The Person in the Car

Hello, Friends!

Welcome back to The Human Leader Project. This one is about an evening I didn't expect, and a thank-you that took years to deliver.

We start here.

Thursday night I was invited by a friend to a panel in Charlotte called Conversations for Culture, put on by the Arts and Science Council. Leaders from the Charlotte Symphony, the Charlotte Ballet, and the Mint Museum were there to talk about what they do in our community and the differences it can make in people's lives. I'd just rolled off the board of my chorus after my tenure as president, and I'd promised myself I wasn't jumping right into anything new. I was there to listen.

I sat down, looked at the stage, and there was Ramona Holloway.

I had forgotten she was going to be on it. And I was just elated, because she's someone I'd only known through her voice before she stepped off the radio, and I had never gotten to tell her what that voice meant. So while the panel got underway, I was celebrating what was going on up there and, at the same time, something else was happening in me. A rush of all of it. Of who I was when I first heard her, and what I'd been driving home to.

I moved to Charlotte in 2016 and found her where most people here did, on the radio, in the afternoon, somewhere between work and home. Her mother, Weezy, was already a character on the show by then, funny in her own right, a voice you got to know secondhand. And then Weezy had Alzheimer's, and Ramona didn't take her off the air. She talked about it.

For years. On the air, to strangers in their cars, she shared her real life: what the week had been like, what her mother did and didn't remember, how hard it was. She approached all of it with humor. But also with grace, and with a humility that never asked you to feel sorry for her. Some of it was hard to hear, and she was so beautifully transparent about the whole thing that you didn't want to look away.

I was there for most of it. I'd get in the car and get to hear an update about what was going on in her life, and for some reason it felt like exactly what I needed. Then 2021 happened. The station moved Matt and Ramona to mornings, into the slot Bob and Sheri had held since I was a teenager in North Carolina, so in one move I lost a voice I'd grown up with and had to go looking for Ramona at the other end of the day. Her mother died that same year. Two years later Ramona stepped away from the show entirely, and I never got to tell her why I'd kept listening.

Here is what I haven't said. For most of those years I was in a long relationship that had gotten hard, for both of us, in ways neither of us knew how to fix. He was struggling and so was I, and by 2016 the struggle had stopped feeling like a season and started feeling like the house we lived in. Every time I got in the car, I knew I was headed home to something I didn't believe was going to get better, and after enough evenings of that you stop expecting the repair to come. You just drive.

I didn't put it together then, but I know it now. She was losing her mother slowly, with no repair coming, and she was still on the air sharing both her grief and laughter. I on the other hand was driving home to someone I was also losing slowly, with no repair coming, and I had stopped laughing about anything. Every afternoon she showed me that you could live beside a long loss without going dark. That you could be funny and light and still be in the middle of something terrible, and that nobody had to choose. I wasn't going through what she was going through. I needed to hear someone else be that human and that vulnerable anyway.

When it came time for the audience, I asked one. I said: in a world that is often very heavy, and knowing that your organizations are a consistent source of light, what is a moment where you've seen what you do become a connection across difference?

Christopher James Lee, the conductor of the Symphony, took it. He said he'd give me an allegory. You have the winds, some made of brass and some of wood. You have the strings. Every instrument comes from a different material, a different history. Then you have the people playing them, a violinist from Romania, a cellist from Russia, an oboist from China. And people forget, he said, that when you put all of that together, from their differences, they create harmony. And then he went one step past where I expected him to stop. It isn't just harmony, he said. It's magic. People in the hall get to experience magic, and the work is helping them open themselves up to it.

I loved it. I also sat there trying to connect with it, and the truth is it felt simple, in a world this heavy and this divided. We've heard the orchestra allegory before. What I kept snagging on was this: he's right, and he skipped the cost. Those musicians rehearse. Somebody plays the wrong note out loud in front of everyone before anybody gets to call it magic. Somebody goes first. And ten feet away from me sat someone who had gone first, every afternoon, for years.

When it ended I went to find her. I don't know what I expected. What I did was tell her, and it came out something like this: that I'd moved here in 2016 and found her on the radio at a point in my life when I wasn't at my brightest, that I'd listened to her talk about her mother for years, and that what she was doing was different from what most people do. She was being vulnerable, on purpose, in public. She was showing strangers that you can be humorous and funny and light and also be going through something really tough, and that you don't have to pick. I told her I hadn't been going through what she was going through. I'd needed to hear it anyway.

She listened intently. She didn't interrupt, and she didn't deflect. Somewhere in the middle she started to tear up, and when I finished she gave me a big hug and thanked me for sharing that with her.

Then she pulled back, wiped under one eye, and said she'd put on lashes tonight and was now regretting that decision. We both laughed. Her mother had been gone for five years and she was crying about it in front of a stranger, and in the same breath she was making a joke about her eyelashes. She'd just done the thing I'd stood there thanking her for.

I thanked her once more and stepped aside for the next person in line to say hello.

Here's the part I hadn't planned on thinking about. She wasn't on that stage Thursday to be thanked. She was there because she's still doing it. The radio voice is at the Mint Museum now, and she sat beside the conductor and the director of the Charlotte Ballet talking about who their work touches. All three of them are out in the community constantly, in schools, in galleries, in the lobby after a concert, meeting as many of those people as they can. But not all of them; nobody could. She spent seven years giving something to a man in a car she didn't know was there, and then she went and found a new way to keep giving it, to a city full of people she'll never get to shake hands with.

I'm not sure what made me walk up to her on Thursday. Most of the time, the person whose voice got you home never finds out, and we all seem to accept that as the arrangement. I'm glad I broke it once.

Driving home afterward I was so grateful my friend felt like I should be there. He had no idea. And, I kept thinking about the other side of it. If I was out there listening to her for seven years without her knowing, then somebody is out there listening to me. Somebody is listening to you. A person at work, a kid, a friend, somebody who is getting through a hard stretch partly on whether you let the hard part show.

They are probably never going to tell you, and you may never find out. What you get to decide is whether you keep being that honest anyway, on the days it costs you something, for people who might not ever walk up and say so. For seven years, in front of a microphone, with her mother disappearing a little more each week, Ramona's answer was yes.

"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." —MB

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