Billy Coffey

storyteller

I Am Not Charlie

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image courtesy of nydailynews.com

Je suis Charlie.

I’ve seen that over and over these last days, that rallying cry in response to the dozen people killed at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices in Paris.

This one feels different somehow, doesn’t it? No shopping mall or landmark or school, but a place even more sinister. This feels like a declaration of war not upon a government or a people, but upon the very foundation of Western civilization. The right to freely express one’s views in whatever manner one wishes is a pillar upon which all freedom is based, a right that transcends the rule of man and approaches the realm of the holy. And so I mourned those deaths even as I cheered the protests that followed, those untold thousands who raised not candles in remembrance of the lost, but pens. Chanting, nearly singing as the call filled the air:

Je suis Charlie. I am Charlie.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing something else these past days. I’ve been pondering what it is I do as well. It seems a silly thing on the face of it, scribbling words onto a page. But if the news has shown us anything of late, it is that art wields a power unequaled by politics and guns. Unequaled, even, by terror.

And that’s exactly what writers are. And cartoonists and actors and poets. Painters and composers and musicians. We are artists. Even me. You’ll likely never catch me saying that again. “I’m an artist” sounds a little too fancy for my tastes, a little too conceited. But it’s true. We create. We explore. We tell the world’s stories.

That is why those dozen people were killed.

I hadn’t heard of Charlie Hebdo until this all happened. In the wake of the violence and death, I wanted to see what sort of art could drive people to murder in the name of their God. I went online and looked at a few of their past covers, knowing all the while that the newspaper was an equal opportunity offender — not just Muslims, but Jews and Christians and politicians as well. I stopped when I found a cover cartoon depicting God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit engaging in anal sex.

I suppose a publication devoted to such things becoming the banner for freedom would touch a wrong chord in some. Soon after Je suis Charlie became popular, another name began being chanted — Je suis Ahmed. As in Ahmed Merabet, the Paris policeman shot in front of the Charlie Hebdo headquarters as the attack began. Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim who sacrificed his life for the right of others to mock what he held most dear.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Ahmed, too. About how noble his death was, and how terrible. “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends,” said a cartoonist for the paper. I wonder if they would vomit on Ahmed, too.

I don’t know how I feel about any of this. There are times when I sit with pen in hand and shut myself off as the words flow. Not so this time. This time, every stroke and thought has been an agony. Voltaire famously said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” As a writer — as a human being — I have always adopted that philosophy and always will, just as I find inspiration in the words of Charlie Hebdo’s publisher, Stephane Charbonnier, who said before his death, “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.”

But I am not Charlie Hebdo.

If I am indeed an artist, then I am the sort who believes art should not shock, but inspire. It should not tear apart, but bring together. I am the sort who revels in the liberty to speak and write and will fight for that liberty until my dying breath, but I am also the sort who believes with that liberty comes a responsibility to use it wisely and with great love. Yes, I am free. But there lays within that freedom limits that should be imposed not by the rule of man, but the rule of decency. Having the right to do a thing is not the same as being right in doing it.

We live too much by impulse and the desires to entice and confound. We would do better to live more by the heart.

A middle finger like mine

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I figure I’m much tool old to bother with New Year’s resolutions. I’ve learned my lesson. So many of their broken bits trail along behind me now, all well-intentioned but doomed to failure. We all strive and wish and work for our own vision of wholeness, however right or wrong that vision may be, and yet we will always be broken. That brokenness, I think, is half of what it means to be human. To try and mend that brokenness nonetheless—to stare ahead into some yet unformed tomorrow and see ourselves becoming the people we are meant to be—that is the other half.

At twelve and on the cusp of thirteen, my daughter suffers no such constraints of worldly wisdom. She not only embraces the concept of resolutions, she devoted much of her Christmas vacation to them. She filled pages upon pages of the small black notebook she carries with wondrous ideas of self-improvement. I cautioned her to narrow things down a bit, cut five pages down to one and then whittle things even further, to a single focus. After much deliberation and crossing out, she announced to me on New Year’s Day her goal for the coming year:

To have a middle finger like mine.

My first thought—God forgive me—was that she meant something along the lines of the lewd gesture to which we are all familiar. Not so. She took my hand and stretched it out, showing me the hump of hard skin just inside the first knuckle of the middle finger on my right hand. She pressed it, then smiled and said, “Feels like a marble. I want one.”

“Doesn’t look too good,” I told her. “Which doesn’t really matter with me, since I’m a guy. Guys tend to think the rougher their hands are, the better. Means they’re doing stuff.”

“I want one,” she said again. “I want to do stuff. Think that’s fine?”

“I think that’s very fine.”

She sat down beside me. A worn nub of a pencil appeared from one of her pockets. That black notebook of hers came out of the other. She opened to a page near the middle and took the pencil in her hand, placing her forefinger along the barrel and wrapping her middle finger around it just so.

I asked, “What are you scribbling?”

“I don’t know. Just words. Sometimes I don’t know what’s gonna come out until it does. Is that bad?”

“Nope,” I said. “I think that’s the best.”

She wrote for twenty minutes maybe, working on those words she didn’t know, working on that writer’s bump she wants on her middle finger. I told her it would take time. Lots of time and lots of scribbling. My daughter doesn’t care.

She says she has stories to tell and everyone does, and if we keep those stories locked up inside us they’ll die and maybe an important part of our hearts will die right along with them. She’s a smart one, my daughter, and wise.

I only told her some of what that hard hump of skin on my finger means. Time and practice, yes, but there is also more and harder. Because if she really wants to tell her stories, my daughter will find the going rough. There is no journey in this life fraught with more peril than the journey inside ourselves, no land more arduous and unexplored, and we cannot ever hope to venture there and return unscathed. Every writer bears ugly scars, just as every person does. The hump on my finger is merely the one most visible.

Tidings of comfort

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Evernote Camera Roll 20131229 090031This Christmas began what I hope will become a new tradition for the Coffey house. On Christmas Eve, my daughter sat at the grand piano in the equally grand foyer of the local hospital. For forty-five minutes, she provided background music to the steady pulse of whispers and footsteps and intercom pages.

“Silent Night.” “Joy to the World.” “Away in a Manger.” The notes shaky at first, timid, only to gain in both confidence and volume as the moments drew on.

I sat with my son and wife on the worn leather sofa in the middle of the foyer. The perfect spot to listen and nod and smile in support. Also, the perfect spot to see what would happen when those songs of hope and joy were played in such a setting. To see a bit of light cast into such a darkened place.

We were alone for a while. There is a current to every public place, one that flows and meanders of its own accord regardless of what attempts are made to alter it. So we all settled in, us on the sofa and she at the keys, joining the crowd rather than ask the crowd to join us.

The automatic doors leading to the parking lot squeaked with a certain poetic regularity. The people who entered did so with a slow purpose, as if walking through molasses. Their arms ladened with ribboned bags overstuffed with gifts. Plastic smiles that sunk no deeper than the first layer of skin greeted us. Their thoughts were plain enough that I saw them well. It is Christmas, these people thought, and I am here—not at home, but here.

My daughter played: Let every heart/Prepare Him room.

In those small spaces where the elevators clustered, those coming in met those going out. These people, too, could not hide their thoughts. I watched as orderlies pushed the freed in wheelchairs as worn and tired as the smile on the patients’ faces. They were greeted at the doors by family members who rushed in from the circular drive just outside—rushed in, I thought, not to escape the cold, but to rescue their loved ones before some unknown doctor reconsidered the discharge order.

My daughter bolder now, smiling down at the ivory keys: And heaven and nature sing.

A nurse stopped on her way to some far-flung department to listen. An old man sat in the chair across from us, drawn there more by the music than the promise of comfort. The December sun glinted off the wall of windows in front of us. Puffy clouds raced overhead, molded into shapes by the wind. More people stopped—patients and visitors, security officers, doctors. Not for long and only to smile as those notes rang out (Round yon virgin, mother and child) before walking on with a nod and a smile.

And slowly, ever so gently, that current changed.

It was not diverted, nor could it have been. This was a hospital, after all. In such places where so much life mingles with so much death, the heaviness in the air is both constant and unchanging. And yet I saw smiles during my daughter’s recital, and I heard the hard sighs of comfort and the sound of applause.

And I knew then this great truth—we cannot heal what has been irrevocably broken. We cannot bring peace in a life where there will always be war, nor healing to a place fallen from grace. Such things are beyond our ability. We have no such power.

Yet even if we are powerless to change this world, we still have the power to nudge it a bit in the direction it should go. To bring joy to another, even for a moment. To inspire and lift up. To give hope.

To endure.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

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image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com
I know where the Parkers will spend this Thanksgiving, and you can bet there will be leftovers. They’ve learned their lesson.

Can’t blame them, really, for what happened a few years ago. That Thanksgiving—2011, if I remember right—was the first one Clay and Dorothy Parker spent on their own. Their kids had come in all the years before, two sons and a daughter, their own kids and spouses in tow. Clay isn’t sure how it came to be that his children had ended up flung all over the country, other than that modern bit of philosophizing a lot of parents offer: “They got out of college and had to go where the work was.” In this case, “work” meant Oregon and Wisconsin and Texas. All three are a long way from Virginia.

The Parkers tried, I’ll give them that. For five years they all gathered on the hilltop where Clay and Dorothy live, the driveway full of rental cars and castoff luggage, what was now four families trying to reconnect as one. But on that Thanksgiving of 2011, that all changed. One son had promised his wife they could visit her family that year. The other son became snowbound. And the daughter? Well, I guess lawyers are too busy some years to pause and give thanks.

So it was just Clay and Dorothy in that big old house on the hill, trying to pretend things didn’t seem so cold and lonely. Didn’t make sense for Dorothy to cook a turkey that year. Or make the stuffing. Or even the peanut butter pie. Clay got the idea that his wife had been cooking Thanksgiving dinners for almost forty years by that point, so maybe he’d just give Dorothy the year off. The two of them would instead head down to the Cracker Barrel by the interstate for Thanksgiving. Have someone else cook and clean up for a change. And friend, let me tell you this: Dorothy jumped all over that.

Turned out they weren’t alone. I’d always thought a restaurant would be a lonely place come Thanksgiving day (and so did the Parkers, both of them told me the same), but the Cracker Barrel was full to bursting that day. People everywhere, and all in a fine mood. Clay and Dorothy would never say so to their kids and grandkids, but I have it on good authority those two had the best Thanksgiving of their lives. Until that night, anyway.

You see, Clay’s a snacker. Always has been. Dorothy’s always on him about it, says the man will eat a dozen bad meals a day instead of three good ones and it’ll put him in his grave sooner or later. I won’t say much to that. I’m a snacker, too. But when he came down the steps that evening and took a left into the kitchen, thinking there wouldn’t be anything in the world better than a cold turkey sandwich with a little bit of cheese, there wasn’t any. Wasn’t any stuffing, either. And you might as well forget about that last piece of pie, because there wasn’t any pie to begin with.

And that’s when it hit him. All the joy that had carried him through that Thanksgiving, the laughing and the talking and the little sighs Dorothy gave as she thought about all those dishes she didn’t have to wash, that all faded away. Because, you see, Clay and Dorothy had just eaten and gone. No leftovers.

Big deal, you might think. And you’re right, maybe it isn’t. After all, leftover turkey is one of those things best left alone. My experience, anyway. But I’ve never forgotten what Clay said to me when I saw him down at the gas station a few days later, right after I’d asked how his Thanksgiving had gone and gotten more than I’d bargained for:

“Just ain’t the same without the leftovers, you know?”

I didn’t. But I’ve thought about it a great deal since, and now I think I do. By definition, a moment never lasts. It’ll all end at some point and give itself over to the next, and there’s no way of knowing if that next moment will measure up to all the bright and good in the one before. Like Thanksgiving at the Parker house. For one day a year, Clay and Dorothy have a family again. No need to email or Skype or talk on the phone, all their kids—all their life—is right there beside them. And even after those kids are left, Clay can sit down with his turkey sandwich and his little bowl of leftover stuffing and remember it all.

That’s what leftovers are to him. It’s his way of living a great moment all over again.

I saw him the other day, down at the bank. Said everybody was coming in this year, even his daughter the lawyer. Clay’s excited, and I’m excited for him. Dorothy wasn’t there. She was home, Clay said, cooking already. Had a whole list of things she wanted to make.

And then he smiled, thinking of all those leftovers.

***

In case you missed it, my friend and fellow author Amy Sorrells was kind enough to interview yours truly about my latest novel, In the Heart of the Dark Wood. She’s even giving away a free copy of the book. You can find both over at her website.

The Gospel of Hank

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Saturday afternoon, early November. Cold an dank. Mood? Questionable. Thirst? Very. So I pulled off the road along US Route 11 and into the parking lot of a no-name service station, the sort of which was what you’d expect for rural Virginia—dirty windows, questionable service, and people who made putting up with both well worth the effort.

People like Hank.

The man behind the cash register greeted me with a “Howdy” as I walked through the doors, each of which had been propped open by two twelve-packs of Budweiser. I nodded back and made my way toward the drink cooler in the rear of the store.

“BETTER ONES UP HERE,” shouted a voice.

I turned, and there beneath the mounted head of a deer sat an old man. His red suspenders clashed with his brown pants and blue shirt. He twisted in a vinyl chair and tapped his cane on the bin beside him.

“ICE MAKES ‘EM COLDER THAN THAT GOL’-DARNED ‘FRIDGERATOR CAN,” he shouted again.

“You got a point there,” I told him.

“HUH?”

“YOU GOT A POINT THERE.”

“AH,” he said and smiled.

I grabbed a Coke from the bin and swabbed the condensation with my shirt, nodding once more. The old man wheezed and coughed a hunk of phlegm into his handkerchief.

I took a sip and paced the store, taking stock of the sardines and canned vegetables, both of which had expired three months prior.

A mother and her brood of three came in just then, all of whom got their own howdy from the cashier. The kids made a bee line for the magazine rack while mom paced the aisles in search of an elusive Something.

“Do you sell salt?” she said to the cashier.

“LAST AISLE, YOUNG LADY,” the old man said, pointing his cane to the opposite side of the store. She smiled a thank you, and he smiled a you’re welcome.

He wasn’t done, either. In the next fifteen minutes, the old man had noticed the keys a customer had dropped, reminded another that his headlights were on, and squished a rather nasty cockroach.

“You have a pretty good helper over there,” I told the cashier as I paid.

He smiled and said, “Yeah, Hank’s been around forever. Used to own the place until he started getting sick.”

As if on cue, Hank began hacking again.

“So he still comes around?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said as he offered my change. “He’s deaf, weak, and the doc told him last month all those non-filter Camels have eaten his lungs up. But he still shows up every day wanting to help out and do somethin’.”

I shoved the change into my pocket and looked at Hank, who had made himself busy by using his cane to scrap half of the dead cockroach from the bottom of his boot.

I had to smile at the sight. Though I knew nothing of the man, it seemed so utterly Hank.

That a simple man in a no-name gas station on a fall afternoon could teach me something was a little unexpected, but then again there are lessons to be learned in most anything. Especially in the sight of an old man clinging to what little life he had left.

Strip away theology’s pretense and philosophy’s theories and we are faced with this one basic question when it comes to the conduct of our lives—what does God expect from us each day?

Over the years I had come up with many possible answers—to love Him and others, to do our best to leave the day a little better than we’ve found it, and so on. But after watching Hank, I knew the real answer to that question.

What does God expect from us each day? Simple.

To show up.

We can give God our hearts and our desires, give Him our minds and our talents, but if we don’t give Him our time, those things just don’t matter.

Poor Hank could have spent his last remaining days at home watching HGTV, but he didn’t. He still showed up in that little gas station every day willing to do whatever he could to help despite his weaknesses and infirmities. I think we should do the same.

Because no matter how wounded we are, no matter how broken and beaten, we can always do something to help. We can always make a difference.

Have a God Day

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Screen Shot 2014-10-27 at 10.00.46 AMMy son is of the age when toys are no longer toys as much as they are necessities. That’s how he approaches me with whatever new trinket has caught his eye—“It’s not just that I want this, Dad. I NEED it.”

Rarely works, of course. No ten-year-old boy NEEDS a basketball hoop, not when there’s one on the street just next door for anyone to use, or a new video game, or a Nerf gun that will end up in the grass by the creek, forgotten.

For the past month, it’s been a cell phone. His reasoning has been strong—I’m not home right after school some days, you might need to call or check in, that sort of thing. He’s wise enough to leave out the real reason (all of his friends have one; they look like cyborgs, faces always stuck in some sort of screen). But his sister has a phone, and, well, every kid comes born with an instinctual knowledge that if you can’t convince your parents, you can always wear them down.

So: a cell phone. He carried it home from the store last week with all the care and love as a father would bring his firstborn. Not a smartphone (he couldn’t wear us down that much), but the sort that can only call and text, the kind my son associates with the uncool and the elderly.

Thus far, all has gone well. The phone hasn’t gone lost, hasn’t ended up in the grass by the creek. He hasn’t used it to call Brazil or Kuala Lumpur. But my son does text. My son texts a lot. And, for whatever reason, mostly to me.

They come in the mornings especially, when I’m on my way to work. A steady stream of smiley faces and winks that always end with HAVE A GOD DAY. Great kid, my boy, even if he is a little spelling-challenged. He says he’s still getting the hang of typing with his thumbs. But his texts to me? He says he reads those twice before he hits send, making sure every letter and word is right. Which means my son doesn’t want me to have a GOOD day at all. He wants me to have a GOD one.

I told him that sounded just fine but that I didn’t know what a God day was. Turns out, he has them all the time.

My son says a God day usually starts out like any other, meaning you still don’t want to get out of bed. But then you do, you get up and get dressed and have breakfast, and that’s when the God day starts—when you go out—because my son says you need God in your bed but you need Him in the world especially.

On a God day, you pay more attention to how the sun is coming up over the mountains than you do all the traffic. And when you have to stop for the train, you don’t mumble things you’re not supposed to near as much as you wave to the engineer and the people you’re stuck there with.

On a God day, you say hi to everyone and ask them how they are, because that’s what people need.

On a God day, you always do your best no matter what it is. That doesn’t mean you’ll always succeed (“This isn’t a fairy tale, Dad,” my son says), but failing doesn’t hurt near as bad if you know you tried.

On a God day, you pray. A lot.

On a God day, you always laugh at least five times, because even if the world is full of sadness, that doesn’t mean your heart has to be that way, too.

On a God day, you come home and hug the ones you love, because they’re the best things God has given you and that’s why you need to take care of them.

I like that. I think my son’s onto something. So no matter who and where you are and what’s going on in your life, I hope you have a God day.