Patton Dodd

30 Good Minutes on Fathers and “A Few Good Men”‘

February 20th, 2023

There is a powerful exchange between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson at the end of a A Few Good Men that moves me to tears every single time.

It’s not the one you’re thinking of. You’re thinking of the one where Cruise shakes his fist downward and demands, “I WANT THE TRUTH” and Nicholson jeers “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Yeah, that’s pretty good. Iconic, even, and sometimes it makes my eyes swell, too. We have that scene to thank (and/or blame) for everything Aaron Sorkin has given us since.

But I’m thinking of the exchange that happens a few moments later. Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan Jessup, admits he ordered the Code Red, and he is promptly arrested. He then lunges at Cruise’s Daniel Kaffee with a deliciously vulgar threat involving removing Kaffee’s head and defecating down his throat. Jessup is restrained by the court officers. He collects himself, stands up straight, and glares at Kaffee one last time.

“All you did was weaken a country, Kaffee,” Jessup says. “You put people’s lives in danger. Sweet dreams, son.”

And then Kaffee says this: “Don’t call me son. I’m a lawyer and a naval officer. And you’re under arrest, you son of a bitch.”

And then I wipe away my tears.

If you need a refresher, you can watch the whole thing here.

That “Don’t call me son” line, is, for me, the true emotional climax of A Few Good Men.

Remember that Tom Cruise’s Kaffee is the son of a late, legendary trial lawyer. We learn early in the film that he is living in his father’s shadow. When the movie opens, Kaffee is cocky but cowardly, committed to a life of mediocre lawyering because he knows he’ll never live up to his father’s legacy or expectations.

Lt. Jessup, then, is not just his antagonist—he is Daniel Kaffee’s father figure. Watch A Few Good Men again with this father-son dynamic in mind, and you’ll see it peeking through scene by scene.

The great Roger Ebert disliked A Few Good Men because, as he wrote, it’s “one of those movies that tells you what it’s going to do, does it, and then tells you what it did.” That is true to a point—we learn that the only way for Kaffee to win the case is to put Jessup on the stand, which means putting his entire career on the line because apparently if Jessup won’t admit it, Kaffee will be disbarred…or something. (In retrospect, the stakes in this movie don’t really add up.) So Kaffee decides he’s going to put Jessup on the stand and try to get him to confess.

But here is the real motivating factor: Kaffee only decides to put Jessup on the stand because his best friend Sam helps him see that such a risky decision is the only way he’ll ever become his own man. Trying Jessup in public is not just about pursing justice—it’s about stepping out of his father’s shadow.

Here’s the script:

DANIEL

Would you put Jessup on the stand?

SAM

No.

DANIEL

Do you think my father would?

SAM

With the evidence we have? Never. But here’s the thing: Neither Lionel Kaffee nor Sam Weinberg are lead counsel here. So there’s really only one question: What would you do?

Sam is asking: Are you just your father’s son? Or are you your own person?

Kaffee’s choice to put Jessup on the stand is only possible because he finally achieves separation from his father. And when he does this, no authority figure can have power over him. He does not need a replacement father. He only needs to rightly see the father he had. At long last, Kaffee is his own man.

You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth—that you are not your father. You are only yourself.

Ok. So. My analysis here is pretty cheesy. I am not exactly proud of what I’ve written here. But I’ve written it anyway because cheesy things can be true.

People have to break free from their parents. Sons and daughters have to leave their father’s and mother’s shadow. But it’s tricky, because on the way out, sometimes they just look for other shadows, often more shadowy shadows. And then they have to escape those shadows, too.

They have to ask not: What would my father do? They have to ask: What would I do? Only then can they see their way clear to make the demand they must make: I want the truth.

Don’t call me son. I’m a writer and a husband and a father of three. And you’re under arrest, you son of a bitch.
30 Good Minutes on New Year’s Resolutions

January 7th, 2023

Last week, in the first leadership team meeting of the year, my boss said he wanted each of us to begin thinking about our personal work goals for 2023 and be ready to present them to him in our next 1-on-1.

I lit up. “Oh, right on,” I said. “I have been working on my goals already. I did that over the holiday.”

My fellow team members rolled their eyes. Brown-noser, they thought, no doubt. (One reason I have no doubt is that one of them said to me the next day, “You were totally brown-nosing in that meeting.”)

What’s funny about this is that I was actually trying really hard NOT to show my level of enthusiasm about our boss’ assignment. I wasn’t brown-nosing at all. I am just really, really into New Year goal-setting.

Some people are driven by goals. I am driven by setting goals.

In years past, I’ve drafted up one-pagers with categories and sub-categories: Finances (budget practices, saving, giving, debt-reduction); Professional (publications to pitch, conferences to attend, classes to take); Family (trips, rhythms of interaction with wife and kids); Body (races to run, aches and pains to address); Spirituality (rhythms of silence, prayer, reading), and so on.

All of this could, to be sure, get a little out of hand. One year, one of my goals was to chill out about goals.

Related: When we lived in Boston during graduate school, my wife and I had a friend over for dinner one night and we were talking about one thing or another, I don’t remember what. At one point I made a glancing comment about being a pretty laid-back guy. Our friend interrupted me: “Patton, you are NOT a laid-back guy.” Until she said that, I had no idea.

But honestly, goals do not dictate my day-to-day life (…he wrote, while working on his “30 Good Minutes” writing series.). I don’t track goal progress very much, and I’m almost as prone to set a goal aside as I am to set one. Indeed, one of my concerns in general is that I’m not great about follow-through. Yes, it’s ironic that I’m writing about this as part of a blog project that has me writing for 30 minutes each week, but look at the date. I’ve not written one of these posts for more than 6 weeks. And they always take me more than 30 minutes.

In 2022, one of my goals was to “make our backyard more inviting.” We have a canopy of live oak trees back there, and a great deck built by the previous homeowner, but there is always too much dog poop and the garden is in shambles and there are weeds everywhere and every shrub is overgrown except the ones that are dead and our too-cheap furniture is usually covered in dirt and dog hair and grossness. When it’s all cleaned up, I sit out there every morning and read and write and listen to the birds and look into the trees, and the space does all the things for my soul that you want nature to do for your soul. But mostly, especially for the last three or four years, I put off doing anything about the mess.

So I made that goal in January 2022, and I started early last year by laying down black plastic over a few large areas of grass and weeds that needed to be smothered. And then, the plastic proceeded to lay there All. Year. Long. I made one step toward the goal, and no more.

Take that story, and imagine how it plays out in all the goal areas I mentioned before.

But of course, I am being a bit hard on myself. I have paid down debt and run some epic trail races and published in places I wanted to publish and invested in family trips. Rhythms of silence and prayer? Well, last year was a low point, but some years have been better, and I’m grateful to say that my first week of 2023 has had more intentional quiet than all of 2022 combined.

For me, the pleasure of annual goal-setting is really in the setting. It’s the measure of hope that comes in looking ahead and imagining what is possible. I know I’ll fall short in some areas, maybe even all areas. But I’m not inclined to let fear of failure, or even actual failure, get in my way. Setting goals helps me think past what isn’t working to imagine what could work, and what I want to work.

So what if I only get 25-50% of the way there? If I didn’t write down what I wanted, I don’t think I’d even get that far.

I finally pulled up that black plastic last weekend, and the grass and weeds underneath were really, really dead. This year, that is going to make it a lot easier to finish last year’s goal.
30 Good Minutes on Saying the Creed

November 21st, 2022
I read and reread the Apostles’ Creed the other morning. That’s not something I do regularly, but I felt a nudge to check in with it, see how it’s doing, and, well, to see how I’m doing with it.

The Apostles’ Creed is one thing when encountered alone, and quite another when encountered in the company of others. In church services, the “I believe” statements of the Creed—I believe in God the Father … I believe in the Holy Spirit …—play more like “We believe” statements. Or even something narrower, like: “Together, we are saying we believe this.” In group settings, I say those things without worrying too much about whether I can actually assent to each thing I’m saying. I’m participating in a joint confession, more like singing at a concert than speaking from a witness stand. We may all be standing and looking forward from our place in the pews, but I tend to imagine us glancing around at one another, giving half-nods, saying, “This is right, right? This stuff is kinda strange, but we’re allowing it.”

But when I read the Apostles’ Creed alone, in the company of no one, I have a harder time getting past the strangeness. What a bizarre story the Creed tells—a Father creates everything and then has one son, only he has it with a woman who has never had sex. We then get a series of past-tense events that happened to that son: he “suffered,” then “was crucified, died, and was buried.” Then he “descended,” “rose,” and “ascended.” Then we get one present tense action—he “is seated”—and one future tense—”will come again.”

After the story, we end with a series of increasingly outlandish claims. I’m not sure if it’s intended to feel like we’re climbing a ladder of faith, but I find that my sense of conceptual risk increases with every line: “I believe in…
- “the Holy Spirit” — sure, given the story the Creed just told
- “the holy catholic church” — not sure how “holy” or “catholic” (universal, inclusive) it is, but yes, there is a church
- “the communion of saints” — such a lovely idea
- “the forgiveness of sins” — yes, please
- “the resurrection of the body” — um
- “the life everlasting” — I mean, we’ve said all the other things, so why not this, too?
Oh, and let’s not pass too quickly by poor ol’ Pontius Pilate, who is presented here as the kind of inverse of Mary—one said yes to god, and the other killed god. Almost nothing is known about the man except that he had Jesus killed, yet umpteen millions of people have been saying his name on the regular for ~1500 years. Leadership has consequences.

Saying the Creed solo is like holding my faith tradition at arm’s length. It’s like a museum piece, something abstract and ornate. The “I believe” feels almost playful, like I’m side-eyeing a gap between what I’m saying and what I’m actually assenting to. I used to tell people that I had to cross my fingers at certain lines of the Creed, but it’s more like part of me is confessing faith, and another part of me is confessing doubt, acknowledging that there is an almost comical amount of trust involved to cross the divide between what the creed is saying and what I can actually know to be true.

With the front of my mind, I’m saying the Creed. With the back of my mind, I’m thinking: Given all that’s happening throughout the world everyday, all that’s happened throughout the history of the cosmos, is it really possible that this is at the center of everything? Of all possibilities, it’s THIS?

I shared a version of these thoughts with a priest pal of mine the other day. He texted me this in response: “As I lead worship, or preach, or pray, or read, and delve, or try, into the triune God, I realize that many of my friends and family would think that I am totally delusional. That just on the face of it what I do and say is almost too much.”

Yes. I’m glad we’re on the same page.

Obviously there’s more to say about why, in spite of all this, I want to keep saying the Creed, and why I expect that I always will. But my 30 minutes is up, so for now I’ll just make another confession, which is that when I was younger I found all these doubtful thoughts scary, but now I just see them as unavoidable, necessary, and even a bit delightful. As Tom Sizemore puts it in Heat, “The action is the juice.” (IOW: The joy is not in winning—or being 100% right—but in playing.)
30 Good Minutes on Things I Won’t Put in My Book

November 13th, 2022

A recurring joke in my household right now: I do something dumb or thoughtless or gross, and one of my kids calls out, “I bet you won’t put that in your book!“ (In case you’re just joining us: the book is a memoir about fatherhood.)

My 15yo boy, Henry, first said this to me a few weeks ago when I did some silly thing or another. I can’t even remember what; he probably knows exactly what, but I am not inclined to jog his memory. Now his line is what I hear when I do any number of embarrassing things: farting while doing my nightly back stretches; making a meal that no one likes and getting grumpy about it; realizing, after several long moments, that one of my kids has been trying to get my attention while I’ve been focused on something else.

The other day I was sitting on the couch working on my book when I realized that 12yo Lou had been trying and failing to get my attention. She had a homework question, or maybe she had a story about school that day, or something else important to her in that moment. But I was focused on the sentence that I was crafting, and when I’m preoccupied my selective hearing is impenetrable. When Lou finally wrestled my attention onto her, she looked me in the eye and asked, “Wait, are you sitting there writing about being a dad?” And then, a beat later: “Are you writing about being a dad while ignoring your daughter?”

Then she and Henry joined together in near-chorus: “I bet you won’t put that in your book!”

In truth, there are all sorts of things I won’t put in my book. Memoirs are not total-access documentaries. They are stories, and stories are constructed, created things.

I have some experience with this process. When I was 27—a full two decades ago!—I wrote a memoir about my faith journey. It was called My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion. That book is a frank account of what it was like to become an evangelical Christian in the charismatic megachurch world of the mid-1990’s. When I wrote it, I thought I was being pretty raw, pretty transparent, especially about the pain of spiritual confusion and doubt.

But when it came out, a few people who know me well noted that I left out some major driving factors in my confusion: namely, my own father, plus a couple influential father figures who’d had a shaping influence on my life. Those people were right. I left some characters out of the story.

Well, I left them out of the published version. Earlier drafts contained lots more detail—at first, I wrote without thinking of how anyone would feel about what I was writing. But a lot of passages ended up on the cutting room floor. And there were two reasons for that.

First, Dad was alive, and so was Mom, and even if I could convince myself that I didn’t care about his feelings, I definitely cared about Mom’s feelings, and she was the one who had to live with the guy and face the consequences of his reactions to whatever I wrote. As for the father figures, honestly I never even considered naming them or detailing their stories in print—they still held sway over my psyche, and I didn’t yet have enough distance to see our relationships clearly.

But truly, the second reason mattered even more: I was writing a story, and again, a story is a created thing. A memoir is not a facsimile of reality. It’s spun yarn. You take the fibers of the real, and you use them to create something new. And while that something new should deliver truth, it also has to work on its own terms—it has to be interesting and coherent and pleasurable in some way.

Stories need characters, and even nonfiction characters are shaped by their creators. Characters are assigned purposes, given shape and color. Some characters loom large, others just get a key line or two, and still others are left out entirely if they don’t serve the purposes of the story. Even when you’re writing from memory, even when you’re working with artifacts—photographs, journal entries—you’re making all sorts of creative decisions.

The truth is that “what actually happened” is a shape-shifting category. It’s not entirely up for grabs, but it is contingent on the storyteller who is constantly (whether consciously or unconsciously) determining what the account of actuality includes and what it doesn’t.

In other words, Henry and Lou, you shouldn’t be asking whether I’m going to write about my farts. You should be asking whether I’m going to write about yours.
30 Good Minutes on Encountering Racism

October 16th, 2022

If you’re new here: “30 Good Minutes” is a weekly(ish) series where I set a half-hour timer and write until it dings.

The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama is holy ground, and we should tour it in bare feet. A few times throughout the 11,000-square foot exhibit space, the curators quite literally honor the specific piece of ground you’re standing on. “You are standing on a spot where enslaved people were warehoused,” reads one sign, stenciled onto a brick wall.

Last week, I toured the museum as part of a 3-day Learning Lab in Alabama led by an organization called Empower Initiative. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it—the entire Lab was phenomenal, but for my few minutes today, I want to focus on the museum.

The people who pulled the Legacy Museum together are master storytellers. Every square inch of the place has been crafted to clarify history, to tell the truth, to invite your whole body, mind, and soul into a confrontation with the reality of America’s terrible, tragic use and abuse of Black lives. It’s an overwhelming encounter with racism, and a hard one.

And it’s one we very much need. I’m grateful for Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, and for all the people whose years of careful, brilliant work made the Legacy Museum possible.

Upon entering, you see the very beginning of the story of chattel slavery—a towering video wall showing waves crashing at you, over and over. This was the view of kidnapped men, women, and children taken from Africa and forced into a voyage across the ocean that many of them did not survive. You then walk through their watery graves, and only then come to the shores of Charleston, Boston, New Orleans, Richmond, and more, where a lifetime of misery awaited.

I do not want to describe many of the exhibits in detail, in part because I can’t do justice to them and in part because they need to be experienced to be understood. Using a phenomenal array of historical archive and new media—animation, hologram, sculpture, text, photography, video—the curators take you from slavery through the Civil War and into the failures of Reconstruction; the era of lynching, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration; organized resistance movements; the rise of mass incarceration, and more.

But I do want to mention two key spaces in the Legacy Museum that I’ll be thinking about for a long time. About halfway through the museum, you come to a wall of large jars filled with dirt, gently lit with amber light. Each scoop of dirt was taken from a particular place where a Black man, woman, or child was lynched—murdered, many times in public view, for the crime of being Black. Each jar is marked with the name of the person lynched, along with the place and date where it happened.

You’re looking at the earth that lay just underneath each victim. The earth that was there when it happened. The earth that bore witness, that still bears that witness.

This wall of dirt broke me open. It’s a strange thing to begin sobbing in a museum, but I am sure I am not the only one. It is a wailing wall, and it was all I could do not to drop to my knees.

Toward the end of the tour, the Legacy Museum closes with the Reflection Room, a tall-ceilinged square room tinted in glowing gold. The walls are filled with large portraits of Black heroes and saints—Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and on and on. It’s another sea crashing over you, but this sea is a resurrecting one.

You’ve spent the last two hours seeing the worst humans can do. Now, you’re in a hall of saints, surrounded by strength and goodness—people who people mined justice, truth, and beauty from the ground of terror. Again, I wept.

Our country continues to struggle with a crisis of contempt, one expressed in structures that are invisible or ignored. Mass incarceration in for-profit prisons. Stubborn, systematized poverty that falls mostly along residential and racial lines. The most necessary and fundamental right of U.S. citizens—the right to have a say in how we’re governed—under attack by a mix of gerrymandering and manufactured cynicism. And on and on.

But that’s why we must take journeys of remembering. We must remember who we have been so that we can change who we are still becoming.
30 Good Minutes on Parenting While Cooking

October 10th, 2022

My new favorite thing is the YouTube channel of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Kenji makes charmingly underproduced cooking videos—he just straps a GoPro on his head and starts pulling together breakfast, lunch, or dinner for his family, chatting at you while explaining what he’s doing. You see his kitchen from his POV, which sorta makes it feel like you’re in your own kitchen. He’s a famous food guy, and you’re just you, but both of you have a lived-in kitchen with the kids’ shoes knocking around the baseboards and dogs underfoot waiting for scraps.

Kenji is a bonafide food science wonk, Cooks Illustrated and Serious Eats editor, and James Beard-award-winning cookbook author, etc., and while he wears all these accomplishments lightly, his master-level know-how comes through as he casually explains, say, how to improve your scrambled eggs with a hot pan and curds or how to reverse-sear a steak (a technique he invented!).

But what makes Kenji’s videos extra special is not what he says, but what he does. And how he is. In each video, there’s the recipe, and then there’s Kenji’s manners and methods that you can pick up on while he cooks. Like—how to stage and stack your ingredients as you prep a meal, how to use a food scraper, how to clean as you cook. My daughter Lou especially appreciates that last thing, as the kids’ post-dinner cleanup duties have gotten a good bit lighter since Kenji came into my life.

His most recent video is a next-level instance of what I’m describing. Kenji is showing us how to make Niku Udon, a Japanese Beef Noodle Bowl. That’s the A story. But a kind of B story develops as he cooks, which is that he’s clearly trying to squeeze in making this YouTube video while he’s juggling other responsibilities; namely: being a dad.

At the start of the video, Kenji says he’s going to show us how to make beef noodle bowls, and he also mentions that he has to run an errand with a kid in 15 minutes. And we think: Really? And you chose NOW to make dinner? And also NOW to make a YouTube video about making that dinner? Okay, Kenji. Good luck.

A few minutes into the video, we learn that Kenji’s other kid has woken up from a nap and needs his attention. So now he’s making dinner for the family before rushing out the door, and he’s teaching us how to make said dinner, and he’s managing the needs of two kids at once.

We’ve all been there. This is parenting while cooking, and it happens in every family kitchen almost every night. You’re doing your best to squeeze in things you need and want to do alongside your kid duties. Then more and unexpected kid duties get thrown at you, and now you’re juggling all you planned to juggle plus a couple extra bowling pins and a flaming adolescent.

That’s a special kind of stress, and many is the parent—especially the father, I’d wager—who has lost his cool in moments like this. Many is the parent who turned real nasty real fast and ended up damaging not only dinner, but also their relationship with anyone unlucky enough to be in the house at the same time.

And so the most remarkable thing about Kenji’s Japanese Beef Noodle Bowl video? The reason I’ve watched it multiple times even though I have no noodle bowl plans in my near future? The reason I’m writing about it for 30 minutes right now?

In addition to showing us a neat trick with trimmed scallions (an ice water bath!), Kenji does something that I find even more impressive: he keeps his cool. He shows us how to parent while cooking.

When Kenji mentions his kid woke up and he’s gotta go, we think his dinner plan is ruined. So is his YouTube video. But Kenji saves both—he finishes the dinner two days later, and the video turns out great. It has over 180,000 views 12 days into its life.

No doubt some editing skills helped bring it all together, but I rather doubt that Kenji had to cut out footage of himself yelling at a kid. He seems to know how to roll with the punches. He keeps his cool, gets the beef noodle bowls on the table eventually, and most importantly, appears to have taken care of his kids just fine.

Way to go, Father Kenji. Way to cook, way to YouTube, and way to be a dad.

(This is all pre-amble: I have a lot more to say about losing your cool as a dad, including what a father figure of mine once taught me—perversely, wrongly—about why dads losing their cool is just an ordinary thing kids gotta come to expect. But all that will have to wait for the book.)
30 Good Minutes on Writing about Dad

September 25th, 2022

I’m working on a memoir about fatherhood. The working title is FourFathers, and it’s broken into four sections: one on my dad; one on father figures; one on me as a dad; and one on the idea—the tradition, problem, and promise—of God the Father.

Here’s how the project is going so far: I’ll write a section about my dad, based around some particular thing that happened in my childhood. I start with a foreground memory—stories readily available because they’re the sort of memories that have percolated in my head for years. Memories like the time in college when I carried Dad’s drunken body into the bathtub, or the day of my high school graduation when Dad was too hungover to show up—I’m hungover, too, Dad, I thought, standing on the stadium field in my dorky blue cap and gown, and I got here just fine—or the one afternoon during college when I had made a painstaking plan to confront dad about his drinking, and I did it, saying all the things I’d planned to say, and he sat fully sober across from me at the kitchen table and explained that he had a good reason to drink, and that reason was me. Well, not just you, he clarified. It’s your mom and sister, too.

That is (ahem) the easy stuff. Easy to remember, because it’s the fat that congeals at the top of my working memory. Writing out those stories is like taking a spoon to that fat, just like I do with my chicken stock, skimming it from the top to get to the pure, perfectly seasoned stuff underneath.

But what I’m finding is that the stock underneath isn’t pure at all. It’s cloudy, chunky, full of gristle and dregs. It’s hard to see anything else, remember anything beyond those top-of-mind stories.

One challenge is that I can’t find much evidence of Dad—I tossed most of what I had that memorialized him, because after he died in 2007 I was awash in the pleasure of being done with him and moving on. I let a lot go.

But now, with this book project well underway, I could use some artifacts to jog a fresh memory or two.

Earlier this year, I scrummaged through my attic and pulled down a few boxes full of family keepsakes. But I found almost nothing of Dad—few photos, little memorabilia to speak of.

I’d hoped to unearth his old Alcoholics Anonymous book—the Big Book, they call it in AA. I remember seeing it in his apartment after he died, and how on the blank opening page he had listed all his sobriety dates—the month, day, year that he gave up drinking once and for all. Dad’s list of dates looked something like this:

~~01/01/83~~

~~04/14/86~~

~~02/13/87~~

~~09/15/90~~

~~08/01/97~~

~~09/13/97~~

~~10/01/98~~

~~03/15/01~~

~~03/16/01~~

~~05/22/04~~

And so on. A multi-decade list of dates jotted down, scratched out, and followed by another date.

It’s a sort of funny-sad page, mostly sad, but the first time I saw that list of dates I definitely laughed out loud. I wanted to look at it again, maybe take a photo of it and print it in my memoir. But I must have tossed Dad’s AA book back in the day, along with most everything else that reminded me of him.

For a while, I had a 4oz bottle of cologne that I found in his apartment after he died, and I kept it in my car and called it “my inheritance.” But that was only funny for a while.

I do have one steady source of memory of my father: my student loan balance. I check the balance most every Sunday, whether I have a payment due or not, because that’s the day I work on our finances. More than the cologne, the student loan balance is my inheritance.

Starting when I was 18 and continuing for five (yes) years of college and into graduate school, Dad encouraged me to take out as much money in loans as I possibly could—the annual maximum, plus a mid-semester top-off the feds could provide. He also tried to borrow some of that money from me, and once or twice, I let him. Then when I graduated, he advised me to defer payments, to put them in forbearance, to consolidate and renegotiate…and never plan on paying: Eventually, they’ll just forgive it, he told me. I have no idea why he thought this back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Even if he’d had a crystal ball foretelling the recent Biden Administration move to alleviate some debt, Dad’s advice was misguided and genuinely terrible.

But here’s the thing: For over a decade of my adult life, I followed his advice—the advice of a man I knew had been an alcoholic basically since he’d been a kid, who’d barely been able to keep me in shoes, who always had all the money he needed for booze but would give Mom $25 on a Sunday as she left for the grocery store, telling her, “This needs to get us through the week.”

I followed this man’s financial advice until it left me and my family with a balance so high I’m not ready to type it out here. We’ve come a long way in repairing all that was broken by that advice and my decision to follow it. We’re still doing the work of repair.

Maybe that’s why I can’t see my way through to many more memories about Dad. Because looking at him means looking at me, and I don’t like what I see.

Nah, that’s too simple. I am okay with me. I’m a mess in my own way, just like you are in your own way. But I’ve been healed of so much. At 47, I resemble my dad in very few ways. I am holding down a steady job. I have some good friends who know basically everything about me. I’m not a drunk, and I don’t pop pills. My wife loves me, and better still, she trusts me. My kids love me, and whatever mistakes I make as a father, they know I have their backs. I’m for them, and they know it. That has to count for something.

So yeah, we’re still working to repair the financial dents left by my dad. But the dents are not the main feature of our lives. Every weekend, I do the grocery run for the family, and when I’m in the checkout line, I often think of my mom and her $25 worth of groceries to feed a family for a week. And as I fill my cart, careful but confident that I can cover the bill, I know the story I’m living now is a new one, and not just a sequel of him.
30 Good Minutes on Poverty

September 19th, 2022

I’ve been learning a good bit about my childhood this year as I work on FourFathers, my memoir-ish book about dads. But there’s a lot I’ll never know—both my parents are gone, and they didn’t leave a lot behind. Few keepsakes, few records.

One of the things I’d love to know is: Were we living in poverty?

That may sound like a question that shouldn’t be hard to answer. You’re either poor or you aren’t, right? But when you begin to look closely at American poverty, you find that things get very technical very quickly. Each year, we identify a poverty line—this year, it’s $27,750 for a family of four. If you make one dollar more, you are not, technically speaking, poor. Which means, of course, that a family can be experiencing extreme economic hardship without being counted as “poor” by the United States government.

My family struggled throughout my childhood. We needed a lot of help to get by. I remember brown bags of canned food being dropped off at our door. I remember the revolving threat of our electricity being cut off. I remember Mom opening envelopes with $25 and $50 gifts from extended family and breaking down in tears of momentary relief: Now I can go to the store! I remember years when everything I needed—shoes for school, haircuts, a few bucks for a class field trip—was an impossible burden on my mom and dad.

Around the time I was in third and fourth grade—1983 and 1984—we could no longer afford a place to live. We had been living in a modest apartment building in Huntsville, Alabama, and we had to move when my dad lost another job. Thankfully, a family at the church we attended moved overseas for a year, and they offered us their house to live in while they were away.

This family was loaded, and their house was a shock to my system. The street was a paradise of big, beautiful brick houses and full-grown trees. I remember staying in the boy’s blue room upstairs and trying to determine which of his toys I could touch and which were off limits. Downstairs, their kitchen had a nook with a TV and a long tan couch. They left their cable subscription on for us, and I got to watch Nickelodeon all year long—a lot of “Belle and Sebastian*,” “*Speed Racer,” and “You Can’t Do That On Television.”

We were living large during the months we were in that house. But we were most definitely poor.

But were we living in poverty? That’s a question I cannot answer without having my parents’ 1040 in hand.

The United States poverty threshold—known as the Official Poverty Measure (OPM)—for a family of four in 1983 was $10,178. If my parents made that much or less, we were counted among the American poor. If Dad made one dollar more, we were not counted. We may have been without a home. We may have relied on the kindness of strangers for clothes and food. But if Dad made, say, $11,000, or even $10,179, we would not have been listed among the ranks of Americans living in poverty in 1983.

I thought about this last week when reading this big story from the *New York Times* about a massive drop in childhood poverty. According to a new analysis from a research organization called Child Trends, childhood poverty has fallen by nearly 60% since 1993. That’s incredibly good news, and it’s worth celebrating.

The researchers arrive at this good news in part by shifting the definition of poverty. The OPM for 2019 (when the study stops) is $25,926 for a family of four. But there are a couple odd and problematic features of the OPM. One is that it is keyed mainly to food costs—it estimates only what a family needs to meet their basic dietary needs. But of course, families need more than just food to survive. The Official Poverty Measure does not consider the cost of goods like clothing, shelter, and utilities. Also, when it looks at what a family has to live on, it only includes pre-tax income and cash benefits, such as Social Security—it is blind to other assets that impact a family’s standard of living, including government assistance for housing, utilities, and so on.

The Child Trends study—along with many other studies of U.S. poverty today—uses another definition of poverty known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which has all sorts of improvements designed to provide a more complete picture of the experience of poverty. For instance, it considers geographic locatlon, recognizing that the cost of living in, say, Brownsville, Texas, is quite different than the cost of living in San Francisco, California. It also considers what a family needs to survive beyond just food, while also taking into account all the resources a family has other than income—namely, government benefits like housing assistance, tax credits, and cushions to help pay energy bills.

If you want to get more under the hood of this stuff, you can read about the different poverty measurement systems here.

Welp, my 30 minutes has sailed right by, so I’m going to wrap this abruptly and post it with a mix of Good News and But Also(s).

Good News: Childhood poverty has definitely fallen!

But Also: There is considerable debate about how it happened. You can see some contrarian takes here and here.

But Also 2: The poverty rate in San Antonio is moving in the wrong direction.
30 Good Minutes: It’s Not Really My Backyard in the First Place

September 12th, 2022

Our far northern San Antonio subdivision is not much for yard signs. The home owner’s association doesn’t have rules against them, so far as I know, which is weird because they have rules about basketball hoops and parked cars and paint colors and SO MANY other things. But not signs, though for the most part people don’t drop much signage in their lawns beyond the occasional happy birthday or high school athlete shout-out.

So it was extra surprising when, one weekend a few years ago, these started popping up all over the place:

They were facing both ways at each community entrance. They dotted the medians in a couple different intersections. Overnight, it seemed, someone had taken it upon themselves to rile the neighborhood up. And it worked—the “town hall” being promoted turned into something more like a rally. We met in the clubhouse of a nearby golf course, and it was bursting at the seams—hundreds of people, standing room only.

The “low income” housing in question was just a single apartment complex financed in part by state tax credits that would require the developer to make the units available at 60-80% of the Area Median Income. So, applicants would need to make nearly $50,000 to qualify. The developer sent a few representatives to our “town hall,” one of whom tried to walk the room through a PowerPoint running down their data on why we needed more housing density in our area (too many workers commuting here from too far away), who was likely to live in the complex (single parents with school-aged children), how they knew their residents would not have criminal records (they had to pass background checks), and so on.

Their point: Everybody calm down. We’re not building low-income housing! We’re just building an apartment complex for the kind of people who already work in this community.

And also: It’s not even in your backyard! As it turned out, the apartment complex in question was not exactly in our subdivision at all. It was nearby-ish, and the theoretical kids in the complex would most likely be enrolled in our neighborhood school. But as the meeting went on, I strained to see how much this project was even relevant to most of us in the room. Where did we think our collective backyard started and stopped? We’d all bought homes in a barely 20-year old suburban development in northernmost San Antonio. Did we really think that all development hereafter would cease? Did we think any of us had a say in determining who else could be northern San Antonio suburbanites?

NIMBYism in a neighborhood like this is like going to a chain restaurant, reserving a table, then demanding that no one be seated at any of the tables around you.

I was reminded of all this last week when reading this story by San Antonio Report‘s Iris Dimmick. Dimmick reports that the City of San Antonio has over $40 million in funds designated for what’s called “permanent supportive housing.” That means long-term housing for people who are chronically homeless. As Dimmick explains, it also means wrap-around services such as mental healthcare, job training, and financial coaching.

This kind of housing, which is genuinely for people with lower incomes, works—it is proven to help people get off and stay off the streets. And it does not harm the surrounding community—study after study shows that housing projects in higher-income areas do not bring down area home values. What’s more, these projects can really do the trick of creating genuine opportunity for families.

Dimmick’s story profiles a few projects in town that have lately run into classic Not-In-My-Backyard opposition. These examples are not quite as problematic as the one in my neighborhood, and sometimes local residents do need to band together to fight for their own common good.

But on the whole, this stuff is maddening. We have precious little housing in this city designed for families who are cost-burdened—and that’s about 95,000 households, according to the official study. The need is there. And now, thanks to the housing bond passed earlier this year, the money is there, or at least the start of it. The space is there. Even the political will is there.

All that’s missing is a lot more backyards that people don’t assume is part of their own.
30 Good Minutes: Introduction + San Antonio’s moment

September 5th, 2022
I’m trying something new: Each week, I’m going to set a 30 minute timer and write until the alarm goes off. When the buzzer sounds, I’ll post whatever I’ve written to this site.

The point here is mostly to thaw the ice on my fingers, or on my brain, or on the part of my brain that works my fingers. But the other purpose is to work out thoughts and feelings on the topics that concern me most these days.

Mostly, the topics that concern me are these two:
- First, the storytelling initiative we are running in San Antonio—now known as Know Your Neighbor, which is focused on the massive wealth and opportunity gaps in our city. By “storytelling,” we mean 3 things: making media (articles, videos, photographs, etc.); crafting learning experiences (cohorts, public events, workshops, etc.); and creating learning resources (explainers, histories, guides, etc.). Our goal is to tell truer, more complete stories about the #1 challenge facing one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities: economic segregation.
- Second, the book I’m writing about fatherhood. Working title: FourFathers. It’s a memoir about four fathers and types of fathers: my dad (the father you get), father figures (the father you seek), myself (the father you are), and God (the father who…well, it’s complicated). The book is under contract with Broadleaf Books, and it’s due this coming February, and I have a LONG way to go on it. I’ve written a lot—more words than the book has room for—but I’m nowhere close to being done drafting. The manuscript is a bit all over the place. Writing has not been my day job for some time now, and I’m finding it harder than ever to write, especially to write about myself and my family, and especially to write about such things in a way that I am excited to share with others. But I’ve got a memoir under contract. A due date, an editor, and so forth. So: more on that to come.
Some weeks, maybe I’ll write about something else entirely. Maybe cooking, or movies, or whatever I happen to be reading. But mostly, I’ll stick to the storytelling initiative (because it’s what I love, it’s what I do everyday, and it’s endlessly fascinating to me) and the book (because it’s almost due, and in spite of my misgivings, I think it’s worth doing).

I’ve almost used up my 30 minutes writing this preamble to the 30 Good Minutes series! So, before I wrap this first one, a brief reflection:

I have covid—my first time! And it’s awful!—and so yesterday I did something I almost never do, which is sit on the couch and watch a college football game. In this case, UTSA vs University of Houston. My wife is currently a graduate student at UTSA, and I’ve become a complete homer for all things San Antonio, and UTSA football is one of the nation’s best sports stories (for real—if you don’t know, google it), so I am 100% on this bandwagon.

The game was a barn-burner and something of a heartbreaker for the Roadrunners, but UTSA definitely proved they can hang with a tough opponent.

For me, the best subplot to the game was hearing the CBS announcers marvel over San Antonio throughout the broadcast—not the team, but the city. At one point one of them remarked that San Antonio is the 7th-largest city in the country. “It’s just huge!” Later the other announcer mentioned it: “This is the 7th-largest city in the country!” What IS this place? was their overall tone. San Antonio! It’s a place! It has football and lots of people! Margaritas and tacos and brisket, sure, we expected that, but also: football and a ton of people!

San Antonio has made national news a few major ways in the last year:
- This Washington Post story on San Antonio as a cite of modern-day redlining
- This New York Times story on the city’s uncertain embrace of fast-paced, history-blind development
- And of course, this very very good and very exciting UTSA football team
I do think San Antonio belongs on the national map. But the attention is complicated—and complicating, as not all change is for the better, especially not for the better of all our neighbors.

San Antonio has been a high-poverty city for a long, long time. What happens to high-poverty cities when they become destination cities for businesses and families across the country? More to the point, what happens to the neighborhoods that have been subject to that poverty for so long? Even more to the point, what happens to the people who live in them—who helped settle them decades ago without virtually any public investment? Do they have any say?

Many San Antonioans worry that the city is bound to turn into Austin: over-crowded, over-priced, and over-white. (That’s not how I feel about Austin, mind you. But it’s not not true…) Our path and pace of growth and development is extremely complicated and fraught. The rich will get richer, and many of those beneficiaries will not even be from San Antonio—the city is an investment vehicle that is no doubt accruing to the benefit of 401(k)s across the land. The main question we need to be asking and working on is: Will the poor get richer, too?