Billy Coffey

storyteller

Prayer adjustments

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
It was a big deal for my daughter and me, a couple Saturday’s ago. We’d been skittish for most of that day. She battled nerves over participating in her first official piano recital. I battled my apprehensions because that recital was to take place at the local nursing home.

One small story first:

I was in kindergarten when my teacher decided it would be a grand idea for the class to make Valentine’s Day cards for the elderly. We plunged into the task with all the gusto five-year-olds can summon, after which we were herded onto a school bus and trucked down to what my teacher called “The Rest Home.” The name conjured all manner of fantastical images in my mind, all of which were proven false once I walked through those old wooden doors. The nurses had gathered everyone in a gathering room that was much less stately and much more moldering, where I was greeted immediately by an old man with hooks for hands (and no, I’m not kidding). The sight froze me such that the other people in class quickly distributed their cards to the nearest person and made a quick exit, leaving me all alone. I heard a murmur to my left and turned there, seeing a hand stretched out. I shoved my card into a set of bony fingers and looked up just long enough to see the woman to which I’d just wished a happy Valentine’s Day didn’t have a right eye, only a patch of red, seeping skin. For months, I prayed at night for God to never let me end up like that woman. The memory haunts me to this day. It’s proof that much of the weight we carry in our hearts has been there in some form for a very long while.

That’s what was in my mind during most of that Saturday. Sitting there on the sofa, listening to my daughter practice.

It’s also why I kept near the doors when we arrived that afternoon. Go ahead and judge me, I don’t care.

The gathering room stood empty but for the twenty or so chairs that had been laid out in neat rows. The concertgoers trickled in after—men and women dressed in khakis and dresses, combed and perfumed and bejeweled.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad, not really. They were smiling and talking and happy. They were, as far as I could tell, nothing more than a collection of friendly grandparents.

That all changed when a nurse pushed in the woman in the wheel chair.

Her hair was thin and the color of snow, arranged in a what reminded me of an abandoned bird’s nest. Beneath her white slacks and blue shirt laid the remains of what I imagined to be a vibrant and healthy body once upon a time, but was now little more than a thin layer of dried, leathery skin over frail bones. And right there by the doors, I prayed that I would never end up like that woman.

The nurse wheeled her into the first row as the recital began. One student after another, fingers dancing and sometimes tripping over the keys. The room became filled with applause. Only the woman in the wheelchair did not move. Her head lolled from side to side. I supposed that was the closest she could come now to clapping, and I prayed I would never end up like her again.

My daughter did well. Magnificent, in fact, though I am perhaps a bit biased. But I don’t want to talk about the songs she played or how straight she sat or how she really nailed the ending to the Flintstones theme song. To be honest, I barely noticed any of that. I was too busy watching the woman in the wheelchair.

It was in the middle of my daughter’s second song when I looked at the woman again, and only then because of the thin stream of drool leaking from her mouth. But before I could turn away, I noticed her fingers moving along her chest, playing the keys in her mind. She kept perfect time with my daughter’s song, even caught the parts my daughter missed.

And I realized then that she may have been confined to both a wheelchair and a fading life, but she was still hearing music. She was still playing her song, even in the wan of her life. And can any of us truly strive for more in this life? Could our prayers truly ask for nothing else?

Me, I don’t think so. I think that lovely old lady is better off than a lot of us. Which was why that night and every night since, I’ve asked God to let me end up like her.

Making time for beauty

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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.

Making beautiful people

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Part of my end-of-the-year routine means going through the notebooks I’ve accumulated over the past twelve months. I pour over scribbles and jottings, making sure I’ve left nothing of value behind. Often, I find I haven’t. But just now I’ve come across something I’d completely forgotten. Written diagonally across the top of a page were six words, each letter capitalized to express their importance:

CAREER DAY—I MAKE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

It was back last spring. Career Day at the local elementary school, and an acquaintance called to ask if I could come and talk about writing books. I told her writing books was more something I did on the side than a career. She told me when you’re dealing with a classroom of nine-year-olds, such petty distinctions don’t matter.

I went, though admittedly in a selfish kind of way. I didn’t care so much to talk about what I did nearly as much as I wanted to hear about what everyone else did. I wasn’t disappointed. That day I met firemen and police officers and truck drivers, a lady who worked on airplanes and a guy who made dentures. It was fascinating, all of it, and all of it taught me something, too—when pressed, we can all make what we do sound like the coolest thing in the world.

But it was the plastic surgeon that I remember most. Not so much for his appearance (which, fittingly enough, looked as plastic as his creations) or his demeanor (many of us consciously skipped over the tedious parts of our jobs, but I got the feeling the good doctor sincerely thought his didn’t have any). No, it was what he said that struck me then. It’s what strikes me still.

“I make beautiful people. Beautiful people don’t just happen.”

There was a short time for questions when he finished. Only one student raised a hand, a boy in the back corner who wanted to know how much it would cost for the doctor to turn him into Iron Man. The doctor laughed and did not answer. I thought it was the best question of the day.

I wanted to raise my hand and almost did. Got it as far as my shoulder before I put it back into my pocket. It was question time, not argument time. What I was thinking wasn’t a question.

Because that doctor didn’t say, “I make people beautiful.” If he had, maybe I would’ve let the whole thing go. Maybe I would’ve never made that little scribble in my notebook, and maybe I wouldn’t be writing this post. Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. But he didn’t. He said, “I make beautiful people,” and that tiny change, that minuscule switching of those last two words, made all the difference.

Making people beautiful and making beautiful people are in no way the same. One is outward; shallow. It reaches no deeper than the last layer of skin. But the other? It permeates. It covers every cell. To me, the latter is much more valuable.

And the great secret is this: It’s often the beautiful people who don’t look so beautiful at all. They have wrinkles and graying hair from worrying over their kids. They have a swollen belly from too many meals with family and friends. Their eyes are droopy and their hands are rough and calloused from work. They don’t have time to make themselves look pretty. They know the value of a person lies more in the size of their heart than the size of their breasts. It the amount of compassion that matters, not the amount of hair.

That doctor was right about one thing, though. Beautiful people don’t just happen. It takes a lifetime of walking through this world, of enduring. It’s falling down and getting up and falling down again. It’s the courage to try and love and hope when you’re surrounded by failure and hate and doubt. It means getting scars that may fade but will never go away.

Give me that beauty. Because what the good doctor promises is a pretty that will end in the grave. But that other beauty, the real beauty? It will follow us from this world to the next.

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