Billy Coffey

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A case of The Feels

July 19, 2016 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images
My daughter is fourteen now, and in about three weeks’ time she’ll be off to her first year of high school.

It’s a tough thing for a dad to know his children are growing up. Harder, I think, when it’s your little girl doing all the growing. You get to feeling at times that something precious is beginning to slip away, and do you all you can to staunch that flow.

Which was why this past Saturday, with her brother and momma away and only the two of us and the dog to hold down the homestead, I thought it high time to have a little father/daughter afternoon in the best way possible.

I was going to let her meet John Coffey.

If you are unaware of that fictional character from Stephen King’s The Green Mile, I won’t spoil things for you. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, then I expect nothing more needs saying. The story is one of the few I often return to whenever I need a reminder that there is still light and goodness in this world, even in the dark places.

We sat on the sofa with the dog and a giant bowl of popcorn between us as the opening scene unfolded—an old man in a nursing home, crying over a song. From there we made our way through the first act, acquainting ourselves with the main cast and supporting characters. It was awful silent in that living room when John Coffey made his appearance on the Mile. My daughter never moved once he set about doing his quiet sort of magic.

We’d gotten to the final scene when old Mister Jangles peeks up from his cigar box when I noticed my daughter looking at me. Her cheeks were red, her mouth caught in something like a grimace. Two eyes red and crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s the matter?’ I’m CRYING.”

I squeezed her knee. “That’s okay, you’re supposed to.”

“I know I’m supposed to,” she said, “but what about you? You’re not crying AT ALL.”

“I’ve seen this movie a hundred times. Read the book maybe a hundred more. After that many times through a story, all the emotion in it’s been wrung out.”

She would have nothing of it: “You HAVE to cry.”

“Why?”

“Because it gives you The Feels.”

Ah. I nodded then, understanding things better. Because of The Feels. I don’t know where that expression first arose, whether my daughter picked it up at school or she read it somewhere. Maybe she made it up on her own. Regardless, it’s been a buzzword in our house for going on quite a while. It comes whenever one of those SPCA commercials shoot up on the TV or when my daughter stumbles upon an Internet video featuring either soldiers coming home from war or a litter of puppies swarming some unsuspecting child. It came as our family strolled the neighborhood on the night of July 4, gawping at all the fireworks.

Spoken in whispers and in shouts, when things are quiet or still. Day, night, afternoon, evening. First thing in the morning:

“I got The Feels.”

Sitting with me there on the sofa, she asked, “When’s the last time you really got The Feels?”

My answer was the one she dreaded: “I don’t know.”

She grabbed the remote and turned off the television, looked at me. “You seriously don’t know.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I used to, I guess.”

And in her best Mommy voice, my daughter then said, “Well, you better go someplace quiet for a while and try to figure out why.”

So I did. I sat on the front porch and watched the sunshine and the deer and tried to figure out why it seems I don’t get The Feels much anymore.

Granted, I don’t think there is anyone who can come down with a good case of The Feels so often and with such power as a fourteen-year-old girl. Such a thing isn’t possible, especially when you are a forty-four-year-old man.

But it did bug me then, and continues to bug me now, that I can go long stretches of months and even years without being struck by awe or passion or beauty, much less all three at once. Which sounds pretty bad especially considering I spend a great swath of my days writing stories that revolve around the very things that have long gone unfelt in my life.

If pressed, I would say I’ve been this way for quite a long while now. Life can do that to you.

At a certain point you move away from the innocence that defines your childhood and allow other things to take over. You become an adult with adult troubles.

But more than that, your view of the world tends to morph into something wholly different. With age comes experience, and with experience comes the shedding of the rosy caul that so long covered them. We go from seeing the world as a place of wonder to knowing it to be a place of ruin. We begin to see people not as souls but as bodies in possession of every awful thing. We see hate and avarice and violence. Maybe we even come to a point when we feel those very things in ourselves.

Living becomes not a thing to experience, but to endure.

We spend so much of our adult lives wanting only to be children again. For me, that desire had little to do with growing back down to a boy. It was more to reclaim once again that childlike state of belief and hope. To see again that all things hold a beauty and wonder.

Somewhere along the line, I lost all of that. I’ve let a wall grow around my heart as a means of self-protection, a shelter against the storms I saw raging around me each day. It was better doing that. Because constantly seeking out the good in others was to invite only disappointment, and risking belief in the good of the world only meant subjecting myself to constant hurt. And that is love most of all, is it not? It is hurt.

According to my daughter, that’s the The Feels really is, too. Deep down at its most basic level, this constant buoyancy of her spirit is not owed to joy, but a kind of pain that stings your heart and leaves behind a tiny bruise that remains behind long after the hurt of it is gone, keeping the best parts of us soft rather than hard, pliable instead of brittle.

That hurt, it seems, is necessary. That hurt you have for others and our world says that you still care, that you are still alive, and that because of those two things, there is yet time enough to start making things better.

I think we could all use a good case of The Feels right now. Hate may be the safe way to go and anger may never put you at risk, but both of those only work in the moment. But in the after, once all the destroying has been done and all those nasty words spoken, we find that the bridges between us have been reduced to mere fragments and made near impossible to put together again. To be made stronger than they were.

We can each view this world as a place of threat and fear and so look upon it with only a measure of gloom. Or we can seek to smile and search out the light that remains even as a closed-fisted hand seems ready to strike.

That choice is a big one. It’s also like every other choice there is—one entirely up to us.

But I know this. I’ve gone far too long opting for the first. It’s high time I seek out the second.

Filed Under: beauty, burdens, emotions, endurance, family, fear, hope

Washing away the mess we make

July 1, 2016 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

OuterBanks16 1

I stand upon a sliver of land off the North Carolina coast that I call home for one week a year, looking at what has been written in the spot of sand at my feet.

For seven years now, this spot has been my special place. All the information I need to navigate my day can be found right here without use of a screen or wifi, without any device at all.

Here, the tanagers and mockingbirds are my alarm clock. Deer move silent along narrow trails cut among the sea oats, calling the weather by the way their noses tilt to the air. Dolphins dance for their breakfast, twirling and slapping their tails in the calmness beyond the breakers, telling me when it is time to cast a line among the waves.

Yet while solitude here is plentiful, I am reminded that I have not wholly left all things behind.

There are others here as well, a family far down along the beach, a man patrolling the dunes, who have come to this place in search of the very comfort I crave.

I tend to study these others with the same sort of fascination I give to the constellations that shine over these deep waters at night, or the cockles and welks I pick up from sandbars that rise up and then fade in the changing tides. A trip through our tiny parking lot reveals that many who have answered the ocean’s siren call have traveled quite far—Ohio, Michigan, even Idaho. We are all travelers here. As such, friendliness presents itself as a thing ably given, but only with the unspoken expectation that all parties will be allowed to return to their own families, their own lives, in short order.

Umbrellas pop up along the beach in the early morning as though the sand has broken out in a multi-hued pox, each widely spaced so as to neither intrude nor interfere: islands on an island. This partition extends even into the ocean, where one is expected not to stray from the invisible line stretched outward from one corner of your square of beach to the next. If one does, should the waves you jump over or ride atop carry you in front of where your neighbors sit reading Dean Koontz and sipping glasses of wine bought at the island’s only Food Lion, your fun must be paused until you stand and fight your way back across the current to where you belong.

I’m unsure whether this need for boundaries is expressed unconsciously or with intent—if it speaks toward a desire to allow others their own attempt at peace and renewal, or if it rather tells of a deep-seated wariness toward short-term neighbors.

Hillary4prisonBut a little bit ago I took a long walk along the shore, and now I think I have that answer. Here among the piles of scallop shells and oysters and augurs, HILLARY FOR PRISON 2016 has been written into the sand. Not far down comes BERNING FOR NC. Then, TRUMP’S FIRED ’16. Each carved by a different finger or big toe, each thus far saved from the encroaching tide but not by the vandalisms of others.

I thought of two things as I stood by each of those pronouncements, and how those pronouncements had been scrawled at with such rage. One is that we can leave our problems and cares at home for a short while but not our divisions. The other is that increasingly, our divisions are becoming worse and angrier.

This in itself is nothing new; our country has always been an angry one. But our collective mood has changed these last years in such a way that it now feels more a souring that hangs between us all. Our rage and distrust has gone from a thing—the government, the economy—to a person—the hated Other who dares not believe as we believe.

It is a depressing thing, really. And to be honest, it is also the very thing I wanted to get away from for a few days. But here I am yet again, a neutral witness to a raging culture war, and it saddens me as much as I’m sure it does you. It saddens me a lot.

I’m only glad I’m out here alone with only the pipers and gulls. Should the Hillary supporter, Bernie person, and Trumpster meet, there may be violence. That’s where things have arrived at now, or at least where things are headed. And I’m willing to say that’s why even here this year, everyone mostly keeps to themselves. Because we’re all tired of it, all the fighting. Because we all just want a break from the notion that we’ve come to associate the opinions and stances of others with their entirety as people, and from the ugly truth that we have somehow gone from mere disagreement with those who think other than us, to wariness, to distrust, to blame, and now, finally, to hate.

I am a writer. That term is a broad one, though I’ve found its job description narrow enough to fit inside a single sentence: Every time you sit to work, try to tell the story of us all.

Thankfully, that story has been fairly easy to come by for most of my life. Lately, though, it’s gotten a bit harder. Diversity is the magic word now, just as the celebration of all that makes us different has in certain circles become our national religion. And while that might be right and good, I’ve found that celebrating of differences often casts aside all those things that makes us the same.

Like you, I don’t know where we’re going as a country. Like you, I’m worried about it. If the recent tragedy in Orlando speaks of a single thing, it isn’t that there are those who would focus upon the weapon a terrorist used rather than the ideology behind why he used it, or that it is far too easy for a sick man to purchase an instrument of war. To me, Orlando says that we have reached a point now where we can no longer even come together to mourn.

But I’ll leave you with this. That family I saw far down the beach made their way past me a little bit ago. Dad, mom, and two little kids. They did not avoid me as they passed, did not take the easier path toward the dunes to walk around me. The father did not look at me as though I were some potential threat, nor did his children glare at me with Stranger Danger eyes. Instead, the mother smiled and offered me a sand dollar they’d found just up the beach. The kids wanted to see my tattoo. And the dad, grinning, merely said, “How ya doin’, buddy?”

And you know what? I’m doing fine. I am.

OuterBanks16 2Because I nodded and said as much to that beautiful family and then left all that scribble in the sand for the tide to wash away. I walked on as they walked on, all of us looking out toward the ocean with the breeze in our faces and the smell of salt filling our lungs, thinking much the same: in spite of the mess we are prone to make of things, ours is still a beautiful world.

Filed Under: conflict, emotions, encouragement, messes, perspective, Politics, vacation, writing

Lessons learned at the Walmart

May 24, 2016 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He crosses his arms, making a stand.

She bends down.

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

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

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

And kisses him.

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

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

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

Filed Under: children, choice, conflict, emotions, family, love, small town life

Three people

August 8, 2013 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

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

Though my workdays are normally filled with all the commotion and stress that a thousand college students can generate, the days between June and mid-August are mine alone to enjoy. It’s only slightly ironic and more than a little unexpected to me that summer break means even more to me now than it did when I was in school, but it’s true. Never let it be said that a little separation between yourself and others is a bad thing.

Despite the fact I have plenty to keep myself busy, I also have plenty of time to myself. Time that will be spent writing. Which is what I tried to do just a bit ago, and with unfortunate results.

I had just started typing when the buzzing began. First in one ear and then the other and then back again. My right thumb punched downward on the space bar and trampolined my hand upward, waving through the air.

“Stupid fly,” I muttered.

The buzzing returned, and this time the fly actually bounced itself off my head. More waving. More missing. Then the creature circled around and landed right on top of my computer screen, staring at me.

Black, juicy one. Hairy legs and monstrous eyes. And a wingspan that seemed almost unnatural.

Where it had been and how it had gotten into my office escaped me, and I really didn’t care. All that mattered was that I went back to work. I shooed it away and went back to my typing.

SMACK!

Against my head again.

I wheeled my chair around and swiped at it, missing the fly but not the stack of books on the opposite table, all of which tumbled to the floor.

SMACK!

“Dang it, you come back HERE!,” I yelled. “I’m gonna KILL YOU!!”

I roamed around my office for the next five minutes. Found nothing, of course. No buzzing, and no kamikaze attacks. So I sat back down and started writing. Four paragraphs later,

SMACK!

And then after that SMACK!, it stuck. To my head. And I swear, I swear to you, that fly made a beeline toward my ear. I was convinced it was going to burrow in and eat my brain.

I jumped up, slapping at my head and flailing my arms in every direction. The fly somehow managed to retreat back to whatever hell it came from and left me alone. For the moment.

But I knew it would be back. Oh yes, I knew. Which is why I put on my cowboy hat (to prevent any future burrowing) and started to fake type.

Two minutes later, buzzing again. And just at that moment I transformed myself into some strange Jedi/Mr. Miyagi/redneck hybrid, sliced through the air with an open palm—

—and connected.

The fly tumbled backward through the air and crashed against the far wall.

That was five minutes ago.

I’m back at my computer now. Order has been restored. But now I’m suffering through the fits and stops of trying to write, because every sentence I’m trying to type is interrupted by more buzzing.

The fly is still alive, though just barely.

It managed to right itself a bit ago by flopping back onto its legs, but it can’t do much else. Every attempt to take to flight has been both paltry and meaningless.

And now I feel guilty.

There are certain religious adherents who would say I sinned a bit ago, that every creature is worthy of respect and life and that by denying those things to them I deny them to myself. Others would say the sin was letting both haste and anger lead me to do something I now regret.

I suppose a sort of atonement is called for now, though I’m not sure what the proper course of action is. Should I walk over and euthanize it with my boot. Or should I try to nurse it back to health with small tweezers and bits of rancid meat? I’m not sure.

I am sure of this, though. We can try to model our lives to the Good, to walk straight and never wander, to be our very best selves. And sometimes that will work. But who we truly are deep down in our broken souls will always be there, ready in an instant to bare its teeth.

That is, I suppose, why we are all three people in one—there’s the person we want to be, the person we are, and the person who must daily choose which way to lean.

Filed Under: anger, emotions, faith, life, perspective, writing

Dear Casey Anthony

July 13, 2011 by Billy Coffey 12 Comments

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

Dear Casey Anthony,

I have to say I’m probably the only person in the world who didn’t know about you two weeks ago. That’s not to say I keep myself ill-informed of what’s going on in the world. I don’t. In fact, I think I probably know more than I should.

It’s just that when it comes to murdered children…well, that’s the sort of thing of which I do try to keep myself ill-informed. I have kids, you see. I worry about them and fear for them enough. I figure I really don’t need another reason to do more.

That’s why I ignored you as best I could. Sure, there were a few times when I’d come across a newspaper story or some television commentary. But I turned either the page or the channel. I didn’t want to see you, didn’t want to read about you. No offense intended. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

But then came the trial and then the verdict, and it was pretty much impossible for anyone to do anything without hearing about you. So I did start to pay attention. I wanted to know what it was about you that had struck such a nerve in so many people, and I wanted to know what that said about us.

I’m neither theologian nor philosopher, just a guy in a hat. I won’t use this space to excoriate you (plenty have done that, right or wrong) or laude our justice system (ditto). I’ll just say this:

I’m not sure why you got all that attention. Ours is a world in which many children such as your own go missing and are found dead. And like you, their accusers are brought in front of judges and juries to be found guilty or innocent. I’ll leave the answers as to why your case became the focus rather than another to those smarter than I. But I do think ours is a society that must be entertained. We may walk straight in our going about, but inside our hearts are hooked downward. We crave the terrible and the depraved, and we found both in you.

We also found in you the culmination of our baser, more selfish selves. What parents in their weakest moments have not fantasized of a life of freedom from their children? Who has not secretly considered any means necessary to exchange a bland existence for one of fame and fortune? I suspect the difference between you and most is that those frail moments remain in our hidden places and yours were cast out into the world.

Much of the anger directed at you is justified. Much of that outrage, I think, is also a kind of fear. In you we see what evil results when we are untethered from responsibility and left to ourselves. We are reminded of the ease by which we can rationalize even the worst acts. We see the depths to which human beings can plumb.

I understand you’ll be free soon, at least the sort of freedom that imprisonment denies. I’ve heard of death threats and relocation plans. I’ve also heard of agents being hired and books being planned. Movies being discussed. And a desire for more children.

I think in the end, that’s what bothers people most. We have an inherent desire for justice, for the guilty to be punished and the innocent redeemed. For many, you are but one piece of evidence among many to prove that desire is an empty one that cannot be filled in this world.

Fair or not, in the end we see that a blameless child has been killed and her mother will now receive the wealth and attention she so coveted. I suppose that’s where we’ll end this. So much has already been said by so many people, and I hate to add to the pile. But I will say this before I go—you are not the first person to be hated in this world, nor the first to perhaps put your own wants before the needs of others in a search for some sort of earthly heaven. But as you step out from behind bars and into the world, you would do well to remember the many who have found that heaven and discovered it to be a hell.

Regards,

Billy

Filed Under: children, conflict, death, emotions, justice Tagged With: Casey Anthony

Please Take One

April 21, 2009 by Billy Coffey 39 Comments

The toy store downtown is one of those mom-and-pop deals that you can get lost in, the sort of place where you can find things that Toys R Us would never think of stocking. Good things. Great things. Things that really, really make me wish I were a kid again. Which makes shopping there both a pleasure and a curse. A pleasure because there is so much I’d like to get my kids for two weeks of chores well done. A curse because I can’t make up my mind what to get them.

So, there on a Wednesday during lunch, I wander. And in my wandering I happen to spot a Longaberger basket sitting atop a wooden display of toy soldiers (Toy soldiers, I think to myself. My son would love some toy soldiers).

In the basket is a pile of those long, thick pretzel sticks. The sign above them says PLEASE TAKE ONE.

Given the fact that it’s lunchtime and I’m hungry, that’s exactly what I do. I take one and munch while I walk. Through the Legos, the building blocks, the books, the dolls. Through the Tonka trucks and coloring books and Play Doh.

And I am back to where I started. At the basket of pretzels.

Still unsure of what to buy and still hungry, I decide to restock and take another trip around the store. I reach into the basket for another pretzel. And as I bite it, I see something out of the corner of my eye.

Standing beside the stuffed animals about four feet away is a little boy. Sixish, not much older than my son, and staring. At me. He holds out one fist and raises his index finger.

One, it says.

I wrinkle my eyebrows, unsure of what his attempt at sign language means.

One, again.

“What?” I ask him (which actually came out as “Wamp?” because I hadn’t swallowed yet).

“You took two pretzels,” he says.

“So?”

“You’re only ‘posed to take one.”

“Who are you” I ask, “the pretzel police?”

“It’s what the sign says,” he states, now using his index finger to point. “Mama said the sign says ‘Please take one.”

I look at the sign, then back to him. “No,” I answer, “the sign says ‘Please take one.’ There’s a difference. It’s all a matter of emphasis.”

“What’s empkasis?”

“Never mind,” I say.

“You shouldn’t have taken that pretzel. Mama says God watches us.”

My mind takes a sudden detour to those old Disney movies, where the older, bigger kid was always accompanied by Jiminy Cricket, Mr. Disney’s version of a conscience. I’m starting to think this kid is my Jiminy Cricket. Or maybe just aggravating. I haven’t made up my mind yet.

“Your mama’s right,” I answer, wondering where in the world his mama was. “But since God knows the sign says ‘Please take one,’ I think I’m in the clear.”

“Please. Take. One,” he corrects.

There we stand in the middle of the store, staring down one another like two gunslingers in a Western wondering who would draw first.

PLEASE TAKE ONE. An invitation to me, a rule for him. Which was right? I’m not as sure as I was a few minutes ago.

How do we decide who is right and who is wrong? Easy.

Go ask the owner of the store.

“Excuse me,” I say to the nice lady behind the counter. “I was wondering if you could shed a little light on a problem this youngin’ and I are having.”

She perks up and joins us, happy to have something to do.

“We were wondering about this sign here,” I say. “Is it please take one, or please take one?”

The owner gives us both a strange look. “Well, I’m not sure. No one’s ever asked.”

“It’s preyin’ on our minds, ma’am,” the boy says.

“Preyin’,” I add.

“If you’d like a pretzel,” she says, “please take one. If you’d like another, you can take one, too.”

Excellent.

“Can I have a pretzel?” the boy asks.

Situation resolved, the three of us part ways. Him to his mother, who had been preoccupied with the books, the owner back to the register, and me to finish my shopping.

Funny, I think, how three words led us this far. But I am sure of this: if two people can disagree over something as simple as pretzels, it’s no wonder why we disagree over the important things even more—politics and God, right and wrong, war and peace.

Who’s to know which is right and which is wrong? Or even if there really is a right and wrong? How do we settle our differences, put away our prejudices, and find the truth?

Maybe, I thought, we should all do what that little boy and I ended up doing.

Maybe we should all go the Owner of the store and see what He says.

Filed Under: conflict, emotions, living, Peace

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