Hugh Hollowell

Creating a compelling vision of a better world.

The story of Pepe

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I have written bits and pieces of this story elsewhere, but decided to put it all in one place for posterity. – HH

Pepe the catI knew I was in trouble when Renee showed me his picture on her phone.

“His name is Pepe, and he has spent over a year at the no-kill shelter. He is so ugly no one will ever adopt him. So we should.”

I admit, he didn’t look like much. He was an eight year old ginger Tom who looked like a shopworn stuffed animal. He had been horribly abused as a younger cat, and at some point had a bad ear infection no one treated, so most of his ears had rotted away.

We decided to go for a visit and check him out. He lived in a giant walk-in cage with other cats, but he was cowered under some boxes, hiding. He looked virtually catatonic. He didn’t want to be held, or petted or played with. He came out of the boxes long enough to eat the snacks we gave him, and then he went back into hiding.

The shelter tried to be realistic with us.

“He has been horribly abused. He doesn’t like to cuddle, and he isn’t really affectionate. But he is special, and he needs a home where people will love him.”

If you know anything about us, you know that lost causes do not scare us off. So we signed the papers and agreed to take care of him the rest of his life. Our first clue to how hard this was going to be was fighting to put him in the cat carrier, and his screaming once we shut the door. We had to wrap the carrier in a towel to calm him down, and while most families have pictures of the adoptive parents holding their new kitty, we have one of us holding a towel-covered pet carrier with dazed looks on our faces.

As we left, the shelter people thanked us for picking him, and we thanked them for keeping him alive and well until we discovered him.

We gave Pepe his own room at the house, with a closed door so he could be comfortable before we introduced him to the other cats. He promptly found every single hiding place in that room, and spent much time just staring off into space. If you tried to pet him, he would attack your hand and then go hide again.

It went like that for about four months. But in the mornings, we would find his toys scattered and food eaten, so apparently he is having a ball when we aren’t looking.

So we decided that if all he gets is to spend his remaining five or six years in a loving home filled with kitty treats and toys and with people committed to loving him even when he doesn’t have the resources to love us back, that is a lot more than he would have had in the first place, and a lot more than any of us deserve.

But slowly, things began to change. We made it a point to just hang out in his room. He would come out of hiding and walk around us, still looking lost and confused, but at least out of hiding. I would put cat treats on the floor in front of me, and he would eye them, but ignore them until I walked away, when he would dash in, eat them all, and then hide again.

After weeks of this, he began to eat the treats at my feet. Then he would come to wherever in the room the treats were. We began to open the door to his room to let the other cats peep in (Pepe would run and hide again), with the hope he would decide to explore the larger house. Nope. He would walk right up to where the threshold and look out, but never cross it.

Four months after he came to his forever home, he began to tentatively explore. He was so brave – it was obvious he was scared. He would come out of the room, go some 10 feet into the rest of the house and then run back to the safety of his room, only to creep back out an hour or two later.

These days, things are very different. Pepe has gained weight and his coat is shiny, he walks around the house like he owns it, he plays with the other cats, and, most noticeable of all, he sings.

Here is how I described it when I first noticed it:

I don’t have another word for it – it sounds like singing. Early in the morning when it’s just he and I awake, he walks through the house, going in every open room, singing all the while. Like he’s making rounds.

He still does that. In fact, he is doing that while I am writing this, drinking coffee at the dining room table. He is still skittish, and if you came over, he would probably still hide from you. If I move too fast near his face, he will freak out, and every once in a while he and the other cats will get into it over space. But he is home. This is his place.

The other night, the cat who we were warned is not affectionate and that would never snuggle climbed on the bed and nestled up beside my legs and slept, looking for all the world like he was contented. Every night as we eat dinner, he sits beside the table – we have come to realize that he often wants to be near us, but not touch us. As introverts ourselves, we understand that completely.

Everything I know about trauma and recovery says that if we have been traumatized, we cannot begin to heal and recover until we feel safe – which is why the concept of safe places features so prominently in my work. So Pepe being more fully a cat than we have ever seen him means that he feels safe.

Which makes me very happy, indeed.

The daily ritual that saves our marriage

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For the last eight years, my wife Renee and I have engaged in a ritual, nearly every single day. It is very rare we miss it, and the performance of this ritual is, I am fully convinced, the reason we have stayed married. This ritual grounds us, centers our priorities and allows us to be vulnerable and open in front of each other as we live out our values.

We eat dinner together every night.

Nearly every night, with rare exception, it goes like this: One of us will cook (For years it was always me, then it was mostly her, and now it is mostly me again), we will set the table with plates and napkins and silverware, we will get the pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator and fill the glasses with ice, put some music on and then we will eat together. Like a family.

I didn’t have a clue this was actually pretty rare until quite recently. Then I started talking to people and learned that many people eat in front of the TV, or eat different meals at different times, or have their phones out during the meals, or any other number of schemes I have heard about.

Here is the thing: This is one of the most important things we do in our marriage. We are both introverts. I have a very extroverted job. I am an early riser who is generally in bed by 10 and she is a night owl whose idea of morning is 10AM. I am a writer. She is a photographer. It is very possible for us to spend a Saturday together and say less than 20 words all day.

But every night we hold this intentional space where we can share (or not) what we are thinking, what our days were like, what we are thinking about, what our dreams look like. Some days it is nonstop talking for 90 minutes. Some days it is quiet, as we smile at the cats’ antics and listen to the music and just enjoy being in the presence of each other.

* * *

I am a big believer in rituals. I have written pretty extensively about the power of rituals in this essay.

The Church of the Diner

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This weekend I was in Baltimore, 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 (not counting the states of confusion, drunkenness and delirium) 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 this past Sunday 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 house, 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 is 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 put 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.

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 comes into a diner I frequent. I am there once or twice a week, at random times, and she is there fully 50% of the time. She knows the names of all the servers. She has the menu memorized. She has, a server told me, been coming in for years and has applied to work there many times, and never gets called in to interview. But she is undaunted, and keeps coming back.

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.

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.

The legend of you

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Fed Ex was based on an idea Fred Smith had in college. He shared the idea in a paper, which got a C because of the idea’s impracticality. Nobody thought it would work.

In the early days of the company, it looked like the skeptics were right – it wasn’t obvious they would make it.

Sometimes drivers didn’t have enough fuel to do the whole route, so there are stories of drivers pawning their watches to get cash to fill the trucks themselves, because the packages had to be delivered.

A mentor of mine who was an early executive there said that it was not uncommon for his boss to come to them and ask how much cash they actually needed that pay period, and to ask if they could take the balance of their check in stock.

And of course, it is well known that one particular week when they couldn’t meet payroll, Fred Smith cleaned out the bank account and went to Vegas and won the money to make payroll on the craps tables.

The stories are legendary. And that’s my point.

When Smith was faced with a payroll bill he had no hope of paying, I doubt he felt like a business genius. I bet he felt like a failure. If the only way your business works involves your drivers paying out of their own pocket for the gas to do their routes, I bet that doesn’t feel like a win. Looking your executives in the eye and telling them they can’t get their whole paychecks this week can’t feel good.

No, I bet none of that processed as “winning”.

The reason I am telling you this isn’t to say that Smith didn’t quit, and quitters don’t win, and rah, rah, rah.

No, the thing I love about these stories is that now, 30 years later, Fed Ex brags about them. If you go to work there, they have people come into your orientation class to tell you the stories. They brag about the early failures, the missteps, the times it almost went under.

It has become part of the legend of Fed Ex.

Legends are funny things. They exist, and they grow over time. They are stories we tell to make sense of things that happened. In retrospect they seem almost foreordained.

Like a wise old man who has been through the war and lived to tell about it, Fed Ex has scars that taught it things, and, they believe, made it better. In fact, made it who it is. They are the stories they tell themselves about themselves. 

In the moment, however, the people those stories are happening to are not processing them as history. I bet George Washington had tons of self-doubt that freezing Christmas night when he crossed the Delaware River to surprise the enemy.  Washington’s men were starving and literally freezing to death. But now? That story is legendary.

Thinking about this idea – that failures and bad experiences are the stories that will shape us in the future – has changed how I process and deal with those bad things.

When you are going through the dark times, ask yourself, “What will I learn from this? In 20 years, how will I describe this time? If I am mentoring or talking to someone then who is going through what I am going through now, what will I tell them? What advice would I give them?”

In short, ask yourself, “How will this contribute to the legend of me?”