Everything made fair
May 14, 2012
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At eight, my son is at that age when the world begins to unfold in a way that is both bigger and bitter. It’s exciting—some days he feels like an explorer set loose in a strange and fantastical land. But it’s heartrending, too, because he’s beginning to realize that though strange and fantastical, the world is also mean.
His word—mean. I don’t think I’ve ever heard life described as such, but I think it’s apt. This world does look and feel mean sometimes. It isn’t easy. Many times, it’s not fun. And very often it doesn’t seem much fair at all.
This last point—the unfairness of it all—has been a common topic in our home of late. The Coffey household has had its share of aggravations, most of which are too insignificant to share but matter enough when they’re felt. It’s the little things that make our days bright or sullen, depending upon which way they turn. It all accumulated the other day with my boy, who was forced to miss a friend’s birthday party when he developed a sudden and ferocious cold. Sitting there on the sofa, coughing and snotting and feverish, he looked at me and said,
“Everything should be made fair, cause nothin is.”
Wise words made wiser because they’re true. It was kind of sad to be there when he said that, and not just because he felt so bad when he did. No, what got me was that he was only eight, and he’d just stumbled upon that one great truth. I was hoping that knowledge would continue to elude him, if only for a while longer. We grow up to discover a myriad of unpleasantness in this world, but few are as unwelcomed, as…unfair.
It isn’t fair that some live in want and others in excess. It isn’t fair that some are hungry and others are gluttons. It isn’t fair that a man can’t find a job, or a woman can’t bear a child, or that there are the lonely and the downtrodden, or that war is everywhere and peace is nowhere, or that babies die and the elderly waste away, or that dreams so often go unfulfilled. And it isn’t fair that all of those things happen so, so often, and there doesn’t seem to be any way around it.
If my son had his way, everything would be fair. People would get what they deserved. The world would be a better place.
You could chalk that up to childlike reverie if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of grownups think much the same thing. Fairness is a word we hear a lot of nowadays. It’s repeated by politicians and activists, protestors and pundits. They want to make new rules, they say. Change the order of things. Make it all new again.
They want to make everything fair, cause nothin is.
Me, I’m not sure where I stand on all of this. The notion seems good enough, I guess. I’m just not too sure of the consequences. The whole thing seems a bit too pie-in-the-sky, akin to working towards the goal of every day being Christmas.
Life is inherently hard. That’s what I wanted to tell my son as he sniffled beside me. It’s hard and tough and won’t get easier. And sometimes the more you wish the more disappointment comes, just as sometimes the harder you’ll try the more you’ll fail.
But I held my tongue and let him pour it all out, because sometimes you have to do that, too. You have to get angry and disgusted. You have to lash out. Often, that’s the only way change ever comes.
And who knows, maybe someday everything will be fair. Maybe his is the generation that will change the order of things and make everything new again.
Maybe. Who knows.
But I doubt it. Call me cynical. Because this world isn’t for the weak or the weary, but it’s still the only world we have.
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Why not forget?
May 10, 2012
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It’s called propranolol. A mouthful, to be sure. The reason why so many medicines have require long, unpronounceable names has always eluded me. I once asked my doctor why such a thing was necessary. He said nothing and looked at me like I was stupid. I don’t think he knew why, either.
Propranolol is a beta blocker, used for everything from cardiac arrhythmias to high blood pressure to controlling migraines in children. A wonder drug with fantastic benefits.
A recent study by Dutch scientists has revealed another fantastic benefit, one that has led to a lot of thinking on my part.
Propranolol, it seems, also dulls memory. Dulls it to the point where these same scientists are boldly predicting a time in the very near future when we could rid our minds of bad memories all together.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? To get rid of all those nasty reminders of the bad moments in our lives. It certainly sounds wonderful to me. Much of my daily life is still lived in the past, whether knowingly or not. It’s fingers still grip me. Loosely perhaps, but enough that I still feel them. Feel them in my decisions and reactions and worries.
And I’m sure I’m not alone. I dare say that I’m not the only one who carries around a little excess baggage. So why not lighten that load a little? Why not forget?
I can certainly see the value in such a therapy being used to treat those suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress: victims of abuse or soldiers returning from war come to mind. These people are particularly prone to the agonies of bearing what may well be an unbearable weight. Such memories can lead not only to depression and psychosis, but even death.
But what about the rest of us? The ones who are plagued not by horrendous moments, but horrendous decisions? Are our bad memories made less so because they are not as powerful? Because they foster more guilt and regret than terror and numbness?
I’m not so sure.
We are largely the product of our experience, the end result of the countless choices and innumerable decisions. Many of those choices and decisions were good. Many were bad. But both worked together in an intricate and holy dance that has culminated in bringing us to both here and now.
But what if that dance were interrupted? Would we truly be made whole if those bad memories were taken from us, or would we somehow become less than we should?
Would the lessons we’ve learned from our mistakes be dulled along with the memories? And so would we then be doomed to repeat them?
Is there value in the things that haunt us?
That’s the question. One worth pondering, too.
We don’t mind accepting that the good in our lives was ordained by God. I’ve never doubted that my wife, my children, and my job are gifts from heaven. They provide my life with a healthy dose of meaning. They have purpose.
But if the good God has given us is endowed with meaning and purpose, then shouldn’t also the bad? And can we, with our limited vision and understanding, really label something as “good” or “bad” in the first place? How can we know for sure until the end result of our lives is played out and our story is done?
The blessings of my wife and children and job were born of horrible memories of the person I once was. It is because of those bad memories that I realize, finally, how blessed I am now. I love these things not because of the goodness I enjoy now, but because of the bad I suffered through then. Because the bad taught me what mattered. Would I give those memories back? No. Because I think the grace that has been given to me would be lessened in the forgetting. Because forgetting the pain of who I was then would dull the joy in Whose I am now.
We are all scarred by life. No one leaves this world as perfect as we entered it. But it is those very scars that shame us that make us all the more beautiful in God’s eyes. Rather than hide them, He beckons us to give them to Him.
Better than forgetting our memories is surrendering them. Better than pushing them down is lifting them up.
The puddle
May 7, 2012
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It was a hard rain, and fast—the sort of pour that early May is known for here. It came from clouds the color of dark smoke that rolled over town like a wave, here and then gone over the mountains. What was left in its wake was the grateful song of a robin from the oak in the backyard, and the sugary smell of wet grass and tilled earth.
And the puddle.
It was not a deep puddle, nor was it wide. Maybe three lengths of my boot and deep enough to reach the second knuckle of my index finger. It lay just beyond the mailbox at the end of the lane, a pothole the rain had converted into a passing mirror of liquid glass.
The mailman had delivered the day’s assortment of junk mail and bills just before the first cracks of thunder. Now that the sun had returned and the robin was singing and that sweetness was in the air, I decided to go check the box. A small boy riding a dirt-road-brown bicycle rounded the corner as I made my way down the lane. He tried a wheelie, barely managing to get the front tire off the ground, then uttered a Yes! as if what he’d just done was almost supernatural.
I gave the puddle a wide berth—I was in blue jeans and flip flops, and didn’t want to risk getting either wet. There are few things in life more irritating than wet cuffs on your blue jeans.
I’d just pulled the mail out of the box (a reminder of the upcoming Book Fair, a ten dollars off coupon for Bed, Bath & Beyond, and the cable bill) when the boy squeezed the brake levels on the handlebars. The bike skidded nearly ten feet on the wet pavement, the last four or five fishtailing, which produced another Yes!, this one whispered.
I looked up. The boy was staring at my feet, where the puddle lay. A soft breeze rippled the surface, and for a moment, however brief, my mind turned to something I’d once heard from an old relative—all mirrors have two sides, she’d said. One side you look at. The other side looks into you.
“That’s a pretty cool puddle,” the boy said to me.
I looked at it and then to him. “Sure is.”
He nodded, and I got the feeling it was the sort of nod that was more the punctuation on the end of a decision rather than an agreement with what I’d just said.
I thought he was going to ride through it. That’s what I would have done at his age. Plus, it would have the added benefit of turning his dirt-road-brown bike back into the red I suspected was underneath. But he didn’t. He threw down the kickstand and dismounted as if from a mighty steed in the Old West.
He walked to me and toed the edges of the puddle.
“You gonna use that?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Mind if I borry it?”
“You can borrow it all you want.”
He nodded and took three kid-sized steps back. Then he ran forward, leaped, and landed square in the middle of the puddle. Water billowed up over his legs, reaching his waist. He lands with a smile that to me is brighter than the rainbow over us.
“Thanks, mister,” he said. “You can have a go if you want.”
He rode off, a plume of road water trailing behind him. I held the mail in my hand and tried to remember the last time I jumped into a puddle in the road after a May rainstorm. Years, probably. Probably long ago, back when I had my own dirt-road-brown bike.
Puddles aren’t adult things. Adults avoid them. They splash and make a mess and get the cuffs of your jeans wet. It isn’t responsible or mature.
Maybe. But then there’s that mirror inside each of us. The one we look into that shows us who we are, and the one that looks into us and shows us who we should be.
I won’t tell you if I jumped or not. Some things need to stay secret. But I will say this—I can’t wait for it to rain again.
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Calling all angels
May 3, 2012
In the village of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, there is a cathedral. Atop the spires and colonnades are statues of saints and angels, many of which are smiling faintly, as if they know all the answers to all the mysteries that vex us so.
One angel in particular has caused something of a stir in that small village. The newest one, erected only last April. Whereas all of its counterparts are garbed in the traditional flowing robes and wings, this one has been modernized with jeans, a laptop, and a cell phone.
It’s the cell phone that captured the attention of one particular husband and wife in the village. The wife especially. So much so, in fact, that she set up a number so people can call the angel. Sort of a heavenly lifeline.
The church, of course, frowned on such a development. They didn’t think it appropriate for anyone to be playing an angel. In their wisdom, however, the bishops decided to let things be. A good thing, that. Because now upwards of thirty people a day dial the angel’s number, and each are greeted by the voice of a very normal and very anonymous Dutch housewife who says, “Hello, this is the little angel.”
It’s all become somewhat of a phenomenon. The angel even now has his own Twitter account (@ut_engelke). Calls come from all sorts of people in all walks of life—old and young, rich and poor, happy and sad. Recently, a little girl called the angel for prayers for her dead grandmother. A widow called for prayers for her dead grandchildren.
The angel (I suppose that should be “angel”) answers them all. She listens. I doubt if much advice is given, but I have no doubt that’s a good thing. When people are hurting, what they need isn’t advice, it’s an ear to whisper into and a shoulder to lean upon.
I read about all of this the other day. It stuck in me. Not so much like a nagging pain. More like an itch you get deep in your ear that can’t be scratched. I couldn’t define that itch then. I think I can now.
What struck me wasn’t so much that somewhere in the Netherlands there exists a statue of an angel wearing jeans and holding a cell phone. Not even that in a tiny village there lives a woman who is now heaven’s answering service. No, what struck me was the number of people every day who call a number they know doesn’t point heavenward to speak to someone they know isn’t an angel, for no other reason than that they are hurting.
That they need help.
That, my friend, is a powerful thing.
I’ve long believed that joy is an individual thing; what makes me happy, what brings me peace and laughter, might not be what would bring those things to you. But when it comes to what makes us hurt, what makes us afraid, what keeps us up at night staring at a vacant ceiling, those things are the same. Maybe not exactly, but close enough.
Our hurts unite us.
They define us.
They make us not only human, but a family.
And if that’s the case, maybe we could all be angels, too.
Waiting for applause
April 30, 2012
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The other day my wife found a notebook tucked beneath a pile of kindergarten papers and rainy day projects. It was my daughter’s. Her first notebook, as a matter of fact. With chewed corners and squiggly lines instead of sentences.
She’s a chip off the old block, my little girl—equal parts bookworm, nerd, dreamer, and writer. That last bit has taken hold over the last few years. She wants to be a writer, just like her daddy. I’m good with this.
This past week, she had the honor of attending a gathering of county elementary school students known as Young Authors, which included a genuine flesh-and-blood children’s writer. Maybe even cooler than that, each student had to write his or her own story that would be read during the event.
This was big stuff. Important stuff.
My daughter worked for three weeks on her story. She wrote and rewrote, edited and cut, pasted and revised. And fretted. There was a lot of fretting. That’s when I figured she was closer to becoming a real writer than I’d thought. The result was nearly seven hundred words concerning a Middle Ages princess who found herself in very deep trouble.
I wasn’t there when she read it, but I received the blow-by-blow later that evening between sniffles and those wet, whispery hiccups young girls tend to develop in the midst of an emotional breakdown.
It wasn’t because she faltered while reciting her story, nor was the story itself horrible (on the contrary, I was quite smitten with it). No, it was something else. Something much, much worse.
No one applauded at the end.
That no one applauded for any of the other stories offered seemed to me an extremely relevant fact. Not so to her. To her, it didn’t matter at all that none of the other children’s stories was met with adulation. All that mattered was that HERS didn’t.
She was crushed, wholly and completely. Ruined to the point where she vowed to never write a single word again. The simple act of writing hurt itself, she said. But writing without applause at the end? That was a pain beyond description, one that could only be expressed by sniffles and wet, whispery hiccups.
That’s when I knew my daughter wasn’t just close to becoming a writer, she was actually on the precipice. She was there, mere steps away.
There are things writers are supposed to say when asked why they do what they do. They say it’s because they want to define the world, and once that’s done, change it. They say its because there is a story in them that begs telling. They say it’s because writing is their ministry or their passion or their calling.
And yet while those things may be true in some respect, the plain fact is that all of it is mostly bull. Because deep down in places we’d rather keep shadowed, we’re really doing it for the applause at the end.
Despite whatever sin we think this involves, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Writing is work. Hard, sweaty, painful work. It is what Hemmingway called “hard and clear about what hurts.” It is the tilling of the packed soil within us, the dredging up of our angers and fears not so we may hide them further, but so we may show them to the world.
The applause we seek isn’t for that; we do not want to be congratulated for our valor. No, it’s for something more fundamental. We want claps so that we may know we’ve been heard, that by exposing our pain we have built a bridge that spans Me and You and creates an Us.
To a writer, the only thing that is worse than derision is silence.
I write this post with my daughter on the other side of the couch. She just asked me for a synonym for the word “courageous”. I stopped pecking at this keyboard long enough to glance over and see another notebook on her lap. She’s begun another story.
I tell her to use “intrepid,” but inside I’m thinking a better word would be her.
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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