Jangle, jangle
December 14, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
My wife sent me to the store forty-five minutes ago. Since it takes only five minutes or so to get there from the house and another five to pick up a gallon of milk, pay for it, and leave, I figure I should have been home about a half an hour ago. But I’m not.
In fact, I haven’t even made it into the store yet. I’ve been stuck near the entrance watching a Salvation Army volunteer.
The boy is maybe ten, and he’s taking his job seriously. A wool cap sits on his head, ski gloves on his hands. His coat is the puffy kind that looks like its made for sub-Arctic temperatures. He needs them all today. It’s cold out here, and the wind is biting.
This is the time of year when the Salvation Army is out in full force. They’re a gracious lot, volunteering their valuable time to help the helpless. They stand out in the cold and ring their bells and say Merry Christmas when you offer a little something to the nearby kettle. Other than that, though, most won’t say much. They have the bell, and the bell is good enough.
Not so for this boy.
His bell is a clarion, a call to say a message is forthcoming and it is something you’d better heed if you know what’s good for you:
JANGLEJANGLE—“Give to the poor folk. They need Jesus, and so do you.”
The “Jesus” comes out more like “Jayzus.” I can see the boy’s breath in the cold December air. It stops mere inches from his mouth and then fades, but the sound carries. It carries far.
Every shopper who approaches the doors must get through him first. He lets no one off the hook.
JANGLEJANGLE—“Give some money, mister. Think of what all you have and the needy folk who have nothing.”
Standing along the wall about ten feet from the boy is an older man. He, too, wears a wool cap and ski gloves and a heavy coat. He’s sipping coffee and watching. The smile on his face tells me who he is.
I ease my way up to him and say, “That’s your boy, ain’t it?”
He nods while sipping and smiles again. “Sure is,” he says.
JANGLEJANGLE—“God wants you to help the poor people, ma’am.”
The ma’am does. She puts five dollars into the kettle and gets a “Merry Christmas!” in return.
“Seems to be doing a pretty good job,” I tell the father.
“That ain’t no lie, buddy,” he says. He nods toward his son. “He told me last night he wanted to come watch, but that didn’t last long. He said I was doin’ it wrong. I told him he could give it a try if he thought he could do better. That was about an hour ago.”
It’s my turn to smile. “You should be proud.”
Another sip, then, “I sure am. He told me he didn’t understand why there had to be poor people. Said it broke his heart. But then he said that maybe there were poor people because not enough people have done something to help. Lots of people blame God for stuff that’s our own fault.”
JANGLEJANGLE—“Hey mister, don’t you wanna help the poor?”
I suppose some could say the boy’s methods are all wrong. Rather than appeal to whatever inward sense of charity people have, he prods them—and maybe even guilts them—into giving.
But honestly? I’m good with that. Jesus once said that the poor will always be with us, and that’s the sort of thing that can make it easy for us to pass them over. “Let someone else help,” we say. “I have too many problems of my own.” So I don’t mind his prodding and guilting. It forces people to do something about the state of the world. Sometimes it’s good to feel shame.
Me, I’m with the boy. I don’t understand why there has to be poor people, either. It upsets me right along with him. The heart is broken upon the sight of that which contradicts what we know God desires.
But maybe instead of blaming Him, we should all do something about it.
I wish the father a good day and make my way inside. On the way, I drop my own contribution into the kettle. Not enough, I know that. But a start.
“God loves you, mister,” the boy says.
Yes. And God loves him, too.
This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Rejoice hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. To read more posts on the topic of Rejoicing, please visit his blog, PeterPollock.com
Choosing to walk
November 16, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 27 Comments
That’s my daughter over there in the picture. She’s eight now, and that’s a fact I seem to struggle with on a daily basis. It seemed only days ago that I held her for the first time—held her in one hand, almost—and she grabbed my finger and squeezed. There are moments in life that moisten eyes long determined to remain calm and stoic, and that was one of them for me. I still remember that moment. I always will.
If that moment was days ago as my memory suggests, then it was only hours ago when she said her first word (“Dada,” of course) and mere minutes when she took her first steps. Then came the diabetes. I suppose that should seem like seconds ago, but it doesn’t. That seems years more than the meager four it’s been.
Isn’t it strange how that happens? How the world sometimes seems to shrink the good into moments but stretch the bad into eternities? True in my case, at least. Because there are days—and this is between you and I, dear reader—when the many moments of hearing my daughter laugh are overcome by the moments in which she’s cried, and the days of peace are swallowed by nights of fear and worry.
I suppose in that regard I’m no different than any parent. We fear and worry for our children. We protect their innocence and their happiness, we covet it, because we know the ways of the world. We know it’s dark and scary and that it isn’t fair, and we know that one unfortunate day they will know it too, and we vow to make that day as faraway as possible. Because we are parents, and that is what parents do.
Not so for my daughter. In many ways, the blessed ignorance that is childhood ended for her after four years. She is burdened with knowledge no child should be forced to carry.
She knows already that life is not fair.
It’s a fact she must face daily. It rears its teeth when her classmates are on the swings and the jungle gym and the kickball court and she must sit on the bench sipping apple juice because her sugar is low. Bites her when the headaches slam into her skull when her sugar is high. Its shadow looms every two hours when one of her little fingers is pricked and bloodied. It engulfs her in bruises on her arms and legs from the four insulin shots she must get between the time she rises and the time she sleeps.
And yet she continues.
She continues in spite of her bouts with tears and anger, and perhaps because of them. Because even now at the age of eight, she is searching for answers. God has a purpose. He must. There are times when I believe the difference between her and me is that she is sure of that and I merely hope.
But there she is in that picture, showing me—showing us—that belief is the seed from which actions grow.
She is taking part in the Juvenile Diabetes Walk held at the park in the city. In that picture, she has discovered she is not alone. There are others like her, children who have also been burdened with the knowledge that life is not fair. She walks, and as she walks she knows that each step is raising money for research and a cure for what ails her broken body.
Strapped to her is the pack carrying what she can never stray far from—juice, test strips, a meter, a finger pricker, insulin, syringes, cotton balls, Skittles, a book listing the amount of carbohydrates found in the most common foods, and a terrifying Glucagon syringe in case the worst happens (it never has, and thank you, Jesus).
She walks in the Saturday sunshine. Walks among the birds and the ducks and the others like her. Walks the 1.3 miles around the park.
And then walks around once more.
She had to take that second trip. It was neither required nor expected, it was her decision.
Her choice.
I will keep this picture, and I will remember that day. I hope she does, too.
Because it taught her an important lesson, maybe one even more important than the fact that life isn’t fair. And that lesson is this:
We often cannot choose what happens to us, but we can choose what we do with what happens to us.
We can choose doubt or faith. Love or hate. Strength or weakness. Courage or fear.
We can choose to stop or we can choose to walk.
My daughter chooses to walk. Every day. And then she chooses to walk once more.
And for that, I am grateful.
And for that, she is my hero.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Gratitude, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Cleaning up the world
October 5, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 14 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
To work at a college is to have the opportunity to live your life in reverse. To see yourself as the person you used to be. True for me, anyway. I listen to their stories and hear their dreams and realize both sound familiar. They’re much the same as mine were, once upon a time.
There is a sense of determination among them, an anticipation. It’s almost palpable. They’re at that golden age in life when they’re both informed of the happenings of the world and determined to do something about them. And though the thousand or so students here differ in beliefs and opinions, they are united in this one important sense:
They are all convinced the world needs a good cleaning up.
Many more than you might think are here for simply that reason. They’re learning and preparing to go forth into the dark lands outside these ivory walls and do some good. To clean up. They see The Way Things Are and believe theirs is the generation who will put a stop to it all.
But there’s much they can do while they’re here, too. There are clubs and protests and candlelight vigils for everything from tolerance to global warming to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They write articles for the school newspaper on equality. Each of these activities are undertaken with a sense of excitement and passion you’d expect to find in young adults. They’re fighting the good fight and smiling as they go.
That was me once. I was never one for clubs and protests and candlelight vigils, but I did write articles. And I did believe the world needed a good cleaning up. Believed I was the sort of person to do it, too. I had all the excitement and passion in the world behind me to push me ahead. I promised myself that things would be better one day and that my generation would be the ones to thank for it.
It’s funny what people believe when they’re young. How that excitement and passion is the result of a blind expectation rooted not in reality, but in the idealistic dreams of youth.
You, dear reader, know this. I’m sure of it. Because like me, you likely once thought much the same. But the big dreams we sometimes have tend to shrink as time wears on. Where they once lifted us up in possibility, they soon begin to weigh us down in doubt. We may know of the world at twenty, but we cannot fathom it. Not yet. That comes later, when job and family and responsibility appear. When getting ahead is narrowed into getting by. And we see then for the first time this horrible truth—things are too big for us. We are not the stalwart captains of hope and change we once believed we were; our determination instead resides in surviving this day to face the next.
We no longer wish to change the world. All we want is to make sure the world doesn’t change us. That would be enough. We don’t like thinking we’ll lose in this life, even if winning seems unfeasible. Fighting to a draw, then, is the best we think we can do.
That’s what I think about when I see these students every day. About how their passion will be tempered against the hardness of a world they can only flirt with and not yet love. I wonder how kind the coming years will be to them, what they will lose and then gain from the loss.
And through it all they will be nagged by the very notion that still nags you and me, the notion that the world does indeed need a good cleaning up. We’re all right in believing that. Where they’re wrong now and I was wrong once is believing that cleaning should begin at the upper reaches of our society and drip down onto everyone else. I don’t believe that to be true. Not anymore.
Because now I know better. Now I know that if I ever want to help clean up the world, I have to start by cleaning up myself.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Healing, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
“We’re all gonna die!”
September 21, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I listened as well as I could, though I’ll admit she nearly scared me to death at first—Die? Why die? What happened?—but then I managed to get the entire story. She’s eight now, my daughter, an age I’m quickly beginning to see as Not So Young Anymore. The world is opening up to her, and not just the good stuff, either. She’s learning that not all of life is so wonderful and that the future doesn’t always seem rosy.
It was strange at first that what bothered her so much wasn’t something that would happen, but something that already had.
“Do you know how the dinosaurs died?” she asked me.
“No room in Noah’s ark?”
She looked at me like I was the kid and she was the parent. “It was a meteor!” she said.
“So why are we all gonna die?”
“Because there’s more,” she said. She waved her tiny arms around her head as if she were trying to beat them all away. “It like happens all the time.”
“What does?”
“They hit our planet and kill everything.” She slumped down on the sofa beside me and sighed. “One could be coming now.”
“I hope it waits until this ballgame’s over,” I said, “because I really want to know who wins.”
“I’m being serious, Daddy,” she said. “Aren’t you scared?”
I told her I wasn’t, and that seemed to satisfy her enough. Nothing else was said about things falling from the sky. Mission accomplished, I would usually say. But the fact is that I kinda/sorta lied to her when I said I wasn’t scared.
Because I kinda/sorta was when I was her age.
The truth is that the history of our fair world isn’t fair at all. There have been five mass extinctions in our planet’s history, the last of which occurred just over 70,000 years ago after a volcano almost wiped humanity from history before it had even started.
Just weeks ago, two meteorites passed within just a few thousand miles of Earth.
Global warming.
Nuclear war.
Solar storms.
Superflu.
You get the picture.
I remember when I was about my daughter’s age hearing a preacher on the radio saying he’d received a vision from God (which, heard through his Southern accent, sounded more like GAWT) that the world would end in exactly seven days and thirteen hours. I can’t recall who the man was, but I remember the panic he caused among the few who actually believed him. Me included, of course.
I sat out on the hood of my father’s truck that night and waited for Armageddon. Didn’t come, of course. And even though predictions of The End will stick on me like a burr from time to time, I learned my lesson that day.
I learned that no matter how hard we all may try, none of us can keep the bad away. We can lessen its impact, we can fight it, we can even turn some of it into good, but the fact remains that it’s still there and it’s still coming. The world’s full of trouble, and whether that trouble comes from earthquakes or madmen doesn’t really matter.
If that sounds submissive, I didn’t mean it to be. My daughter fell into the very trap I’ve found myself in so many times—she was worried about something she couldn’t influence. In the age of twenty-four-hour news channels and the internet, that’s something we can all struggle with sometimes.
But I’m older now. I can let solar storms and the superflu go.
It’s the other, personal forms of destruction I want her to worry about, and that’s what I’ve learned to concern myself with more, too. Because it doesn’t take a meteor or a volcano to ruin our lives, especially when we can do that just fine on our own.
We can give in to pain rather than get through it.
We can surrender to temptation rather than fight it.
We can yield our dreams rather than cling to them.
Those are our choices to make, those small decisions that perhaps have no influence on the world outside but make all the difference in the world inside.
That’s what I want my daughter to know. Because planetary destruction is in God’s hands, but self-destruction is in ours.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Brokenness, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Into the world
August 24, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 28 Comments
image courtesy of A Simple Country Girl, used with permission. For info on available images, please click on the image.
I took the day off from everything—work, writing, and the computer. “It’s your day,” I told the kids. “We’ll do whatever you want.”
Their smiles were genuine and laced with only the slightest bit of mischief, just enough for me to start to worry about a day of alternating wrestling matches and tea parties.
“Don’t worry,” my son said. “We’ll have an adventure.”
Okay.
The day began as every day for the past week had, with the three of us staring through tiny holes of mesh around the butterfly cage. Mommy had ordered caterpillars the week before, which had arrived in little plastic containers of mud and goo. According to the directions, the caterpillars would find their way to the top of the containers and form cocoons, at which point we would transfer them to the cage and stand guard. We watched for three days until the butterflies emerged. Then we had a birthday party—brownies for us, sugar water sprinkled on purple flowers from the backyard for them.
They were fed and loved, oohed and ahhed. They got the prime seat in front of the television so they could watch cartoons. My daughter sang lullabies to them at night. “They’re like my kids,” my daughter said. That was true; she cared for them as such. And the butterflies grew. Their wings grew and changed from a dull gray to bright orange, and they began flittering about the cage. It was time to let them go.
That was one item on the list for that day.
There were also plenty of others.
There was wrestling, yes. Much. And I drank so much imaginary tea that my stomach imaginarily sloshed.
We readied knapsacks for school and checked off their needed supplies.
We took in a matinee movie. Not at the fancy theater down at the mall with the noisy video games and the fancy seats, but the cool one downtown with the creaky wooden floors and the old movie posters.
We visited the school on the way home to say hello to teachers and pitch in to help mommy.
We took a walk around the neighborhood and chased imaginary pirates.
Summer had died. I think we all knew that. And I think we all knew that last day was also its funeral of sorts, a way of saying thanks and goodbye and see you again some day. But rather than mourning summer’s passing, we toasted it. We spent out day eating food we shouldn’t, laughing uncontrollably, pondering the mysteries of the world, and trying to suck the marrow out of every minute.
That’s how every funeral should be, I think. A celebration. A see-you-again-some-day.
I don’t mind bragging—they had fun. Much fun. In my son’s words, “The funnest day ever.” I like to think I had a part in that.
But the truth is that I had fun, too. I like having my kids around. I like the fact they’re nestled in a life that is stable and loving and good. I like knowing where they are, and I like knowing that place is safe.
That night after dinner, the four of us took the butterfly cage outside. My son unzipped the top and pulled it back, while my daughter clothes-pinned it to hold it open. We sat for a few minutes and watched as the butterflies crawled to the top and perched themselves there, slowly opening and closing their wings.
“It’s okay,” my son whispered. “Go!”
We all watched as one by one they did just that, leaving the home they loved for another, bigger one. One full of wonder and delight mixed with danger and darkness.
My daughter sidled up to me and put her head on my shoulder. “I wish my kids could stay here,” she said. “I know they have to go into the world, but I wish they could stay here. Does that make sense, Daddy?”
“More than you know,” I said.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Children, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Why I got a tattoo
June 29, 2010 by Katdish · 44 Comments
The first rule I ever remember learning was maybe the most important—always keep your promises. The reasoning behind that rule was basic. In the end, all a man has is his word. If we say we’re going to do something, we’d better do it. Simple as that.
I’ve done my best to fulfill my promises over the years. I’ve succeeded most times. Failed some, too. Others have had to be put on hold until the circumstances were right. One of those promises was one I made to myself, one that had been put on hold for seven years. I was determined to keep that promise. Last Saturday, I did just that.
I got a tattoo.
I realize that may sound a little ridiculous. Childish, even. I assure you that neither applies in this situation. My tattoo was serious business, the product of much thought and introspection. It wasn’t done on a whim, and it isn’t, as Jimmy Buffett so eloquently put it, “A permanent reminder of a temporary feeling.”
When I first sat down to write Snow Day, I did so with two thoughts in mind. One was that if it was good enough, it would get published one day. The other was that it could very well give a lot of people what I was so lacking at the time, and that was a sense of hope in their lives.
The odds of getting a book published were not lost to me. I knew what I was getting into and what would be involved. So I promised myself that if I managed to hang on and if God just so happened to smile upon me, I’d get a tattoo.
It’s easy to lose chapters in the story of your life, easy to let the ones already written slip away and into the wind while you’re writing the here and now. I didn’t want that. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.
And I didn’t want a run of the mill tattoo, either. I wanted something unique to me. Something that told my own story.
I wanted a Native American feel, since they’re in both my blood and my family tree. To the Native Americans, every person has their own totem, an animal that acts as a protector and guide through physical and spiritual worlds. Knowing your totem is an innate process, they say, and a sacred one. Though my own beliefs don’t really allow room for spirit guides, I’ve always been drawn to wolves. To the Native Americans, wolves were the pathfinders, the protectors of wisdom and tribe. Loyal and strong and independent. Always watching. At home in the mountains and the wild places.
If God would have made me as an animal, it would have been a wolf.
I wanted a reminder of those long years spent trying and failing, too. I didn’t ever want to forget the faith I found or even the doubts I had, as both served to make me a better man. Our hopes and dreams don’t nearly define us as much as the manner by which we journey toward them. I needed to make sure I could remember that. Which is the reason for the designs around the wolf. Each design represents a year I spent waiting to get published. The small ones are years that went by quickly, when hope was abundant and doubt was hiding. The long ones are the years when I almost gave up.
There are a lot of long ones.
One question has been asked the most—did it hurt? My answer has usually been given in typical Country Boy fashion—“It didn’t tickle.” The truth is that it hurt. The truth is also that I was looking forward to that hurt, because much of the last six years hasn’t tickled, either.
I got a lot of thinking done during the two and a half hours I spent with an electric needle punching me in the arm (the tip of which, appropriately enough, looked much like the nib of a fountain pen). I allowed myself to remember. Everything. The places I’ve been, the people I’ve known, and the blessings I’ve received.
To the artist doing the work, it was just another tattoo.
To me, it was my story.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Strength, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Compassion in the Cold
June 14, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 34 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I remember standing at an overlook in the mountains on a December night in 2006. I remember it was cold. Very cold. And though it made sense for me just to get back into the truck and turn the heat on, I couldn’t. I had to be outside with the stars and the wind. What I had to do couldn’t be done from inside the truck.
So I went ahead and built the fire. Walked down into the woods, found some rocks, dug a fire pit, and gathered kindling. I got the fire going despite the wind and tossed a few bigger sticks onto the pile. Cedar, I remember. I always liked the smell of burning cedar. And then I leaned back and half smiled and half didn’t, because it was all ready whether I wanted it to be or not.
I reached into my bag and pulled out a thick wad of paper bound by two rubber bands. I turned it over in my hands, watching the firelight dance against it.
Now, I thought…now.
But nothing happened. Whether it was the cold or God or the fabled spirits of the mountain, something had severed the connection between my head and my hands.
Failure seemed too bitter a word, so I decided it was all about letting go. About knowing how to as much as when to. The how was easy. I would burn it. That was the first thought that came to mind a few days before when I got the latest reply. The when, though? Not so easy. I thought for sure it would be that night, but I was having my doubts.
When you spend ten years of your life hanging onto a dream, it takes a lot out of you. You learn to get by on things like faith and hope and tenacity. You try to accustom yourself to blocking out the army of voices both within and without that scream you have no idea what you’re doing and therefore you shouldn’t even bother pretending anymore. It takes strength to endure more than it does talent.
I had the strength. The faith, too. Even had the hope and the tenacity. But something was still missing, and it was a big something. Something that seemed important enough that missing it brought me there in the mountains sitting in front of a fire, ready to incinerate five years of my life.
I was going to burn my manuscript. Release it into the ether once and more all and let its memory float away. I wanted to be done with my dream. I wanted to let go of it so it would let go of me.
I tried once more—
…now—
but I couldn’t, so I simply sat there in the cold and watched the flames dance.
This was not about letting go after all, I decided. No, it really was about failure.
I had pushed myself. Worked and tried and refused to give up, and still after all of that I had nothing to show for my life. It wasn’t that I was too weak to hang on or even too strong to let go. It was that I was stuck in the middle, wavering. A tough place to be. Maybe the toughest. But looking back I think that’s a place we all need to find ourselves at some point, if only so we can find out if our dreams are worthy of the people God calls us to be.
I was thinking about that night one day last week while I was looking over the Fall 2010-Winter 2011 catalog for my publisher, FaithWords. Not only was it pretty darn exciting to see my book on page nine, it was even more so to see they’ve used the cover art for Snow Day as the cover for the catalog. If you’d like, you can see it here.
My point?
My point is that in the end, your dreams are all on you. That means having the faith to see them through.
Having the hope to keep believing.
And it means forgiving yourself when you fail.
The compassion we’re called to show others is the very compassion we’re called to show ourselves. That alone is a source of divine strength.
That alone can move mountains.
I’m proof of that.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Compassion, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
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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