Billy Coffey

storyteller

The symphony of us

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images

I’m not sure how I’ve come to share my house with a group of musicians, but such has been the case for the last few years.

Between both kids and my wife, no less than seven instruments can be heard playing within our walls on a nightly basis. For hours, I’ll add. Which is nice, don’t get me wrong, if there’s anything the world needs more of it’s music, but when you have a piano and flute and guitar playing three different songs in your ear at the same time, it can get hard to read your book. Or think. Or keep from going crazy.

The dog and I spend a lot of time outside in the evenings. It’s quieter out there.

Not that they’re bad, mind you. My family is gifted in ways I never was with the songs they play and the manner by which they play them. The kids especially. Though in all honesty, I’ve had my doubts.

Take the past week. Both kids have been hard at work practicing for a special district symphony performance—think an All-star game for band nerds. One plays flute, the other sax. Nights now they’ve sat in their respective bedrooms wailing away, and to be honest—to be very, very honest in a very loving way—I must admit this:

It sounds awful.

Seriously.

Now, sure, I have zero musical training beyond a fifth-grad stint with a plastic recorder. The only thing I can play well is the radio. But still. It’s bad. Off, somehow. They’re hitting the notes they’re supposed to, but there’s not doubt something is missing. Something vital.

Aside from you, the only living thing I’ve shared this with is our dog Lucy. She agreed and wanted to go outside.

But here’s the thing—my kids might sound awful and off, but they’re not.

I know this because I’ve been through the whole district thing before. Last year I sweated through the days leading up to their performance, thinking both of my kids would get up there with everyone else and hit one clunker of a note after another. Didn’t happen.

What did happen is they both played their notes to perfection in the same way they’d played them in their bedrooms, only now there were dozens of other instruments around them to fill in the gaps. My daughter played her flute, my son his sax, and where they left off other parts took over before my children swooped in again. The broken and jumbled sounds I’d heard them play at home weren’t broken and jumbled at all, those were merely the parts for them to play.

I’d forgotten they weren’t solo performers, they were part of a symphony.

I say all of this because it’s easy sometimes to take a look at my own life and see nothing but a jumbled and broken mess that sounds a little off. Maybe a glance at your own life would reveal the same. Days of the same old and nights spent so tired you can barely get one foot in front of another. Living for the weekend or the next day off. Watching the years tick by and wondering where they’ve all gone and what the point of it all is, and running beneath it all is a soft current of desperation because you just don’t know if it matters at all.

It’s easy for me to think that way when I catch myself believing I’m a solo. But what if I’m not? What if none of us are? What if we’re all playing our own parts in some greater orchestra instead, letting our instruments mingle with billions of others, leaping out and in such that we add to a melody so pure and beautiful the sound of it carries and carries on forever?

What if it’s not about us at all, and instead it’s about us all?

A case of The Feels

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images
My daughter is fourteen now, and in about three weeks’ time she’ll be off to her first year of high school.

It’s a tough thing for a dad to know his children are growing up. Harder, I think, when it’s your little girl doing all the growing. You get to feeling at times that something precious is beginning to slip away, and do you all you can to staunch that flow.

Which was why this past Saturday, with her brother and momma away and only the two of us and the dog to hold down the homestead, I thought it high time to have a little father/daughter afternoon in the best way possible.

I was going to let her meet John Coffey.

If you are unaware of that fictional character from Stephen King’s The Green Mile, I won’t spoil things for you. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, then I expect nothing more needs saying. The story is one of the few I often return to whenever I need a reminder that there is still light and goodness in this world, even in the dark places.

We sat on the sofa with the dog and a giant bowl of popcorn between us as the opening scene unfolded—an old man in a nursing home, crying over a song. From there we made our way through the first act, acquainting ourselves with the main cast and supporting characters. It was awful silent in that living room when John Coffey made his appearance on the Mile. My daughter never moved once he set about doing his quiet sort of magic.

We’d gotten to the final scene when old Mister Jangles peeks up from his cigar box when I noticed my daughter looking at me. Her cheeks were red, her mouth caught in something like a grimace. Two eyes red and crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s the matter?’ I’m CRYING.”

I squeezed her knee. “That’s okay, you’re supposed to.”

“I know I’m supposed to,” she said, “but what about you? You’re not crying AT ALL.”

“I’ve seen this movie a hundred times. Read the book maybe a hundred more. After that many times through a story, all the emotion in it’s been wrung out.”

She would have nothing of it: “You HAVE to cry.”

“Why?”

“Because it gives you The Feels.”

Ah. I nodded then, understanding things better. Because of The Feels. I don’t know where that expression first arose, whether my daughter picked it up at school or she read it somewhere. Maybe she made it up on her own. Regardless, it’s been a buzzword in our house for going on quite a while. It comes whenever one of those SPCA commercials shoot up on the TV or when my daughter stumbles upon an Internet video featuring either soldiers coming home from war or a litter of puppies swarming some unsuspecting child. It came as our family strolled the neighborhood on the night of July 4, gawping at all the fireworks.

Spoken in whispers and in shouts, when things are quiet or still. Day, night, afternoon, evening. First thing in the morning:

“I got The Feels.”

Sitting with me there on the sofa, she asked, “When’s the last time you really got The Feels?”

My answer was the one she dreaded: “I don’t know.”

She grabbed the remote and turned off the television, looked at me. “You seriously don’t know.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I used to, I guess.”

And in her best Mommy voice, my daughter then said, “Well, you better go someplace quiet for a while and try to figure out why.”

So I did. I sat on the front porch and watched the sunshine and the deer and tried to figure out why it seems I don’t get The Feels much anymore.

Granted, I don’t think there is anyone who can come down with a good case of The Feels so often and with such power as a fourteen-year-old girl. Such a thing isn’t possible, especially when you are a forty-four-year-old man.

But it did bug me then, and continues to bug me now, that I can go long stretches of months and even years without being struck by awe or passion or beauty, much less all three at once. Which sounds pretty bad especially considering I spend a great swath of my days writing stories that revolve around the very things that have long gone unfelt in my life.

If pressed, I would say I’ve been this way for quite a long while now. Life can do that to you.

At a certain point you move away from the innocence that defines your childhood and allow other things to take over. You become an adult with adult troubles.

But more than that, your view of the world tends to morph into something wholly different. With age comes experience, and with experience comes the shedding of the rosy caul that so long covered them. We go from seeing the world as a place of wonder to knowing it to be a place of ruin. We begin to see people not as souls but as bodies in possession of every awful thing. We see hate and avarice and violence. Maybe we even come to a point when we feel those very things in ourselves.

Living becomes not a thing to experience, but to endure.

We spend so much of our adult lives wanting only to be children again. For me, that desire had little to do with growing back down to a boy. It was more to reclaim once again that childlike state of belief and hope. To see again that all things hold a beauty and wonder.

Somewhere along the line, I lost all of that. I’ve let a wall grow around my heart as a means of self-protection, a shelter against the storms I saw raging around me each day. It was better doing that. Because constantly seeking out the good in others was to invite only disappointment, and risking belief in the good of the world only meant subjecting myself to constant hurt. And that is love most of all, is it not? It is hurt.

According to my daughter, that’s the The Feels really is, too. Deep down at its most basic level, this constant buoyancy of her spirit is not owed to joy, but a kind of pain that stings your heart and leaves behind a tiny bruise that remains behind long after the hurt of it is gone, keeping the best parts of us soft rather than hard, pliable instead of brittle.

That hurt, it seems, is necessary. That hurt you have for others and our world says that you still care, that you are still alive, and that because of those two things, there is yet time enough to start making things better.

I think we could all use a good case of The Feels right now. Hate may be the safe way to go and anger may never put you at risk, but both of those only work in the moment. But in the after, once all the destroying has been done and all those nasty words spoken, we find that the bridges between us have been reduced to mere fragments and made near impossible to put together again. To be made stronger than they were.

We can each view this world as a place of threat and fear and so look upon it with only a measure of gloom. Or we can seek to smile and search out the light that remains even as a closed-fisted hand seems ready to strike.

That choice is a big one. It’s also like every other choice there is—one entirely up to us.

But I know this. I’ve gone far too long opting for the first. It’s high time I seek out the second.

Busyness, beauty and light

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On January 12, 2007, over a thousand commuters passed through the L’Enfant Plaza station of the Washington, D.C. subway line. A rush of people, reading their morning papers, talking on their phones. Hurrying out for another day of the grind. The vast majority of these Everymen and Everywomen never noticed the violinist playing near the doors. Panhandlers are common enough in the subways, playing their instruments for dimes and quarters that will feed them for another day.

This particular panhandler remained at his spot for forty-five minutes and collected a grand total of $32.17. Of the 1,097 people who passed by, only twenty-seven paused long enough to listen. And only one recognized the man for who he was—Joshua Bell, one of the most talented violinists in the world.

I wonder about all those people who passed through the subway station that day. I wonder if they ever saw the newspaper articles and television reports and figured out they had been there, had walked right passed him, without even knowing who he was.

I wonder of Joshua Bell, too, and what he was thinking. All of those people so near on that gray January morning, too hurried to hear the music he played. It was Bach, mostly. And the sound—the most beautiful sound a violin ever made. A sound like angels. That day, Bell used the 1713 Stradivarius he’d purchased for nearly four million dollars.

You might say you’re not surprised by any of this. You’ll say it’s the modern world we live in. People are always in a rush to get from point A to point B. There’s so much we have to keep track of, so many things to do. So much vying for our attention. It’s a generational thing. Our parents and grandparents were the ones who enjoyed a slower life. We don’t have that luxury.

Maybe so.

And yet the very same thing happened in May of 1930. Seventy-seven years before Joshua Bell played inside the D.C. subway, Jacques Gordon, himself a master, played in front of the Chicago subway. The Evening Post covered the story this way:

“A tattered beggar in an ancient frock coat, its color rusted by the years, gave a curbside concert yesterday noon on an windswept Michigan Avenue. Hundreds passed him by without a glance, and the golden notes that rose from his fiddle were swept by the breeze into unlistening ears…”

Jacques Gordon collected a grand total of $5.61 that day. Strangely enough, the violin he used on Michigan Avenue was the very Stradivarius that Joshua Bell would use in L’Enfant Plaza station all those years later.

I ask myself what I would have done had I been present there in Chicago or Washington. I wonder if those golden notes would have reached my ears and if I would have paused to listen.

I want so badly to answer yes.

I want to believe that I’m never so busy that I have no time for beauty.

I want to know that in such a dark and shadowy world, I will still make room for music and light.

The Shine

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I am sitting on the hood of my truck atop Afton mountain on a warm August night, taking the opportunity to do something I once did often but now not nearly enough.

Stargazing.

I was six when my parents bought me my first telescope, a twenty-dollar special from K Mart. It was made of cheap plastic and the lens wasn’t very powerful, but to me it was magic. I spent countless nights in the backyard squinting through that telescope, peering into lunar seas and gazing at Saturn’s rings. I was spellbound.

As I grew older, the stars began to serve another purpose. They were my refuge, a physical manifestation of an inner longing to break free from both earth and life and fly away. The night sky was my perspective. Looking around always made everything seem so enormous and consequential. Looking up always reminded me of how truly small everything was.

Now? I suppose now those two sentiments mingle, swirled together in my heart as a patina that washes me in both awe and longing. I gaze up to gaze within and know my truest self – that both darkness and light can blend to form a scene of beauty and wonder. That despite whatever misgivings I may have, I can shine.

I lean back against the windshield, place my hat on a raised knee, and stare. Above me is what a friend refers to as “a Charlie Brown sky.” Pinpricks of light are cast in a sort of perfect randomness, as if God has sneezed a miracle.

I am not alone here. There are about twenty other people scattered along this overlook, fellow viewers of nature’s television. An awed silence envelopes most. All but one little girl sitting with her father in the bed of the truck next to me.

“Daddy?” she says. “Do we shine?”

A thoughtful question deserving of a thoughtful response.

“I think so,” he answers.

“It’s good to shine,” she says.

“Most times. I guess it depends on where the shine comes from.”

My head turns from the stars to them.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Well, you see that star over there?” He points to a bright speck above us. “That star gives its own shine. It doesn’t depend on anything else but itself to give it light. It’s on its own.”

“That’s a bright one,” she whispers.

“Yep. But one day, all that light will be gone. That star will run out of shine. But you see that over there?” he asks, pointing this time to a big, round ball.

“That’s the moon,” says the daughter. “I know all about the moon.”

“That so? Tell me.”

“Well, Mrs. Walker says the moon is dark and cold and dead. And it isn’t made of cheese, like Tommy Franklin said.”

“You have a smart teacher,” her father answers.

“I don’t want to be cold and dark and dead like the moon. I’d rather be a star.”

“But the moon shines, too. And it’s a better shine.”

“How?”

“Because the shine isn’t the moon’s, it’s the sun’s. Light come from the sun, bounces off the moon, and lights the dark.”

“So moonlight is really sunlight?” she asks with a tone of both wonder and doubt. Mrs. Walker hasn’t gone over this yet.

“Yes. And because the moon is just reflecting the sun’s shine, it won’t get tired and start to fade.”

“So as long as the sun shines, the moon will, too?”

“You got it.”

The two sit in silence again, and my eyes move from them back to the sky.

A lot of us choose to stand in our own light. We want to be known for the things we do more than the people we are. “Look at me,” we say. “I’m special. Better.”

But we’re not. The more we try to shine our own light, the darker we’ll likely become. And sooner or later, we’ll fade. We don’t need to be stars in this life and be a light unto ourselves. It’s better to be a moon. Better to know that we can reflect the shine of someone greater and be a light to the world.

Beautiful

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image courtesy of google images.
image courtesy of google images.

An hour ago:

“What are you doing?”

My daughter is standing on her bed and facing the mirror atop her dresser. She’s not looking at herself, not performing the sort of quick once-over females tend to do before going to town. Instead, she’s studying. Closely.

“I’m looking at myself,” she says.

“Why are you standing on the bed?”

“Because if I stand on the floor I can only see half. I want to see the whole thing.”

I offer the sort of nod I often give to females. The sort that says I don’t understand you, but I’m going to act like I do.

“Okay,” I tell her, “but hurry up. We’re ready to leave.”

She continues to scrutinize and then asks, “Daddy, can I ask you something?”

“Can you ask it in the truck?”

“Can you answer it here?”

“Okay, fine.”

She tilts her head to the side and lets her blond hair spill down over her shoulder. My daughter never used to pay attention to mirrors. Now she can’t pass by one without taking a peek to make sure nothing needs tucking or straightening or smoothing.

“Am I pretty?” she asks.

“Very much so,” I say.

She tilts her head to the other side. “Do you think Taylor Swift is pretty?”

“No.”

“Carrie Underwood?”

“No.”

“Well,” she says, “I think they’re beautiful.”

“Can we go to town now?” I ask her.

She hops off the bed and takes my hand. “What makes them beautiful, Daddy?” she asks.

“Well, since I don’t think they’re beautiful, I can’t really answer that question.”

“I don’t think I’m beautiful,” she says.

“Why’s that?”

“Because there’s a lot wrong with me.”

An hour later:

We’ve made it to town. My daughter managed to sneak away and into the truck before I could talk to her more. And heading to town with family in tow is not the proper time for such a conversation. So I’m currently left to stew and walk the aisles of the local Target, trying to decide how I’m going to finish the conversation her and I had begun.

At thirteen, my daughter is on the cusp of that age when appearance begins to matter more than it once did. I don’t think that’s really a bad thing, but it is confusing to her. She thinks everything is beautiful—sunrises, sunsets, and the puffy white seedlings atop dandelions come to mind—but she secretly fears she is not. I can understand. It’s hard to compete with sunrises, sunsets, and dandelions.

And when it comes to things that are beautiful in any obvious way, she still refuses to call them ugly. To her, ugly is just a word people use for things where the beautiful chooses to remain hidden.

That’s the way I want to keep it with her. Because that is nearest to the truth.

This is also the truth—there is a lot wrong with her. Behind that blond hair and those blue eyes is a little girl who has gone through much. Too much, if you ask me.

I see the way she wears long sleeves and pants in the warm weather to hide the bruises that can pop up after her insulin shots. I see the way she talks to friends with her hands in a fist so they won’t see the pock marks left on her fingers from her sugar checks.

It’s bad enough to have a disease, she’s told me. But when you believe that disease makes you ugly, it’s worse.

I don’t blame her for thinking that way. I think there are a lot of people—older, smarter people—who do the same. But what she sees as ugliness I see as a means of becoming beautiful. Her disease has given her a compassion and an understanding I could never have.

I remember recently reading about the Miss Navajo Nation beauty pageant. Held every year. The contestants do the sort of usual things you would find in any pageant anywhere. They dress up and show their talents and talk about what they would do if they held the title.

But there is no swimsuit competition. In its place is a demonstration of some traditional Navajo skill, which can be anything from weaving to butchering a sheep.

I like that.

Because beauty isn’t simply about looking pretty and speaking well. True beauty is useful. It draws attention not to how good you look, but what good you can do.

That’s what I’m going to tell my daughter when we get home.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Beauty from ashes

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Screen Shot 2015-07-08 at 1.11.18 PMThe car exploded without warning on a day this past April, at a stopping center in an area of Baghdad called Al Mansour. Dozens were killed. The market was left charred and in tatters. The air carried a sickening smell of smoke and burnt flesh and the sounds of sorrow and rage and panic, that music of our age.

This is life for a great many people in the world, a daily existence upon which is balanced a need for the basic essentials of food and water, the universal desire for safety and comfort, and the very real possibility that an act as simple as going to the local grocery store may well end in death. People call our time the Digital Age or the Information Age, but there are times it seems more the Fearful Age.

That this bombing occurred somewhere in Baghdad doesn’t really matter. It could have just as easily been London or Paris, Moscow or whatever city is closest to you. The reality is that none of us are truly safe, and it’s been that way for a long while. Unlike my children, I never had to worry about terrorism as a boy. But I do have the memory of hiding beneath my school desk during a nuclear war drill, of glancing up at wads of chewing gum and scribbled names of children long gone and knowing even then how ridiculous it all seemed. As if my tiny school could keep the Russians away. As if a one-inch piece of laminated desktop would save me from death.

But we’ve learned to carry on in spite of it all, haven’t we? We outlasted the Cold War and Saddam and Osama. Chances are we’ll outlast whatever perversion of religion leaks out of the Middle East, too. Iran. China. North Korea. Maybe we’ll even be forced to outlast ourselves. But the shadow of death will still hover over this world as it has hovered since Cain slew Abel, and even in our safest and most quiet moments, we feel that shadow there. We take our children’s hands and tell them to keep close, worry when they don’t, all because of that shadow.

Yet somehow we still prosper. Our children grow on with us, we still find reason to laugh and sing and devote a large measure of our worry to things that don’t matter at all. We adapt to the shadow of death, that rot in the world. We get used to it. Humanity’s ability to accustom itself to all manner of horrible situations to the point where even the worst things become accepted as normal could be our greatest attribute. Without it, how could we have survived this long? And yet that knack for adjusting could also be our worst curse, because it allows evil to continue on unfettered.

I don’t know if that’s what Karim Wasfi was thinking when he heard of the bombing in Al Mansour, but I’m betting it was something close. Because while the dead and grieving were being taken away and the market workers were cleaning up—telling themselves and each other, perhaps, that this day was lost but tomorrow would perhaps be better—Karim Wasfi decided to do something about it. To do something profound. He didn’t reach for a gun, didn’t vow vengeance. He instead dressed in his best suit, reached for his cello, and went to the market. He placed a chair on the burnt ground, and there in the midst of all that carnage and ruin, he played.

One Iraqi said that Karim “is playing music for the souls of the people who died just a few hours ago. I can imagine them listening too, and wondering, ‘Why?’”

You don’t have to be dead to ask that question: Why? It is just as much the call of the living, a single word that has passed through the lips of every person who has drawn breath, one syllable that has both sparked faith and doubt. Why? Why must things be this way? Why is this allowed?

And here’s the answer—I don’t know. You don’t. No one does. We can couch our guesses in religious terms and say God has a plan. We can drown in the shadow of death and call it evidence that there is no plan at all. Either way, the reality remains. Life is merely a string of ever complex questions. The answers, for the most part, only come after.

But that reality doesn’t mean we’re powerless, nor does it take from us the burden of responsibility. We have a task in this life, you and I, and while that task can at times seem pointless and even false, it remains the only task that matters. We are not only to seek out the beauty that remains plentiful and vibrant in our world, but to make that music ourselves and in whatever way best suits us. It is to do as Karim Wasfi did on that April day. To fill the air with hope and love and peace, and to call that the music of our tomorrow.

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