Tag: Reflecting

Biscuits I have known

When I pulled out of the cheap motel I had spent the night in the outskirts of Charlotte, NC, I couldn’t wait to hit the road. But first, I had to refuel. I grabbed some gas at the gas station, and spied a McDonald’s across the way. Say what you will about them, but they are reliable, if nothing else. I grabbed a sausage biscuit and coffee and hit the road.

It wasn’t all that good. Again – reliable, though. Like, you know how bad it’s gonna be in advance, and can brace yourself for it. And as often happens when I eat a food that is filled with memories, I reflect on previous meals I have had with that same food. And perhaps no food has more memories attached to it for me, in as many places, as do biscuits.

My momma didn’t make biscuits. Heresy, I know, but she wasn’t a natural cook. She married way too young, after a childhood of moving often as part of a military family. She had no traditions when she married dad. Dad’s mom died shortly after that. And we had to make it on our own, with nothing but church cookbooks, Southern Living, some elderly neighbors that loved us, and the back of boxes to guide us.

Mom never really enjoyed cooking. It was a thing she did, but you got no feeling she derived any pleasure from the act, nor appreciated the attention that comes from doing it well. It was a chore to be done, like washing the dishes or sweeping the floor, and gave her about as much pleasure as either of those tasks.

But Dad – now Dad could make a hell of a biscuit. Big, fluffy cathead biscuits, big as your fist. He didn’t do it often, but when he did, they were amazing. I remember weekend mornings when Dad would make breakfast – rarely, because when he worked for the gas company he worked Saturday mornings, and up until 14 or so we went to church regular as a family (one day, I’ll have to tell you the story of why we stopped. Or maybe not – some things are best handled around a table, late into the night). But when he did, you knew you were about to get fed. As a child, he taught me to make biscuits and scrambled eggs, because then you could always feed yourself for cheap, he told me.

My mom’s stepmother was a tiny woman who had grown up in the city, and while she loved me fiercely, she couldn’t make a biscuit. When we would go visit them in the summertime outside Dallas Texas, she would make sausage gravy and whop-em biscuits – called that because to open the can, you whopped em on the side of the counter – and they were a novelty for us. They were the cheap canned biscuits, small and round and flat topped, with a layered nature one never saw in a real biscuit. It almost felt like eating desert.

In the Marines, the mess hall would have biscuits, but they were square, for some reason known only to God and the Commandant, and I’m sorry, but you can’t really enjoy a square biscuit, even if it didn’t taste of too much baking powder, which these did.

Some years back, Renee got a biscuit cookbook and learned how to make amazing biscuits, a lot like the ones Dad made all those years ago. And they are huge and puffy and have little peaks and knobs, and because they are made with love and practice by someone who loves me, I love them.

But my platonic ideal of a biscuit is none of those.

Her name was Montaree, but we all called her Aunt Monty (pronounced Ain’t Monny). She and her husband Doc lived in a 900 square foot house they built on three acres my grandmother sold them at a time when our money was tight. My Aunt Louise’s husband had built and wired the house for them, and it had pine floors with amber shellac. And growing up, they played the role in my life grandparents would have traditionally, had my folks not all died off when I was little.

Monty made biscuits every morning of her life up until Doc died and she moved to be with her son in Jackson. But that wouldn’t be until after I left – my whole childhood, she made biscuits. She had a five-gallon sized metal bucket, with a tight fitting lid, she kept in the cabinet under the counter that she kept her flour in – self-rising flour bought in 25 pound sacks made from cloth, that had a dish towel that came with it as a premium. I don’t think she ever had a purpose bought dish towel.

She had a large bowl not used for anything other than biscuit making, and she would scoop out flour from the bucket, and put it in the bowl, making a depression in the middle of the pile of flour, into which she took a small lump of lard in the winter (after hog killing) or shortening in the summer (after the lard ran out) and massaged it all in, so it looked like corn meal when she was done. To this she added sweet milk a splash at a time until it was right, and then massaged it into a wad of dough.

She then floured the countertop and patted out the dough until it was thin and used a tin can with the ends cut out (that resided in the flour bucket, along with the biscuit bowl when not in use) to cut out the biscuits. She would place the biscuits on a small cookie sheet, perhaps 8×16, that was so old its origins were lost to history, and before putting them in the oven would smear a light coat of whatever grease she was using, lard or shortening, on top.

I must have watched her do it a hundred times. There would always be scraps of dough left over, which she would fashion into a small freeform biscuit that was meant for me. These were not elegant biscuits. They were not even all that pretty. They were flat, perhaps ¾ of an inch thick, the size of a regular tin can, with none of the knobs and bumps of the biscuits Dad made, and which I saw in magazines. They were lightly browned on the bottom and golden on the edges of the top, and had a crumb that reminds one visually, but not texturally, of English muffins.

These were not fancy biscuits but daily biscuits, which fed a well digger for 50 years and were literally their daily bread. It was the bread with their meals – they were made fresh and eaten hot for lunch, their big meal, and leftovers were eaten cold at supper and for breakfast. I can close my eyes and smell the hot bread and the plum jelly, made from the wild plums by the clothesline, and feel the melting butter run over my fingers and drop off my chin.

I love to cook. I derive pleasure from it, and pleasure from being good at it, and while I can make a passable biscuit, I have never been able to make a biscuit like Monty’s. Lord knows I’ve tried. Hell, I’ve never even seen another one like it.

I guess those biscuits will just have to live in my memory. But this fall, I did plant some wild plums out by the fence line, so at least one day I can have some decent jelly.

Grief (not a poem)

I don’t know how to explain
That it isn’t just that he died.
It’s that the world I lived in died too.
Because I have never lived in a world
That didn’t include him.
I don’t know how to explain
That sometimes the grief washes over me
And then I can’t breathe, I can’t function.
So the report doesn’t get written, the form not filed
And my dreams get deferred.
I don’t know how to explain
That it isn’t your fault I’m distant.
It’s not you – it’s me. It’s very much me.
I am learning how to live in this new world.
And I don’t like it here.
I don’t know how to explain it. So I don’t.

Dad and the pocket knife

One winter in the early 2000’s, I was practically penniless. I had gone through a career change, giving up my gig as a “Financial Adviser” in order to save my soul. A nasty divorce ensued, and I had been legally homeless for a few months earlier that year, when I lived in the backroom of the small (failing) bookstore I bought as my “second act”. I moved in with my girlfriend as a way of surviving that winter.

She invited my parents to Christmas dinner that year, without telling me she was going to. I was pissed – largely because my parents and I were going through an awkward phase after my divorce, but not the least of which was I had wanted to avoid having to buy them the sort of present you open in front of other people. You know – nice ones.

I honestly forget what I ended up buying Mom, but I knew Dad, and when in doubt, Dad was always happy to get a tool or pocketknife. I scrimped and saved, and believe me when I tell you I had no money, so I was waiting as long as possible in the year to buy him something. You would not believe how scarce money was for me that year.

Finally, 2 days before Christmas, I went into the small hardware store near our house to look at knives. I had, unfortunately, waited too late, and all the lower priced knives were sold out. But there was a large yellow handled Case XX sitting in the display case that was about $60, which was about $20 more than I would have paid elsewhere and about $35 more than I had planned on spending.

But when I turned 15, I had bought a hunting knife with my birthday money, and I had bought a Case XX, because Dad told me what a good brand it was. Dad told me at the time he always wanted a Case XX knife, but he couldn’t justify the money.

So anyway, here we are, some 17 years later, and I was feeling a lot like a failure and had just watched my life fall apart and everything was turning to crap, but I could buy my Dad a knife he would want and be proud of, and it would be from me.

So I bought the knife. He ooohed and awed over it at Christmas, and he was beaming. I was glowing, knowing I gave my dad something he actually wanted.

It’s been nearly 20 years since I thought about that knife. That girlfriend and I tried really hard, but it didn’t work out. Eventually I would close the store and move to NC to work out some crazy ideas I had about how we could address homelessness. It was there it all turned around for me.

And then last October, Dad died, and Easter Sunday of this year I was standing in their bedroom, going through a box of his things Mom had put aside for me to look through, and there was the yellow handled Case pocket knife.

It’s scratched up now, and the blades are worn from being run endlessly over an oilstone and there is some staining, but all of that is patina from use. You see, my Daddy not only liked my knife, but he used it.

Dad would never hurt someone’s feelings. Ever. If he hadn’t liked it, he never would have said anything, but he would have just slid it into a drawer and forgotten about it.

But no – he used it, he carried it, and obviously liked it. And now it is mine again, and it is far more valuable to me now than it was that Christmas all those years ago, and it has cost so very much for it to come back in my possession.

At the funeral home.

The slide show plays on the monitor on the wall, a large selection of pictures from her life on repeat roll past, with no pattern to the selection. Here she is in her team photo from when she played basketball in 1940, here she is in the nursing home, here she is at her second wedding 10 years ago, here she is at 17 doing a backbend.

We are gathered in a loose circle in front of the coffin that contains the subject of the slide show. We alternate between pointing out things on the slides, looking at the woman in the casket, and having snippets of conversation. We are participating in the “viewing”, a much more sedate version of the wake, where the body is on display a few hours so friends and loved ones can pop by to say a few words and pay their respects.

The slide show is a recent innovation.

As we stand there, someone says, “I bet she can hear us right now, and is laughing.”

Her granddaughter turns to me. “Can she?”

“Can she what”, I ask.

“You’re a preacher. Can she hear us?”

“Oh. I don’t know”, I say, quite truthfully.

A long pause ensues.

“I mean, I can tell you what the Christian tradition say – actually traditions, because there is more than one version. But nobody really knows.

“But I can tell you that she loved God. We are told there is no place God is not, so she was with God before her passing, and she is with God after her passing, and she is more fully in the presence of God now than she was before.”

“So she is in heaven.” Another lady chimed in.

“Again, I don’t know that she is in some specific place or what that looks like. Nobody does. But I do know she is no longer confused, and no longer hurting, and she had a long, hard life and is now at peace.

“Meanwhile, we have dozens of stories to remind us of when she was here and how much she loved us, and we have the opportunity every day for the rest of our lives to be the sort of person she thought we could be. And in turn, we pass those lessons on, and her influence and love will continue on for generations.”

Another long pause.

“I like that”, one woman says. “I like that a lot.”

Me too, I say. Me too.

Indispensable and Invisible

Like many children, I ran away from home.

Not literally – I was way too chickenshit for that. I did dream of building a raft and going down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans on it after reading Huckleberry Finn, but it never happened.

No, my childhood was about wanting and desiring what I did not have, and rejecting that which I did have. And so as soon as I was able, I left.

One example of this is that while I am naturally like both of my parents – my mother’s boldness and passion, my father’s introversion and peacemaking – I saw those things as flaws to overcome, rather than gifts to embrace.

Our heroes often contain what we lack. How many bullied children have looked up to Superman and dreamed that they too could save the day and be respected for their strength? Our conception of God (or gods) often does too, but that is another conversation for another day. As the meme’s say, y’all ain’t ready for that conversation.

My heroes were rich. Assertive. Full of confidence. Respected for their business acumen. Donald Trump. Lee Iacocca. Gordon Gecko.

Or strong, physically. Lee Haney. Sylvester Stallone. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I had no heroes that worked behind the scenes for systemic change, who showed up and did the work and were respected for their work ethic, their persistence, and their wisdom. That isn’t to say I did not know such people: I did, and was raised by them. But I did not see those traits as traits to be admired.

So I ran away to become strong and rich. I was a Marine and then a salesman. I was strong and if not rich, I made good money and learned that lesson many people who aspire to wealth learn – how to fake it: You lease cars you cannot afford to buy, you buy your designer suits at factory outlets, you learn enough about wine to drop tidbits into conversations at dinner in the restaurant you put on your credit card.

But this post isn’t about that – I have covered that ground elsewhere.

Even after I walked away from that life, I still tended to approach things as someone assertive and full of confidence, full of privilege and assertiveness. Like, imagine Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, but after he joined a contemplative order of monks.

In some sectors of the Christian Tradition, they lift up aggressive voices that conflict with the status quo and call them prophetic, and if they are not honored, they are often respected. I often got put in this camp, and thus received social recognition and reinforcement for my privilege and brashness.

It becomes an endless cycle, however, and you have to keep amping up the aggressiveness or else you risk someone else being more aggressive that you are, and thus eclipsing you and then you no longer get the social reinforcement you crave and are feeding on. And then, like Icarus, you may end up flying too close to the sun and destroy yourself in the process.

When I moved to Jackson three years ago, I was exhausted after more than a decade of being the angry prophet that vigorously defended my community’s right to exist.

Exhausted.

The last three years have been a time of rebuilding and reflecting. Of doing good work that nobody on Facebook knows about. Of building local relationships. Of learning how to actually organize people to action, instead of just making them angry. Of learning how to change things when you are not the one in charge. Of learning how to take care of myself. A time of learning how to fall in love with a place and its people.

It is not lost on me that had I embraced the models I had at home, I could have saved myself a good 25 years of striving.

After I was an adult, my Dad once told me his goal over his career had been to be both indispensable and invisible.

“Son, if the only way people know you are important is that you told them you were, then you weren’t important anyway.”

I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying.

The Bully

He was a nerdy kid. Let’s call him Brian.

Brian’s family had been living in England before moving back to the States. He didn’t really fit in.

To start with, he was very small. Like, much smaller than other kids his age. He was a year behind me when we shared Algebra II class, when I was in the 11th grade.  He looked like a 6th grader when he was in the 10th grade.

But a well-dressed 6th grader, because he wore a tie most days, and often a blazer. Our school was in the middle of a dairy farm, and smelled strongly of cow manure. Blazers and ties were seldom seen. We believed his clothing was a holdover from his time in the UK, but who knows. Not me, anyway.  I don’t remember asking him much about himself. He also wore product in his hair, which he wore in a style reminiscent of something from the movie Grease.

Brian also spoke very properly, and sneered at our accents. He made us feel inferior – like he really knew he was better than us. Brian didn’t make it easy to like him, and we tended to distrust anyone who is different.

There was a Senior in that Algebra II class as well – let’s call him Steve. Steve was very popular. And attractive. And a cut up. Girls thought he was adorable.

I was not popular. Nor adorable. Nor attractive. In fact, the only thing I really had going for me was that Steve thought I was funny. It helped that we both were failing this class, so we bonded over that.

And for some reason, Steve seemed set to make Brian’s life miserable. I don’t think Steve really thought poorly of Brian – it’s just that Brian was easy to pick on, and was often the butt of Steve’s jokes. Brian had a last name that seemed tailor-made for making fun of. Steve was happy to oblige.

I was desperate to fit in, so I made fun of Brian too. This was another way Steve and I bonded – over our shared hazing of Brian. Once, I remember Brian falling asleep at his desk, and I tied his shoe laces together. Steve then slammed a book down, and Brian jumped up, and then fell on his face. We all laughed. The teacher laughed.

Brian didn’t laugh.

When I watch Back to the Future and I see the way Marty McFly’s dad acts around Biff – that good natured aww shucks sort of ingratiating thing he did – that was how Brian acted towards Steve and me.

These days we would say that Brian was being bullied by Steve and I. At the time, we made snide comments about Brian’s being gay, but he wasn’t – he was just different. I was different too, but I sought out someone who I could feel superior to so I could be assured that I was not on the bottom.

The way we treated Brian was wrong, on multiple levels. It was wrong, period, but I also hate that I did it in order to suck up to someone else. I was cruel in order to be popular. Several people that year mentioned, when they signed my yearbook, how funny I was in Algebra II class. In other words, I was funny and liked because I was cruel to Brian.

I only remember Brian being at school that one year. Some folks said his family moved to Memphis. I never heard from him again. Steve graduated and now is a truck driver. And I did lots of things before I ended up being me.

Recently, I wondered what became of Brian. I looked him up on Facebook. He had a very distinctive name, and so it didn’t take long to find him. He had gone into the Army right after high school, and there were lots of pictures of him still looking small, but otherwise very brave in his desert fatigues during Desert Storm. He then became a cop, and there are lots of pictures of him with guns, with “thin blue line” posters, pictures of him looking very serious and posed, like he is trying to convince himself that he was really strong.

There were pictures of him and his wife and their two kids. He apparently liked to hunt and had taught his son to hunt. There were lots of overtly patriotic imagery too. It seems as an adult, Brian liked to project an image of strength.

Two things stood out: Although we had gone to the same school, we had no shared friends on Facebook. And his last Facebook update was in the middle of 2018. I Googled his (rather distinctive) name and learned he had died from suicide in June of 2018.

A therapist who knew me pretty well once asked me what I was repenting of to live the sort of life I do now. I told her it wasn’t quite that simple of a story, but there were many stories. And one of those stories would have been about Brian.

There is no way to wrap this up prettily. I wish I could tell you that before he died, Brian and I had made amends. That I was able to ask his forgiveness before he died. That he had forgiven me for the way I bullied him in the fall of 1988 so popular people would like me.

I wish I could tell you any of that. But that’s the thing about death – it stops everything in its tracks. It takes away all your options. And if I have learned anything in life, it is the futility of wishing you had a different past.

But as long as you are alive, you can still have a different future.

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.

Kindness

When I was 5 years old, my best friend in the world was a boy named Paul who went to kindergarten with me, and who lived a mile and a quarter up the road from our house.

Paul was adopted, and his parents had been around 50 when they adopted him as an infant, so Paul always had the “old” parents. By contrast, my parents were 21 when I was born, so his parents were nearly 30 years older than mine.

His father was a tall man, who worked in a warehouse and had thick ropey muscles in his arms, and a silhouette of a naked lady putting on her panties on one forearm, and an anchor on the other – vestiges of his time in the Navy.  At the time, it was the coolest thing in the world. I remember asking him if the naked lady was Paul’s mom, and he just giggled.

He also had an old Ford Falcon that he had turned into a pickup truck with the help of a cutting torch and some plywood. If there was anything cooler than having a naked lady tattooed on your arm, it was making your own pickup truck. I thought Paul had the coolest parents in the world.

Anyway, it was Paul’s birthday, and I was invited. It was a beautiful spring day, and there were lots of kids there. Paul’s parents didn’t have a lot of money and they lived in a small single-wide trailer with one bathroom. And so, predictably, when there were suddenly 10 little boys in the house, a line formed outside the bathroom. And I suddenly had stomach cramps.

I was hurting bad. My stomach was churning and there was this long line to the bathroom and suddenly my intestines exploded and then there was warm diarrhea running down my legs inside my Sears ToughSkin jeans. I was mortified. But, as often happens when you get everything out of you, I felt so much better, other than having a pants load of poop, that is.

I went and found Paul’s mom, but I couldn’t tell her I had crapped my pants. So I told her I wasn’t feeling good, and asked if somebody could please take me home. Paul’s dad was pressed into service. I climbed into the cab of his homemade pickup truck, with a cloud of putrid funk following me. He gets in, looks at me, and rolls down the window. We head to my house.

At the stop sign, he said, “So, you are not feeling good?”

I replied that I was not.

He said, “You know, it smells like you messed your britches.”

I sat silent, mortified.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

When we pulled up in the driveway, Dad was outside, working on the car. Mom came out when she saw us, and I ran to her and hugged her legs. Paul’s dad explained that I said I wasn’t feeling well, and he and Dad talked about whatever was wrong with our car while Mom took me inside, her nose telling her exactly what the problem was.

She asked what had happened, and I told her, and she told me it was OK, and asked how I felt. I told her I felt wonderful, now. She asked if I wanted to go back to the party. I assured her I did. She cleaned me up, we put on new clothes, and I ran outside and told Paul’s dad I felt much better now and asked if I could go back to Paul’s with him when he went.

On the way back, he looked at me, and said, “So you feel better?”

I assured him I did.

“I’m glad.”

And the rest of the way in silence, and everyone welcomed me back when we pulled up at Paul’s house, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

There were so many ways that could have went differently. He could have made a big deal out of how much I stunk. He could have laid out plastic for me to sit on, or demanded I answer him when he asked if I had soiled myself. I was already embarrassed beyond belief – he could have made it so much worse.

But he didn’t. Instead, he tried to empathize with me, and normalize what I was feeling.

“If you did, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes, I mess my britches. It happens.”

I think about that story sometimes, about just how… kind he was in that moment to a mortified kid with poop in his socks.

Kindness counts.

Grief: A metaphor

It’s been a rough week.

A friend died earlier this week, very suddenly. She had overcome a lot, had provided hope to a lot of people, and now she’s gone.

I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet.

But it stirred up some thoughts about Dad’s death last year.

A friend who lost her dad a few years ago and I were talking this morning about Dad’s death, and she asked how I was coping.

I told her that if was as if when he died a piece of glass shattered, with sharp edges and jagged pieces everywhere. And for weeks, these pieces just tumbled around, slicing and stabbing. It was really bad.

But as time went on, they rubbed up against each other, and eventually the edges wore smooth. They are still there, easily observable, but for the most part, they are softer, less abrasive, almost beautiful, like sea glass.

But every once in a while, you find a sharp edge. It catches you by surprise when it happens.

It happens less often than it did. But it still happens.

Hope is a choice.

I met a new friend today. At least, I think we will be friends.

It was one of those conversations where you just agree to meet up for coffee and before you know it, three hours have passed and you have talked about 5 or 6 different things, and the conversation flows easily from one thing to the next. Those are rare for me, but I love it when they happen.

And one of the things we talked about was how change happens. I have these conversations a lot these days. We look around us and feel like things are bleak and divided, and we wonder if there is any way out. If those who work to oppress others, those who would take rights from others, those who work for their own self-interest even when it hurts others, and we wonder how we get them to change.

My new friend was somewhat cynical. “I think I have given up on their changing,” she said. “I mean, I want to believe they can, but it doesn’t feel like a real possibility”.

I told her I didn’t have enough self-esteem to believe that people can’t change.

She was puzzled. So I explained that I once believed very different things than I do now about… almost everything. I used to be an Evangelical who wanted to save your soul from Hell, and now I’m not. I used to believe God did not love Gay people, and now I don’t believe that. I used to chase money, and now I chase relationships. I used to want to distance myself from the South, and now it’s a core part of my identity.

“But here’s the thing: In every one of those instances, I didn’t change because I accidentally had a change of heart, but because of a relationship I had that caused me to reconsider my position.  I changed because who I knew changed, and I changed because my ideology had to follow my relationships. My heart changed, and then waited for my head to catch up.

The Jewish mystic Abraham Heschel said that when it came to God, there were no proofs, but only witnesses. In other words, some things can’t be proven but only experienced. I believe people can change because I have changed. A lot.  I can’t prove that people can change, but I am a witness to the fact that they do.

And I don’t believe I’m special. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m not. I’m pretty mundane, actually. And if I can change, as un-special as I am, then pretty much anyone can, given time and the right relationships. Or else I have to assume I’m so special that I think I can change, but they can’t. And I don’t have enough ego for that.

“That is… hopeful. Maybe more hope than I have right now,” she said.

“Oh yeah. It’s hopeful as hell. Because I want things to change. And I believe that the only way things will change is because people change. And if I thought people couldn’t change, then what choice would I have but despair? So I find myself having to choose between hope and despair.

“And I choose hope.”