At the mall
August 14, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 52 Comments
“Leave me alone, you freakin’ nut!”
Laurie’s search
August 12, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 33 Comments
Her name is Laurie, and she’s one of the smartest people I know. Ivy League educated in both English and philosophy, well versed in both culture and the arts, and able to converse with the intellectual elite. Occupation? Professor. Politics? Liberal. Status? Content.
She is, in other words, my polar opposite.
But we do have one thing in common—we both seek to define life through the written word. Laurie is a writer, and a real one. She’s actually published books with covers and pages and everything, which puts her more than a few steps ahead of me.
Of course, she would be the first to admit that her books are at best difficult to find and nearly impossible to read. Laurie is an academic, after all. But when she asked if I would be willing to read a paper she was submitting to a prestigious philosophy journal, I said sure, why not? I love me some philosophy.
I took Laurie’s paper home and pulled it out while sipping a cup of coffee on the front porch. An Inquiry Into the God/Man Dynamic by Means of Employing the Art of Prose, said the title page. I read it twice (the second time aloud) and began wondering what I had gotten myself into. If the title was that complicated, what was the rest of it going to be like?
I never got a chance to find out. By the end of the first page, my brain hurt. By the end of the second, I was drooling. When my eyes began rolling into the back of my head at the fourth page, I decided I’d had enough.
I took the paper back to her the next day and confessed that while I was sure it was very informative, it was also just a tad over my head. Laurie seemed to take that as a compliment. Philosophers were supposed to be a tad over everyone’s head. “The search for truth and meaning requires a unique combination of vagueness and brains,” she told me. “It’s not for everyone.”
Oh.
“Are you writing?” she asked.
“Yes’m,” I answered.
“I think the writing process is fascinating. The synergy between mind and page overwhelms me. Does it you?”
“I guess so,” I said with a shrug. Mostly because I wasn’t sure what “synergy” meant. Though it did sound like a pretty cool name for a drink.
“It’s incumbent upon every writer to expose the hubris of our lives and reinstate the grandeur of the interaction between the divine and man.”
“I know,” I said, not knowing.
“My next series is going to attempt to discover a correlation between man’s longing to rediscover his true distinctiveness in the cosmic relationship and his struggle to adequately define his true nature,” she continued. Then, “What are you writing about?”
“Pretty much the same thing,” I said. “Throwing stuff in the creek by our house.”
Laurie sat at her desk, staring at me. She fidgeted with her glasses and cleared her throat, giving her precious moments to figure out how to respond.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that’s…good.”
There was an uncomfortable pause in our conversation just then, which gave me the opportunity to invite Laurie back to her work. She did, thankful that I’d suggested it. And I left.
It was on my way out when I remembered two things. One was that much of what passed as philosophy had always confused me. The other was that deep down, I didn’t like Laurie at all.
Not because she wasn’t a nice person (she was) or because she was a tad arrogant (she was that, too), but because we differed on a fundamental belief when it came to finding truth and meaning in life. To her, such pursuits were limited to those with big brains and bigger vocabularies. To me, they were the property of us all.
We are built to seek. Made to explore. It’s a part of who we are. No other human attribute is as strong or as unyielding as that need to tread upon those undiscovered lands within us.
To Laurie, the search for truth and meaning was not unlike surgery—slow, precise, and very serious. But it was always bustling, random, and fun for me. I guess the fact that my search for truth and meaning resembled an Easter egg hunt pretty much described my personality.
In the end, I supposed that it really didn’t matter how we sought, so long as we did. And I had no doubt there was a place for the Lauries of this world. But I suspect there was a bigger place for the rest of us, the ones who believed truth could just as easily be found by throwing stuff into a creek than using big words no one can understand. The ones who believed God did not hide as much as He stood in front of us waving His arms.
Fred The Bug
August 10, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 30 Comments
“Look Daddy, look!”
My son raised the plastic container high to my eye level and I peered inside. Behind the white mesh was a pile of fresh grass, a few browned leaves from the maple out back, and one very large bug.
“I think it’s a monster!” he said. “His name’s Fred.”
My son was fickle with his toys. Those playthings that were most valuable today will likely be forgotten by that evening and yard sale fodder by tomorrow. But the Backyard Safari Kit he got for his last birthday has endured. I wasn’t surprised. Such a gift spoke to one of the most basic of human needs—to capture the mysterious and give it a name.
“Fred, huh?” I said. “Perfect name. Don’t think it’s a monster, though.”
“Then what is it?” he asked.
“A big bug.”
“Awesome. Can I keep it?”
“Sure.”
So we sat and watched Fred the Bug. Watched him crawl and eat and hang upside down. My son thought it was fascinating. I did not. Because I knew what was coming.
“You know you should let him go,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because he’ll die if you keep him cooped up like that. It’s like he’s in jail.”
“I don’t care if he’s in jail,” my son said. “I wanna keep him.”
Fine.
I can proudly say that my son took very good care of Fred the Bug. He fed him and gave him water and made him a tiny bed of grass. He put a tiny mirror in Fred’s home so he’d have the illusion of company. He even told Fred bedtimes stories and included him in bedtime prayers. And all was well.
Until this morning. Until he knocked on the bathroom door as I was shaving.
“Dad,” he said, “do big bugs like to sleep upside down?”
My razor paused in its downward angle. Uh-oh.
I looked down and into his wondering eyes. “Not generally,” I said.
The two of us walked onto the porch and stared. Sure enough, Fred was belly up. My son shook the plastic house. We both listened as his shell clicked against first one side and then the other. That convinced me. Fred had gone to see Jesus.
An impromptu funeral service was held later that day, complete with a tiny hole dug with my pocket knife and two popsicle sticks taped together in the shape of a cross. Somber and serious, we stood over the grave.
I cleared my throat and began:
“We are here today to honor the life of Fred the Bug,” I said. “Fred was a really good bug. He…crawled…and stuff. And made funny noises with his wings. And he was really, really green…”
I looked down at my son, who looked up and nodded appreciatively. His Yankee hat had been removed and was now nestled in his chest. It was the ultimate sign of respect.
“Fred’s with Jesus now,” I said. “Hoppin’ through those green hills up in heaven. So…we’ll see ya, Fred. Have fun. Amen.”
“Amen,” came the tiny echo.
I left my son to pay his last respects in private, promising yet again to be careful not to mow over the gravesite. There he stayed for about ten minutes, at which point the hat went back on his head and he resumed life as a five-year-old.
I was pretty sure that Fred the Bug would go the way of Nerf balls and Legos. Lost in the shuffle. Next week when I mowed the yard again, I could pluck up the popsicle stick cross and put it in my pocket. Nothing would be said.
But I was hoping something would be said. I didn’t want the lesson of Fred the Bug to be lost on my son. Or on me.
Because like Fred, we won’t last long in a cage. We can’t survive being surrounded by walls, especially those of our own making.
Walls of fear. Of doubt. Of hatred and pain. Walls we erect to keep the world out and walls we erect to keep our loneliness in.
The measure of our joy is the freedom we have, our ability to spread our wings and fly. There’s no doubt it’s a big world out there. Scary, too. And it would at times seem easier and more comfortable to shut us off from it. To shrink the world down into something more manageable. There’s less risk that way.
But the truth? The truth is that when we try to shrink the world, we shrink our hearts right along with it.
The things we carry
August 9, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 15 Comments
I tend to be somewhat of a minimalist when it comes to most things in life. For the most part, less is always better. That holds true for everything from tears to possessions.
The weekend What If?
August 7, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 23 Comments
It’s Saturday (finally!), so that means it’s time for the weekend question from Dr. Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions.
Buster
August 6, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 29 Comments
I rarely indulge myself in fanciful flights of What Should Be But Isn’t. As in, I should be a writer with a cabin in the woods rather than a mailman with a house in the suburbs. And truth be told, I rarely sit around and gripe about my work. But it does happen from time to time. And when it does, I always cure it by taking a Friday off to watch Buster Graham work.
It doesn’t take much preparation to do this. I don’t have to go anywhere. All I have to do is grab a cup of coffee and take a seat on the front porch.
Buster comes to me, you see. Every Friday around 8:30 a.m. You can hear him before you see him, courtesy of the old diesel engine grinding up the slight grade toward my street. Start, stop, and start again, with each pause taking thirty seconds.
Let me clarify. Thirty seconds exactly. I’m not kidding here. I’ve timed Buster, and it’s never twenty-nine seconds, never thirty-one. Thirty. Period.
Buster picks up my garbage. Well, Buster and two other guys. But Buster does most of the work. The other two are what he calls his audience. They’re lucky guys in my opinion. I’d gladly pick up trash if it meant I got to see Buster do his thing every day.
The first time I witnessed Buster’s act was purely by accident. I’d taken the day off to get some things done in the yard, which just so happened to coincide with my trash getting picked up. It was an astonishing, almost magical moment that went like this:
Truck pulls up, Buster jumps off. Buster takes two steps and turns, scooping up my two barrels in a mystical, aikido-like move, dumping both in one motion. He then rights both cans so as to return them to their previous spot beside the mailbox. But he doesn’t just place them there. Not Buster. No, Buster spins them. From five feet away. One clockwise and the other counter, as if both trash barrels are entwined in some sort of exotic mating ritual.
He doesn’t pause to see if both end up where they’re supposed to be or if they’ll topple and roll into the ditch, either. He doesn’t have to. Buster knows what’s going to happen. He just turns his back, climbs onto the truck, and rides off into the sunrise before both barrels come to a stop. Exactly where they’re supposed to be.
There’s a word for what I saw Buster do that day: Sprezzatura. “A certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” Coined by a man named Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier in 1528. Brought to life by a man named Buster Graham in faded blue jeans and a T- shirt in 2009.
I took the next Friday off as well. Just to talk to him. Just to ask him how he does what he does. His answer surprised me.
“Jesus wants me to empty the trash,” he said, spitting a brown stream of Beechnut chewing tobacco onto the pavement. “He would have been a trashman, I think. If’n He’d have been around now, that is. Trashmen do a lot of good. The world’s a mess, and we gotta clean it up.”
I’d never thought about Jesus being a trashman. (Buster also said that Jesus would eat at the Waffle House. Because the food’s good there, and that’s where all the common folk eat. I can’t argue with that). The notion of Christ emptying my garbage is a little unsettling. It seems so beneath Him. Would God do that? Maybe. After all, He washed the disciples feet. I imagine that would be a little unsettling, too.
But there’s more to Buster than his graceful emptying of my trash. It’s his attitude. If there is anyone who could rightly feel their job is meaningless, it’s a trashman. Spending all day tossing spoiled food and dirty diapers around is bound to be depressing. But Buster isn’t depressed. To him, his job has a holy purpose. He’s cleaning up the mess.
And there is a lost of mess, isn’t there? Everywhere. No matter where we spend our days or where we collect our paycheck, there is some sort of mess. It might be a mess in someone’s heart, in someone’s life. It might be a mess to clean or straighten or even prevent.
It doesn’t matter what job we have, there’s always a mess. It’s the consequence of living in a fallen world. And as Christians it’s our job to clean the messes up, whether it’s saving a soul or lending an ear or doing a little extra for someone. Or even picking up the trash.In Buster’s eyes, he’s not just a trashman. He’s a holy warrior doing God’s work. I think we should all feel the same, regardless of our occupations.
Because the value of a person’s job doesn’t depend upon what it allows him to have, but what it allows him to become.
The ballgame
August 5, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 28 Comments
There are sounds that stop at the ear and others that venture farther, vibrating our very hearts. Chief among these in my life is the sound of bat meeting ball meeting glove. Of the many soft spots in me, few are softer than baseball. Fewer still are softer than a pickup game played by a handful of boys on a lazy summer afternoon.
Which is why last Sunday I walked across the street from my parents’ home to the local baseball field, where eight boys were playing a small town version of the World Series.
I sat in the bleachers watching them play and listened as they spit and cussed and insulted. It didn’t take me long to realize that despite the years between us, life as a boy hadn’t changed much. I saw in them the me I once was. And as they stole the occasional look into the stands, I couldn’t help but think they saw in me the them they would become.
A brilliant but purely accidental catch by the left fielder ended the visitor’s half of the inning, and the teams changed positions, moping on and off the field. I wrinkled my brow. I didn’t know what the score was, but the game seemed close. Surely even enough to motivate the players to go hard and get dirty.
“What’s the score?” I hollered.
Eight sets of confused looks stared at me.
“What?” one of them said.
“What?” I repeated.
“We’re not keeping score,” said another.
“What do you mean you’re not keeping score?” I asked. “How do you know who’s winning?”
“We don’t care who’s winning.”
I sat there silent, trying to process the words.
“You mean you don’t want to win?” I asked them.
“No,” said the pitcher. “If one of us tries to win, then someone has to lose.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said. “What kind of garbage is that?”
No answer.
Since it was Sunday and most of them had already heard one sermon, I didn’t bother giving them another. I did, however, inform them they would likely change their minds one day. There are certain childhood illusions that one should hang onto, and there are others best suited to be left behind.
The irony, of course, was obvious. Here were eight boys determined to squeeze equality out of a game designed to display one of life’s greatest truths – some triumph, others lose.
We would like to believe otherwise. In fact, there are many who work hard for a world where everyone is a winner and no one is a loser. Honestly, though? Despite what our children may watch on television and you may hear in church, not all of us are winners. There are plenty of losers out there, too. There, I said it. Welcome to reality.
But what separates the oysters from the pearls? What is it that makes someone a winner in life and someone else a loser?
The answer, I decided, wasn’t anything as shallow as money or status. No, the oysters and pearls of this world were determined not in leaps and bounds of fortune, but slowly in the small moments of the everyday.
Like choosing to follow your bliss instead of resting in your comfort.
Or having faith when doubt seems much more reasonable.
It’s risking love rather than accepting loneliness and trusting someone other than yourself.
It’s rising to a new day and daring to say “Good morning, Lord!” rather than “Good Lord, morning.”
It’s knowing that just because you can’t dry the tears doesn’t mean you can’t wipe them away.
It’s getting up, falling down, and getting up again.
That’s being a pearl. That’s a winner.
The boys resumed their game, still playing as though they didn’t care. I could understand then why. I knew why there was so much moping and trudging on that field when there should have been laughter and running. And for that matter, why it was the same in the world. Because to them and to many of us, becoming who we can be, who we should be, didn’t matter. No one was keeping score, anyway.
The truth was that life was rarely neutral. It exacted from us the price of a daily choice to live with passion or resignation. Ours was not an existence of neither/nor, but either/or. We’re either living or dying, doing or dreaming.
Winning or losing.
Staples and the human condition
August 3, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 22 Comments
It’s often said people don’t miss what they don’t know, and that is a maxim proven true many times in my life. Like right now.
When I was a kid, back-to-school shopping involved little more than perusing the two aisles of office supplies at the local Roses, where the selection was limited and the quality was debatable. But now there’s Staples. If there had been a Staples when I was in school, I’m sure I would have roamed the aisles of notebooks and pencils with the same sense of wonder and excitement my children are displaying.
Shedding the outdoors for a classroom is now a call to arms. One look at the sheet of necessary supplies in my wife’s hand that came directly from the school officials confirms it. Pencils, notebook paper, backpack, glue, tape, composition book, erasers, and kid-friendly scissors are just a few of the necessary items. I feel like I’m sending my kids off to college rather than second grade and kindergarten.
Although I am at times not so patient a father, on this day and in this store understanding comes easy. My kids are regarding our trip here with the perfect blend of excitement and seriousness. A tiny seed of knowledge is being planted within them that somehow this supply shopping is no errand. In a few years it will sprout and grow into the knowledge that what they are doing is the physical manifestation of a spiritual truth. They will see this a holy rite, and a universal one at that.
Because if my children are anything like me, all this shopping and ogling over school supplies and all this excitement over starting a new year will likely one day be replaced by a determination not to screw things up yet again.
I was never a standout in school. Nowhere near honor-role caliber. Average at best. I suppose I had the smarts to do better and be more, but not the drive or discipline. What people thought of me and how I fit in mattered much more than learning the Pythagorean theorem or how photosynthesis worked. Then, and sometimes now, the things that really shouldn’t matter at all mattered very much.
For me, the best days of the school year were the first few and the last few. The first few because they always held the most promise. The last few because by then I had firmly entrenched myself in my yearly rut of getting by rather than pulling ahead, and just wanted everything over with.
But summer vacation is the Great Eraser, three months of sunshine and play that put enough distance between me and the previous nine months to suggest the next year might be mine to own. Back-to-school shopping would always cement that thought. All those fresh notebooks with empty pages waiting to be filled with knowledge? Pencils sharp and wood-scented, ready to chew on in deep thought? And of course there was the epitome of student organization, the Trapper Keeper. Those were the weapons I would wield in the battle against myself.
And it always worked for the first few weeks, after which those notebooks would be filled with doodles born of boredom and angst, the pencils would be thrown at either a classmate or the ceiling, and my Trapper Keeper would have been torn to shreds and abandoned in the bottom of my locker.
We have good intentions, don’t we? Every notion to make the next day our best, to rise above petty thoughts and empty words and become who we know we can be. And still every night we close our eyes with the nagging thoughts of who we let down and what we couldn’t measure up to.
Just as we can’t be the perfect student, we’ll never be the perfect people. Deep down we all know this. But we also know that just because our feet are stuck in the mud of this world doesn’t mean our hands can’t reach ever higher toward the sky. Just because we cannot fly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stand tall.
That’s what I want my children to know as they walk these aisles.
August 2, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 13 Comments
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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