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The crazy neighbor

May 5, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I’m pretty sure the man down the street is losing his mind.

Let’s be honest, we’re all probably doing the same thing at this point in one way or another. But this guy is turning a special kind of crazy, to the point where I’m starting to worry about him.

His descent from Buttoned-Down Businessman to Something Completely Other is something I can’t seem to avoid, since his house sits on my daily walking route. I’ve walked more in the last six weeks than I probably did in the last six years. Our dog has gone from wagging her tail and yelping with joy every time I grab the leash to curling up in the corner and uttering a kind of not-this-again moan each time I tell her we’re taking yet another jaunt through the neighborhood. But it’s healthy and it gets us out, and everybody says that sunshine doesn’t just help beat back the invisible scourge, it helps beat back the blues as well.

Our route generally begins with a left out of our driveway and a straight shot about a quarter of a mile, where pavement yields to gravel and then a dirt trail leading into the woods. Our dog Lucy always heads there first. Like she’s telling me that if I’m going to drag her two and a half miles down one street and another, she’s going to get her fill of the woods first. And I always oblige her, because I like me some woods too. The problem — if I can call it that — is the man’s house sits right near the end of the street where the trail sits, meaning I get to watch him just about every day.

It began innocently enough. After all, I don’t think anyone goes crazy all at once.

It’s more a gradual thing, nice and easy and bit by bit until maybe it’s too late to turn back. I don’t know many of his particulars. Not his name (there’s just a number on his mailbox), or what he does for a living (though it’s a suit-and-briefcase kind of job; there were mornings before the quarantine when I would see him dashing from his door wearing one and carrying the other), or how much he makes (plenty, given that fancy car he drives). He does have a wife and at least one child. I’ve seen both, and first impressions told me they weren’t nearly as high strung as he seemed to be.

Like most everyone else, he’s either working from home or home and not working. Being stuck where you are in the midst of so much uncertainty tends to weigh on the mind and the heart. Tends to make us a little jittery sometimes. We’re all dealing with this as best we can. That’s what I told myself a few weeks ago when I passed by his house on my afternoon walk with Lucy and saw him lying in his front yard. I didn’t know what bothered me most as I passed, whether it was the fact that here was a grown man splayed out on his grass and staring at the clouds, or the fact that he was wearing a faded pair of jeans and a plain T shirt. It just didn’t seem to fit the picture I’d always had of him, you know? Like seeing a polka-dotted elephant.

Two days later he was out there again, this time in one of the rocking chairs on his porch. Different jeans and different shirt (both of them a little more ragged than before). Feet kicked up onto the railing. Glass of tea on the table beside. His jaw held a thin layer of scruff, and his hair had gotten long enough to touch the tops of his ears. I noticed some gray in there as well — the Food Lion was running out of everything at that point, and I figured that included Just for Men.

And you know what he did? He waved. At me.

I don’t think I can overstate the shock I felt. Even the dog looked at me like one more thing in the world had just fundamentally shifted. I was so thrown off guard that I don’t even remember if I waved back.

He was back the following Thursday. We heard him before we saw him. His garage door was open to catch an unusually warm April sun. Lucy pinned her ears back on her head as the first chords to Poison’s “Nothin’ but a Good Time” blared from somewhere inside. He didn’t wave that day. Too preoccupied, I guess. What with him playing air guitar and all. Seriously.

I’ll be honest — it all preyed on my mind. Lucy and I started taking our walks with the singular purpose of strolling past his house. Forget the sunshine. Forget the woods. I just wanted to see what that guy was doing, see how far he had fallen. Terrible, I know. I equated it with driving past a car accident and just having to look, if only to tell myself,

“Things might not be great, but at least I’m not that guy.”

Then came yesterday. Me and Lucy and a bag filled with her daily deposit, out enjoying the warmth. Mountains? Clear as a bell. Sky? Empty. Streets? Quiet. Crazy man down the road? Crawling around his front yard. Literally.

At this point, Lucy was just as interested in him as me. She held him up as just another example of how humans are bumbling idiots and only dogs can truly save the world. We slowed as he inched along on his belly, aiming for a rabbit munching on a bit of grass near a maple tree. There the both of us stood, watching him watch it. Lucy’s growl chased the rabbit around the house.

The man looked at us and shook his head, grinning like a kid on Christmas, and what he said convinced me that everything I’d thought about his mental state was dead on:

“Dude, wasn’t that GREAT?”

I said sure, thinking it was just a rabbit. This guy gets worked up over a rabbit? Has he never seen a rabbit before? What’s he going to do when he sees a coyote out here? Or a bear?

“Steve,” he said.

“Billy.” I waggled the leash. “Lucy.”

“You guys doing okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “You know, just waiting for things to get back to where they were.”

Steve shook his head then in that slow sad way that you often see parents do with their young children. “I keep hearing people say that,” he said. “But not me. No. Way. I don’t want to get back there to the before. Back there sucked. Why does anybody want to go back when we got this gift?”

I was sure then: nuts. Certifiably nuts.

“I mean, I know,” he said. “It’s terrible, all these sick people. All these people out of a job. I’m out of a job. You know that?”

I shook my head.

“But it’s okay, you know? All this is gonna be okay.”

I wanted to ask if the rabbit had told him that but didn’t.

“How many times does somebody get to start over?” he asked. “Fix things? Try something different, something better? How many times does somebody get to see how screwed up their life was and then get to do something about it? You know?”

I didn’t, not really. But as we said our goodbyes and Lucy and I left him lying in the grass and looking at the clouds again, I got to wondering. We’re all trying to get through this moment in our lives the best way we can. For some, it’s filled with fear and grief. For others, a kind of numbness. But for those like Steve, there is hope to be found even in so dark a time.

Happiness, even. Even joy. You just have to look for it.

If I’m honest, there were things in my life that I didn’t much like back before the world went wonky. Things I wished I would have done differently, things about me that I always wanted to change. We always seem to settle, don’t we? Always aim for just good enough. Always want to just go back.

That’s why I just got up from writing this to stand by the upstairs window and crane my neck down the street just to see if I can get a glimpse of Steve’s house. Get a glimpse of Steve. I wonder what he’s doing.

But I’m wondering even more which of us is really the crazy one.

The best things in us

April 6, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

A quick look at my website tells me that it’s been almost two years since I added a single word to this blog.

Aside from the (very) occasional update to social media, I’ve largely been absent from the internet. There are reasons for this, good ones and many, which will likely come up from time to time in the weeks and months ahead.

For those who have kindly reached out privately to make sure I am still alive, thank you. I very much am. And for those who have wondered if I’m still writing — yes, I also very much am.

But again, we’ll get to that.

Suffice it to say for now that there was some question if Billy Coffey should remain Billy Coffey or perform a bit of literary magic and become someone else, and that at some point in the last two years, the internet became little more to me than just a place where people shouted at each other. Both of those things made me realize that maybe the wisest decision was to take a nice long break and head back out into the real world.

It’s ironic that heading back out into the real world is what ended up bringing me back to my own little corner of the virtual one.

Because it’s crazy out there right now, isn’t it?

One month ago we were all under the impression that our lives were as solid as the world we walked upon. Now we’re coming to understand that was just a story we told ourselves to keep the monsters away. The truth is that life is a fragile thing, much like our happiness, our peace, and our plans for the future. Any one of them can be threatened at any time by any number of things. We’re nowhere near as big and strong as we think. A lot of us are figuring that out right now, myself included.

Like most of you, I’ve spent the last few weeks at home. My wife the elementary school teacher is still teaching, though only to those students blessed with internet access and only from our sofa. Our children are here. I am fortunate enough to continue my day job here here in my upstairs office. We take the dog on long walks and play basketball in the driveway, spend our evenings on the front porch listening to the wind and the birds and our nights watching movies. We’ve fared better than most. The sickness has stayed away from our little town. Though its shadow creeps in everywhere, I’m even more glad than usual to call this sleepy valley my home.

Social distancing, that’s the key.

Keep others safe by keeping yourself safe. Don’t go out unless you have to. That’s life for all of us right now, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for a while. One day at a time, wash your hands, sneeze into your elbow, wear a mask, call and text the ones you love.

Get by. I keep hearing that from people — we all just need to hang in there right now and get by.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that, and for many of us that has to be enough. Let’s face it, hanging in there and getting by is exhausting. Most days feel like we’re all having to swim against a constant current. Victory doesn’t mean progress, it just means holding in place.

That was my thinking up until about two days ago. I figured the best way through this was to keep apart and keep busy, so that’s what I’d been doing. Lots of work. Lots of walks. Lots of writing and reading. Getting by. I thought I was doing everything right.

Then I had to go to the Food Lion in town.

It can be a harrowing experience to go to the store now, and next time I’ll tell you how that trip to get some groceries made me feel a lot better about things. But right now I’ll leave you with what the little old Amish lady in line told the cashier. I couldn’t hear the beginning of their conversation (the rest of us in line were standing six feet apart and looking at each other like we were all infected), but I did catch the end, that warm smile and a gentle voice that said:

“The worst things in the world can never touch the best things in us.

We just have to try and get our eyes off the one and put them on the other.”

Not the first time an Amish lady told me exactly what I needed to hear.

The truth is that I’ve been practicing as much distraction these last few weeks as distance, keeping myself busy so I wouldn’t have to stop for a minute and really think about what all of this is and what it means. I’m not going to beat myself up over that. Sometimes the things that come into our lives feel too big to handle. Too scary to look at. For a lot of us, this time is one of those things. There’s nothing ever wrong in getting by.

But that little Amish lady at the Food Lion stirred something in me that had gone asleep.

I’m tired and stressed and worried and can’t stop washing my hands. But for as much as I just want all of this to be over, I also don’t want it leave me the same as I was a month ago. If we believe that nothing in life is random and everything means something — and I do — then there must be a purpose to all things, even the bad ones. For me, that means wondering what my purpose is in this, and what purpose this has in my own life.

Somewhere along the line, I lost myself. I bet I’m not the only one who can say that.

If that’s you, then maybe we can find ourselves together. Because in the end, that’s how we’ll all get through this.

Together.

When things were right

May 19, 2017 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

My kids tell me they’d rather be growing up when I did.

Trade 2017 for, say, 1978. Anything with a “19” as the first two numbers will do. I’m certain the bulk of their evidence for this conclusion can be handed to the stories I tell about how life was once lived in our little town, which isn’t little so much anymore. “Back in the day,” as some would put it. Or, as I’m apt to say, “When things were right.”

Like how during the summer you might go all day without seeing your parents and your parents were fine with that, because they knew you were safe and you’d be home either when you got hungry or when the streetlights came on.

Or how you’d just keep your hand raised above the steering wheel when you drove down Main Street because everybody knew everybody else. You either went to school with them or went to church with them or were kin to them through blood or marriage.

How there was Cohron’s Hardware right across from Reid’s mechanic shop, and if you were a kid and knew your manners you get a free piece of Bazooka! gum at the former and a free Co’Cola in a genuine glass bottle that was so cold it puckered your lips at the other.

How, back then, you rode your bike down to the 7-11 to play video games—Eight-ball Deluxe on the pinball and Defender and RBI Baseball—and then pool what money you had left for a Slurpee and a pack of Topps baseball cards.

How maybe in the afternoons there’d still be change enough in your pocket to buy a Dilly bar from the hippie who drove the ice cream truck around the neighborhood. You’d hurry up and eat before the sun could melt it away and then head over for pickup games at the sandlot which rivaled any Game 7 of any World Series, and after, once all the playing was done and the arguing finished, you’d have the best drink of water in your life out of Mr. Snyder’s garden hose.

Evenings were for supper and bowls of ice cream fresh from the machine your daddy spent and hour cranking on the porch. You spent the nights catching lightning bugs and lying in bed slicked with sweat because there was only that one fan in the hallway. You’d go to sleep listening to the lonely mockingbird singing through the open window from the maple in the backyard.

So, yeah. I get it when my kids say that’s the life they want. Who wouldn’t want a childhood like that?

Truth be known, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I’d like to grow up back then again, too. Not so much to right certain wrongs (I have none, other than the day when I was six that I crushed a frog with a cinderblock just to see what it’d look like), but just to go back. To feel that sense of freedom again, and safety, and to know the world as wide and beautiful instead of small and scary.

I’ve talked to others over the years who feel the same way. Some grew up with me in this tiny corner of the Virginia mountains. Many more did not. They were born elsewhere in towns and cities both, yet each carry a story not unlike my own as one would a flame in the darkness. Even many who suffered horrible childhoods look back over them with a sense of fondness. They tell me things like, “Those were some good years, weren’t they?” Even when they weren’t.

This is part of what it means to be human, I think. We spent the first years of our lives wanting nothing more than to get away from where we are, only to spend the rest of it trying to get back.

My kids will be the same way. Yours, too. They will grow and flourish and have kids of their own, and those kids will be regaled with tales of how much better the world was back in the day. When things were right.

It’s only been in these last few years that my own parents have begun telling me the truth about my golden childhood. How they often struggled to keep a roof over my head and food on my table and clothes on my back. How it seemed like the country was on the cusp of some great abyss. People at each other’s throats. War looming. Nuclear missiles. How it was hard to tell the truth from the lies. Sound familiar?

My parents don’t look back on that time with fondness at all. To them, it was their childhood world of the 50s that was back in the day. That was when everything was right.

I’m sure my grandparents would disagree if they were yet here.

There were no good old days. I think we all know that deep down.

But that doesn’t stop us from believing there were, from wanting so desperately to know that one lie a truth in its own right. Because that’s part of what it means to be human, too. Maybe the best part. That deep longing and need for a time when things are right.

There are some among us who believe that will never be the case. Things were never right and never will be. I’m not one of them. Sure, deep down I know that my childhood wasn’t always the bright summer day I remember it to be now. But on some distant tomorrow? Well.

I’ve heard that heaven will be made up of all those secret longings we carry through our lives. I hope that’s true. Because if it is, I can take comfort in the fact that I’ll be spending eternity on a quiet street in a quiet town in a quiet corner of Virginia. I’ll be listening to mockingbirds and playing a pickup game of baseball and drinking from a water hose.

That’s all I want. Nothing more.

A little sparkle in the muck

February 10, 2017 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

That pile of rock and dirt still sits in the back corner of our yard,

and it still may be some gold in there, but there’s no telling because the kids haven’t dug through it in about forever. The last time they did (I can’t remember when it was, only that they were both a whole lot shorter), my son came running into the house with what looked like a piece of gravel.

Swore it was gold.

I told him the same thing I’d told him a thousand times before:

“Could be.”

How it all started was they’d seen a TV show about prospectors out West. One of them had struck it rich. The kids, young enough to believe if that sort of thing could happen to some guy in California then it surely could happen to them all the way in Virginia, decided they would have a go at it. They used the yellow plastic sifters we’d gotten at the beach that summer and went on out to the creek beside the house. It lasted about half an hour. Wasn’t so much the sifting they minded, it was the snakes.

But that pile of dirt and rocks at the end of our yard was well away from any lingering serpents, plus there was the fact it sat near enough to the neighbor’s oak to give them shade from the sun. There my two kids parked themselves for most of a whole summer. They separated dirt from rock and rock from what they called “maybes,” pebbles which gave off something of a shine and so would be studied later. Took them a few weeks, but that whole pile ended up being moved a good three feet.

Sometimes I’d sit on the back porch and watch them. There was an order to the kids’ work, a methodical examining which carried a strong current of patience beneath. Neither of them minded getting dirty or sweaty in the process.

“You gotta get down in all that muck,” my son told me one day, “because that’s the only way you’ll find the gold.”

To my knowledge that vein of leftover driveway gravel and leaves scattered by the wind didn’t pan out. My kids never did find their gold. Something other came along to capture their attention. Dragons, I believe it was. My daughter had read a book about dragons, which are vastly superior to gold, and so her and her brother spent the next few months out in the woods rather than in our rock pile, looking for dens and nests and serpent eggs.

I thought about their search for treasure this evening when I had the dog out and her sniffer led us both to the end of the yard in a meandering sort of way. Thought maybe I’d go inside and ask the kids if they remember the summer they spent sitting out there panning and sifting. I guessed they maybe would. If not, I would remind them.

Because there’s a lesson in that old pile, I think. One both of my kids would do well to remember.

They’re both getting toward that age when the world can lose a bit of its color. Things don’t seem so wondrous anymore. There are obligations and responsibilities. Things that have to get done. Adulthood is looming, for both of them. There will come a time when they’ll find much of the world is one sort of muck or another. Living can be a messy business. No one can get from one end of it to the other without getting a little dirty in the process.

But what I want them to know is there’s still treasure in there, treasure everywhere, so long as they’re both willing to put a little work into finding it. Won’t always be easy. Sometimes you’ll grab whole handfuls of days and months and even years and find little in there that sparkles. But you’ll always find something, that’s what I’m going to tell them. You’ll always find enough to keep you going.

And really, that’s all we need in the winter seasons of our lives. A little gold to keep us putting one foot in front of the other, to keep us warm and waiting for sun.

Danny

August 12, 2016 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

Danny was the one who told me about sex. He swore it was true but refused to confess the source of his information, instead repeating all the necessary steps in order, none of which involved kissing. That’s the reason I called it a lie. Everybody but an idiot knew you got babies by kissing.

But then Danny said, “Swear to God.”

That gave me pause. You didn’t go around saying something like that willy-nilly. Swearing to God was more than a promise, a lot more and maybe the most more there was. I took a step away in case the playground broke open beneath us at that moment, spewing hellfire.

He turned, looking to make sure Mrs. Harrison wasn’t around, and raised both hands. One became a circle, thumb resting across the nails. Danny made the other look to be pointing at something—a chubby forefinger caked in eraser shavings and dirt and what may well have been a booger. He shoved that finger through the circle made by his other hand and sort of wiggled it around in there.

“Like that,” he said.

“That’s just about the grossest thing I ever heard” is what I told him, which it indeed was, and I followed that with a lengthy dissertation concerning human anatomy and body function, namely that the two parts in question were meant for a variety of things but never THAT.

“Swear to God,” Danny said.

Maybe you could say right there was when a bit of my childhood ended—that tiny corner of the third grade playground where the slide emptied out and where two discarded tractor tires had been sunk into the earth to make a crude playhouse. Because Danny swore to God, and that’s something you didn’t do unless you were absolutely certain. And because if babies came from an act that disgusting, then the entire world was upside down.

It turned out, of course, that Danny was right. And like a lot of things in life, what I started out thinking was gross actually turned out to be anything but. For me that was proof learning can come from just about anywhere. Even an elementary school playground. Especially there.

Danny proved himself a fount of further information in the years following. Most all our classmates were good for learning something from, whether it was what I should do or what I shouldn’t. When you come up in a small town you come up with all the kids there are; I walked across a high school stage near a dozen years later to be handed a diploma and looked down to the same people I’d known for as much of forever as I could reckon. You can’t help but form bonds.

And then life happens. We all scattered. Some to college and others to work, and some who all but disappeared. I still see a few of my classmates around town. Others I haven’t seen for close to thirty years now. That’s how it goes. There are some in life who come along and stay in some manner or another, and ones who make only a brief appearance across the stage of your days and then exit, never to be seen again.

I received news of Danny’s death early this week. “Work related” was all the information I could gather. I found a picture of him online. He hadn’t changed much except for the beard, trimmed tight in high school but now long, a hybrid of an Amish man and Willie Robertson.

It’s funny how you can go years without thinking of a person and still feel a little hole left in you when he passes. Like a link in the chain that holds your yesterdays to your today has been broken, leaving a part of you to twist in the wind.

The rough and tumble boy I knew Danny to be back then became a man of deep kindness in the years after our graduation. He married and settled into living. Got washed in the blood of Jesus. Life can harden some as it moves over them. For others, it softens. I am glad to know it softened him.

I’m glad, too, of all the lessons he taught me. Even that gross one.

If you’ve a mind at some point in your busy day, do me a favor? Say a little prayer for Danny’s family. I’m sure they’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t bother saying one for Danny, though. Because he’s good now.

He’s good.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes, take 2

February 26, 2016 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Technology hates me.

Call me irrational, but this is my truth. Something was broken on the new website yesterday and I don’t even know enough to know why it wasn’t working. Fortunately, my job is to write. I leave the technology to those much smarter than me. With apologies to those of you who tried to read this post yesterday and gratitude to website administrator Kathy Richards and web master David Allen, I give you what you were unable to see yesterday…

Change, they say, is a necessary thing. A good thing. And while I have been told as much from my parents to my wife to friends and even my children, I have to admit that change is something that’s never settled well with me. I am the sort of person who enjoys a good deal of constancy. I enjoy routine, however bland it may be. My motto has always been a simple one: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But I’ve learned a little over the years (a very little, if you ask some), and part of what I’ve learned is that a portion of change here and there isn’t so bad. Is, in fact, good. And while I’ve grown quite fond of my little corner of cyberspace through the years, maybe it was time to do some sprucing up. Add some things, take a way a few more. Get that front porch shiny.

So feel free to take a look around and see what’s new. (If you click on the “Home” button it will take you to the landing page, then you can mosey around from there.) I’ll see you back here soon with some new stories and news of my upcoming book.