Billy Coffey

storyteller

The “What You Do” List

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What you doOur daughter is but a few days away from joining the ranks of legal drivers in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

In preparation (as well as to decrease, however slightly, a father’s angst), I’ve done my best to offer whatever advice and warnings I can. Don’t speed. Don’t text. Don’t pick up hitchhikers. Always do your best to avoid hitting dogs and rabbits and raccoons, but don’t worry about squirrels. We have no deal with the squirrels. You get the idea.

Driving around with her has sharpened my own view of driving, most of which has drifted into the realm of instinct over the years. I’m paying more attention what I’m doing on the road through the filter of “I need to tell the little girl this” or “I need to make the the little girl knows that.” The list has gotten so long as to be somewhat unwieldy. There’s nothing like one of your kids getting a driver’s license to make you realize how dangerous driving can be.

I came across one of those Need To Tell Her This things a few days back along a stretch of road known around here as Brands Flats.

Long straightaways and gentle curves and a 55 mph speed limit which is all but impossible to obey. Coming around one of those curves, I managed to catch a glint of early sun off a windshield hidden among the median’s thick trees. I braked (that instinct thing) and held my breath. Good thing I was doing under sixty, or ol’ Smokey would’ve had me.

What I did next was what I’ve always done, what my daddy taught me to do and what was taught him: I went on around the next curve and flashed my lights at the three vehicles coming the other way.

That’s when things got a little wonky.

The first car was a purple hatchback driven by a young lady who promptly offered me a middle finger.

The country boy in the jacked-up F-150 behind her flashed his lights right back at me.

And the third, an ancient man driving an even more ancient Dodge truck, only gawped in confusion.

I’m not going to sit here and say I hoped each and every one of their names ended up in Smokey’s ticket book.

Don’t mind if it’s implied, though.

Granted, I’ve always been a little behind the times. But when did flashing your lights to let someone know a speed trap is waiting up ahead stop being a thing? Or is it still a thing, and i’d just run upon a few grouchy and dim-witted folks down in Brands Flats?

I figured I’d ask around. Turns out I’m in the minority of people who still do this. The reasons why varied from laziness (“I ain’t got time to go flashing my lights at everybody”) to fear (“You know that’s how you get shot at, right?) to outright orneriness (“I figure if the bastards is speeding, he deserves himself a ticket”).

The younger drivers I asked even turned my question back on me, wanting to know why they should bother flashing their lights at all. Don’t people need consequences for their actions? Don’t speeding tickets help pay for our roads and schools and help that policeman keep his job? Aren’t I in some way circumventing the law by helping those breaking it avoid punishment?

My answer to each was the same, however confusing to them it was. Why was I taught to flash my lights? For the same reason I was taught to pull over for a funeral procession and remove my hat until all those cars went by. The same reason I was taught to get into the left lane when anybody’s coming off an on ramp:

Because that’s what you do.

A simplistic answer, maybe. But also a telling one. I remember a time when That’s What You Do was answer enough. It spoke to something much deeper than the act itself, straight the meaning beneath it. Our society was filled with That’s What You Do’s. Those words helped hold things together.

The sad thing, the terrible thing, is I don’t see much of that anymore. Blame politics or Twitter or the onslaught of a 24/7 news cycle. Blame a culture where people demand they not be defined but go around defining everyone else. Whatever it is, we’re just not getting along. We don’t see others as very much like ourselves, all holding on to the same fears and needs and wants, all getting out of bed each morning for the same reasons—to do our jobs, play our parts, and feed our families. It isn’t We now, only Us and Them.

I think I’m going to start a new list for my daughter. My son, too. A That’s What You Do list. Not just for driving, but for living.

It isn’t a matter of them learning anything, either. All my kids have to do is remember that in the end we’re all in this together for good or ill. We’re to watch out for each other and help each other and be ready to offer a hand when needed.

Forget color.

Forget Conservative or Progressive.

Never mind religious or atheist.

We’re all family in the end.

The Bet

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chocolates

All of this happened a few weeks ago,

Valentine’s Day to be exact. It began like most things do when it comes to twelve-year-old boys, by which I mean a bet, offered so both may get over the one thing standing in their way, by which I mean fear. Speaking from experience, that’s how it works. Every fiber of your being propels you to do this one thing but deep down you know you’re too scared to do it, so you need a little help. A dare works well here. A bet works even better.

According to my son (who is both a champion darer and better), it was his friend’s idea.

I have reservations about that statement—I don’t know the friend, and this seems very much a thing my son would start—but I suppose it’s like every good story in that the beginning is important but the ending is everything. My son and his friend both happen to have crushes on two separate girls in their seventh-grade class. Alone, they could do nothing beyond staring goggle-eyed when both the girls and the teacher wasn’t looking. Call it a boy thing. When you’re twelve, any attempt to tell a girl that you like her will somehow get twisted into yanking on her hair or calling her a stupid head.

But then came an idea (again, from the friend): “I bet you won’t get her a box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day.”

“Bet YOU won’t.”

“I will if you ain’t chicken.”

Challenge accepted. My boy is a Coffey. Coffeys don’t back down.

My son relayed all of this to me on the evening of February 13 as we meandered the aisles of the local Kroger. He had money enough in his pocket for a nice box of chocolates. I was impressed and made that known, but also wary and played that close to my chest.

“Who’s this girl?”

“Just some girl.”

“What’s she like?”

“She pretty and goes to church and hunts and fishes.”

Good enough for me. You always want the best for your kids.

So we got the box of chocolates which he paid for with his own money and even stood there an answered every question the cashier asked (“You in love, honey?” “What’sat lucky girl’s name?”) and then we rode home and nothing else was said for nearly three days regarding the matter. I wanted to bring the girl and the chocolates up but never did. Sometimes it’s like fishing, raising kids. You got to let them come to you.

But then around that Friday evening the two of us were sitting on the porch. My boy leaned back in the rocking chair and let out a little kind of sigh, and I knew it was time.

“Whatever happened with your bet?” I asked him.

“It went okay.”

“She like those chocolates.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why ain’t you sure?”

“Well, I went up to give them to her and then got scared, so all I pretty much did was toss the box her way and take off running. But I think she liked it. We’re texting now. She can’t date nobody, though.”

“Neither can you.”

“That’s what I tole her.”

“And what about your friend? He keep up his end of the deal?”

“No,” he said. “He turned chicken and said we never shook on it, which we did, and then he ate the whole box hisself.”

Then he grinned and I grinned and we rocked a while together. I said I was proud of him and it’s the truth. It can be a hard thing to talk to a girl, them being so mysterious in all their ways. Harder still to open up your heart and let somebody else get a peek inside. It was a risk, no doubt about it. But life is full of those. My son will find that out the older he gets, and he’ll come to learn there are really only two kinds of people in this world. There are the ones who dream and dare make those dreams true, make them real, and whether they find success or failure on the other side doesn’t matter because at least then they’ll know.

And there are the ones who dream but never dare at all and so settle.

I never want him to settle.

A little sparkle in the muck

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pile of rocksThat 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.

Our inner Bam Bam

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mountain bike pixbay

He is eighty-one pounds of pure energy, a spring wound tight and apt to blow at any point into any direction,

and he has lived across the street from me for the entirety of his nine years on this planet. His name isn’t near as important as the nickname he’s been given.

We call him Bam-Bam.

Pure boy, Bam-Bam. Blond haired and thick-chested, he has the eyes of one both enthralled with the world and eager to conquer it. I’m not sure how far he’ll get in that regard, but he’s done a fair job subjugating the neighborhood. Every house on our block is his domain, every bit of dirt his playpen. You’ll see him zipping down the street on his bike (complete with one of those electronic gizmos on the right handlebar he turns to make a motorcycle sound), or his scooter, or his Big Wheel. Very often he’ll be half-dressed. Bam-Bam doesn’t hold to shirts or shoes, preferring the feel of the wind at his stomach and the good earth between his toes.

His momma tries to dress him, I promise you. It doesn’t take. The other day I watched Bam-Bam come out the front door decked out in so many layers you would have thought he was embarking on an arctic expedition. Two minutes later I looked again, and all he had on was his jeans. I never knew what he did with those clothes until the mail lady came the next day and dug out a sweater, a scarf, and a heavy coat from the mailbox before putting in the mail. From what I heard, Bam-Bam had to answer for that one.

He is impervious. Cold doesn’t bother him, or snow.

Bam-Bam has a penchant for running around in the yard during thunderstorms and soaks up the heat like a lizard. Think of a mini-Jason Bourne.

Not that everyone on our street is always thrilled when he’s around. I can’t count how many times I’ve had to tell Bam-Bam not to shoot at our birds (not that he listens, and not that the birds are in any danger; Bam-Bam loves to hunt, but you can’t kill much with a Nerf gun) and to please-for-the-love-of-God don’t run out in the road when Harold Thompson races by in his souped-up Camaro. He’s loud: the only thing more ear piercing than Bam-Bam’s laugh (which is near constant) is his crying (which is just as often). And you have to be careful what you let him do. Bam-Bam is more than willing to help you with just about everything, so long as you realize what you’re trying to fix will likely end up more broken if he’s involved.

You have to love him, because he’s that way. But that won’t stop you from taking a peek out the window to make sure he’s not around before you step outside to do something. Bam-Bam’s daddy summed it up nicely last summer when he told me, “My boy’s a blessin’, no doubt. And he also must be punishment for some past sin I cannot reckon. Either way, I expect that boy’s gone drive me to drink.”

I could only agree.

And yet I will sit on our porch in the evenings after school and watch him try to shoot down a cloud or sneak up on a deer or spin himself in circles until he either yarks up his lunch or falls down giggling, and I can feel nothing but envy for my neighbor Bam-Bam.

Because I was once like him, once upon’a. I was that boy through and through, and so was my son (truth be told, my son still sometimes is). There was a time I treated life a gift to unwrap every day, and I looked upon it all with an unquenchable joy.

There are times I wonder where that boy I was went.

Maybe he’s gone, died away so the man I was bound to be could come. And maybe he’s still inside me somewhere, wanting out.

It’s funny how so much of our youth is spent wanting to be grown up, only to spend so much of our grown-up years wanting to be kids again.

I’ve heard that youth is wasted on the young. I think wonder is, too.

The grace cup

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image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images
Before I tell you what is sitting at the corner of the big wooden desk in Room 304 of the local elementary school, I want to talk about rules.

Yes, I know: rules stink. Ask anybody. Ask me. Much of what drives us—the little devil at our shoulder that most times shouts a little louder than the angel sitting at the other—has rule breaking at its core. Rules are made to be broken. Color outside the lines. Right?

I don’t know anyone who likes rules. Then again, I don’t know anyone who thinks the world would be a better place without them.

In Room 304, this rule reigns supreme: you must have a pencil. No excuses. The pencil is mandatory. In an age when computers and tablets and smartphones rule, the world inside Room 304 is much more tangible. More basic. Work is done with paper and pencil. Every subject, every day. And as these bits of wood and graphite are both plentiful and exceedingly cheap, this seems like a rule easily enough followed.

You would be wrong.

These young elementary school kids, they don’t care about pencils.

Pencils don’t even enter into their minds. And so class must be interrupted each day as thirty children scramble to beg and borrow and steal something to write with in order that they may learn all about nouns and fractions and Chief Powhatan. And the teacher must punish the most egregious of offenders by sending them to a lonely back table for a punishment known as Think Time, which includes the filling out their name, crime, and reason for committing said crime on a single sheet of paper.

They never forget their Nike shoes. Or their Pokemons. And don’t even think they’d come to school without their iPhones. But a pencil? Please.

Kids these days, right? Sometimes all you can do is pray.

The worst of these offenders is a little girl who sits in the back of the second row. Quiet kid. Average student, though barely. She struggles. Doesn’t seem to study for her tests, and you can forget about any homework assignments. Jesus will come back before she remembers to bring a pencil to class.

It all got to be too much three days ago. Math class, and would you know it—no pencil again. To the back table she goes to fill out her Think Time report (she’s an expert at this, trust me).

She fills in her name, first and last.

Under “Reason”: I forgot my pensil.

Under “Why”: I got up lat. I had to get my bruther up. I had to get my sistr up. Mommie at wurk. Daddie don’t life with us. I had to get the dog up. The dog puked. My bruther cryed. My sistr spiled her milk. I cleened it up. I cleened my sistr. My dog puked agin. We went on the bus layte. I forgot my pensil.

Kids these days, right? Sometimes all you can do is pray.

I don’t think I need to tell you what went through the teacher’s mind when that confession was turned in. Teachers know. They hear the stories of students too poor to eat and with mommas hooked on meth and daddies gone to jail, fist-sized bruises blamed on rickety steps and half-shut doors. Teachers know, friend. They know and it breaks their hearts. I know this as fact, because I’m married to one.

That is why you will now find at the corner of the big wooden desk in Room 304 a ceramic container daily stocked with dozens of freshly sharpened No. 2 pencils, and a note taped to the front that reads “Grace Cup.” Because we all need rules, but sometimes those rules must be forgiven.

Today you will walk out your door into a world teeming with people carrying worries and wounds you will never see. A great many of those people will be so kind of heart that they set aside their troubles long enough to nod or smile or say hello. A few will even help you in some way large or small.

But there will be some as well who won’t follow the rules of Please and Thank you and Have a good day. They will be grumpy and mean. They will do horrible things. They will make you mourn the state of things.

That’s why my advice to you is carry a Grace Cup of your own. Dip into it frequently and as needed. For others, and for yourself, too. Because it is a hard business, this thing called living. Sometimes the dog pukes.

And that is a thing worth remembering.

Lessons learned at the Walmart

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WalmartThe scene: Very back corner of the local Walmart. Not the corner with the toys, which plays into much of the drama that is unfolding before me. No, I’m talking about the other back corner. Namely, the applesauce aisle.

The characters: One mother, aged mid-thirties, dressed in a faded pair of blue jeans and a Johnny Cash T-shirt that reads FOLSOM COUNTY PRISON in faded letters. Hair a frazzled blond.

Also her son, aged six by my estimation, wearing a similar pair of jeans and a look on his face that says Watch Out, I’m Gonna Blow.

And then there’s me, standing some ten feet away and playing the role of Gawker. Because this kid is about to get the snot knocked out of him.

Not that I can blame him, really. Sometimes Walmart puts me in just as much a foul mood as it has put this poor kid, who has just about had enough. He’s endured rows upon rows of boring stuff—tomato sauce and cereal and flour and canned soup, not to mention a questionable assortment of produce. Time has gone wobbly. Past and present and future have been sucked away within these four massive steel walls, creating some sort of hellish alternate dimension where Happiness cannot survive for long. He wants to go look at the toys or at least the DVDs, something besides groceries. Mom says no, not yet. She says groceries are more important than toys and DVDs. The boy knows is either a lie or further proof that this woman who gave birth to him, who carried him in her very womb and suckled him at her very breast, is some sort of alien overlord.

He tries to keep quiet, keep himself together. Tries to hang on. But it’s here in the applesauce aisle that he finally loses it, and only after waiting in agonizing silence as his mother spends a full two minutes pondering the difference between the cinnamon applesauce, the low-sugar, and the regular. He’s tired. He’s grouchy. He just wants to look at some toys for a little while.

What happens isn’t the sort of slow-building meltdown with which every parent is familiar. No, this is a full on natural disaster that goes from calm to catastrophic in less than three seconds. The boy wails. He thrashes. He stomps his feet and screams and yells “STUPID!” and “TOYS!” and other words I cannot decipher, all of which draws every eye near. There are sympathetic looks from other parents. A few nearby children offer slight nods of support.

Everybody knows what’s coming. People can go on and on about corporal punishment and the negative effects it has upon children, how it’s even a form of child abuse. But most folks consider those words as little more than academic ramblings that have no place in the real world, and the the world doesn’t get more real than the applesauce aisle at Walmart.

We’re all riveted—me, the young man a few feet away who looks as though he’s just decided he was never going to be a father, the old woman with a cart full of panty hose and microwave dinners who looks at the boy and whispers “Kids these days” in the same way another old woman no doubt had once looked at her. The only exception is the mother herself, still studying a package of low-sugar applesauce and one flavored with cinnamon.

She places both back on the shelf and looks at her son.

He crosses his arms, making a stand.

She bends down.

He steps back too late. Her arms shoot out and take hold of his shoulders the way a spider would its prey, making everyone flinch. The boy, now caught, struggles as his mother pulls him toward her. He fights and squirms and screams more before realizing none of it will do any good, at which point he plays his only remaining card—he goes boneless.

Unfortunately for him, his mother doesn’t care. She continues reeling him in until he is near her face, at which point she lifts his feet off the ground. The eighteen-year-old boy next to me turns to leave, likely remembering his own public spanking sometime past. The old woman only shakes her head (“Kids these days” she says again) and decides to keep watching.

But just as the moment we’ve all been expecting finally arrives, the mother does something that surprises us all. She doesn’t turn her son over and give him a stiff whack on the butt, doesn’t shake her finger in his face and give him a lecture about all she has to do to keep him alive. Instead, she lifts him up to her eye level, staring through those red cheeks and wet eyes and the snot running down out of his nose.

And kisses him.

That’s it, nothing more. Kisses him square on one red cheek and then lowers him back to the floor, where the boy can only stand shocked into silence as she goes back to studying the pros and cons of applesauce.

What crowd had gathered now moves off in search of other entertainment. Me? I linger. I take a minute, because I know something important has just happened here. Anger has been quelled. Rage has been stymied. Not by means of hotter anger or larger rage but by a single kiss—by a simple act of love that said I know you’re upset, but I promise it’ll be okay.

And do you know what I think? I think a lot of our problems with each other could be put away just by doing that. Not to meet screaming and yelling with louder screaming and yelling, but with a simple act of love. With a reminder that we’re all in this place where happiness can never last long, but we’re all in it together.

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