Tag: Reflecting

The Old Man and the Boy

I was 10 years old the summer Mr. Doc died, but we could have already filled books with the adventures we had by then. He was a large man, who wore black shoes and blue Dickies work clothes and when outside, a worn, frayed straw hat. His hair was close cropped and woolly white over watery blue eyes that always held the beginnings of a smile. Well, they always did for me.

Doc and his wife Montaree were retired farmers, and when they retired, they had purchased three acres from my grandmother and built a small house on it. They lived simply and kept a large garden and a couple of hogs, and when my young parents were spending so much time at work trying to make enough for us to survive, Doc and Monty were my caretakers, teachers, and surrogate grandparents.

As was typical of their generation, Monty ended up doing most of the actual caretaking, but I lived to spend time with him, and he taught me how to make a slingshot, a cane whistle, and almost all the important things an eight-year-old boy needs to know about life.

Tell the truth. Plant your watermelons after the full moon in May. Stand up straight. Don’t interrupt. Always shake hands. You will feel better if you take a nap after lunch. Always carry a pocket knife. Most shows on TV are useless. Do one thing at a time. Food tastes better if you share it with someone you love. There is value in sitting in the shade and doing nothing but listening to the mockingbirds. Everything is better if you can eat wild plums while you do it.

He had a designated chair in the living room, and sometimes he sat in it and stared down the road, lost in his own thoughts for hours, and then would suddenly stand up and ask me if I wanted to go with him to the store. I would scramble out to the old Chevy truck that stood in the driveway, and he would drive the mile down the road to the small corner store which had been my family’s salvation when my grandmother got a job there after my grandfather died.

Regardless of whatever else we were after, he would always buy a handful of penny candy and a Milky Way candy bar. The penny candy was for later, but he and I would sit on the porch of this small store and watch the cars at the crossroads while splitting the Milky Way before it had a chance to melt. Never has a candy bar tasted so good. We would sit there, in the shade of the porch on that hot summer Mississippi day, an elderly man and a small boy, neither of us saying much, but just sharing a rare treat and occasionally smiling at each other, as if we knew some secret known only to us. Some things are just too important to talk about.

This May, he will have been gone 40 years. Monty died some 25 years ago. The truck is long gone now, of course, and some city people bought the house and they didn’t make biscuits or have hogs or a garden and they cut down the wild plum bushes he and I tended. The store is gone too, long since turned into a pawn shop, and the porch bench is gone and that lazy corner is now a bustling intersection.

It’s all gone now, existing only in the memory of a man who will turn fifty years’ old this summer, and who still loves Milky Way bars and penny candy.

 

The Ugly Part

In our last house, we had a tiny bathroom. Like, 5 feet by 5 feet. The sink was in a tiny 2-foot-wide nook in the corner. All of me wouldn’t fit in the mirror. The tiled tub surround was made up of random colored tiles with no apparent order or design.

But that wasn’t the bad part.

When we moved in, we spent a lot of money getting the kitchen done and buying appliances and getting the flooring right, after ripping up layers and layers of plywood. We didn’t have any money to address the squishy floor in the bathroom. Basically, we spent the next two years hoping we wouldn’t fall through the floor.

It was a one-bathroom house, which also led to our delay, because anything we did to that bathroom would put our only working bathroom out of order. And at the time, I was working an insane schedule running a day shelter for people experiencing homelessness.

When I do something like renovate a bathroom, I have thought about it for months. I get a little obsessive, searching all sorts of ideas out on Pinterest, googling clearances, searching shopping sites for options. And so, when I start, it is a little like being on auto-pilot, because it has filled my head for months at that point. I have already built it three or four times in my head.

Even so, that renovation was fraught with difficulties. The subfloor was rotten, and had to be replaced. The cast iron toilet flange broke, and had to be replaced. The sink fittings had to be replaced. The water shut off had to be replaced. I had to tile the floor. Twice. I have never had anything go as wrong as that tiny bathroom did.

A friend let us sleep at his house the weekend I did the major work, but even so, we had a less than optimal bathroom for about a week. And it took a month of evenings and weekends for me to get “done”. And it all cost, almost to the penny, twice as much as our already stretched budget had allowed for the project.

I will tell you that when we were done, that bathroom was my favorite part of that house. Literally everyone who came over remarked on it. I had penny tile on the floor, corrugated metal wainscoting, and espresso shop-made trim. It was still tiny, and still had a crazy tile surround, but now it looked more eccentric than random.

Now, it sounds like this is going to be a happy ending sort of thing, and the end was worth the hassle and yada yada. And yes, you could tell the story that way, but I skipped ahead a bit. I want to talk about what it was like in the middle of that project.

My only bathroom was in shambles. I was exhausted, and out of money. I had to reinstall the toilet twice in the middle of the chaos because we needed to use the bathroom and had no other options. It looked dramatically uglier at this point than it did before I had done anything. I felt like I was moving backwards.

I was in the middle of what I call the ugly part.

Every renovation has the ugly part. It’s when you had to break up the tile floor. Rip out the sheetrock. Pull down the wall. It looks worse now than it did before you started. And it’s really easy to look around at all the chaos and to feel like this was all a horrible mistake. Maybe you should have paid a contractor to do it. Maybe you should have been happy with the ugly floors. Maybe you shouldn’t have tried to do it yourself.

It’s the ugly part.

Now, if you do enough renovation work, you eventually come to realize that this is part of the process. To fix things, you often have to break them worse than they were before. Things often do have to get worse before they get better. And when you have pulled a rabbit out of a hat a dozen times or so, you come to expect that the 13th hat, there will be a rabbit in that one, too.

But it’s not just renovations that have an ugly part. Lots of things do.

Medical school has organic chemistry. The second year of law school almost wiped a friend of mine out of the process. The third day you lift weights you will wish you had stayed on the couch. That third week of Couch to 5K has knocked me out three times.

Anytime you seek to change the status quo, you will have to disrupt things. Break things. Rip things out. And in the short run, it will look worse. But it’s not worse – it’s just not done.

It’s the ugly part.

It’s part of the process, but it is crucial to remember that it isn’t the end of the process.

Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. That part is up to you.

The Church of the Diner

I wrote most of this in the Before Times. I have not hung out by myself in a diner in almost two years, merely one of a long list of things this pandemic has stolen from me. I miss it tremendously.

* * *

A few years ago, I was in Baltimore to watch some friends get married, a city I have never spent any time in. So, being in a strange town all by myself, I did what I always do – I found a diner to eat breakfast in.

I have eaten in diners in, I believe, 28 states and they are always the same. In a real sense, they are like churches, with a public liturgy, a crowd of regulars, a common text and while there are many choices, we all have our favorites.

You have your 23rd Psalm, I have my ham and cheese omelet with a side of fruit.

Like churches, which are easily identifiable as such, there is a common architecture for diners as well: Formica tables and broad expanses of glass facing the street, a counter that serves the single folks, the pot of coffee, the orange juice machine.

The elements of the service are similar from place to place, too. Just like a chalice or altar is immediately recognizable, so also are the thick white china mugs in a diner, perhaps the most perfect device ever invented for consuming coffee. Coffee tastes better from a heavy porcelain mug with a thick lip, and if the server is on it, she will run hot water in it first to warm the mug up, keeping your coffee warmer longer.

In the Church of the Diner, they welcome regulars, but are happy if today is the only time you come in. Unlike most churches I have attended, they welcome newcomers with no expectation you will ever return. They are content for you to join their community just for today, to participate as much or as little as you want, and trust you will leave happier than when you arrived.

“I don’t know you or your story, fella, but you look hungry. Come on in,” they seem to say. And so I do.

As a child, I was castigated for bringing an outside book to read during church, but at the Church of the Diner, my book is welcomed, as is my scruffy, unshaven face and my coffee stained t-shirt.

They were not offended that day in Baltimore when I did not want to be part of the crowd, but instead was content to sit in the corner with my book, drinking coffee and periodically staring out the rain-streaked window as I watched the world come alive.

I have long thought that Diners are one of the last bastions of egalitarianism left in this country. The Judge will sit in a booth next to a plumber who sits in the booth next to a homeless man who is buying his coffee with spare change given him by a kind soul.

As I looked around, I wasn’t proven wrong. The other diners are diverse. There is the shift-worker eating a meal before heading home. A sex-worker sitting at the counter, drinking coffee. A table of rowdy folks in their early twenties haven’t made it home yet after a Saturday night out. A collection of old men sit at a corner table, flirting with the waitress and occasionally laughing a bit too loud – a scene you get the feeling has happened daily for years.

Everyone is welcome at the church of the diner.

* * *

At a diner near my old house in Raleigh, a server passed away suddenly. I did not really know her – she had waited on me several times, and we passed the time of day, but at diners I am often just the observer, sitting in the corner with a book, listening to the ambient chatter, soaking in the presence of others. So I did not really know her the way other regulars did.

On the counter near the cash register was a picture of her, a candid snapshot downloaded from her Facebook profile, because who has actual paper photos of anyone these days? And in the weeks after her death, a jar sat there, taking up a collection for her funeral expenses. I always added my change in the jar, and sometimes, an additional 5 or 10-dollar bill. After all, in the Church of the Diner, we take care of our own.

There are faded newspaper clippings on the wall near the cash register: Obituaries of regulars, commendations received by police officers who are regulars, a spelling bee victory by one of the kids who come in with their parents.

Like any church, they have their nutjobs. The people who can’t make it through the day without a drink, the people who take advantage of community to hustle and scheme. The annoying person who won’t leave you alone, when it is obvious you want to be left alone. Amazingly, there are diner fanatics as well.

There is a woman who regularly came into a diner I used to frequent. I was there once or twice a week, at random times, and she was there fully 50% of the time. She knew the names of all the servers. She had the menu memorized. She had, a server told me, been coming in for years and had applied to work there many times, and never got called in to interview. But she was undaunted, and kept coming back. That was some years ago, but in my head, I imagine her still devoutly going into that diner on New Bern Avenue in Raleigh.

A mentor once told me that communities eat together, celebrate together and mourn together. And he told me that while we were sitting in a diner.

Writing Hopefully

I was afraid I had lost my voice.

Three and a half years ago, I walked away from a ministry I had founded and built for 12 years because it was killing me.

The Rabbi Abraham Heschel said something to the effect that the Biblical prophets were enraged by things everyone else assumed were “just the way things are”. For the first 12 years of my career, I was enraged all the time. If someone died in the woods because there was no trans-friendly shelter for them, I not only became angry – I took it personally. I saw it as a personal affront to me and my work.

That sort of rage is… useful. That sort of rage helps you win fights, helps you change things, and will give you focus and clarity when everyone else is in a fog. It also makes you hell to be around, will risk your deepest relationships, will drive you into deep depression from which you may not survive, and is generally unsustainable.

The worst problems to have are those that are destructive, yet socially reinforced. In our social media driven world, the sort of rage I used to have is celebrated and applauded. We love people who are angry like that, who are “passionate” and “vulnerable” and who “tell it like it is”. On social media, anger is celebrated and reinforced.

I used to routinely “go viral” writing about things that made me angry. And I was good at it. There are people who ended up with large book deals that are worse at being angry on the Internet than I was.

But the depression that follows long periods of unresolved anger almost killed me. Literally. So, I have spent the last three years trying to not be angry. Oh, it still happens sometimes, and all the old anger comes back and my body knows what to do – the flared nostrils, the tingle in the upper back, the accelerated heartbeat, that vein that pops out on my right temple.

When it happens, it’s like like welcoming back an old friend – but the old friend you used to get high with when you skipped work and cheated on your spouse, who met your emotional needs but in a way that was corrosive and slowly suicidal.

It feels good to be angry. And it scares the hell out of me.

That was part of my blog silence until this Fall – having written perhaps 5 things in the prior two years, and having nothing I’ve written published since I left. I didn’t know how to write when I wasn’t angry, and was unsure if I had anything to say if I wasn’t angry. And I can’t do that again. I’m not interested in being that guy any more. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t survive being that guy, actually. And I want to stick around.

I was afraid, though, that I had lost my voice. I didn’t have any words. And God almighty, the world needs words right now. There is a lot to be angry about these days. And my personality type is such that I will always have a dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and will dream of the world as it could be, and will work to build that better world. But it’s a quieter, more gentle anger these days.

And slowly, the words have been coming back. I’ve been learning that hope is also an emotion, and one worth sustaining and building on. I like me better when I’m hopeful. And if I can’t write things that make people angry in ways that make me popular, perhaps I can write things that make people hopeful in a way that makes the world better.

The Journal

My Dad was a quiet man. He seldom raised his voice. He virtually never cursed.

And he was an intensely private man. You would never know who he voted for – you might suspect, but you would not hear it from him. He never, ever, put a bumper sticker on any car we owned.

He shunned the spotlight. His goal was to be both indispensable and invisible, content to do his work well and sure it would shake out in the end. As he told me once, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

He probably had undiagnosed ADHD, I am diagnosed, as is my niece, his granddaughter, and it is hereditary. And he bore lots of the signs, if you knew what to look for. And for many of us who have this diagnosis and yet manage any degree of effectiveness, it is because we have developed coping mechanisms.

And one of Dad’s coping mechanisms was his journal. We didn’t really know it existed. I mean, Mom knew he kept notes of things – sometimes she would come in the room and he would be typing on his phone, and if she asked what he was up to, he would say, “Just writing something down before I forget it.”

It was a simple program he kept on his phone, where most days, he would put anything he wanted to remember later. I found it when he died, when we were going through his cell phone. From July of 2013 until two days before he died, there were notes for nearly every day, and some days had multiple entries. Sometimes there were multiple paragraphs, and other days merited a single sentence.

On July 20, 2013 he changed the oil in the tractor, and there was 695 hours on the engine. On August 25th of 2013 he wrote “Hugh Jr was nearly arrested in Raleigh yesterday for feeding the homeless.” For their 48th wedding anniversary, he noted they ate Chinese food at Hunan’s, and another entry that day mentioned he topped off the freon on the AC. They would rent cars to go on trips out of the state, and I know now that in November of 2017, they rented a 2017 Ford Fusion Hybrid that got 43 MPG on the trip to see Mom’s family in Oklahoma.

There were notes related to work – contracts he had signed; purchase agreements he had entered into. The weather figured prominently, as did the grandchildren. We know how much the drill he bought at the pawnshop cost, the interest rate on the truck loan he had been quoted, that Lowes screwed up his order for a new dryer for the house in 2016.

If these seem innocuous, that is largely because I am sharing the non-personal ones, but you get the point. He recorded birthdays and what gifts he bought, where they ate dinner when he and mom went to town, major news events. He noted (without comment) both the election of Trump and the removal of the Confederate emblem on the state flag of Mississippi, the record low temperatures in the winter of 2014, the time my brother’s son was the scripture reader in church, along with the notation that he did a good job.

In short, they were the record of how he spent the last seven years of his life. And it was a tremendous gift to us, even if he had no reason to expect anyone but him would ever see it.

I downloaded the file to my laptop, and the formatting was horrible as a result, but I spent the last six months or so, in odd snatches of time, cleaning it up, and then had it bound for Mom. I gave it to her for Christmas this year.

I don’t know that I really needed to know that Dad had a coupon for Taco Bell that day in 2015, or that the belt for the lawnmower in 2018 cost him $34, or that when the tornado hit our county in 2015 and he worked 3 days straight on virtually no sleep that he kept a record of which reporters he talked to, but I’m glad I know those things now. I feel like I know him in a different way than I did before. There were no revelations, but lots of confirmations. Countless times as I was working on the formatting, I would read an entry and find myself nodding my head, as if I saw that coming.

So, one of the habits I have now is that I put Evernote on my phone, and every morning I open a note with today’s date, and throughout the day I jot down anything I want to remember, in either sense of the word – things I need to have a note of, or memories I don’t want to lose.

We don’t have kids, so I don’t know who will read it, or if anyone ever will. But after seeing Dad’s journal, and the gift it was to us, it just made sense.

2021

I was talking to Renee today about how weird 2021 has been.

Nothing really bad happened to us, personally, this year. But the general anxiety of living through the second year of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people has been exhausting. In some ways, the day to day of this year, where we are in a constant state of expectation and shifting boundaries, has been much harder to navigate than 2020 was, where the boundaries were more clear.

I was elated when, in February, we drove 2 hours in the snow to get Renee her first vaccine shot. I literally wept at the relief. Finally, I thought. This will all be over.

But it wasn’t over. It still, 11 months later, isn’t over.

Early on, I predicted this was going to last for years and years. I hoped I wasn’t right. But I was right.

Like many of you, we spent this year trying to figure out how to live in this new reality. We spent a lot of time at home, although not as much as we did in 2020. We stretched by traveling, albeit travel with lots of precautions. We ate out more, mostly outside or in empty restaurants. We saw three movies in empty theaters. I met people for coffee. It felt, for a minute, almost normal between the variants.

I became more distrustful of people this year. Instead of being potential allies and friends, they became potential disease vectors. Crowds are unsafe places in this new world in which we live, and people who intentionally seek out crowds became unsafe people. Millions of my fellow Americans intentionally chose not to get vaccinated, placing my immune compromised wife at risk. I am as yet unable to forgive them for that.

This year I prioritized my health in a way I never have before. I committed to daily physical activity – 2.5 mile walks or 30 minutes of swimming nearly every day. I began eating consciously, and along the way lost 48 pounds. I have a set bedtime, and fight hard to get at least 7 hours of sleep.

I built a workshop over the summer, where I now spend my evenings making things that make me happy. It is an extravagance, that creative space, but it makes me happy.

In 2020, I wrote 2 blog posts on my personal blog. This summer I built a new website, where I blog daily and since September 1st have published 84 posts and more than 60,000 words.

I leaned in this year to my identity as a writer, as now I make a not-inconsiderable portion of my income from writing related activities, and in addition to this blog I also publish two newsletters each week (this one and this one.)

So, while a lot of good things happened this year, it was all fought for and won reluctantly.

As I have said before – I don’t set goals. But I do intend to lean further into my identity as a writer and Internet publisher in 2022. I intend to lean into my identity as a craftsperson more in 2022 – expect an online shop where I will sell some of my wares, and more writing about craft. I intend to lean more into my identity as an organizer, as I continue my work organizing faith communities here to make a better Mississippi. But mostly, I intend to continue to believe in a better world than the one in which we currently live, and to strive to live as if that world was already a reality, and by so living, bring it a little closer to fruition.

Happy New Year, friends. I wish you every good thing.

 

The First Tree

It was a cold day, as I remember it.  We had more of those then, and they came earlier in the year, too. You could see your breath that day, and I pretended I was smoking a cigarette, holding a stick between my fingers the way my Aunt Louise did. Well, I did that up until momma caught me doing it, and then I had to hurry up and get in the truck after hearing a sermon about the evils of smoking.

We lived on 30 something acres in the hills of North Mississippi, and had carved a few acres out for the house and yard, and the rest was fenced off scrub oaks and pines and cedar that we let a cousin lease and he ran a few cows on it. When Daddy put the chainsaw in the back of the truck, I knew we were up to something good. Then he put the old single barrel shotgun that had been his daddy’s behind the seat and we set off.

The truck was an old Ford dad had bought from work when they finally decided it was too ragged out to make sense to keep fixing it. It was red, like all their service trucks were, and had a vinyl bench seat with cracks in the vinyl that hurt your legs if you were wearing shorts, and if you were wearing jeans, like I was on this particular day, then bits of the yellow foam that was beginning to deteriorate would stick to your pants.

We drove up the path, along the massive ravine that ran down the middle of our property that had more than one junked car pushed off into it, past thickets filled with elm seedlings and blackberry canes and sedge grass. Our property was on the southern side of a massive hill, and our house was about midways up it. This day we were headed uphill, to the area at the edge of our property, next to the old cemetery where generations of Black folks were buried, and whose origin story nobody ever told me.

Because that is where the cedar trees were.

Later, when I was studying such things, I would be fascinated to learn that they weren’t cedars at all, but Juniperus virginiana, also known as the Eastern Redcedar. Several years ago, after having learned this, I told Dad they were Junipers and not cedars, and he said, “Not here they aren’t. Here, we call them cedar trees.”

I guess that settles it then.

We were out on this cold Saturday afternoon hunting for our Christmas tree. We understood that there were people that lived in cities that bought trees out of a parking lot, and we also knew some rich people that had artificial trees. But being neither of those, and having 30-odd acres full of cedar trees, this is what people like us did.

Up by the cemetery was a huge field, perhaps 5 acres wide, of nothing but sedge and cedars. And daddy stopped the truck, told momma to look for a tree she liked, and he took the shotgun and my hand and we headed into the woods.

“What are we doing, Daddy?” I asked.

“Hunting”, he said.

This excited me to no end. All the old men I knew hunted, even though Dad did not.

“Are we hunting quail”, I asked?

“No, son. We’re hunting mistletoe.”

Mistletoe is a semi-parasitical plant that grows in deciduous hardwoods, like pecans, hickories, and oaks. And in the wintertime, after the leaves have fallen, you can see it in the treetops. You can, if you are a bit crazy, climb up in the tree and cut it down, to hang in your Christmas decorations.

Or you can be like Dad and just shoot it out of the tree with birdshot.

When we got back, me holding the mistletoe (after a warning to not eat the berries) and Dad holding the shotgun, Mom was standing beside a tree about six feet tall.

“Is that our tree?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Mom said.

As we rode back down the hill to the house, Mom was holding the mistletoe in her lap and me, I was on my knees looking through the rear glass at the tree I had “helped” cut down, holding on to the back of the seat and swaying as the old truck jostled.

I couldn’t wait for Christmas to arrive.

I still can’t.

Nostalgia for a Different Past

I don’t know if you have spiritual practices that others don’t view as spiritual practices, but I do.

One I have is looking at my Facebook Memories. It is like a perpetual journal, where I can see what was on my mind on this day for each year for the 14 years I have been on that platform. And sometimes I cringe at what I said, and sometimes the urgency of my post is lost, and now it just seems inane, but always I end up with things to reflect on in my quest to find healing for myself.

And recently I have been reflecting on the lost relationships I have, most especially with the people I grew up with. I saw where a person with whom I had went to High School had commented on something of mine from 10 years ago, but they are no longer my Facebook friend. And then I noticed they were Facebook friends with other people from my childhood that I didn’t know they knew (from a different circle of friends) and that made me reflect on A) How small the world of my childhood was and B) How shut out of that world I am now.

As a child, I had the curse of being the kid who read, and while that helped me substantially with trivia contests and ACT scores, it also made me dissatisfied with the small world in which I lived. It gave me a desire to see more of the world than the 33 acres on which we lived after inheriting it from my grandmother, and the small church with my grandfather’s name on the cornerstone as the chair of the building committee, and the sure thing job I could have had as a lineman for the Power company my cousin was the head of.

So, I left. In fact, I once overheard my mother describe me that way to a friend – Hugh was the one who left. I didn’t really have a plan, and it showed. I was a Marine for a while, and did all sorts of jobs from lineman to firefighter while I was a wandering scholar for a while, and I was a husband for a while until I wasn’t, and I sold securities and a hunk of my soul at a chance at the brass ring, only to find it was bitter in my mouth and required copious amounts of alcohol to make it palatable to me.

But all of that happened because I was the one who left.

I could have stayed. I would have had a good paying job. I had a ready-made social circle, and a name that in that community meant a level of privilege I have never felt elsewhere. My world would have been smaller but more comfortable, and definitely easier.  I would most likely have married someone I had known for years and years, have bought a house not far from mom and dad, most likely have ended up on the best end of the Republican party (but maybe not, as my home county went for Obama, Clinton, and Biden in the last three Presidential elections), and been an active member of the Methodist church of my childhood.

But none of that happened, because I was the one who left. I met, and knew, and loved people who were different than any of the people we knew growing up. I read books that wouldn’t have been permitted in the small library of my home town. I saw parts of the world that are a mystery to some of the people I grew up with, and I knew both plenty and want, and learned from both experiences. And because of all of that, I came to care about things that were not concerns of the world in which I was raised.

I am the product of Scots-Irish honor culture, and we tend to feel strongly about things. For some of us it is the rights of the unborn, and for others the rights of LGBT folk to marry those they love, and for yet others it is SEC football, but we all feel strongly all the same. And because I was the one who left, I learned to feel strongly about things they did not.

And because we all feel strongly, it often leads to feuds at worst and passive aggression at best, and it meant that I wasn’t a member of those circles any more. I will never again spend a crisp morning in a deer stand with people I have known my whole life, or have a job in the community that nurtured my family for almost 200 years, or be welcome – fully welcome – in the church of my childhood.

I like being me. I love my life. But sometimes I wonder what it would have been like had I not left. Had I been content with where I was from, and decided to lean into being a member of that community.. If I had 5 acres with a horse in the back lot and a workshop and a pick-up truck, if the only wine I had ever drank was Boone’s Farm, if going to Memphis was as far as I would travel most years, if I was just an active member of a church where my kin were buried in the cemetery next door.

A friend, who also left, says that I am romanticizing what it would have meant to stay. But I just think I am having nostalgia for a different past.

Keeper of the Pictures

I am the keeper of the family photos. I think most families have someone like that – I have a dusty suitcase filled with snapshots of people I do not know.

I also have a hard drive full of photos Dad had started scanning, as well as the pictures from his iCloud account I downloaded when he died. There is no organization at all.

My dad liked to take pictures.  Of everything.

When he was young, his pictures were more artistic. He wouldn’t have used these terms, but they were his creative outlet – his art, if you will. We were poor as dirt until I was a teenager, so money spent on film and developing was money that took from other things.

As he got older and digital cameras became common, he moved more into documenting in addition to creating. So I have countless pictures of some store he visited on a road trip. Or a piece of woodworking he admired and thought he might want to try some day. Or receipts he needed to submit for reimbursement.

I have like 30 Gig of pictures I need to sort though, most of which aren’t important at all. It’s a little overwhelming.

But I get the urge, sometimes, and I decide that the first thing I will do is just delete the photos that nobody will ever, ever need.

Pictures of receipts. Odometers. Random signs. Such as that.

Last night, I got such an urge and was clicking through them, deleting with abandon, when I came across a picture that stopped me cold.

It was a row of bottles of juice of various kinds: Orange, grape, apple. No context. No captions. Totally random.

But it wasn’t random to me. I know what’s going on here.

A thing you have to know for this to make sense is to know that Mom was in a bad car wreck 25 years or so ago, and it hurts her to stand for long periods of time. So, when there was something where you had to stand in line, often Dad would do it for her.

I said no context, but that’s not totally true. It was one picture in the middle of a bunch of pictures from about 10 years ago, when he and Mom went on a trip to Texas for a family reunion for Mom’s family. And the picture before this one was of a serving table full of food, like you would see at a potluck.

So what this picture tells me is that he stood in line to get them some food, and when it came time to pick a drink, he didn’t know what she would have wanted. So he took this picture to take back to her so she would know what juice options were available.

It’s the most Dad thing ever. He wouldn’t have wanted to make a mistake. And Mom isn’t predictable like that. So he took a picture so he could let her pick.

I have seen this exact scenario played out dozens of times. I can write the scene; I know it so well. He was so kind he wouldn’t want to take a chance on getting something this small wrong.

And just like that, I realized I wasn’t ready to delete this picture. Or any pictures.

So I close the folder one more time. I’ll try again later.

Maybe.

Independence Day

On this day in 2009, at 11:51AM Eastern Time, I went on Twitter and changed my world forever.

I had been bothering over something all morning. I had read an article about a church in Michigan that had disbanded their ministry that gave food to people experiencing homelessness rather than serve people who were LGBT.

This really pissed me off. On multiple levels.

I vague tweeted about it earlier in the day.

Again, the church that claims the name of Jesus would rather be right than compassionate. I love the church, but they don’t make it easy.

You have to understand that up to that point, we had been largely supported by Evangelical churches – not because our theology agreed with them, but because they said yes. Every Mainline or left of center church we approached either demurred or tied me up in committees for months. The Evangelicals would say yes quickly.

And I learned how to dance. I would couch what I said to them in ways that made them think I agreed with them, or at least, that they would not disagree with me. I once joked and said that fundraising in those days was like being a phone sex operator. I made the noises they wanted to hear, and then they gave me money.

But it was grating on me. I argued I was doing good work with their money – and I was. But more and more I came to see that the church was my actual “mission field” – that if the work of conversion needed to be done, it was converting those who would erect barriers to keep people out, who would gate keep love, that would put limits on God’s love and grace.

So it wasn’t so much this article I read itself, but more like it was the final breaking point. I decided, in a fit of anger, that I was done with dancing. I didn’t consult anyone. Didn’t warn anyone. Didn’t even really think it was going to be as bad as it was.

I tweeted the following post from the Twitter account of the small scrappy Christian Ministry I had started a few years before. And almost instantly, my world changed.

We will feed anyone, regardless of who you pray to or who you love. And we welcome ALL people of faith or no faith to help us.

I hit send on that tweet and set off an absolute shitstorm.

I lost two advisory board members that day. Over the next three months, I would lose most of the Evangelical churches that supported us. Three other folks who had been with us from the beginning left. Half our income was gone inside a month. I got a job selling hotdogs late at night outside a local leather bar to pay my rent.

I had, at that point, been married for just over a month.

I was terrified. We barely survived. I questioned my call to that work, my suitability to that work, and many other things. But I never regretted sending that tweet.

And I learned some things that year.

I learned who my friends were, and made many new ones. Queer folk rose up and saved us, promoted us, and fought for us.

I learned that I could look failure and fear in the face and survive.

I learned that if I don’t take your money, you don’t get to tell me what to do.

And that everything I wanted in life was on the other side of my fears.

But the most important thing I learned is that by planting a flag and loudly declaring my position, I made room. By declaring our position loudly and unequivocally, I used our privilege to create space for people who felt they had no space, and thus made room in a previously closed off space for them to be all they were made to be. And along the way, this also opened us up to far more opportunities and alliances than I ever imagined possible.

And I have never looked back.

It was my Independence Day.

NB: I don’t deserve a cookie for finally doing the right thing. If anything, I deserve condemnation for the years when I bowed and scraped for funds from people who, if they had known the truth, would not have funded us. By doing that, I centered the comfort of those with resources rather than vulnerable people, and I regret the years that happened, and have worked ever since to never do that again.