proclamations of our unworthiness. He believed in a wrathful, powerful God in a way I have never believed in anything. He could cite obscure scriptures to “prove” his points, and when he was sober–which admittedly came and went–-he was a kind and gentle soul.

Over the three years I saw him often, Mike would occasionally go away for a while to various rehab facilities, and while there he would write me letters filled with Biblical citations and affirmations of his complete recovery when he was released. Promises made, the Holy Spirit invoked, Satan renounced. This time, it was going to be different.

Sadly, his aspirations always exceeded his abilities, for Matt never lasted more than a month outside of rehab before he was using again.

One day he walked into my office. I had not seen him for a good three months. We always said that when people disappeared on us, it was either really good, or really bad. For Mike, it had been bad. He was dirty, and smelled of sweat and urine. In his hand he held his Bible.

“Preacher, this is my Bible. My granny gave it to me when I got saved at a revival when I was a teenager. I don’t want to lose it – will you hold onto it for me?”

Of course I would.

Mike began a steady descent after that day. I wonder sometimes if the responsibility of keeping track of his one prized possession hadn’t been good for him. I don’t know – I just know that after that, he spiraled down quickly.

One day he came in, relatively sober, and asked if I still had his Bible. I told him I did, and asked if he wanted it back.

“Not yet,” he said. “You keep it for me until I am ready for it.”

That was the last time I saw Mike. He disappeared, and several weeks later we learned he had died one night in a storm, drowning in a drainage ditch while high on paint fumes.

Mike didn’t make it, but I still have his Bible. It sits on my desk, and I will pick it up some days and thumb through it-–sometimes looking for comfort, but other times when I need to be reminded of truths I know, but am prone to forget.

The page at the front of the Bible where marriages are to be recorded has Mike and his wife’s names written in, but her name marked through and obliterated, serves to remind me that things don’t always go like we wish they would.

The underlined verses about the wrath of God and the power of God (but never about the love of God) remind me that people like Mike, who in this life was powerless but loving, needed a God who was what he wasn’t.

The embossed cover with his name on it, a gift from his Granny, reminds me that as broken and discarded as Mike was when I knew him, he was once loved and prized by his family, and that all of us have a back story–none of us are the worst thing other people know about us.

But mostly, this old Bible reminds me that you don’t always win. When I read from it, I am reminded that no one ever wanted to be sober as much as Matt, and that just wanting it is never enough.

But I really wish it was.

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.

Road Trip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually, I may even believe it.

For chosen family

On the 25th day, I am grateful for chosen family.

Renee and I have some friends in Raleigh named Karen and Toney who are retired jewelers, and they have had a life full of adventures. As a result, they have a wide range of friends from all over the world. And when we lived in their city, so far from our own families, they sort of adopted us. A mutual friend said once that Karen and Toney collect people. And we were part of their collection.

They lived in a large old house, filled with knick-knacks from their travels – there is the Persian rug brought back from Iran, over there the Buddha from India, the animal skin from the Southwest, the antique couch from Goodwill. It was an eclectic house, but in a good way.

And when we lived there, we went to their house for Thanksgiving. Everyone brought something, and just as their friends were eclectic, so was the meal – there was American style turkey and dressing, for sure, but there was also babaganoush, and eggrolls, and empanadas, and baklava. They would put out the invitation – if you don’t have a place to eat Thursday, well, now you do. Come as you are and bring what you can.

When you got there, the table was already full, but Karen would always say, ‘Don’t worry – we will make room”, and another chair magically appeared and people would scooch their chairs and now there was room for one more person at this most unlikely of feasts. By the end of the day there would be several tables added to the end of the dining room table that now extended into the living room.

And I am here to tell you, that would be the best meal you had all year, and the most diverse. The last year we were there we ate with, among others, an undocumented house painter, a professional dulcimer player, a nurse who worked on death row, a Syrian mathematician, a folk singer, and the woman who had worked the front desk at a nearby retirement community.

It was crowded, and there was lots of shuffling and “pardon me” and “let me scooch by”. There were kids playing and new people arriving and hugs and introductions and passing the potatoes and the deserts – my God, the desserts.

And after the meal the musical instruments would come out, and impromptu jam sessions would happen and people who had other obligations would come by to visit. Their daughter’s ex-husband was a vegetarian, and since he often had to work on Thanksgiving he would come by during this point, and Karen had always made sure there was food he could eat, and a plate would be made and his children would surround him as he ate, and tell him of their adventures that day.

And it would last until late in the evening, with people snacking the rest of the day, and guitar picking in the living room and camera flashes and…

It was always a very good day.

But we also got invited to birthday parties. Dance recitals. Block parties. Christmas. Easter. It was lovely – we were part of their family. You instantly had plans for every holiday, you had people who loved you, you had people who would miss you when you moved away. And people you miss since having moved away.

It seems to me that there are two types of family: those you are born to, and those you choose. And while the former is a biological fact, the second is a decision. On this thanksgiving day, I’m grateful for our friends who decided we are part of their family, and who have modeled for us, again and again over the years, the sort of lives we want to have.

For reliable, safe cars.

On the 21st day, I’m grateful for our safe, reliable cars.

In January of 2009 I was living in a small attic apartment near downtown in Raleigh, NC.  I think my rent was $400 a month. I was not yet married to Renee, but we were  talking about wedding dates. And I was making about $1,000 a month doing this homeless ministry thing I did, and had a 30cc scooter to drive around on instead of a car. I ate a lot of meals at the soup kitchen as a necessity, in addition to whatever outreach opportunities it afforded me.

Renee needed to go to see her heart doctor as part of a routine checkup. Her car was broken down, and I said I would take her on my scooter. It was a good 7 miles away. Uphill. And it started to sleet on our way there. My face was literally blue when I arrived. Her teeth were chattering.

“This is bullshit”, I said. I was fully convinced I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Had been called to do, in the language I would have used at the time. I could barely house myself, or feed myself, and my disabled fiancé was depending on me and my tiny scooter to take her to the doctor in the snow. I was so discouraged. I felt defeated.

That night, I stomped around my apartment, pissed. About 9PM, I called Renee and told her.

“I’m quitting. I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but I can’t keep doing this. I feel like God wants me to do this work, but if so, God can damn well come up with a car for me to do it in, or I am out of here.”

The next morning, I was in a coffee shop, doing some freelance writing I occasionally did in those days to bring in extra money, when a guy I know stopped at my table.

Let’s call him Chip. He was in his mid-50’s and was part of a church that had donated hygiene supplies to my organization the year before. He was very Charismatic – believed in the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues and the whole thing. Chip was… annoying. He was a close talker – you had to lean in to hear him –  and he called me “Brother” all the time, and was a little handsy – he had to touch your arm or shoulder when he talked to you.

“Hey, Brother. The Lord told me I would find you here. I really need to talk to you.”

I was too kind to mention that he had met me there for at least three different meetings in the previous three months, and I had mentioned each time that I often worked there in the mornings. Whatever. We will let the Lord get the credit for this one.

It seems that his ex-roommate had moved away and left a car in his garage, where it had sat for a while. Eventually the roommate signed the title over to Chip, who now had this car he didn’t want. Or need.

“So anyway, last night I was praying and asked God to tell me what I was supposed to do with this car, and God told me I was supposed to give it to you – that you couldn’t be expected to do this work without a car, especially as bad as the weather’s been lately.”

“God told you this?” I asked, somewhat skeptically.  “When?”

“Last night after I got home from church. About 9PM.”

Well, crap.

I want to state, for the record, that I don’t have that sort of theology. I mean, I knew literally dozens of people in worse shape than I was. Why would God single me out, out of everyone that could possibly need this car? I debated explaining this to Chip, but I shut up and we took the car, and drove it for three years, including to the beach for our honeymoon that fall.

I was telling my friend Brian this story several years later, and reiterated that this wasn’t my theology. Brian agreed, and said it wasn’t his either. And then he said, “Don’t you hate it when your experience of God contradicts your theology?”

Well, crap.

Spoiler: I did not quit. That car was a turning point for us – one of maybe three things that happened around then that let me keep going, and that set the path for me and would change my life.

These days, we own two cars, both older, but safe and reliable. Both are paid off. And while I’m tremendously grateful for their being in our driveway, I think a lot about the debt I owe to a charismatic close-talker who talked to God like it was real, and to whom God told to give me a car when I really, really needed one.