courtesy photo

From the Rearview

more resources

Related Stories:

The Power in Choosing Love

Go Co-op and Buy Farmers Market Fresh

From Easel to Exhibition

Share This:

Ron Hall will speak at the Downtown Women’s Center Spring Luncheon on Thursday, April 8, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Amarillo Civic Center’s Heritage Room. Individual tickets are $25 each, though attendees are welcome to help sponsor the event by purchasing a table. Autographed books may be purchased for $15 at The Uptown Shoppe at I-40 and Georgia. For more information about the Spring Luncheon, call 372.3625.

You’re coming to Amarillo April 8th to the Downtown Women’s Center. Is Denver coming too?
No, his health has taken a nose dive. He has diabetes now and blood clots in his legs, so he can’t ride on planes or cars for longer than 30 minutes. But he’s doing okay. We just finished breakfast together and now I’m going to see my grandkids.

Essentially What Difference Do it Make? is a collection of stories – it’s a recap of how Same Kind of Different as Me was born, a closer look into your relationship with your father, and chapters of Denver’s advice to readers on how to make a difference in a person’s life. Tell me how this latest book came to be.
I’m not really an author. I’m a storyteller but I became an author by default. I had some good stories to tell and I was encouraged to write them down. Of course, it was Denver’s idea to write our story down, and at the time he couldn’t read or write, so I knew I’d be the one doing the writing. SKoDaM has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for 102 weeks consecutively, but it’s a book that was turned down several times. Still we haven’t spent money advertising. It’s a word of mouth phenomenon.

The second book came about because we were getting so many readers sending their stories. They were moved to action. We literally had hundreds of stories that were inspired by the first book, so we decided we’d tell a story of their stories. I realized there wasn’t cohesion with all the stories, so we picked out 10 or 15 of the stories and put more in there about Denver and more about me and we started writing from that angle. Then last January my father died and I spent some time reflecting on his life and my life as his son. I just had to get through the process because I resented him for most of his life and I had to learn how to love him. I talked to Lynn Vincent, who puts everything in Denver’s voice, and she wanted to include some of the writing about my dad. After that, it just came alive and started to make more sense.

Let’s talk about your father. You said you resented him most of your life and how you had to learn to love him. How did it feel that last week with him, sitting on his porch, the man who lived his life as an alcoholic and there you shared a drink with him. How did you get there with him?
Denver helped me get there. About 10 years ago, one of the first Christmas’s he spent with us, Deborah had prepared this wonderful meal after having nine months of chemotherapy and just two weeks after surgery. She was fighting for her life and had just made this meal for us. My dad made this horrible remark about cancer not being a big deal. Our dinner broke up and we all left mad. Denver said, “Mr. Ron, we need to bless that man. He didn’t mean anything. You can’t love him for who you want him to be. You have to love him for who he is. If it weren’t for him, there wouldn’t be you. And if it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t be me and Miss Debbie. He gave you life, so you need to honor him even if you don’t like him.” So I began to look at my dad in a different way. I softened towards him in the last two years while I took care of him. Since he wasn’t coming in my direction, I figured I had to go in his. That day on the patio at the ranch sharing a bottle of wine and smoking cigars, well that was the first time in my life that I liked him, that I found him funny. I just had to love him on his terms. They’re hard lessons and it all ended well, and that last day sitting on the porch with my father was one of the highlights of my life.

What is the difference between “helping” the homeless and “blessing” the homeless?
That was really Denver’s idea. He was a poor man who was wise and by his wisdom our city would be changed. He never ceases to amaze me… You know, I always thought I helped the homeless by giving them a dollar or serving them soup, but Denver always said that homeless people are quite capable of feeding themselves. What I was really doing was making myself feel better about me. Those were blessings, but to really help them you have to stick with them until there’s a real change. That was Debbie’s idea, too. Denver will tell you that the government programs kept him alive all those years, but the government doesn’t love. And apart from love, no one can really change.

Denver said homeless people need people, so maybe there’s a place for both?
He pointed out many times that the homeless issue isn’t a donkey-elephant problem. It’s a heart problem. The government can’t love. It’s the church’s responsibility to love. If you take one homeless person into a church and meet all of that one person’s needs, that person will be transformed and will go back into society as a reformed person. A church usually has enough members with the skills needed to help one person. That’s the only way we’re going to make a dent.

One of my favorite flashback pieces was the conversation between you and your wife, when she told you that God had laid it on her heart for you to reach out to Denver and you responded by saying you weren’t at that meeting where she heard Him speak. That attitude resonated with me because we’re all so full of excuses. What do you tell the person who is “waiting to feel led?”
I tell that person - God bless you. Do what you feel led to do. If it’s nothing, then do nothing. But you will have a defining moment in your life at some point when you’ll either have to answer the call or not, no matter what it is. Working with the homeless certainly isn’t for everyone, and you’re not going to do them any good if you go with a bad attitude. There are many people doing good things for all kinds of causes and I don’t want anyone to think I’m judging them.

One of Denver’s mantras seems to be “leave the judging up to God.” Why do you think that’s so difficult for us to do, even taking religion out of it? What’s our problem anyway?
Denver says we all want people to be like us and we can’t accept the fact that God created us individuals. He says, “Everyone has a fig leaf somewhere.” We’re all hiding something.

My favorite reader story was Carina’s, the mom of four boys who had to have life-threatening brain surgery. The last line of her story was, “Sometimes you can only understand why things happen when you see them in the rearview mirror.” What are some things that have happened in your life that didn’t make any sense until you were on the other side of them?
Of course, Debbie’s death made no sense. The affair that I had made no sense. But I can see. One of the last conversations we had was when she told me that [the affair] made our marriage better. She said, “Ron, it was a good thing. Look what God did with that.” It turned our marriage around, it gave us a story for Denver. Even with her death, I was so angry. But looking back, hundreds of thousands of people have been impacted by this story. Now the rearview mirror is clear. I was sitting at Starbucks a few days ago and a doctor walked in and recognized me. He said, “After reading your book a year ago, I decided I was going to do something for the homeless. My partners and I set up a free clinic in Dallas and we did that because of your book.” That’s just one of so many stories I hear all the time. Deborah’s dream was real and God had an even bigger plan than we knew.

Are you still mad at God?
(laughing) No, I think He’s pretty cool now. He certainly got my attention. Listen – that’s what relationships are all about and that’s how you experience forgiveness. He knew I was mad and He let me rant and rage for a while, and then things came clear.

In Chapter 16, you explain the domino effect that occurred from Deborah planting the seed of a friendship between you and Denver to a saved marriage in Washington, which is just one example of how your story impacted the lives of strangers. If Deborah was still here, if she was on the phone with us, how would she respond to you giving her all the credit?
Her final words to me were, “Don’t give up on Denver. God is going to bless your friendship. And don’t name anything after me.” So she’s probably up in heaven pointing her finger at me saying, “This is not about me. It’s about God.” In my mind, it’s her story. I’ve had a hard time starting over apart from her and starting over with anyone because she’s still very much with me.

In the quieter moments between you and Denver, what are some of the things you talk about? What do you spend your free time doing together?
We laugh a lot. You know, Denver is incapable of having a conversation with anyone but me because he’s a true spiritual being. He doesn’t know many current events but he doesn’t really care about sports or anything, but he sits down and listens when I read the paper sometimes. None of those things really mean anything to him. He’s just a person who really listens. But we laugh a lot, we’ll go get coffee. Of course, we sign a lot of books. We sit at our kitchen table doing that almost everyday. He paints and we’ll go to the studio. We just enjoy each other and laugh. He’s always saying, “We’re just two nobodies who’s loved by a real Somebody.”

There’s a movie in the works for Same Kind of Different as Me. How involved in that process are you?
I’ll be in Los Angeles next week to meet with producers. Samuel L. Jackson will play Denver and we have to finish up casting.

Is that a little weird? Did you ever think this was in your future?
When I was writing the book, some nights I’d write all night long wondering if anyone other than my family would read it. Every once in a while I’d allow myself to dream about it being on the bestseller list. I got turned down more than the sheets of a five-star hotel. I couldn’t get anyone to even read it. Then my dreams went away and I self-published 50 books just to give them to friends and family. Those big dreams went by the wayside and I thought it just wasn’t meant to be anything more. Then, in God’s miraculous way, he put me together with someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years and then I had a book deal.

But I have to say, reading the screenplay, just the arrogance in my life and the disregard of my marriage – it’s going to be painful seeing it on the big screen. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s my story and it’s real life and it seems to have helped a lot of people. Second to the homeless issue is how Debbie’s attitude and forgiveness of me helped so many people in their marriages.

by Jennie Treadway-Miller

Jennie was a columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press for eight years prior to moving to Amarillo in 2008. She is an avid reader, runner and writer.