Billy Coffey

storyteller

Turn the page (The grocery store, Part II)

image courtesy of photobucket.com

Last week I wrote about my trip to the grocery store, and the Amish woman in the checkout line who offered us all a little wisdom on how to approach everything that’s happening. But there’s a lot more to that story.

Consider this Part II.

To recap, I thought I’d be smart and get to the Food Lion out on Route 340 right when they opened. The problem was half the town had the same bright idea. You should have seen us all
— rednecks and farmers and factory workers, everybody trying to get what we could without getting too close. What struck me as I weaved in and out of the aisles were the many ways everyone approached the experience.

For the produce guy, that Tuesday morning was just another day.  It was business as usual. There’s not a finer human being than the produce guy at our Food Lion.

Always smiling, always talking, always ready to help. “How you doin?” he asked as we crossed paths. I was fine. “Great day, great day,” he said. “Everything’s beautiful.” Business as usual.

There was the woman who came in through the doors as if those were her final steps from a long trip home. Smiling, waving to everyone. Saying, “What y’all doin keepin yourselfs all the way over there?” before cackling at her own joke. Because who says humor has to die during a pandemic?

Workers coming off the graveyard shift at the Hershey plant, just trying to get a few things so they could go home and sleep before doing it all over again. For them, life hasn’t changed much at all.  That’s good in some ways, bad in others.

Farmers roaming the aisles for their wives, confused about where the flour and cooking oil were but not confused about some virus, because whether they get sick or not, the cows still need fed and the corn grown.

The business man in his suit and tie walking up front with a loaf of bread and a bag of coffee tucked under one arm, pausing only to nod at a stock boy who said, “Hope you sell some tractors today, Ed,” and to which he replied, “Hope I do too, because things is thin.”

But it was the man in the cereal aisle I remember most.

The one who looked as if he’d arrived at the Food Lion that morning prepared to enter the mouth of hell itself. Mask and gloves, along with a pair of thick overalls designed not only to repel dirt and mud, but any virus this nasty old world could throw at him. He held box of Cheerios in one hand and a box of Fruity Pebbles in the other. Lifted them up like to judge their quality by their weight. As I walked by, he flashed me a look of pure hate and even purer fear. Someone up front laughed. He turned his head that way. Beneath the cover of his mask, I heard:

“This ain’t no goddamned fairytale here.”

I kept going. None of it was particularly shocking. You hear a lot of cussing in the grocery store, mostly from men who are at the same time confronting their own ignorance along with why in the world the jelly isn’t stocked next to the peanut butter. But it did bother me in a way that only now I can describe. It wasn’t what he said, really, but how he said it. Sure, he was angry, but he was scared most of all. And who among us can blame him for that?

I’ve long lived by the notion that life’s big things are better understood when viewed through the little things.

That idea was proven true once more by that trip to the store. Every one of us can be found in one of the people I shared those fifteen minutes with. Some of us are trying to keep our heads up, trying to focus on the beauty and the good that this world still offers in spite of everything. Others are just trying to get by. Some are taking it one shift at a time. And there are a lot of us who are just plain scared.

It’s true that we’re all in the same boat, but it’s also true that we’re all given a different view of the dark waters around us.

We’re all asking the same things right now. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to think? What’s going to happen? Anyone who claims to have an answer is either fooling themselves or hasn’t thought about it enough. Because there is no answer, or at least no answer that we could ever understand.

It’s easy for people like me to say “We just need to keep our heads up, do what we’re supposed to do, support each other, and we’ll all get back to living soon.”

But for millions of people around the world, that advice simply doesn’t apply. They can’t keep their heads up because their burdens are too great. They did what they were supposed to do but still lost loved ones. They’ll say, How can I support other people when I can’t even support myself now? And how can I get back to living when the life I’ll find once this is over will be so different, so much less, than the life I’ve always known?

Try answering that in a supermarket aisle.

But I have thought about it since then. I’ve thought about it a lot. And if I could meet that man again (adhering to the six-feet rule, of course), I’d tell him he was wrong. Because I think a fairytale is exactly what we’re living, or at least something very close to it.

There are those who think life is best thought of as an equation. It’s something that should be approached logically and methodically, and every truth will reveal itself through careful poking and prodding. What is Real constitutes only those things that can be seen, studied, manipulated, or understood; all else is deemed Unreal.

Then there are those who think that every life is less an equation to solve than a narrative being written. We are all in a great story being told by a power infinitely greater than ourselves. And while we know a little about that story’s beginning and a little more about its end, those chapters in between are being written one day and one sentence at a time. It’s a story that tells the truth about us, and what it means to be human., and that truth isn’t timeless like a formula, but timely in the sense that it “comes true,” little by little with every breath we draw.

That’s what I would tell that man in the cereal aisle. That’s what I’ll tell you. Our days aren’t like a formula that needs solving, they’re a tale that needs living.

So don’t put your book down just yet.

Don’t throw up your hands and say you can’t bear another page.

The story’s not done, and the best part is yet to come.

Forgotten America

The wedding is held inside a small Mennonite church shielded by mountains so thick and lush that it feels as though the sun is a mere passing stranger.

Two things come to mind as I gather up my family. One is that hunting season isn’t far off, evidenced by the slight chill in the air and the gunfire off the high ridges. The other is that there is apt to be no farming going on this afternoon, at least not close by, because all the farmers are here.

One whole side of the parking lot is occupied by trucks stained with dirt and mud and manure. An old Ford is parked near the doors, its bed stuffed with apples fresh off the trees and ready to market. Men gather beneath a narrow wedge of porch. They wear jeans not long plucked from the clotheslines where they had been pinned to dry and Sunday shirts, ones with snaps rather than buttons. Talk is low and slow and centered upon the goings on of the mountains rather than the wider world, one being a place of silences and mysteries that enchant, while the other is by their judgment becoming a thing near unrecognizable with each passing day.

Children skitter. Women pass in plain dresses offering waves and hugs and pecks on the cheek.

The bride stands in a patch of grass down below the church.

Her hands hold a bouquet of wildflowers that may well have been plucked and gathered from the banks of the quiet stream beside her, where there runs water so fresh and clean that it could be bottled straight and sold to rich folk. She smiles at the camera pointed at her, and in that grin is the promise of long years ahead.

Inside the church, the groom waits at the first pew. Those who will stand with him lean and talk. All are dressed in their finest Wrangler jeans, many of which possess a light, almost white-colored ring at the back pocket where a can of snuff usually rests. Country music drifts through speakers. Bluegrass. Songs of love and loving and the difference between.

The flower girl comes down the aisle in an old wooden wagon pulled by the ring bearer, each knee-high and grinning. The bride appears. We stand. The ceremony itself is of the simple kind, as all good ones are: a brief sermon, a long prayer, an exchange of rings that ends with a kiss and a series of whoops from the back. And I feel joy here. Much joy.

Afterwards we all move to a nearby barn where the reception is held, a wide and clean space decorated with strings of lights that will adorn future Christmas trees. The air is heavy with the smells of barbequed chicken and fresh biscuits. On the opposite end, the doors are opened to a wide pasture filled with hills and cows. The new couple enters to more cheers (and more whoops from those thinking of the wedding night). Farmers talk. Children play. Women—quite a few—gather in the center of the barn. They hike their dresses and kick away their shoes, high-stepping as “Rocky Top” blares from some hidden place.

And me, friend? I sit in a small corner of this barn, gaping at all this food and music, these smiling faces, and what I think is this: these are my people, kin by blood or marriage or just plain time. Folk of the hills and hollers who live out their lives now in much the same way as was done a hundred years ago, a season and a prayer at time.

In some ways my people are enjoying a brief moment in the spotlight, courtesy of an upcoming election based in no small part upon their perceived anger.

All those talking heads are right on that point. The whole lower class in this country—and in Appalachia particularly—are ticked off indeed. They are tired of being mocked because they are poor, and they are tired of being ignored because they are the wrong color poor.

But aside from this, I find my people are not overly enthused about politics—part of that wider, unrecognizable world. I’ve heard only one mention of the election in all my time among the mountains today, this from an old man who sighed in a heavy way and said, “Don’t make a damn which one gone win, we’ll get a rich Yankee Democrat either way.”

Maybe that’s so.

I’ve no doubt that come November 9, most interest in my people’s problems will fade.

The cameras and lights that have been turned to their hardships will go out. The stories of an epidemic of suicide and drug abuse will go unwritten. A people proud and self-sustaining—the sort of folk you would pray to have close when everything goes to hell—will fade once more into the lonely places that both bless and curse them. That is a sad thing to say, but it is expected. We’ve reached a point now as a country where everything is political, the downtrodden most of all.

And yet I take some small comfort in the fact that life will go on here in the simple way it always has, connected to soil and tress and unspoiled fields tended by those who understand what it is to hurt and love and gain and lose. Even here, here especially, there is joy.

There is singing and dancing and praying. And as I sit and smile and look out on all this, I think maybe those are three words for the same thing.

Rich or Poor

Mansion“Daddy, are we rich?”

My daughter at the dinner table. Which, since school has started again, is quickly becoming more of a place to discuss Important Things rather than eat.

If elementary school paints a broad stroke of a child’s future life, middle school narrows things a bit. I’m not just talking about things like math and history and spelling. I’m talking about where children fit into the scope of society. My daughter is in a classroom of about sixteen. That means there are fifteen other children who might be her age, but sometimes have little more in common.

There are children who are of a different color. Some have no father at home, or no mother. Some are from other parts of the state. A few are from other states completely.

Some have accents. Some wear glasses. There are the tall and the short, the big and the small, the smart and the not so much.

There is a mixing of ideas and life experiences, even if those ideas are still relatively undeveloped and those experiences are few. And the result is that all of the children, are trying to figure out where they fit in and why or why not.

The girl who sits next to my daughter whipped out a brand new toy from her book bag the other day. A nice toy. One that my daughter herself had expressed a desire to have every time the commercial appeared on the television. I told her it was too expensive, that it was the sort of thing that fell under Santa’s jurisdiction rather than her parents. Did that mean her parents had less money than than this other girl’s?

The boy who sits behind my daughter was quite the opposite. He has no toys. None that he has chosen to sneak into school, anyway. His clothes are worn and sometimes dirty, and his shoes look like they are too small. Like my daughter, his parents didn’t seem rich either. But unlike my daughter, he seemed to have even less.

So: “Daddy, are we rich?”

The thought occurred to me to put a spin on her question. I could use the whole We’re Rich In The Things That Matter speech. I could say that we had things like love and togetherness, things that make us rich but can’t really be seen most times.

Of course I could use the We’re A Lot Better Off Than Most speech, too. I could say that there are a lot of people in a lot of other places that didn’t have a house to stay in or good food to eat or even a television to watch. People who would consider us to be very rich indeed.

Neither of those options seemed right at the time. So I decided that honesty would be the best policy.

“No, we’re not rich.”

“We’re not?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then are we poor?”

“No.”

The paused with a spoon full of mashed potatoes in her hand. “Then what are we?”

I shrugged. “We’re normal.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

Thus ended our conversation.

Being normal was okay for her. No big deal. She wasn’t rich, which may have been a disappointment. But she wasn’t poor either, which may have been a bigger one. She was in the middle. Neither/nor. And that was fine.

I hope she always has this opinion of things. I hope that she never gets so ambitious as to forget her blessings and never so complacent as to forget that she can always be and do more.

It’s a delicate place, this normalness. It takes skill to be average. We Coffeys have become masters at it. It’s a source of pride.

Ambitious goals

photo by photobucket
photo by photobucket

Spencer said, “I ain’t never doin’ it. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

The words were slurred because his tongue was still hanging out of his mouth, giving the impression that this five-year-old had been drinking a little more than his customary Kool-Aid.

“Do you have to keep sticking your tongue out like that?” I asked him.

“Yeth,” he slurred again. “If it’s in my mouff, I can’t control it.”

“Ah,” I answered and nodded in approval. It was a good idea, I thought. A more practical way to tame the tongue. “Good luck with that. If it works, you’ll be famous.”

“Why?” he asked, eyes bulging.

I shrugged. “It’s never been done before. Not as far as I know. Folks say it’s impossible.”

Spencer hadn’t considered the prospect of fame. Riches, yes. But renown might be even better.

“I ain’t never doin’ it,” he repeated. Meaning that was that and I should probably be moving along.

So I did. Away from the Sunday school rooms and through the foyer to grab this week’s church bulletin, then finally into the sanctuary to settle my family. It just so happened that Spencer and his family settled in two rows behind. Just after the first hymn and just before the first prayer, I stole a look over my shoulder.

Spencer’s tongue was still out, despite the repeated attempts by his mother to rectify what she no doubt considered ill manners. I raised an eyebrow at him and got a thumbs up in reply.

His father takes the blame for the entire situation. He was the one who took care of Spencer’s loose bicuspid with a bit of fishing line and a doorknob. “Quick and painless,” he’d told his son. Spencer didn’t think that was quite so. Turned out that both of them were right.

The trick was quick, yes. And also painful.

Fathers often resort to desperate measures to put a stop to a crying child, and Spencer’s tried everything in the book up to and including an impending visit from the Tooth Fairy. That perked Spencer’s ears a bit and brought the wailing down to a somewhat manageable sob, but that only lasted until Spencer found out all the Tooth Fairy was good for was a dollar. To him the pain and suffering alone was worth at least ten, not to mention the mental distress.

Knowing his son was quite the budding capitalist, Spencer’s dad decided to up the ante with an old wives tale.

“Better stop cryin’,” he told his son, “or else your tongue might slip into that hole in your mouth.”

Spencer stopped. “Why?” he mumbled.

“You mean you don’t know what happens if you keep your tongue clear?”

“…no.”

“If you never let your tongue touch that spot, the tooth that comes in will be gold.”

It was without doubt a stroke of genius, a psychological ploy designed to divert Spencer’s attention away from the pain he was feeling. More than that, he gave his son a goal. And we all know that a little pain is nothing if there’s a goal to be reached.

However.

There is that unscientific yet utterly concrete law of unintended consequences. Each cause has more than one effect, which will lead to any number of side-effects. In this particular case, the effect was what Spencer’s dad intended—his son stopped crying. The side-effect, though, was that Spencer walked around the house for a full day and a half with his tongue hanging out.

His parents didn’t mind (though his mother would have preferred her son not stick his tongue out while in the house of the Lord). In fact they encouraged it, going to far as to tell Spencer that it was considered permissible to house his tongue inside his mouth during sleep. Evidently consciousness is a prerequisite in the cultivation of a gold tooth.

In the end his parents have experience on their side. They understand the desire to accomplish a goal, no matter how intimidating the odds. They also understand that very often the thing we’re trying so hard not to do is the very thing we end up doing. Life is all about the constant battle between the two.

The pastor delivered a fine sermon that Sunday, but I have a feeling no one will remember it. What they will remember is the sound of a little boy shouting “Aww heck!” in the middle of the service. The Bible does indeed our desires are tough to tame. We’re always getting in our own way. Which is why the real sermon that day came from a child in a pew rather than a preacher at the podium.

Ringin’ for Jay-zus

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An acquaintance of mine has spent a few days this week standing outside a local Wal-Mart. Busy place this time of year, but you’d still see him. He’s the one guarding a red kettle and holding a bell in his hand.

You’d hear him before you saw him, most likely. CLANGEDY-CLANGEDY-CLANGEDY. The sound of Christmas. He signed up for three four-hour shifts, which he says is about as much as his old body can take.

“Ringin’ for Jay-zus,” he says.

He tells me it’s mostly a nice way to spend an afternoon. I’d agree with that. I’ve always wanted to be a bell ringer for The Salvation Army, and one of these days I will. Me and the kids, I think. It’d be a good life lesson for all of us. It certainly has been for my friend. He’s learned a lot about people this week, and about himself most of all.

I asked him what it’s like to stand out there. I’m not an innocent when it comes to these modern times. Things happen to bell ringers that didn’t used to. They get robbed or accosted or made fun of. I would imagine such things could never happen around here, but you never know. Doesn’t matter where they are, people are still people. Here’s what he told me:

He likes standing in front of the Wal-Mart better than standing in front of the higher-end stores. Sure, the perks aren’t as good (last year he got free hot chocolate from the coffee shop downtown), but he said the giving is different. Wal-Mart folks tend to give both more and more often than other folks. That surprised me, but not him. He said poor folk know what poor feels like, and that’s something they’d never wish on anyone else.

And he knows all about how some people skirt as far away from the kettle as they can. How they’ll look down at the ground real quick as they pass or pull out their phones. Every bell ringer knows this, he said. These are the people who don’t have any change in their pockets or who gave last week or who are just in a hurry to get some shopping done. He doesn’t begrudge anyone for this. He gives such people the same CLANGEDY-CLANGEDY-CLANGEDY and “Merry Christmas!” as he gives those who pull out their ones and fives. He wanted me to make sure I passed that along—it’s okay if you don’t give money. Sometimes a smile is good enough.

But mostly ringin’ for Jay-zus isn’t about the poor or even Christmas, it’s about him. He said that bothered him a good deal at the start, but not so much now. He figures it’s God’s way of teaching him something that maybe otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

My friend’s honest—sometimes those four hours fly, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes that bell feels light as a feather, and other times it’s an anvil. It can depend on everything from how much sleep he’d gotten the night before to what the weather is, but he doesn’t think that’s the point. No, the point is how he feels sometimes when he’s smiling and Merry Christmasing and going CLANGEDY-CLANGEDY-CLANGEDY.

Because sometimes he feels like he’s really doing something. That he’s a part of something bigger than himself and contributing some good. That the world maybe isn’t in as bad a shape as everyone says it is.

Other times, he’s a little more skeptical. No one puts anything in that old kettle. Three hours standing here in the cold with my knees locked up, he thinks, and for what? A few handfuls of silver. They walk in acting like they can’t give me anything, they walk out with flat screen TVs and pack them in fancy SUVs with Jesus is the Reason for the Season bumper stickers. He thinks such a thing makes Jesus nauseous. Then he wonders what kind of television reception they get in hell.

Not that he’s exempt himself. Because there are plenty of times when he stands there ringing his bell thinking about how much God must love him right now, because he could be sitting at home or out watching a movie but instead he’s standing in front of the Wal-Mart freezing to death for the poor people. Those are the times he thinks hell is earmarked for people who don’t think they deserve to go there.

It’s mostly the realist in him that wins out in the end, though. The part of my friend that says we’re all trying as much as possible to do what we can. That we’re all lost and wanting, and we’re all just trying to find our way. That deep down, all we really want is to love and be loved.

That’s what ringing the bell has taught him most.

Embracing normal

image courtesy of photobucket.com

“Daddy, are we rich?”

My daughter at the dinner table. Which, since school has started again, is quickly becoming more of a place to discuss Important Things than eat.

Fifth grade paints a broad stroke of a child’s future life. I’m not just talking about things like math and history and spelling. I’m talking about where children fit into the scope of society. My daughter is in a classroom of about sixteen. That means there are fifteen other children who might be her age, but have little else in common with her.

Some have no father at home, and some have no mother. Some are of a different color. Some are from other parts of the state. A few are from other states completely.

Some have accents. Some wear glasses. There are the tall and the short, the big and the small, the smart and the not so much.

There is a mixing of ideas and life experiences, even if those ideas are still relatively undeveloped and those experiences relatively few.

The result of all this mixing and matching is that each of her classmates are spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out not only where they fit in, but why and why not.

One of her friends had a new toy to show the other day. A nice toy. One that my daughter herself had expressed an overwhelming desire to obtain every time the commercial appeared on the television. Christmas maybe, she’d told me.

I told her it was too expensive and it was the sort of thing that fell under Santa’s jurisdiction rather than her father’s. So when she saw what her friend had just gotten at Target, the first notion in her mind was envy. The second was whether that meant her parents had less money than her friend’s.

The boy she saw during recess was quite the opposite. He had no toys. None that he had chosen to sneak into school, anyway. His clothes were worn and a little dirty, and his shoes looked as if they were too small. Like my daughter, his parents didn’t seem rich either. But unlike her, he seemed to have even less.

So: “Daddy, are we rich?”

The thought occurred to me to put a spin on her question. I could use the We’re Rich In The Things That Matter speech. I could say that we had things like love and togetherness, things that make us rich but can’t really be spent at Target.

Or I could use the We’re A Lot Better Off Than Most speech, too. I could say there were a lot of people in a lot of places who didn’t have a house to stay in or good food to eat or even a television to watch. People who would consider us very rich indeed.

But neither of those options seemed right at the time. There are moments when a lesson is in order and moments when the truth begs to suffice. I decided that honesty would be the best policy.

“No,” I told her, “we’re not rich.”

“We’re not?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then are we poor?”

“No.”

She paused with a spoonful of mashed potatoes in her hand. “Then what are we?”

I shrugged. “We’re normal.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

Thus ended our conversation.

Being normal was okay for her. No big deal. She wasn’t rich, which may have been a disappointment. But she wasn’t poor either, which may have made her feel better. She was in the middle. Neither/nor. And that was fine.

I hoped she would always have this opinion of things. I mean that. There were people in the world who wanted so badly to be more than they were that they forgot they were actually pretty good to begin with. And I also knew people who were so convinced that they could do nothing that their lives became little more than self-fulfilled prophecies. I hoped that she would grow up to be different, that she never got so ambitious as to forget her blessings and never so complacent as to forget that she could always both be and do more.

So let her reach for the stars, I say. I think we all should. But it’s always helpful to keep our feet firmly on the ground, too. It’s a precarious position, our normalness. It takes some skill to keep from tipping over one way or the other.

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