The luckiest boy in the world
March 30, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 25 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I’ve seen the boy a few times when I pick my kids up from school, just a little thing, no taller than my waist. Why he stood out to me among the throng of other elementary-aged children I can’t say, though I suspect his demeanor helped.
No hollering from this boy. No running down the halls, no smile. Not even (as far as I could tell) friends. Just him, walking by his lonesome into the cafeteria every afternoon where parents waited to pick their kids up and spare them from a bus ride home.
The school is home to what is generally known as the poor children in town. There is evidence for this fact—dirty faces, oversized clothes, undersized clothes, and a plethora of emotional problems due to meager home lives. They are good kids in bad situations, unaware they were born with a strike or two against them.
Like the boy. He of the bushy, unkempt hair and the backpack with holes so big everything from pencils to notebooks comes tumbling out. A worn and faded sticker is slapped over one hole. The name JEFF is stenciled there. I wonder if it’s there as a patch or so Jeff can better keep track of his belongings. Or, perhaps, to help remind him of who he is.
Jeff snakes his way through the lunch tables toward his waiting mother. Her smile is not reflected in his face. He looks tired. All the kids do, mine included, but Jeff especially so. He does not hug his mother, simply stands there looking at her feet. She rises from her chair and guides him to the door with her hand. They are gone.
A week later and there is Jeff again, plodding into the cafeteria. I notice his hair hasn’t been combed since the last time I saw him. His eyes keep to the small amount of space just in front of his feet. His backpack is empty. I wonder if that’s because he has no homework or because of the holes. His mother is absent this time, replaced by an older woman I take to be his grandmother. Jeff does not hug her, though she hugs him. Then she guides him to the door with her hand. They are gone.
It was the same three days later except it was neither mother nor grandmother, but a man. His father, I wonder. But then I see the man does not guide Jeff to the door with his hand, he simply gets up and lets Jeff follow. I decide no, perhaps not his father. Perhaps someone else.
That night, I ask my wife about Jeff. She teaches at the school, knows most everyone, but she can’t place him. I ask my kids. They, too, don’t know him.
I’m sitting in the cafeteria the next day, waiting along with thirty or so other parents for the final bell to ring. I notice Jeff’s mother sitting to my right, a few empty seats between us.
I lean over and say hello, which is returned with a smile that seems a bit forced. We spend the next few moments making small talk about the weather and my hat.
I say, “You’re Jeff’s mother, right?”
“Yes.” She looks as if she’s waiting for me to ask something else. I don’t. “He’s a middle child. Middle children have it harder sometimes, I think.”
“I’ve heard that,” I tell her. “So he has two other brothers or sisters?”
“No,” she says. “Well, yes. I suppose, in a way.”
I wonder how a mother could not know how many children she’s had.
“You see, his father and I are divorced. We had three children, including Jeff. His father remarried and has four step-children.”
“Oh. So there’s—”
“—Seven,” she says. “Yes. I talk to Jeff all the time about how great he has it. He stays with me unless I’m working nights. I do that some. He’ll stay with his grandma if I am. And then he goes to his father’s on the weekends. It’s nice. Jeff has three bedrooms. Can you imagine? I tell him he’s the luckiest boy in the world.”
The bell rings. Children everywhere, including mine. Including Jeff. He approaches with is holey backpack and his unkempt hair. I see the clear sunshine in the other children’s eyes and the dark rain in his.
He looks tired. All the kids do, mine included, but Jeff especially so. He does not hug his mother, simply stands there looking at her feet. She rises from her chair and guides the luckiest boy in the world to the door with her hand.
They are gone.
Go out in the world and live
March 28, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 17 Comments
photo by Aaron Jarrad
The story in the newspaper was accompanied by a photo of the street on which she was last seen. It was that eerie time just after the earthquake and before the wave hit. Taylor was riding her bicycle home from an elementary school in the city of Ishinoma-ki.
Use your imagination, and you will see houses and storefronts and perhaps children playing on the street corners. You will see that strange combination of resistance and joy that defines human life everywhere, that sort that makes you feel melancholy but happy to be alive.
That’s not the picture the photograph displays, however. All you see is death and destruction.
Though I do my best not to, all I can think of is her last thoughts as that wall of water came rushing toward her. I like to think it was fast. I like to think it was over before she knew it was upon her and that she didn’t suffer.
Derek Kannemeyer is a French and English teacher at St. Catherine’s, the school which Taylor once attended. In the article, he described his former student’s philosophy of life this way:
“You’ve got to go out in the world and live.”
This is the first time I’ve written about the events in Japan. I’ve wanted to ever since it happened, but I just…couldn’t. There are a great many things in this world meant to be written about by better writers than I, and what happened in Japan is one of those things. It raises questions in me about the things I believe and why I believe them. I’ve done my fair share of questioning God and shaking my fist at Him.
You should know better, I tell Him. Why didn’t You do something?
People smarter than me have been asking that question for a very, very long time. I suppose they always will.
Me, I have no answers. There is a lot in Christianity that must be accepted on faith. It is a rock you can break yourself against, that can tear you to pieces, unless you realize there are answers only God can know and you never will.
I still struggle with that.
But today I am thinking of Taylor Lane Anderson, whose life was cut short by shaking earth and raging ocean, but who still chased and managed to grab hold of her dreams. Her death was a sad tragedy, but knowing she died doing what she loved somehow takes a bit of the sting away. In the end, death that comes out of fulfilling our purpose is something to which we should all aspire.
I still question God. I doubt neither His existence nor His love, but I do His ways. They are higher than my ways, Isaiah said, as His thoughts are higher than my thoughts. I believe that. But believing that also brings a mixture of calm and fear, and I don’t believe I’m the only one to feel such things.
It is a scary time to be alive. There just seems to be so much going on—so much bad. There are days when I feel as though a black cloud hangs over this world, rumbling and swirling and ready to dump catastrophe upon us all. It’s easy to wake up in the morning and wonder, “What’s next?”
I’m sure I’ll wonder what’s next again, sure I’ll look up hoping to see the light and instead see that black, swirling cloud. When I do, I’m going to remember Taylor Lane Anderson. I’m going to remember the way she lived her life.
Because no matter what happens, no matter what fear entangles us, we’ve got to go out in the world and live.
Not only survive. Not just get by.
Live.
God’s catastrophes
March 23, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 9 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I suppose you could say it all started for Tommy back when the river took his house. That was six years ago, more or less. Tommy can’t remember if it was six or five. Or seven.
He does remember the house was a bargain—two bedrooms, two baths, 1200 square feet. And then there was the land—ten acres of woods that thinned out right at the river’s edge. Tommy always wanted a place like that, out in the country where everything was slow and the only sounds were the coyotes and the birds.
He settled in and got used to his new life. The divorce had been tough on him (all divorces are), but now the papers were signed and he was ready to move on. Tommy fixed up his new house with some paint and new furniture. Added a deck on the back so he could sit there in the evenings with his dog and watch the water drift by. Tommy said he loved that deck. Sitting there watching that water made him realize that things will always keep moving, that the bad that might be here now will be behind you soon enough.
Tommy was there for three summers when it all happened. It began as a front coming up from the Gulf, welcome news for the farmers and their dry fields. The weatherman said the next two days would be wet ones and that we should all spend the time sharpening the blades on our lawnmowers. Tommy didn’t do that. He couldn’t sit on the deck and watch the river, so he pulled the recliner around toward the window and watched it from inside.
Watched it rain. Then pour. And then the pour became a deluge.
The weatherman said the system stalled over the mountains, churning in a big circle the kept dumping water onto the valley. It rained nonstop for those two days. We all felt like Noah.
By the end of the first day, the river was swollen. By the beginning of the second, water was spilling over the banks. By mid-day, Tommy’s house was gone.
He managed to get out the most important things—pictures of his kids, his dog, the motorcycle. The rest was soaked or swept away. Including the deck, which was soaked while it was being swept away.
Tommy thought his new life would be better than his old one. But as he stood in what was once his front yard a week later, he figured he thought wrong.
There was little doubt in his mind it was God’s doing. The Lord sent the rain, the Lord kept the rain there. The Lord watched as Tommy’s house ended up floating down the river. It was His will, Tommy thought. Had to be. Because if it wasn’t, then that meant the rain was bigger than God. Tommy hadn’t been to church since he was a boy, but he said he knew enough to know God was bigger than the rain.
He knew enough to realize as well that if God allowed all that to happen, it must have been for a reason. I think that’s what kept Tommy going in the months that followed. The insurance check arrived. He used it to buy another house, this one with no river in sight. He settled in once more, with new furniture and new paint (not a deck, though, as this house already had one). Things started looking up. Tommy considered it the start of his third life, and he was glad to be putting the first two behind him. Somewhere in the midst of all that newness, Tommy did something else. He took a drink.
He’d never held much fondness for alcohol. A beer at the ballgame and maybe a shot of liquor during poker with the guys, but nothing else. To hear him say it, Tommy still can’t explain why he decided to pick up a six-pack at the 7-11 that day. He just did. And wouldn’t you know it, the last one tasted even better than the first.
Like I said, that was six years ago. More or less. Tommy can’t remember.
And as it turned out, his third life was even worse than his previous two. He lost his job because of the drinking, which has also started to affect his health—“Can’t have a beer without a smoke,” he often says. He spends his days sitting on the sofa with his dog watching television. The Price is Right is his favorite.
I guess that’s how it goes with some people sometimes, sad as it may be.
Tommy says it’s all God’s fault for sending that stupid rain. It was a catastrophe, he says, and there’s little doubt it was.
But he’ll also say the drinking was his idea. God didn’t have anything to do with that. Which is why I think the catastrophes that God sends are ones we can overcome. It’s the ones we send upon ourselves that we crumble under.
Blog Rocket
March 23, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 4 Comments
I’ll be the first to admit that blogging can be a tough thing. It takes time to design a good site, more time to write good posts for that good site, and even more time to figure out how in the world to build an audience when there are literally millions of other blogs out there. It can all seem like a daunting task, which is exactly what it is.
So when someone comes along with an idea to help bloggers navigate the heady waters of audience and platform, I figure the least I can do is help spread the word.
Chances are you’ve heard of Bryan Allain. He’s been blogging since 2001 at BryanAllain.com, where he offers a daily mix of comedy and inspiration. He’s managed to build quite the empire over the years, writing for such outlets as RELEVANT Magazine, COLLIDE Magazine, Stuff Christians Like, The Burnside Writers Collective, and The Daily Beast. And I can vouch for the fact that he’s a nice guy. I met Bryan and his wife a couple years ago at Waffle House. There’s a bond between people who meet at Waffle House.
Bryan’s started a new website called BlogRocket.com, where he helps fellow bloggers overcome their blogging frustrations and achieve their blogging goals. The site features a membership community and a 12-week Booster Course designed to help small to mid-sized bloggers increase their traffic numbers, hone their blogging voice, and develop a strong community.
Head over there and join the BlogRocket Mailing List, and you’ll get a FREE download of The 29 eBook, a 32-page eBook that offers advice and insight on the Top 29 Frustrations bloggers face. I signed up last week, so I can vouch for what the eBook offers. You’ll also be entered to win a $109 Amazon Gift Card, and you can’t beat that with a stick.
Like I said, blogging can be a tough thing. Whenever an opportunity presents itself to get a leg up on the competition, it’s best to take it.
Trust me.
Doubting heaven
March 21, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 15 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
There was a time when I wasn’t sure about heaven.
God seemed too distant—too big—to go to all the trouble of tending to my eternal needs. I thought His time was better spent keeping the planets in motion and tending to the angels. Angels were much more worthy of His attention than little me. Little, scrawny, dirty me.
That wasn’t always the case. As a child, I believed heaven was there much like I believed West Virginia was there. Our sister state resided just over the mountains, there but not seen. Heaven was much the same, just over the horizon of my life.
I don’t remember when I started my doubting. My teenage years seem the likely culprit, that time when the head swells with knowledge and the heart is found tender and broken by loves unfulfilled and dreams unmet. That’s generally the age when God goes from nearby to far off, and we wonder why He moved. That was me. Heaven was relegated to that corner of my mind occupied by stories of Atlantis and Santa Claus, both of which may have been real enough once upon a time but were now covered with thick layers of exaggeration. The world opened up just as wide for me at eighteen as it does anyone else. It took up all my vision. I could not see heaven anymore.
That lasted until my mid-twenties. Another milestone in life, one just as important but not as celebrated as the teenage years. I was married by then, working, trying to get something—anything—published and not quite getting it. I remember my wife and I were renting a small house on a farm, and I remember getting up early one morning and sitting on the porch, staring out at the alpenglow coming over the mountains and the cows grazing in the pasture. That’s when I realized that heaven was real. Seems strange, doesn’t it? That I would fully return to faith by staring at cattle. But that’s how it happened. It was as if some small part of me finally understood that I was made for better lands. That we all were.
With heaven now firmly entrenched in my mind, my thoughts then went to the prospect of hell. An old man named Luther Campbell died a few years later. A good man. Raised up here in town, was called to war in Korea. Came home, married, had kids and then grandkids. Spent thirty years at a job down at the factory that he absolutely hated, but did it anyway. For his family, he said. Everything about Luther revolved around his family.
Luther wasn’t a Christian. Sundays were overtime days at the factory, and that’s where Luther worshipped. For his family, you see. I remember sitting there at his graveside wondering where he was and figuring he now had all the overtime in the world. He was a good man, I kept telling myself. Wonder what God did with him?
Luther wasn’t someone like Hitler or Stalin. Those guys deserved hell. Not Mr. Luther Campbell, a good man who just wanted to provide for his family. If God was love—and I believed He was—couldn’t He see that? Couldn’t He see that we all struggled though this life, taking our turns with our feet held to the fire? That we all hurt, we all cried, we all felt the weight of sadness?
Don’t we all deserve heaven in the end?
Yes, I thought. We do. So I went from wondering if there was a heaven to being convinced there wasn’t a hell.
All that was years ago.
Things are different now.
I’ve learned much since then, life being the ultimate classroom. I still believe in heaven, now more than ever. Still believe we were made for better lands. I still believe that God is love, too. But I do believe in hell. I suppose that answers my question about where Luther Campbell’s soul now resides. It’s tough for me to deal with that sometimes. I miss him and want him safe and well. But I figure God whispers to us throughout our lives and in many different ways, and it’s up to us to listen. I think that in the end, He doesn’t send any of us to hell. We do that ourselves.
My doubts now tend to revolve around humanity rather than God, which I suppose is more justified but just as painful. I’m daily amazed at the good we can do, and I’m equally amazed at the harm we can inflict. I suppose that’s why I no longer wonder about heaven and hell. I know both are there. Because I can see the seeds of each in us all.
Swinging the hammer
March 16, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
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I just typed the final period of the final draft of what will hopefully be my third book. Always an ambivalent experience. You’re glad the story is done, but at the same time it’s hard to let the story go. Even now, my thoughts are away from this sheet of paper and on my characters. I wonder what they’d do next and if they all managed to carry on. The answer to the former is that I have no idea. The answer to the second? Yes.
I figure that between drafts of books, journal entries, and blog posts, I’ve written about a million words in the last ten years. That’s a lot. And I have proof, too—the trunk beside my desk at home is full of notebooks and papers, as are the bottom two rows of my bookshelves. Not to mention files upon files on my computer. You would think that considering such bountiful evidence, I would know a thing or two about writing.
I don’t.
It’s a sickness to believe otherwise, at least in my case. Each time I feel as though I’m coming down with a case of I-could-do-a-whole-book-about-writing, I remedy myself by actually sitting down to write something. Always does the trick.
Because it’s difficult, the crafting of words. It’s painful and draining, and more than once I’ve asked myself why in the world I do it at all (answer: because it’s more painful and draining if I don’t).
This has been especially true with the book I just finished. Though aspects of it are similar to my first two, much of it isn’t. It was a leap of faith designed to prevent the one feeling I want to preserve every time I sit down to write.
Not hope or faith or love.
Fear.
Yes. While I’m writing, I want to be afraid.
On the surface, that shouldn’t be a problem. Deep down, writers swim in fear. They’re terrified of rejection, anxious that their work will be perceived as infantile, troubled that there are thousands of other writers out there more talented and successful. We’re a tangled mass of neuroses and obsessions.
But those aren’t the sorts of fears I’m talking about. In fact, I’d say those fears should be battered into submission so the real fear—the necessary panic—can course through me unencumbered.
Whatever our words may be to readers, to ourselves they should resemble a sledgehammer taken to the barricade we construct to keep us a safe distance from the world. Each tap of the keys or stroke of the pen should in reality be a swing of the hammer. Each word should be a tiny chunk taken from our walls. Each paragraph a brick, each page a section, until finally we are left naked with nothing between us and our audience.
That’s the fear of which I speak.
That’s the only way writing works.
There are countless definitions of what good writing looks like. For me, only one counts—good writing doesn’t show how we’re all different, but how we’re all the same. And that’s impossible unless writers are willing to be vulnerable.
Vulnerable enough to commit to the page those hidden parts within themselves which they wouldn’t even whisper to their closest friends.
The changing tides
March 14, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 16 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
June 1992:
Everyone’s telling us to leave, but we’ve already decided that’s not an option. Vacation comes once a year, which means I can only see the ocean once a year, and I didn’t make the four-hour drive from the mountains to the coast just to turn around and go home. Besides, what will soon rage outside is just a tropical storm. It’s not like it’s violent enough to be considered a hurricane.
And there is a strange beauty in all this swirl. The thin line on the horizon that usually separates sapphire water from cobalt sky is gone. Before me instead is a gray that gives the illusion of hole a torn in the universe that threatens to swallow us all.
The boardwalk is empty save for the brave and the stupid. I wander about, unsure if I should be included in the former or the latter. The tide flexes and roars, sending water where beach should be and breakers over the guardrails. Policemen in SUVs rove as sentinels, shouting in loudspeakers over the wind and rain for everyone to seek shelter.
I linger nonetheless, awed by the power of the sea and the smallness of myself. I grip the bench in front of me and squeeze as a sudden gale threatens to send me backward, rain now falling sideways, at first kissing and then slapping my face, and I celebrate that I am alive.
Blue lights in the distance to my left and sirens to my right converge in front of my hotel. Police and rescue personnel pour out of flung-open doors, their binoculars fixed outward toward the raging water. One of them brings a bullhorn to his mouth. Says, “Return to shore immediately.”
I crane my neck around them, out towards the gray hole in the universe. A lone figure on a surfboard pops out among the whitecaps. Swallowed. Pops up once more. He sees the flashing blue lights and the man yelling at him. Reaches up with an arm and waves. Behind him comes a swell that seems stories high. He paddles after it, grips the sides of his board as the wave lifts him. He is to his feet, his arms outstretched, as if hugging the storm itself. Even in the wind and the rain, all this howl, I can hear his joy.
The wave deposits him close to shore but too far for the police to reach him. The man with the bullhorn tries once more—“Return to shore. NOW.” The surfer pauses, stares at us, and smiles. He turns to head back into the maelstrom. One more wave, he asks the storm. Just one more.
When it is over, the police handcuff him and unceremoniously toss his board into the back of an SUV. It’s an unfortunate end to his glorious morning. But I see the smile on his face as he’s placed into custody, and it’s a smile that says it was all worth an arrest.
And as I watch them leave, I know I would say the same.
March 2011:
The weather outside my window this morning reminds me of that long-ago day—gray skies, sideways rain, a gale that rattles the windows. The wavy horizon I’m used to seeing of sapphire mountains and cobalt sky is now a gray tear in my world.
I stand and stare, a cup of coffee in my hand. My thoughts drift back to the man on the surfboard, out there that day in a tempest of water and wind, all to catch that one big wave and to celebrate that he was alive.
I remember what I thought as well, that his deed was a noble one. Not in the eyes of the law, perhaps, but in the laws of existence. I remember envying his courage and the will with which he embraced that one small moment.
Yet as I sip and stare I realize how much I’ve changed in the years since. If I would stand and watch that man dance amongst the waves at thirty-eight instead of nineteen, I would see him as more dunce than hero. Far from believing he was embracing his life, I would think he was spoiling in an act both dangerous and stupid.
I would watch the policemen cuff him and take him to jail, and I would say he’d gotten what he deserved.
That’s what I would think now, and it is not what I thought then.
And honestly, I do not know if that should make me mourn or rejoice.
Saying no
March 9, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 15 Comments
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It was my son who approached me the other night after supper and prefaced his request to go play in the creek with, “I know you’re going to say no, but…”
He was right, I did say no. It was getting dark, it was already cold, and he had chores to finish and homework to do. But that preface bothered me a little.
“I know you’re going to say no, but…”
Meaning I must say no to him a lot. A whole lot.
And that bothered me to the point where I began keeping track of the ratio of yeahs and nopes I give my kids over the course of a normal day. Finished my research the other night. The results were…well, I’m not really sure yet what the results were. All I have is numbers. Their meaning is still up in the air.
According to my calculations, I tell my kids no about ten times a day. Where that fits on the scale of Excessive Parenting is debatable. Even I’m not quite sure. Considering how much I talk to my children, I suppose ten isn’t an unreasonable number. But when I consider the fact that for most of the day they’re at school and I’m at work, ten sounds like a lot.
In my defense, many of the things my children ask to either have or do are things few parents would allow. Few children should have an elephant as a pet or their own television show or be allowed to dress like thugs and prostitots.
They, of course, do not see the wisdom in my refusals. And I have no doubt I sometimes transform in front of their very eyes from Nice Daddy to Mean Tyrant. Once, my daughter even told me I wasn’t cool.
But stripped down to its most bare essentials, saying no is what parenting is all about. I’ve learned in my nine years of being a father that kids will ask for anything—anything at all—without much thinking involved. Their tiny minds are based on the principle of immediacy. It’s now they think about, and seldom later.
That’s where I come in. As a father with thirty-eight years of experience in later, I can testify to the wisdom found in keeping one’s eyes forward rather than the small amount of space at one’s feet. Life has taught me this one thing: everything leads to something else. Everything has a consequence.
I tried a little show and tell about this with my kids once. We were sitting by a pond. I told them to watch as I tossed a rock into the water, then explained how the things we do are like the ripples that come after the toss. They reverberate.
They didn’t get the lesson, they just wanted to throw some rocks of their own. To them, it was the splash that mattered. The ripples were inconsequential.
I can’t blame them.
I was like that once.
I often still am.
To them, I can be the mean parent who won’t let them have any fun. That’s okay, because God willing one day they’ll be mean parents themselves.
But there’s more to this.
The study of my ten-times-a-day No has made me realize I’m somewhat of a hypocritical father. It’s not always easy to answer my kids in the negative, but I’m comforted by knowing it’s for their benefit. Children need boundaries, and they need to be kept safe. And bottom line, they really don’t know what’s best for them.
That’s why it’s a bit disheartening to realize I act like them when it comes to the things I ask for from God.
He tells me no a lot, too. Probably more than ten times a day.
I once thought that was because He didn’t love me or because I wasn’t good enough. That I wasn’t worthy.
I know better now.
The truth is that He does love me, and that both His yes and His no come from that very love. Being good and worthy doesn’t matter much. I know it’s because I need boundaries and to be kept safe. And because bottom line I really don’t know what’s best for me.
And that’s okay.
Because He does.
Allison
March 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 24 Comments
The dedication page from my first novel, Snow Day
I had life figured out by the time I was seventeen. My future was planned, crystal clear and meant to be.
I was the starting second baseman on my high school team and had already received interest from several colleges and even one professional team. I was going to play baseball forever. I had to. Because the kid who roamed the halls of my high school and drove his truck around town wasn’t me. Not the real me, anyway. No, the real me was the guy on the ball field. It was the only place where I ever really felt I belonged.
School was an irritant. Most high school seniors try to stretch out that last year as far as they can, enjoying every moment. Not me. I wanted to get out. I had a life to start living.
Not that high school was hard, mind you. I had the prototypical jock schedule of classes—math, history, English, and four study halls. Brutal. On day my English teacher decided I needed to do something besides sit around all day, so she pulled some strings and got me a job writing a weekly column for the local newspaper. Write about anything, she said. Just make it good.
Oh. Joy.
I obliged, partly because I had to but mostly because she was my favorite teacher. Every Tuesday evening, I would sit down with a pad of paper and write between innings of the Braves games on television. It was busy work, nothing else. Just something to pass the time.
Then everything fell apart.
I blew out my shoulder three weeks later. Trips to doctors and specialists resulted in a shared consensus that though I could kinda/sorta play baseball again, I’d never play the way I had.
It’s tough being seventeen and knowing that every dream you’d ever had was gone. Tough knowing that your entire life lay in front of you, but it wasn’t going to be the life you wanted. Tough.
Too tough.
So one night I got into my truck, drove into the mountains, and found the highest rock I could so I could jump off.
Almost did it, too. I got to two-and-a-half on my count to three when a voice popped into my head and said, “You’re not really afraid of dying, are you?”
No. Not at all.
“Then you’re afraid of living.”
Whether that voice was God’s or my own still escapes me. But I sat for a long while on that rock, thinking. Then I got back into my truck, drove home, and wrote my column. Really wrote. About how things sometimes don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to and how sometimes life can be more night than day. About how, in the end, we all just have to keep on.
That was the night I learned to strip myself bare on the page, to risk exposing fears and worries and doubts. To quit pretending I was someone I wasn’t. It was the biggest act of courage I’d ever displayed.
Three days later, a letter was sent to the high school with my name on the front. Thank you, it said. “I’m having a really tough time right now, and a few days ago I thought I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was going to end it. Then I read your article and, well, I’m still here. So thank you. You rescued me.”
It wasn’t signed, and there was no return address on the envelope. I didn’t know who sent it, but I did know this: God didn’t want me to play baseball. He wanted me to write.
At the mall, a month later. I was picking up my girlfriend from work and decided to walk down to the bookstore. Approaching me was a teenage girl in jeans and a leather jacket. I nodded as she passed, and then she called my name.
“Allison,” she said. “My name’s Allison. I’m the one who wrote you that letter.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. So I asked if she was all right, to which she replied she was, to which I replied that it was nice to meet her. I was so shy, so backward, so unnerved, that I simply nodded again and walked away.
I have had many bad moments in my life. That one? Top three.
I never saw Allison again. I do, however, still spend many a day wishing that I would have. Just once more. Just to say I’m was sorry for not saying more. To tell her to keep hanging in there and she’s not alone.
And to tell her she rescued me, too.
***
This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Future hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. To check out more posts on this topic, please visit his website, PeterPollock.com
Junior Griffin reconnects
March 2, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 13 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
No one knew for sure what Junior Griffin would do with all his free time once he finally retired from the phone company.
Some said he would likely just do more of what he did on the weekends—fish. Folks say there’s nary a pond around here that Junior hasn’t thrown a line into at least once in his sixty-five years.
Others said Junior’d finally have time to fix up the old truck he bought years ago and had since sat on cinder blocks beside or house. Or maybe he’d just fix up his house. He liked to do that on Saturdays.
We all supposed it didn’t matter what he did really, so long as it was something. It’s good to stay active when you retire.
It surprised us all when the fishing and fixing didn’t take. Junior said those things had always been weekend pursuits, and having to do them during the week kind of felt like cheating. Those things were special, he said. He didn’t want the shine that was on them to rub off from overuse. So he puttered around town—the hardware store, the gas station, loafing and gossiping with the other retirees.
When that didn’t take either, Junior went out and did something no one expected.
He went to Staples and bought a computer.
The world was passing him by, he said. Nowadays everyone was connected—“computerized,” he called it. On the Internet and surfing the web and chatting it up. A neighborhood kid hooked everything up and taught Junior the basics. Showed him what sties everyone used, things like You-Tube and Google and Bing.
But it was Facebook and Twitter that caught Junior’s fancy. Imagine, being able to talk to people anywhere. Imagine being able to make friends with total strangers clear on the other side of the country. On the other side of the world, even. It was a pretty amazing thing to consider for a man who’d hardly ever ventured far from the hollows of Virginia.
Junior dove headfirst into the magical world of social media. He Facebooked and tweeted with all the vigor of a bona fide professional. Had friends as far away as South Africa. Took him a while, of course (we all know how long it takes to really get the hand of such things), but before too long ol’ Junior was yakking it up on the web almost ten hours a day.
He met writers and artists, housewives and businessmen, the powerful and the pain. It was glorious and new and exciting.
And then it wasn’t.
Junior disappeared from the world of the Internet just as quickly as he’d arrived in it. One day he wasn’t there, the next day he was, and then he wasn’t again.
Gone.
I was up in the mountains over the weekend when I ran into him. Sitting on the tailgate of his old truck looking down over the valley, a sandwich in one hand and a mason jar containing a questionable liquid in the other. As happy as he could be.
He asked me how the Internet was doing. I told him it was still there and doing fine. He asked me if I’d noticed his absence, and I told him I had. I wasn’t about to ask what happened to chase him away, not with that view of the valley sitting there for me to look at. Besides, I figured he’d tell me anyway.
He chewed his sandwich and gulped from his jar. “It’s fun, bein’ on there,” he said. “Get t’meet all kind of folk. Nice folk, too. I needed that, you know, ’cause I retired. And Ellen’s been gone three years now—d’you know it’s been that long since she passed? Anyways, gets lonely bein’ at home all by m’self. Havin’ all that company on the computer made things easier.
“But you know what? That weren’t the company I needed. I started sittin’ in front of that dad-blamed thing while the whole world went by. The more I did it, the more I wanted to do it. Got to be too much. I was yappin’ my mouth off, but I’s never sayin’ anything. Got to be too much. People’s always sayin’ how great all that Facebookin’ and tweetin’ is, and I guess they’re right, but tweetin’ ain’t no better’n livin’ is what I say. You hear me?”
I said I did.
Junior finished his sandwich and said he’d best be going. There was still some daylight left, and he wanted to get some fishing in. He always liked fishing, he told me. Gets you outside in the quiet so you can think and breathe and be.
Can’t do that on the Internet, he told me.
I couldn’t disagree with that.
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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