Life’s potholes
July 30, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 25 Comments
image courtesy of metro.uk.co
I’m at the local mechanic’s shop getting my dizzy truck nursed back to health. Dizzy because it won’t drive straight. You can tell when you get out on a flat and straight road and it drifts to the right. The alignment’s messed up. Not a big deal.
They do a lot of alignments here, which is understandable. One of the many perks about living in the country is the abundance of dirt roads one can travel upon. One of the few drawbacks are the potholes that litter those roads. And since the recession has drained the Department of Transportation of funds, there are now plenty of potholes on the main roads, too. Big, angry ones that are hungry for unsuspecting tires.
The folks here at the shop aren’t the only ones who deal with the aftereffects of potholes. There’s a local preacher sitting here beside me. He deals with potholes too, though in a more spiritual sense. And his wife, who just got up to fetch a cup of coffee, is a practicing psychologist. A fixer of mental potholes.
Given the choice, I’d much rather hit a rut in my truck than in my life. Both hurt, of course. Both are ugly, too. And both will cost you. You just pay in different ways.
Hit a pothole in your truck, and all you have to do is come down to the shop here and have it fixed. While you wait, you can chat with some locals about the weather and the crops and fill yourself with free coffee. Most, you’ll find, have hit the very same pothole you have. There are worse ways to spend your afternoon.
Hit one in your life, though, and getting repairs can take a lot longer. Because it isn’t a simple process of getting a hunk of metal fixed, it’s a complicated process of getting yourself fixed. Your heart, your head, your soul. Because it’s easy to be full of happiness and peace and faith while the road is flat and straight, but when you hit a bump, when everything goes from good to downright awful, everything changes. Happiness becomes depression, peace becomes anger, and you not only wonder if you’ll find faith again, you wonder if you ever really had it in the first place.
There’s often no one you feel you can chat with when your life hits a pothole. There’s another difference. Some may see you dizzy and drifting and offer. They’ll say that the pothole you just hit is the very same they hit once upon a time. But you won’t believe them. You’ll think they’re wrong, that yours was bigger and deeper and they wouldn’t understand. I know this is true. I’ve said it myself to those who have tried to help me. Many times.
But you learn. You grow. It never gets easier to align yourself after the bumps in life, but you at least come to understand they’ll always be there. It doesn’t matter how carefully you go or how much you pay attention. Doesn’t matter how good you are. Sooner or later one of them will jump out and eat you and leave you dizzy and drifting again.
I think that’s one of the reasons why Christianity is so appealing. It doesn’t gloss over the potholes. It doesn’t tell you that with enough hard work and right living, the bumps will go away. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said. The other part of that verse has Jesus saying to take heart, He has overcame the world.
Not the potholes, though.
Which I guess means that even though hitting them hurts, hitting them can also be necessary at times. That sometimes bad can turn out to be good.
I doubted that until I read about Steve Wheen, a cyclist who lives in London. Evidently the roads there are just as bad as they are here, and Steve was sick and tired of not only seeing them, but also riding over them.
So he started doing something about it. He started planting flowers in them. He ‘s turning ugly into pretty. Making something useless useful.
I wonder if we could do the same about the potholes in life.
I’m thinking Jesus would say yes.
Looking for the good
July 28, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 26 Comments
Photo courtesy of photobucket.com
I spotted it while waiting for my family to finish their weekly shopping outside of a local department store, scrawled into the pavement next to a garbage can with what appeared to be pink sidewalk chalk. With nothing else to occupy my time, I bent down to see what had been written.
There’s lots more, it said. Look! A small picture of a flower had been drawn beside it.
I looked up and back into the crowd of people both going in and coming out. I hated shopping, and especially so at that particular shopping center. As a boy, it was once a field full of trees and tall grass and deer. Now, it was a paved city in and of itself, with a different sort of wild animals walking upon. The march of progress often takes its toll on beauty and leaves in its wake an ugliness that is glossed over with words like “convenience” and “revenue.”
I waved to a friend coming into the store. Said hello to another leaving. A third who seemed confused as to which way he was going began a conversation. That’s when my eyes wandered to the spot where his right foot was planted onto the sidewalk.
Another picture. This one of a dog’s face. Written below it—There’s lots more. Look!
We said our goodbyes and I reached for my cell phone to check on the progress of my wife and children inside. I was informed that I had plenty of time to look around. I said I was going to do just that.
I looked back to the garbage can, then to the spot where my friend stood. The result was a straight line approximately ten feet long. I walked a little farther, studying the ground.
Another! This one a tree whose roots said, There’s lots more. Look!
I paced off ten more steps and saw nothing. Then, next to a storm drain, I saw the outline of a puffy pink cloud.
There’s lots more. Look!
I did. Past the Michaels store and Bed Bath & Beyond. Past the hair salon the Hallmark, all the way to the end of the Books-a-Million.
There were pink birds, pink suns, and pink balloons. Pink people with gigantic smiley faces and pink snowmen. There were even pink angels.
They ended just as suddenly as they had begun, at the door of the bookstore. It was a pink book. Written in the pages was There’s lots more. Look!
I did. I didn’t find anything.
But I did turn around and look at how far I walked. A hundred yards, at least. One hundred yards spent not staring at the bad, but looking for the good. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, that was all that mattered.
We’ve heard a lot about change in the past couple of years, about how much we need it and how necessary it is. I can agree with that. But I don’t think we can do much about a lot of things in this world. I think we can do a lot of things about us, though. Maybe that’s how real change happens. Maybe we change the world not by changing governments, but by changing ourselves.
And we can start by not wallowing in the ugly, but looking for the beautiful.
Because there’s lots more. We just have to look.
Kicking and Screaming
July 26, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 8 Comments
image courtesy of washingtonpost.com
According to the latest U.S. Census statistics, the average life expectancy for someone living in the United States is 78.3 years. Women typically live longer than men. Their average life expectancy is 80.8 years, while us guys are only expected to live to 75.7 years of age. Figures. Even after we’re dead we’ll be waiting on a woman.
I’d never given much thought to how many years I might have left here on earth until a recent conversation with a friend over coffee. He fully intends to live to a ripe old age. Me? I’m still not so sure. To read more about our conversation and what got us talking about it in the first place, join me over at katdish’s place today.
Fine dining
July 23, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 27 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
The next time you’re in Copenhagen, Denmark, you should stop by a little restaurant called Noma and try to get chef Rene Redzepi to cook you up some dinner. Try, I said. Chances are he won’t because you’ll never get a seat. Because according to the article I just read, Noma is the best restaurant in the world.
I wasn’t sure what sort of food—“cuisine,” I guess I should say—chef Redzepi whips up. The article said his dishes are “on the cutting edge” and that “the result is a very idiosyncratic style of food that speaks to concerns about the way a global food culture turns our eating experiences a uniform beige.”
After reading that, I still didn’t know what sort of food Noma served.
I’m not sure what sort of food the other restaurants listed in the article served, either. Places like Arzak in San Sebastian, Spain and Iggy’s in Singapore and L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon in Paris. But it did get me thinking.
I know some pretty good places to eat, too.
Take the pizza place here in town. Walk in there any day of the week (except Sundays of course, when they’re closed) and before the door swings shut you’ll be welcomed at least five times by everyone who works there. Order a pie, and Tony will get your life story while he tosses the dough in the air right in front of you. He’s a bartender without the alcohol. He’ll listen to your problems and let you cry on his shoulder, and when you’re done he’ll tell you in his still-thick Italian voice that most of what’s wrong with you can be easily cured if you just went to church.
There’s the place on Main Street, too. Originally bought and operated by the man who was once my Little League coach. The old schoolhouse had been wasting away for years before he got the idea to move in and set up shop. It’s generally considered The Place To Be on Sunday afternoons when all the churches let out. Baptists and Methodists and Lutherans flock there to prove that though certain theological points may separate us, food never will.
Take a seat there, and you’ll likely get Elaine as your waitress. She’ll call you Honey and Sweetie and tell you that you really should try the peanut butter pie. You’ll try it, too. Just to make her happy. I can sit there in the big dining hall that was once a gym and can almost imagine the ghostly footsteps and laughter of children who are now grown with grandchildren of their own. My parents among them. They both once played basketball there during gym class. I once ate lunch in their old classroom.
The place on Main Street is highly recommended. Just make sure you don’t stop by during the third week of July. They close down then so the fire department can host their carnival in the restaurant’s parking lot.
Let’s not forget the BP station, either. Home of the best fried chicken in town. If you stop by there and you’re extra nice to the lady behind the counter, she’ll give you extra potato wedges for free.
But by far my favorite eating place is an old picnic table on the Blue Ridge Parkway. There is a caveat, though—you have to bring your own food. And that’s okay, since technically you’ll still be eating out.
The picnic table is good for breakfast or lunch, but perfect for dinner. Make your reservations for seven-ish. Spread a tablecloth, get your sandwiches and your sweet tea, and watch as the sunset falls on the valley below. You can see my entire town from that spot—a few subdivisions, lots of trees, and miles of cornfields. You tend to feel small up there, and I think that’s the point. It’s nice to be reminded sometimes that you’re not the center of the universe.
I don’t know much about fancy eating. I generally don’t put anything in my mouth that I can’t pronounce. God made me a regular guy, and so He gave my palate a hunger for regular food. I’m good with that.
But you know, if Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark is the best restaurant in the world just because it enhances one’s eating experiences, then I say my restaurants are better. Because it’s not just the food I enjoy when I visit them, it’s also the company.
And the view.
Starting over
July 21, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 27 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I last saw Joey five years ago, just before he started over. He was a mess back then. Thin and shaky and unkempt. A shadow of the man who was once a boy I called a friend. He was still sick. Still “fighting the bear,” as he called it. He was in the pit, yes. But at least he was looking up toward the light. For the first time in nearly ten years, he was smiling.
His life had followed the same downward spiral that more and more people in this area had taken before him. Booze had turned to pills and pills to meth. He had no idea that the foggy paradise he thought he’d found was in reality a grave that was being dug around him. I’m not sure what finally managed to take hold of him as he tottered on the edge of an eventual overdose, whether it was his wife and kids finally leaving him or getting fired from his job. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was God. Whatever it was, it worked. That Something grabbed hold of Joey and refused to let go.
He entered counseling. AA and NA and nearly every other A you could imagine. Joey made his peace and asked for forgiveness and learned to rely on a Higher Power. The road to healing was a slow process and a brutal one, but then the road to all good things usually is.
“I need to start over,” he told me that day.
He was moving. Away from the temptations that had nearly killed him and had cost him so much. West. Colorado maybe, or maybe Montana. Joey had always loved the mountains, and the Rockies seemed the place to go.
“You know how the mountains here are smooth?” he asked me. “It’s because they’re old. They’ve been worn down by time. The Rockies aren’t like that. They’re still sharp. I’m tired of feeling worn. I want to be sharp again.”
So he left, taking that winding path West that so many once trod in search of freedom and a better life. I understood. We all needed to start over sometimes. And we all yearned for a new place to do it, a place where our sins wouldn’t follow and we could be judged by who we’ve become rather than who we once were.
I told him to keep in touch and he did. There were emails and phone calls and even an old fashioned letter or two. Doing good, he said. Weather’s perfect, he said. Joey found work and a home and bought a dog to keep him company, a Siberian husky with one blue eye and one brown one. He named him Crackhead.
The Rockies soon lost their appeal, though. As it turned out, there was just as much temptation out West as there had been down South. Joey wrote to say he was heading for Alaska to find work on a fishing boat. He’d always wanted to do that.
The years went on. Emails and phone calls stopped. I thought nothing of it. Time and life often get in the way of friendships like currents that push ships apart and send them on separate courses upon the same ocean. I was here and he was there, and somehow that knowing alone made things okay.
I was catching up with an old friend last week when Joey’s name came up. I wondered aloud whatever had happened to him.
“You didn’t hear?” my friend asked. “Joey died a year ago.”
I didn’t want to believe it, but it was true. He’d heard the news from Joey’s mother just after it had happened. They’d found him in his apartment. The needle was still in his arm.
I thought about Joey today. No reason, really. Sometimes things just pop into your head, memories that you haven’t quite sorted out and found reason in yet.
All Joey wanted was a chance to start over. To leave his problems behind. Most addicts are like that, I think. They’re prisoners unto themselves, chained by a desire that goes beyond want and straight into need. They hate what they do as much as the people who love them hate it. They hate it more.
But there is a catch to starting over, and it’s this—no matter where we go, we always take ourselves with us. And not just our hopes and our dreams. Our frailties and our wounds, too.
Best Friends
July 19, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 2 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
The similarities extend beyond the physical. She’s much like me on the inside, too. Reflective and agreeable. And we both like to laugh. But there is one thing she seems to excel at that I never quite did at her age, or most any other.
She makes friends easily.
With me, it was always different. There were a lot of people who called me a friend, but there weren’t a whole lot of people I could call one. Sounds a bit strange, I know. But I learned early on that there were people who could come into my life and not stay. Time and circumstance would take most away. A piece of me would always go with them.
I was reminded of that recently on my drive to work. To read about it, hop on over to katdish’s site.
Bob Sheppard
July 16, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 21 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I work in a college mailroom. My days are spent walking from one side of the campus to the other and back again. And then again. I do the same thing at the same time in the same way every single day, five days a week, all year long.
It gets old sometimes. And when it does, I think of Bob Sheppard.
You don’t have to be a baseball fan to appreciate what Bob Sheppard did, you just need to have a job. Doesn’t matter what sort of job, either. CEO or housewife, mailman or doctor. Whatever. The truly great people in this world are the ones who are an example for everyone, regardless of who they are and what they do.
That was Bob Sheppard.
In April of 1951, he took a part-time job to supplement the income he received from what he called his real job—teaching speech at St. John’s. Not a rare thing, taking on extra work. Not then, not now. Where that job was and what it entailed, however, was rare indeed.
He became the announcer at Yankee Stadium.
For the next fifty-six years, until a bronchial infection forced him to retire in September of 2007, he sat high above the crowd in a cramped room and uttered the names of batters and pitchers and stadium messages. He announced sixty-two World Series games, two All-Star games, and introduced nearly eighty Hall of Fame players. If was one of those players, Reggie Jackson, who gave Sheppard the nickname he would carry for the rest of his life—The Voice of God.
This man, whose face was seldom seen by fans and whose uniform was a finely-pressed suit, became just as much a part of the New York Yankees as Joe Dimaggio and Micky Mantle. In 2000, the team honored him with a plaque in Monument Park. Visiting players would take an extra few seconds before stepping into the batter’s box just so they could hear Bob Sheppard say their name. He would often sit in the Yankees’ dugout during batting practice, and players, titans of their sport and heroes to millions, would quietly approach and ask to meet him. When Alex Rodriguez signed with the Yankees, one of his first acts was to ask the PR people if they could help him get Sheppard’s autograph.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Because with all due respect, Bob Sheppard didn’t do much. He announced names. Nothing more. One could argue that the vendor who sold hot dogs and beer in the right field bleachers did more work than Bob Sheppard over the course of a ballgame. He would even carry a book with him to the games so he could read between batters, pausing only to offer his usual order of announcing a player—position, number, name, number for the first time through the batting order, after which came just the position and the name.
Doesn’t sound like the stuff of legend, you might say.
But you’d be wrong. Because here is where Bob Sheppard teaches us all. Here is where one of life’s most important lessons is displayed in both detail and glory.
In an age where sports announcers are more circus ringleaders and cheerleaders, he was not. Bob Sheppard did not scream, did not raise his voice, did not offer any sort of emotion or spectacle. He had three rules that he followed through the course of thousands of games—be clear, be concise, and be exact. He followed this pattern unwaveringly. Exactly. Delivering them with a constancy that brought his duties as close to perfection as is humanly possible.
He was, according to Yankee legend Don Mattingly, “…the constant.”
Yes. That’s what Bob Sheppard teaches us.
That in the end it doesn’t matter what we do to make a living, it’s how we do it. It’s turning our work into art, whether that work be washing a load of laundry or leading a country. It is striving toward an unattainable perfection and perfecting ourselves along the way. Not wishing for more, but knowing we’ve been given all we need.
Bob Sheppard died last Sunday. He was ninety-nine years old. There were more than a few who mourned his passing as one of the last remnants of a time when it was grace and restraint and not crude vulgarity that crowds wanted. I was one of them.
He isn’t gone, though. Listen as Derek Jeter steps to the plate in Yankee Stadium, and you’ll still hear The Voice of God—“Now batting, the shortstop, number two, Derek Jeter, number two.” Jeter asked that a recording of Bob Sheppard announcing him be played until the end of his career. He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else doing it.
I can’t blame him.
My daughter’s fingernails
July 13, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 36 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.clm
Buy all the books you want about how to raise a child into a fully functioning and responsible adult, and you’ll be wasting your money. I know that’s a pretty broad statement, but I stand by it. Because it doesn’t matter what Ph.D. says what or how much Biblical wisdom people can give you, in the end you learn by experience. This I know.
I know this, too—you learn to pick your battles with your children. Which means making them earn an allowance to buy the toy they desperately want rather than simply handing over the money, but treating them to a Slurpee when they pine for one as you drive by the 7-11. Simple enough. At least, it usually has been.
But then came my daughter’s fingernails.
Coffey women tend to have the reputation of being both ladylike and tomboyish, depending upon which the situation warrants. Which means my daughter will strut around all day long giving tea parties in her Sunday finest, only to hit me in the head with a pillow and want me to wrestle. I honor both. It’s good for girls to have tea parties. Good for them to know how to scrap, too.
The problem was the fingernails. Good for pouring tea and wearing dresses. Bad for rolling around on the floor with daddy. So when our impromptu grudge match the other night resulted in me looking as if I’d been attacked by a Komodo dragon, I called time out and grabbed the clippers.
“Time to cut your nails,” I said.
My daughter didn’t protest. Not yet. She simply stood there and stared, wondering how she could explain what she needed to.
“Come on. Sit. It’ll just take a minute.”
More staring.
She sat down with the sort of thump that would one day evolve into something that would seriously frighten her husband. When I took her hand, it was a fist.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her.
“I don’t want you to cut my nails.”
“Well, unless you want me to go upstairs and get the boxing gloves, I’m gonna have to.”
“I don’t want you to cut my nails.”
The thought occurred to me that this was some sort of game, the object of which was for the both of us to see if I could get her fist open. I tried. She didn’t like it.
“Okay,” I said. “Why don’t you want me to cut your nails? Girls cut their nails. It’s popular.”
“That’s not why.”
I stared, waiting.
“If you cut my nails,” she said, “I won’t know if I had a good day or not.”
What?
She said she would explain, but I had to put the clippers down first. I did. Then my daughter raised her hands palm up and fingers wide, and told me the story of her day.
The bits of brown and green on her nails were from her work in the garden that morning. A smidge of white paint was on her thumb from the picture she made after breakfast. She pointed out a spot on her pinky that seemed indented, put there by a stubborn drawer she’d helped her brother open. An orange stain from that afternoon’s popsicle. And though the evidence was scant, she swore there was a spot on the ring finger of her right hand where a firefly had landed and made her smile.
“How am I supposed to remember all that,” she asked, “if you cut my memories off?”
How indeed.
Like I said, you have to pick your battles as a parent. You have to learn when to raise and when to fold. I folded. A little pain on my part would be a good enough trade to keep her memories safe.
I wonder a lot whether I’m living the way I should be. Life can get so complicated when you’re an adult. I try to make sure I do more good than bad, but it’s hard to keep track of it all.
Which is why I’ve been paying attention to my own fingernails lately. It’s something I don’t normally do but maybe should do more of. Because I know if there’s evidence there that I’ve worked and created, helped and smiled, then I’ve had a good day.
Then I’m living right.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Summer, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Playing catch-up
July 12, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 2 Comments
- image courtesy of photobucket.com
To me, summer has always been the time to catch up. After nine months of constant work and unending stress, everything finally slows sufficiently enough to at least be able to run alongside rather than falter behind. I can take a breather. Relax.
That’s the plan, anyway. The reality, of course, is much different. Because those three months of slowing down and taking it easy are never really like that. There’s just as much to do and keep up with as before.
I never really understood why that was. Life is so rushed and so constant that we always seem to be lagging behind. Those moments when we feel as though we’re actually ahead of the game are both few and fleeting. Pause to think that, to give yourself a little praise, and suddenly you’re behind again.
But I think I understand why that is now.
Jason told me.
He of the big brain and the coffee shop. A classic over-thinker who thought himself into a mess but just might be onto something.
To hear what he had to say to me and to find the answer to one of life’s enduring mysteries, I invite you to hop on over to katdish’s website. But first, take a sip of coffee and a deep breath. You’ll find out why soon enough.
Heroes
July 9, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 37 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
He was the one who stood in front of me and about twenty other students one day and said that from a scientific perspective, garbage was the most important thing in the world. To him, archaeologists and anthropologists didn’t get much of their information from the things ancient civilizations had left behind, but from the things they threw away. From their garbage.
That little fact may well be the only thing I remember from high school science. It’s managed to stick like a burr in my brain for twenty years. Maybe that’s why I get such a kick about taking the family’s garbage to the dump. I get to see what other people are throwing out. It tells me who they are and what they care about. And, maybe more importantly, what they care about no longer.
I was at the dump the other day when a truck backed in beside mine. The man climbed into the back and began tossing bags over the railing and into the dumpster. I tossed a few of mine.
“How ya doin’?” he asked me.
I tossed a few bags of my own while we made small talk about the weather. I finished unloading before he did, so I leaned against his truck as our conversation wore on.
The man had finished with the garbage bags and was now tossing in other castoffs. A Tiger Woods poster that had come unrolled in transit. Four tiny golf clubs and an even tinier pair of golf shoes. A Nike golf hat.
I was beginning to see a pattern.
“You got a kid who’s a golfer?” I asked him.
“Was,” he said. “Not anymore.”
I nodded. I knew too well the fickle nature of a child’s attention. What he or she is inseparable from one day is landfill fodder the next.
But that wasn’t exactly the reason in his child’s case, because just then he held up another crumpled poster and said, “It was his fault.”
“Tiger Woods?”
“My kid loved golf, and he loved that guy,” he said. “We’d go down to the par-3 almost twice a week. He’s only seven, but he’s pretty good, you know? But then all…that…happened, and even though he can’t understand much of it, he hears stuff other people say. The other day I was out mowing, and I saw all this stuff in the trash. Said he didn’t want to play anymore.”
“Really?”
“I tried talking him out of it,” he said, tossing the poster into the dumpster with the anger and hiss of a fastball. “But I couldn’t. He just said he didn’t care anymore. But I can’t blame him. I did the same thing once.”
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yep, back in the 80s. I was in Little League. Loved Pete Rose.”
Oh.
“Let me tell you something, buddy,” he said. “There ain’t no heroes anymore.”
He jumped from the bed of his truck and waved goodbye, leaving me to ponder his last words.
There ain’t no heroes anymore.
Was that true?
I thought back to the heroes of my yesterdays, surprised that I had so many. I was equally surprised to remember that all of them had at some point let me down, whether through their poor choices or the realization that the person they portrayed to their fans and the media wasn’t the person they truly were.
I guess that’s what happens when we put someone on a pedestal. We try to be like them and forget they’re often trying to be someone else. We see the ideal, but not the reality.
The pessimist in me says that anytime we put our faith in another person, we’re sowing the seeds of disappointment. Because it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do or how famous you are, in the end you’re nothing but a person. A fragile, weak, fallen person. No different from anyone else.
But the optimist in me says different. He says that we all need someone to look up to. We all need someone who lights the fire of a dream and sets an example. And I believe that. I really do.
But was that man right? Are there really no more heroes?
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.
Don't miss anything: Subscribe now-
You can catch up with me here:
-
