Billy Coffey

storyteller

Getting things wrong

new york daily news photo
new york daily news photo
It should come as no surprise that the events in Charleston last week are still a big topic here in Carolina. As our vacation has largely removed me from the world beyond sun and sand (as by design), I’m not sure if that’s the case elsewhere. I hope it is. Whenever something like this happens—which we can all agree has become far too often of late—the first thing I often hear is something along the lines of, “This country needs to have a honest discussion about race.” While I agree wholeheartedly, I’ve often wondered what an honest discussion would mean. And I guess I’m not the only one, because that conversation has yet to begin.

What’s getting the most attention around here isn’t the act itself, the murders, nor the racism that sparked that act, nor even the now national push to have the Confederate flag removed from all state government buildings and grounds. No, people here seem focused upon the ones who deserve the focus: the victims. Namely, how those victims treated the young man who became the instrument of their deaths. How this young man told the police after his capture that he almost didn’t go through with his plan because of the kindness shown to him by those in the church.

That would be amazing if it were not so sad.

He had an idea in his head, you see. A belief that blacks were less, that blacks were a danger, that blacks were responsible for so much of the evil in the world that they must be erased in order that the rest of us could be saved. That belief had been ingrained over the years by a variety of sources, strengthened and ingrained to the point where it became, to him, fact. And yet reality proved something different. Once he sat down with them, listened to them, heard them pray and speak, once this young man knew their hearts, some part of him understood that what he had come to belief was false. These were not monsters, these were people. People like him.

And yet even that knowledge wasn’t enough to keep him from drawing a weapon and killing nine of them. Belief proved stronger than reality in this case, just as it does in most cases. That’s what people here are grappling with most, and what I’m grappling with as well.

These first few days at the beach have given me an opportunity to do what life in general often denies—the chance to simply sit and think. What I’ve been thinking about lately is this simple question: Have I changed my opinion on anything in the last five years?

I’m not talking about little things, like the brand of coffee I drink or what my favorite television show is or where I shop for groceries. I mean the big things, like how I think about life or God or my place in either, and how I see other people.

Have I changed my beliefs in any way toward any of those things? Have I altered my thinking, or even tried? Have I even bothered to take a fresh look? Or has every idea and notion I’ve sought out only cemented what I already knew and believed to be true? Those are important questions, because they lead to another, larger question that none of us really want to ask:

“Have I ever been wrong about anything?”

Have I?

Have you?

Have we ever been wrong about who God is? Wrong about politics or social stances or what happens when we shed these mortal coils? Because you know what? I’m inclined to think we have.

None of us are as impartial and logical as we lead ourselves to believe. Often, what we hold as true isn’t arrived at by careful thought and deep pondering, but partisanship and whatever system of ideals we were taught by parents or preachers or professors. That creates a deep unwillingness to refine what positions we hold, and that unwillingness can lead to laziness at least and horrible tragedies at worst.

Whether we hold to the Divine or not, we all worship gods. Chief among them are often our beliefs themselves, graven images built not of wood or stone but of theories and concepts. We follow these with blind obedience, seeing a desire to look at and study them as tantamount to doubt or, worse, an attempt to prove them the paper idols they are. Yet truth—real truth—would never fear questioning, and would indeed always welcome it. That’s why we owe it to ourselves to test our opinions. We are built to seek the truth, wherever it may lead.

The poor folk

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

I ask Larry if he’s still watching over the poor folk every time I see him, and every time he says yes. He says yes and then offers me one of those nods that are accompanied by pursed lips. You know, the kind of expression that means it’s tough to look but you have to anyway. Someone’s got to watch over them, Larry says, and it might as well be him. Especially since he was poor once.

He’ll tell me he still watches over them from the same place, right across the river from the big building where they like to gather. Not a pretty sight—Larry will tell me that too, and always—but one worth watching nonetheless, if only for the education the sight provides. “There but for the grace of God,” he’ll say, and then he’ll nod and purse his lips again.

He says there have been times in the past when he’s taken the bridge across the river and gone to see them. Or tried. The poor folk will sometimes entertain Larry’s presence for a while. He was after all one of them once, and the poor folk are mannerly on the outside even if they are lost inward. They’ll say hello and how-you-doing and come-on-in. Larry will hello them back and say he’s fine, just fine. But he never goes in the big building. He’s been in there too many times in his life, he’ll tell me, and he’s seen all there is to be seen. I guess that’s true enough, but sometimes I think Larry’s afraid he’ll catch the poor again, like it’s some sort of communicable disease spread by contact.

Better than driving across the bridge to say hello is to stay on the other side of the river and watch. That’s what he tells me. It’s sort of a warning, though it’s one I don’t need. To be honest, I don’t have much of a desire to be around the poor folk. I like it where I am, right here with Larry and the rich people. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll catch poor, too. Maybe deep down I think they’ll sneeze on me.

Larry says he has God to thank for being rich now, and when he says this he won’t nod and purse his lips. He’s much more apt to pat the rust spot on his old truck—a ’95 Ford from down at the local car lot, which was a steal at $5,000—or take off his greasy cap as a sign of respect for invoking the Almighty. Yesir, Larry will say, God stripped away all of his poor and made him rich. I guess that’s nothing new in a time when a lot of people think God’s sole purpose in the universe is to shower down hundred dollar bills on everyone who’s washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Sometimes I’ll ask him if the people who gather at the big building across the river are all poor. Surely there are a few rich ones mixed in. He’ll tell me yes, there are a few rich ones, but they’re rare. Once he said I’d just as soon go in the big building looking for a unicorn as I would a rich person. I laughed at that. I think it was the way he’d said it—“Yooney-corn.”

Still, curiosity kicked in. I had to find out for myself.

I drove up to the big building one town over, careful to park across the river as Larry suggested. Lines of cars filled the parking lot—from my vantage point, I saw seven Mercedes, half a dozen BMWs, and three Jaguars. I watched patrons adorned in fancy dresses and pressed suits go in for dinner, watched the golf and tennis players come out.

Larry’s poor folk.

He was once one of them (it was the Mercedes and the golf for Larry, the fancy dress for his wife, and the tennis for his kids). They were at the country club five days a week and sometimes six, depending on how busy they all were. He’ll say he swore he was rich. But then came the recession followed by the job loss, and suddenly the Mercedes was gone (replaced by the truck, a steal at five grand) and so was the country club.

That’s when God showed Larry that what he thought was riches was really poverty. That’s when Larry found that wealth is better measured in love and family and simple things.

Larry says he never knew how poor he was because all that money got in the way. Now he says he’s the richest man in the county.

I think he might be right.

The puddle

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

It was a hard rain, and fast—the sort of pour that early May is known for here. It came from clouds the color of dark smoke that rolled over town like a wave, here and then gone over the mountains. What was left in its wake was the grateful song of a robin from the oak in the backyard, and the sugary smell of wet grass and tilled earth.

And the puddle.

It was not a deep puddle, nor was it wide. Maybe three lengths of my boot and deep enough to reach the second knuckle of my index finger. It lay just beyond the mailbox at the end of the lane, a pothole the rain had converted into a passing mirror of liquid glass.

The mailman had delivered the day’s assortment of junk mail and bills just before the first cracks of thunder. Now that the sun had returned and the robin was singing and that sweetness was in the air, I decided to go check the box. A small boy riding a dirt-road-brown bicycle rounded the corner as I made my way down the lane. He tried a wheelie, barely managing to get the front tire off the ground, then uttered a Yes! as if what he’d just done was almost supernatural.

I gave the puddle a wide berth—I was in blue jeans and flip flops, and didn’t want to risk getting either wet. There are few things in life more irritating than wet cuffs on your blue jeans.

I’d just pulled the mail out of the box (a reminder of the upcoming Book Fair, a ten dollars off coupon for Bed, Bath & Beyond, and the cable bill) when the boy squeezed the brake levels on the handlebars. The bike skidded nearly ten feet on the wet pavement, the last four or five fishtailing, which produced another Yes!, this one whispered.

I looked up. The boy was staring at my feet, where the puddle lay. A soft breeze rippled the surface, and for a moment, however brief, my mind turned to something I’d once heard from an old relative—all mirrors have two sides, she’d said. One side you look at. The other side looks into you.

“That’s a pretty cool puddle,” the boy said to me.

I looked at it and then to him. “Sure is.”

He nodded, and I got the feeling it was the sort of nod that was more the punctuation on the end of a decision rather than an agreement with what I’d just said.

I thought he was going to ride through it. That’s what I would have done at his age. Plus, it would have the added benefit of turning his dirt-road-brown bike back into the red I suspected was underneath. But he didn’t. He threw down the kickstand and dismounted as if from a mighty steed in the Old West.

He walked to me and toed the edges of the puddle.

“You gonna use that?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Mind if I borry it?”

“You can borrow it all you want.”

He nodded and took three kid-sized steps back. Then he ran forward, leaped, and landed square in the middle of the puddle. Water billowed up over his legs, reaching his waist. He lands with a smile that to me is brighter than the rainbow over us.

“Thanks, mister,” he said. “You can have a go if you want.”

He rode off, a plume of road water trailing behind him. I held the mail in my hand and tried to remember the last time I jumped into a puddle in the road after a May rainstorm. Years, probably. Probably long ago, back when I had my own dirt-road-brown bike.

Puddles aren’t adult things. Adults avoid them. They splash and make a mess and get the cuffs of your jeans wet. It isn’t responsible or mature.

Maybe. But then there’s that mirror inside each of us. The one we look into that shows us who we are, and the one that looks into us and shows us who we should be.

I won’t tell you if I jumped or not. Some things need to stay secret. But I will say this—I can’t wait for it to rain again.

Fisher of men

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

Next time I won’t order the fish. That’s what I thought after he left. If I would have ordered chicken or steak or shrimp I would have gotten my food earlier, which meant I would have prayed earlier, which meant he wouldn’t have seen me. But he did, and like they say, that is that.

Lunch time for me is a sort of take-it-when-you-can thing that depends on how busy I am and how far I want to drive. Most of the time that places me inside a small restaurant downtown, just a few blocks from my work. Nice place with nice food. Very friendly, very tasty, and very quick.

So. The fish.

An extra ten minutes, the waitress said. “You sure you don’t mind waiting?”

No.

The man came in five minutes later and was shown to the table across from mine. We smiled and nodded like friendly folk do, and I was fairly certain that would be the extent of our interaction. It wasn’t. Because soon afterward my fish arrived and I offered a very silent and inconspicuous prayer.

He was staring at me when I opened my eyes.

“So you’re a churchgoer?” he asked.

“Yep,” I answered. “You?”

“Never,” he said in a tone that seemed rather proud.

I nodded and went back to eating.

“Don’t believe in God myself,” he said. “Just seems like a waste. I guess that means I’m going to hell, huh?”

I’d been around long enough to know when I was being baited into a conversation I really didn’t want to get into. This, I thought, was one of those conversations.

So I just said “Not my call” and raised another bite of fish.

“Not your call,” he repeated. “That’s typical.”

I chewed and thought about the last little bit of what he said. It was more bait, of course. And it was still a conversation I didn’t want to have. But maybe it was now one I should.

“Typical?” I asked.

“Yeah, typical. You people like to use those pat little answers for questions you just don’t know or are just too afraid to face.”

“Like whether you’re going to hell?” I asked.

“Sure. That just bugs me. Christians say that God is love, but if you don’t go along with the program then you get eternally punished. That doesn’t sound like love to me, that just sounds hypocritical.”

I shrugged. “Not really. I reckon God’s spent—what, fifty years or so?—trying to get you to pay attention to Him. He’s arranged circumstances, given you a glimpse of things you don’t normally see or think about, even spoke to you. There’s no telling how many chances you’ve gotten to say ‘Hello’ to God after He’d said the same to you. But you have a choice. That’s how He made you. You can choose to listen or not, choose to believe or not, choose to accept or not. I take it that so far, it’s been not. So if you spend your whole life telling God to stay as far away from you as possible, He’s gentleman enough to do just that when it’s all over. So yes, I suppose if you keeled over right here right now, you’d go to hell. But it’s not me who’s gonna send you there, and it’s not God either. It’s you.”

He looked at me. I looked back.

“Alright then,” he said.

We both continued our meals. Ten minutes later he squared his tab with the waitress and left, pausing at the door to offer me a smile and a tip of his hat.

The waitress focused on me then, asking if I’d like more coffee or just the check. I asked for a check and an answer.

“That fella come in here a lot?”

“Sure,” she said. “He’s the preacher at the church next door.”

“He’s the what?” I asked her.

“The preacher.” Then she smiled and added, “Was he havin’ a little fun with you?”

“Don’t know if I’d call it fun.”

“He likes that,” she said. “Likes finding people who call themselves Christians and tests them. Sees if they know their faith or just accept it. These days we have to be ready to defend it, don’t we?”

“We do,” I said.

And that’s the truth. It isn’t enough to just accept our faith nowadays. We have to stand for it. And this is the truth, too—next time I go there to eat, I’m ordering the fish. Maybe he’ll stop by.

The happy gas theory

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

It’s May, and that means both good and bad things around here. Good in that the school year is almost over for my kids. Bad in that it still quite isn’t. That’s why my son said something about the happy gas last night.

Here’s where he got that:

He was six when he got his tonsils out. It wasn’t the visit to the hospital that worried him. He was okay with the hospital. And it wasn’t even the pain. What worried him the most was the very thing he most looked forward to.

The happy gas.

It’s tough trying to explain a medical procedure to a six-year-old, especially when the ins and outs are pretty vague to his father. I didn’t really know what tonsils and adenoids were, what function they served, or why they were giving him such trouble. But the anesthesia part I knew.

So I told him he got to wear a mask like Batman did and that the air would smell like cotton candy and he’d fall asleep. And while he was asleep the doctors would do their business and make him better.

“You won’t feel a thing,” I told him. “Promise.”

He didn’t believe me.

Experience had taught him otherwise. He’d slept before, and he’d either done things or had things happen that he not only remembered, but felt.

He fell out of the bed twice. Felt that. Bopped his face against the headboard. Felt that, too. He’s also awakened himself by burping, talking, snoring, and coughing. Sometimes all at once.

No way, he thought, no way, would he be able to sleep through someone operating on him.

So I explained that the happy gas wouldn’t just put him asleep, it would put him really asleep, and that the doctor would make sure he stayed that way until everything was finished.

Afterward, once we were home and he was safely on the sofa with his ice cream, I asked him about it.

“I didn’t feel anything,” he said. “I can’t even remember anything.”

And then he said this—“I wish I could have some of that for when I go to school. That way I could just wake up when I got home and I wouldn’t remember any of it.”

Funny, yes. And that definitely pegged him as my son. But he really had a great idea there, at least on the surface. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have some advance warning to the less than perfect things we have to face? And wouldn’t it be great if just before we could put on a Batman mask, breathe some cotton-candy air, and fall asleep through the whole thing?

Yes. It would.

I’ll admit for a while I did my best not to try and poke holes in his Happy Gas Theory. I knew there were some and most likely many. But sometimes we take comfort in those things that aren’t and can never be. That’s what I did while sitting on the sofa with him. I reveled.

But the truth of course was that we had to go through our painful things sometimes. We could slide around some and jump over others, but sooner or later a storm would come that we couldn’t outrun or take cover from, and we were left to stand there in the open under the pour.

Sometimes, that didn’t seem right to me.

It would make more sense to say that if God was there and if God was good, He would take better care of the ones who loved Him. He would make sure our paths were clear. He would prevent the pain and the pour and the doubt. He would take away the fear.

If there was such a thing as everyday happy gas, I thought, then shouldn’t it be God?

Maybe. But maybe that pain and pour and doubt served a purpose that outweighed the need for our happiness. Maybe we needed fear so we could know the value of faith.

Maybe.

I didn’t know for sure, but I thought the odds were good that He’d spared me from a great many troubles in my life without me knowing it. Not happy gas, but maybe something better. And as I looked down and saw my son wince when he tried to swallow, I knew that all the happy gas in the world couldn’t take away all the pain. Some still lingered.

That was true for all of us, I supposed. We were all a collection of bruises and cuts. We all had our tender places.

And I thought that in the end, it was our pain and not our happiness that brought us nearer to heaven.

Avoiding life’s sting

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

I see him by the steps as I pull up. Standing there, staring at the door. He’s still there when I park, still there as I climb out of my truck with shopping list in hand. Still there when I sidle up beside him.

“Hey Charlie,” I say.

He turns and looks at me. “Hey.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Oh,” he says, “just waitin’.”

“Uh-huh,” I answer.

I decide not to say anything else. I know what might happen if I do, and I know what might happen after that. Because Charlie is one of those people who can start a conversation in the real world and finish it somewhere in the Twilight Zone.

But then I figure what the heck, I have some time to kill.

“You know,” I say, “they’re not gonna bring your groceries out to you. You gotta go in and get them yourself.”

Charlie nods. “Yep,” he says. “I’ll be going in directly. Just gotta wait for it to leave.”

“Gotta wait for what to leave?”

Charlie points to the flying speck of something in front of the door and says, “That.”

I squint my eyes and stare ahead, trying to figure out what I’m looking at. After careful consideration, I decide it’s a bumblebee.

“You’re not going in because there’s a bee in your way?” I ask.

“Yep.” Then he says, “Nope,” just in case he got his words mixed up.

The door swooshes open then as an older woman rolls her grocery cart out, oblivious to the certain death that hovered over her. Charlie winces as she walks past, exhaling only after she was clear of the danger zone.

“You allergic to bees, Charlie?”

“Nope.”

I nod, trying to find the right words to ask him what I need to ask him next. “You, um…you ain’t, you know…afraid of them, are you?”

“Nope.”

I nod again. “Okay, well want me to go get your beer?”

I don’t know for sure that Charlie is here for his beer. He might be low on something else, maybe hamburger or peanut butter or ice cream, because Charlie loves his ice cream. But he loves his beer even more, and I have a feeling that his shaky right hand isn’t completely due to the bee.

“Nah,” he says. “I’ll go. I got the time to wait. Just don’t wanna get stung.”

It’s then that I realized Charlie really is afraid. I’m not convinced that is a bad thing, though. No one likes getting stung by a bee. It hurts. Everyone knows that.

More than that, I realize people do this sort of thing all the time. Myself included. We all eventually realize not just where we were, but also where we want to be. And we realize there is usually some sort of Bad blocking the way. It could be a rejection slip or an unreturned phone call. Could be nerves or insecurity. Could even be the prospect of success after years of failure.

Regardless of what it is, that’s what’s floating between you and it. Between where you are and where you want to go.
The size of what’s blocking your way doesn’t matter either, because the fact of the matter is this—there is risk involved in proceeding further. You could fall. You could fail. You could be disappointed.

You could get stung.

And that hurts. Everyone knows that.

The alternative, of course, is to stay where you are. With practice and dedication you may convince yourself that you’ve gotten this far, which is further than some and maybe even most. That might be good enough. And you might even begin to believe that holding onto the prospect of what you could have done will be good enough.

I could have been a writer. Or a teacher. Or a nurse. I could have gone to school. I could have had that job or that career. But there was this Bad between me and it and, well, things just didn’t work out.

But you know what? That never works.

I know from experience that Could Have is just the same as Never Did.

“I’m gonna go in, Charlie,” I say. Then I look at him. “You know that bee’s gonna fly right out of my way, right? Because I’m bigger than the bee.”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then.”

I leave him there at the door and pick up the few things on my list. Charlie’s still standing there when I head back to my truck.

“Don’t want to get stung,” he says again.

“I know,” I answer.

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