Billy Coffey

storyteller

The best things in us

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

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.

Refusing to toe the line

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It’s Super Tuesday here in Virginia, otherwise known as A Day Off to my kids and Parent/Teacher Conference Day to my wife. Me, I’m already in line down at the church at the end of our street, waiting to cast my vote. And no, I ain’t saying who that vote’s for.

I will, though, tell you what’s on my mind:

Image courtesy of Wikimedia.com

The picture to your right was taken in October 1938 in the city of Eger, in what is now the Czech Republic. Germany had just invaded. Stormtroopers were marching in. I want you to particularly notice the third woman from the left.

Hitler, of course, didn’t do all of this alone. Germany was still in shambles a decade after the first World War. The Treaty of Versailles had forced the country to admit sole responsibility for causing the entire conflict. Traditional German territory was lost. A War Guilt clause was enacted, forcing Germany to repay millions of dollars in damages. Military restrictions were enabled. I would imagine it was a hard time to call oneself German. Hard to look at yourself in the mirror and call yourself a man or a woman.

So when a failed painter came along promising a strong government, full employment, civic order, and a reclamation of national pride, people flocked. When the Nazi propaganda poured forth, they cheered. And when Hitler eliminated all opposition and declared himself dictator, they pledged their allegiance.

Even now, almost seventy years after the fall of Nazi Germany, better minds than mine struggle to understand how an entire country could be brainwashed by such evil. I won’t try to add my opinion to that discussion other than to say that I suppose the fear of Hitler held just as much sway in the minds of the German people as his fiery words. Many bought into the notion of an Aryan paradise, to be sure. But many others didn’t and simply thought the prudent thing was to keep their heads down and do as they were told.

Which brings us to this picture:

image courtesy of wikimedia.com

It was taken in 1936 during a celebration of a ship launching in Hamburg, Germany. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for three years and already abolished democracy. German factories were rearming the country after a disastrous World War I. In three years, that country would invade Poland and plunge the world into the deadliest war in human history. Over fifty million people would perish.

The man circled was named August Landmesser. I don’t know much about him other than the fact that he’d already been sentenced to two years of hard labor. His crime? Marrying a Jew. You would think getting into that much trouble would change your attitude and convince you to toe the line.

Not so. Because there was August, standing in a sea of Germans on that day in 1936, folding his arms in front of him while everyone else Hiel Hitlered.

I don’t know what became of August Landmesser. I like to think he outlived the evil that befell his land and lived to a happy old age with his wife. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. Maybe not. But regardless, August was my kind of guy.

He refused to bow down to fear. He held strong against public pressure.

I would imagine some of the men around him in that picture bought into the evil Hitler was peddling. I would imagine some didn’t but saluted anyway. Not August.

August stood strong. Not by fighting and not by protesting, but for simply folding his arms. And for that, he has my undying admiration.

Anger, it seems, is everywhere now. So far as I can tell, it is the single force driving the coming election on both sides and the reason a great many of my townspeople got up so early this morning. We are fed up. Sick of how things are. Tired of the politicians and the ruling class and that great swath of Washington, D.C. that insulates itself and has no idea what’s going on Out There. Kick the bums out. Blow it all up. Take back the country. I’m willing to bet there are a whole lot of people out there who will do as a buddy of mine said a few minutes ago—“I get in there and pull that lever, I’m gonna do it with my middle finger.”

I’ve seen some mighty things done because someone somewhere got mad enough to change something. Just as I know some of the darkest times in history were the result of a people channeling all of their fear and anger into a savior who turned out to be a devil.

Our leaders can’t save us, folks. That’s up to me, up to you.

Don’t believe me, ask August.

The sanctity of writing

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Image courtesy of google images.
Image courtesy of google images.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first read To Kill a Mockingbird. No more than a boy, most likely. I do remember how I felt when I reached the last page — that odd sense of relief that the story is done mixed with the desire that it would keep going forever, as though I was at once both full and hungry. I still have that old copy. It’s beaten and dog-eared and underlined so much that entire passages are nearly illegible. It remains one of the very few novels I re-read every year.

Part of the book’s allure goes far beyond the story of Scout and Atticus and Boo Radley to the author herself. To Kill a Mockingbird is the only novel Harper Lee ever published, choosing instead to spend that last fifty years or so away from the public eye. Until last week anyway, when news broke that Lee will be publishing a second novel, Go Set a Watchman. Written before To Kill a Mockingbird, the book will feature many of the characters I first fell in love with years ago, centering around an adult Scout returning to her small Alabama town from New York to visit Atticus, her father.

I first heard the news on Facebook of all places, where I wrote it off as wishful rumor. Harper Lee has long been adamant that she would allow no more of her writing to be published. “I have said what I wanted to say,” she told a friend in an interview four years ago, “and I will not say it again.” But then I saw more posts and then more, and then it hit the major news networks and the publishing blogs and a flood of writer friends proclaimed this a high point in literary history and yes, I felt the same. I really did. Because this is Harper Lee, and she is in no small way one of the reasons I call myself a Southern writer.

I was thrilled. But only for a while.

Others voiced their skepticism. Go Set a Watchman was believed lost until recently, when Lee’s lawyer discovered it. And the timing of the announcement itself comes only months after the death of Lee’s sister Alice, who also served as Lee’s former lawyer and had long kept the outside world at bay. A subsequent interview with Lee’s editor only made things seem more suspicious: “…she’s very deaf and going blind. So it’s difficult to give her a call, you know? I think we all do our dealing through her lawyer, Tonja. It’s easier for the lawyer to go see her in the nursing home and say HarperCollins would like to do this and do that and get her permission. That’s the only reason nobody’s in touch with her. I’m told it’s very difficult to talk to her.”

Which, okay. But then Lee’s sister Alice said this, just before her death: “Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence.”

So what does this mean? Is releasing this novel Harper Lee’s wish, or is this a case of a publisher taking advantage of a senile old woman for the sake of what promises to be a buttload of money? And here’s another question, one posed by an article I read: If it’s a good book, does it even matter?

The Harper Lee fan in me almost answers no to that question. But the writer in me says yes, it matters more than anything.

I’m sure millions will line up for their copy of Go Set a Watchman, but I won’t be one of them. It pains me to say that, but I have to stand by it. It is an exercise in terror to pick up a pen and make it the instrument through which you spill those things buried deep inside, precious and frightening things that no right-minded person would dare confront. And it is often an exercise in lunacy to then seek to share those things with a world that will at best ignore them and at worse pronounce them lacking. Writing requires talent and discipline and unyielding relentlessness, but it requires courage most of all. And much of that courage hinges upon the one great freedom every writer holds dear—to choose when and where and especially if those words will ever be seen at all.

When God hates you

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

She stared at me, jaw straight and chin high, and said the three words. I stood there looking back at her, my jaw not so straight and my chin normal, not exactly knowing what to say other than to ask her to say it again. In a slow cadence that enunciated perfectly each of the three syllables, she repeated—“God. Hates. Me.”

“God hates you because your mail isn’t here?” I asked.

“Yes. If He wanted, He could make sure it got here. It’s not here. So God hates me.”

It was the sort of logic I’ve gotten accustomed to here at work, a place full of higher learning and lower thinking. And I had no doubt the student in front of me really didn’t mean what she said. She was angry. Frustrated. Down.

“You know the mail’s backed up,” I told her. “The hurricane and all.”

“Didn’t God make the hurricane?”

“Doesn’t the atmosphere or something make the hurricane? Something about the air off the coast of Africa?”

“Doesn’t God make the air off the coast of Africa?”

I could see where this was going.

“I don’t think God hates you,” I said. “The U.S. Postal Service, maybe. But not God.”

My attempt at levity did little to resolve the situation. She grunted and walked off. I told her to check back again tomorrow. She said she would if God hadn’t killed her by then.

That was yesterday. I didn’t see her today—I’m assuming God hasn’t killed her—which is good, considering her mail still hasn’t arrived. I’m still of the opinion that she was kidding about the whole God-hating-her thing, assuming she knows a little about God. You don’t need a lot of knowledge about the Higher Things to know He doesn’t hate anyone, that God is love.

But still.

There have been times when I’ve caught myself thinking that same sort of thing. Maybe not that God hates me, but certainly that He’s ignoring me. That He’s more concerned with keeping the universe expanding and the world turning than little old me. I suppose that’s not as bad as thinking He hates me. I guess it isn’t much better, either.

Aren’t we all at times like that, though? So much of life is fill-in-the-blank. Things are going badly because _________. Often what we give as our answer is more pessimism than optimism. We hurt and we take sick, we fall on hard times, not because others have done so since time immemorial, but because God hates us.

A few months ago, I got the chance to observe a professional jeweler polish silver. The process charmed me. He walked me through the entire process. The secret, he said, was heat. A good silversmith knows just how hot to get the silver before it is molded. Too hot, and it’s ruined. Too cool, and it spoils. The piece he was polishing? Perfect. Just enough heat.

I think God is like that with us. We’re made for better things—Higher Things—than to simply exist. We must be good for something. We must be molded in a fire neither too hot nor too cool. We are all pieces of silver in the Jeweler’s hand.

It is true this world is cracked and made for suffering. But it is also true that by suffering, we are made to heal what cracks we can.

God does not hate us, He simply loves us too much to fill our lives with ease.

One final thing about that jeweler. He told me he’d been sitting there for hours shining that piece of silver. That fact seemed a bit pointless to me. I couldn’t imagine it shining any brighter. I asked him how he would know when it had been polished enough.

“The silver faces the fire,” he said, “but it isn’t done. Then it is molded and polished, but it still isn’t done. The silver is only done when it casts the Jeweler’s reflection.”

Yes.

The prayer of Jabez

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

I was at the book fair the other day and found a copy of The Prayer of Jabez for $2.99. I’d completely forgotten about that book. Which is odd considering how popular it was ten years ago. Seemed like everyone had a copy of that book. Or the Bible study. Or the journal. Or the workbook or the copy for teens or women.

It was quite the industry really, and the reasons for it were pretty apparent. Say a little prayer, and God will bless you in abundance. It almost seemed too good to be true, but there it was. There was even a verse to back it up.

I never bought a copy. Didn’t even buy the $2.99 copy at the book fair. Not because I didn’t (and still do) want to be blessed in abundance, but because once upon a time I said my own version of Jabez’s prayer without knowing it. The answer I got was a little different than his. And though that prayer was uttered at years ago, I still remember that conversation between God and me.

It was like this:

“You there, God?”

I’m always here.

“Can I tell You something?”

Of course you can.

“I have dreams.”

Wonderful! Everyone should have dreams.

“They’re great dreams. Really great.”

I should hope so.

“Yeah. So, I was wondering if, You know, You could make those dreams come true.”

Of course I can. Why else would I give them to you?

“Oh, I don’t know. Lots of reasons, I guess. Wait. You gave my dreams to me?”

Where else would they come from?

“I don’t know…me?”

I give you the desire. You do the work. Life is a partnership between you and Me. Not 50/50, though. More like 100/100. You give your all, I give Mine.

“Great! So I can have my dreams?”

If you work and you believe, yes. But certain things have to be done first.

“Like what?”

Great dreams require great people. So first, I must make you great.

“Now I like the sound of that. So I’ll be popular and rich?”

Popular and rich doesn’t equal greatness.

“Then what does?”

Love and kindness, faith and trust. Trust especially. You need to understand that it’s not your happiness I want, it’s your trust.

“Okay.”

Are you sure? This isn’t going to be easy for you.

“Sure it will. I can be that sort of person if it means I’ll have my dreams.”

You don’t become that sort of person to get your dreams, you get your dreams because you’re that sort of person. There’s a difference.

(Silence.)

You think your dreams will bring you success, but some of the most miserable people in the world are the ones who’ve gotten everything they’ve always wanted. Stuff doesn’t bring joy. Only I do.

“Oh. So maybe my dreams aren’t all that good for me?”

Parts are. Not all. But that’s okay. I can give you better things than those.

“When I become great.”

You don’t have to be great for Me to bless you. But for your dreams, yes. You must be great.

“I still want to be great, even without the dreams. But the dreams would be nice.”

Wonderful!

“So…when can we start?”

We can start now.

“I was hoping You’d say that. Then I pray You’ll give me love and kindness and faith and trust and make me great.”

Good. But remember, there are two things that I must give to everyone in order to make them great and realize the dreams I have for them.

“Grace and blessing?”

No. Time and trial.

Skipping to the ending

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stacks of booksMy daughter is a reader. Reads everything. Novels, poetry, history, cereal boxes. Doesn’t matter what it is. Most people pack clothes before they go on vacation. She packs books.

I encourage this. In an age when no one really reads anymore, it’s good to have at least someone out there whom I know will read my books, if not now then someday.

She dog-ears pages, just like me. Underlines those passages that particularly grip her and writes notes in the margins, just like me. A book is like a shirt, she says. You gotta break it in.

One thing drives me crazy, though. When it comes to a story, my daughter must always begin with the end. She reads the last page first, reads it carefully, looking as though she’s actually chewing the words for their taste. Names and characters don’t matter here, nor the setting. It’s the tone she’s after. The feeling. She’ll read books that lift her up and books that break her heart (an equal opportunity reader, my little girl), but she has to take a peek at the end first. Good or bad, she has to know what she’s getting into.

I tell her I hate this on principal, both as a novelist and as a human being. I say she’s robbing herself of something wonderful and magical. She’s denying herself a journey of the mind and heart and the chance to grow as a human being.

What’s the fun, knowing the end?

She shakes her head at me, says I don’t understand. She’s right. I don’t.

I was in her bedroom last night tucking her in. (“Tucking her in” = “Would you put that book down and GET SOME SLEEP?!?”) I heard her before I saw her. The bed is in the corner of the room, nestled into two corners, better lighting for her to read. A sniffle. Not the dry sort of allergy sniffle, the boy-howdy-the-pollen-is-awful-this-year sniffle snort. No, this one was wet. Snotty.

Sad book.

She was crying. She’s a cryer, my girl. Any commercial with a sappy score to it will do her in. To this day, I hate Sarah McLachlan just because those SPCA commercials she does sends my daughter over the edge. Sitting up in bed, hunched over a paperback. Eyes wide and glassy, a crumpled tissue in her hand.

“Calvin and Hobbes?” I tried. (Humor, my spiritual gift!)

“Stop it.”

“Bad one, huh?”

She nodded. “She just died. She DIED. It’s not fair.”

I didn’t know who “she” was. I supposed my daughter wanted me to ask. I didn’t. Don’t judge me.

“Maybe you should try to read some lighter fare,” I said. “You know, least at bedtime.”

“No, I like this one. This one’s good. And I know it’ll be okay.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I peeked at the end.”

Ah.

I let her read a while longer that night. No sense in having to call it a day at a sad part.

But there are a lot of those, aren’t there? Sad parts, I mean. Vast sections of our lives that look and smell and seem purely tragic. Hard times that feel like we’re under God’s boot heel. Times of grief and anguish, when everything around you is shouting to just give up, it doesn’t matter anymore.

Don’t. That’s what I’m here to tell you. Don’t give up, because it does matter and I know it does, because I’ve peeked at the end.

I’ve peeked and seen a new heaven and a new earth, where death is no more and eternity has taken its place.

I’ve peeked and seen a final wiping away of our tears by a hand too large for this universe that brushes our cheek like a feather.

I’ve peeked and seen the end of every struggle.

You, me, we know how it all ends. And maybe that more than anything else is what gets us through the sad parts.

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