endurance

Eddie’s story

October 8, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Screen shot 2013-10-07 at 10.15.27 AM I see him raise a hand out of the open passenger window and think he’s shooing a bee at first. He’s allergic to bees and swears the little buggers can smell that in a person. But no, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s instead waving to the bum who has taken up residence at the guardrail abutting the interstate onramp. That isn’t so surprising. Neither is the fact that the bum waves back, flittering his cardboard sign (HUNGRY, LONELY, TIRED is printed in black Sharpie on the front) and grinning back.

“That’s Eddie,” he tells me.

“Eddie.”

“Yep.”

I keep my eyes to the windshield and nod. “And you know this because—”

“—I stopped to talk to him the other day—”

“—Of course you did,” I say. Because that’s what the man beside me does. He talks to people. Talks to anyone. Anywhere. He’s a property owner by day, running a mini-kingdom of rented homes and apartments. I think he’s secretly a combination of St. Paul and Andy Griffith. To him, there are no strangers, there are simply people he isn’t friends with yet.

“And he’s Eddie?” I ask.

“Yep.”

He turns and sticks his head out the window. I look in the rearview. Eddie’s still looking, still shaking his sign. A blue SUV stops beside him. The driver hands him something that might be a dollar bill.

“Did you give him something?”

I’m nodding even before he says, “I bought him lunch,” because that’s what the man beside me does, too. The HUNGRY and LONELY and TIRED are the people he tries to love most because those are the ones he says Jesus loves most. We both love Jesus, my friend and I. Sometimes I think he might love Him a little more.

I smile and ask, “What’d you get in return?”

“What I always get.”

And here is my favorite part, it always is. Some say no act is truly altruistic, that there is a bit of selfishness in everything. That might be true, even with my friend. Because he wants to help and he wants to love just as Jesus said we all should, but he always asks for something in return. He always asks for their story. They all have one—we all have one.

“Did you know Eddie’s been to every state?” is how he begins. I just drive and listen. “Born in Cleveland, but he didn’t stay there long. Parents were awful, that’s usually how it goes. Drunks that beat on him. He ran when he was sixteen. That was twenty years ago.”

“So what’s he do?”

He shrugs and says, “Just drifts. Went west first, all up and down the coast, then made his way east slow. Even went to Thailand once. Worked on a steamer. Only job he’s ever had.”

I don’t say anything to this and wonder for a moment if it’s a trap. We’ve had this discussion many times, my friend and I. I’ll start by saying people like Eddie really could find work. Menial work will still bring money. There’s help out there if Eddie wants it, I’d say, but a lot of people like him live the way they do through choice rather than necessity. My friend agrees in principle. He also doesn’t think that matters much.

“He was married once,” he continues. “She died. Had cancer while they stood in front of a justice of the peace. Eddie knew it and married her anyway. Told me he loved her, and that was reason enough. That was eight years ago. He came east after that. I think he’s trying to run from the memory.”

“I think we all do that,” I say.

“Eddie’s smart. Not with that,” he’s quick to add, “I mean smart like other people are smart. He has dreams.”

That’s the last my friend says of Eddie—“He has dreams.” We end up at the Lowe’s to get what we’ve driven to town for. By the time we head back, Eddie’s gone. I don’t know where he’s gone. My friend probably does, but he doesn’t offer.

I’ve told him many times I wish I could do what he does—stop someone, notice them, help them. Ask them their story. I guess such a thing just isn’t in me. I’m a shy person. Maybe I don’t have enough Jesus.

Still, I think we all need the reminder that all those lost souls we see and read about—those people we sometimes lie to ourselves and think aren’t like us at all—really are. They’ve loved and lost. They’re still searching. We’re all people, and in many ways we’re all hungry and lonely and tired. It’s such an obvious statement, and maybe that’s why it escapes us so often.

Back in the Summer of 69

September 29, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

That dry season I told you about a couple weeks back is nothing more than a memory now. It’s been raining here for so long that people can’t even remember when it began. Days upon days, one long and soggy line. The creeks are full and the grass is back; everywhere you walk makes a squishy sound. No downpours, at least not yet. Just that steady sort of falling water that starts out making you feel comfortable and ends up sinking into your bones. The ground is saturated now. I hear more rain is coming, the kind that keeps interrupting the radio with screeches and buzzes and warnings of rising rivers and washed out back roads.

Whenever these parts are hit with this much rain, invariably someone will mention 1969. Usually it’s an old timer, like the ones who hang around down at the hardware store or on the benches outside the 7-11. You’ll say hello to them and keep going for your new hammer or a bottle of Mountain Dew, and they’ll draw you in. Old timers like that have all the hours in the world to talk. And since so many of them have spent their lives coaxing food from the black dirt on their farms, weather is their specialty. Weather and memory.

“You think it’s wet,” they’ll say, “you don’t know nothing. You shoulda been here in ’69.”

I wasn’t, of course. I missed what happened here back then by three years. But I know many who were not so fortunate.

In August of that year, a tropical wave formed off the coast of Africa and swept westward along the 15th parallel into the lesser Antilles, where it became a hurricane south of Cuba. The National Weather Service named it Camille. It made landfall on August 18, crushing Waveland, Mississippi. From there Camille tracked north, through Tennessee and Kentucky. Then it veered hard right through West Virginia and into the Appalachias, where it ran smack into Virginia’s Blue Ridge.

That was August 19, 1969.

Nelson County, just over the mountain from us, suffered worst. The rains came so hard and so utterly fast that it defied human reason and nearly touched the Divine. Some even called it judgment for a people who had strayed from the Lord. Houses were swept away, cars tossed like playthings. Whole towns and families lost, disappeared. The very contours of the mountains were shifted and changed by walls of mud. In the end, twenty-seven inches of rain fell in less than five hours. The National Weather Service stated it was “the maximum rainfall which meteorologists compute to be theoretically possible.”

One hundred and twenty-three people perished. Many more were never found. To this day, their bones lie somewhere among the fields and vales. It was estimated that 1 percent of the county’s population were killed that day. Most perished not by drowning but by blunt force trauma, the water throwing them into the nearest immovable object.

The destruction and loss of life was so complete that Camille was stricken from any further use as the name for a hurricane. People here won’t even utter the word. It’s always The Flood. Nothing more than that needs saying.

Then again, maybe I’ll say a little. Because what gets added on the end of that nightmare across the mountain was the grace and kindness shown after. The government appeared en masse in the days and weeks following the storm to clean up and rebuild, but it was the untold thousands of volunteers who did most—the farmers and mountain folk and more church groups than anyone could count, people who knew those mountaintops and hollers well. My daddy and granddaddy were among them. They moved slow through all those shattered homes and marked the ones that had become tombs. They carried pistols in their hands because of the million snakes that had been washed from their dens.

For years Grandma kept a picture she’d taken of the sky on the day the Camille left on her mantle. It was black and white instead of color, but you could still see how black the sky looked, how evil. But you could also see as plain as day how in the middle of that picture the clouds had parted in the perfect shape of an angel to let the sunshine through.

It wasn’t the first time tragedy and hardship had visited this part of our world. It won’t be the last. But if there is any comfort to be had in such times, it is the same comfort that was found in the late summer of ’69—God is still there, still watching, and there will always be good people who will rush to your aid and help you repair what life has born asunder.

Empty years

August 17, 2015 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

You reach a point when there’s enough behind you that it warrants a looking back. I’ve caught myself doing a little of that this past year. I’m forty-three now. That’s the sort of age that lends itself to a certain amount of introspection. I figure if all goes well, I’m somewhere close to the fifty-yard line of my life. It’s important to know from where I’ve come and to where I’m going.

The problem with looking over my shoulder is what’s staring back at me. If I’m honest, I’ll say I should be a little farther along than I am. I couldn’t imagine forty when I was eighteen. It was an age I painted in broad strokes and mixed colors. And yet even with that in mind, I’ve fallen short.

It’s all that empty space, you see. Giant chunks of years I spent doing large amounts of nothing. My past seems a waste for the most part, a long string of failures best defined by equal amounts confusion and ignorance.

I worked down at the town gas station for ten years after I graduated.

Spent five more at the factory.

I’m on year eight of an occupation that offers little in things like pay and advancement, but those shortcomings are more than made up for in stress and labor.

That’s twenty-three years all together. No wonder I walk around feeling like I’m playing catch-up.

I’m not alone in all this. I know plenty of other people who feel much the same way. We work hard and save what we can and still feel like a gerbil on one of those wheels that spin and spin and never go anywhere. Makes you wonder what it’s all about.

I was talking all of this over with a preacher friend of mine the other day. Smart guy, as most of them are. He’s older, which meant he knew exactly where I was coming from. And when I was done talking, this is what he said:

Jesus didn’t do much of anything for about twenty years. It doesn’t really feel right, saying that. I don’t mean to imply the Lord was lazy in any way. Bu the preacher supposed that if Christ had done anything worth mentioning between the time he left his momma and daddy to head home from Jerusalem without him and the time he called his disciples, someone would’ve said something. But the Good Book is silent on such things. No one knows what exactly Jesus was doing all those years.

That’s why you’ll find all those legends and lost gospels saying how he went to Egypt or India, or how he liked to make living sparrows out of mud. And while I can understand the allure of such things, the preacher thought it better that the Lord simply lived a quiet life back then. He rose up every morning and went to work. Helped his daddy build a door or a chair, maybe, or did his part with the household chores. He went home at the end of the day and broke bread and talked and laughed, and then he went to bed knowing the next day only promised more of the same.

But the preacher also told me all those empty years weren’t for nothing. Sure, the three or four years after were more exciting. Those were the ones filled with miracles and intrigue and a rising from the grave. But none of those things could have happened were it not for those quiet years before. That was the preparation. The getting ready.

I like that.

That’s why I’m going to try and reconsider my own missing years. I’m going to try and look upon them in a new way. Because really, is there anything quiet when it comes to God? Any moment without purpose? Anything in even the smallest life that could be considered as lost or missing?

I think not.

No less precious

August 13, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

It was a little over sixteen years ago when Ken Copeland’s wife woke up feeling a little queasy. It was a Sunday, he remembers. The big deal that day was the football game later that afternoon. Redskins and Cowboys.

Ken never saw that game, because his wife decided to take a pregnancy test later that morning. In the two years they’d been trying to conceive a child, she’d gone through dozens of those tests. All had produced nothing but a disappointing minus sign. On that day, however, a vertical line appeared and bisected that familiar horizontal one. It was a plus.

Ken and his wife celebrated that day with tears, fears, and a steak dinner at the Sizzlin’ in town. They told everyone (even the waitress, who discounted their steaks as congratulations). Everyone wanted to know if Ken wanted a boy or a girl. His answer was the usual one. Ken didn’t care, just so long as the baby was healthy.

Matthew Brent Copeland was born nine months later at the local hospital.

Fast forward sixteen years to the playground at the local elementary school. Father and son are at the swings, Ken pushing Matthew. It’s the younger Copeland’s favorite activity, one that somehow calms the storms that rage in his mind. Ken thinks it’s the back and forth motion that does it, that feeling of flight and peace. He takes Matthew there every evening.

There are smiles on both their faces, though that hasn’t always been the case. The Copelands went through a tough time when Matthew was diagnosed with autism at age four.

In quiet conversation, Ken will tell you that almost killed him. He’ll admit the anger he felt toward God and the despair over his son, whose life would now never be as full and as meaningful as it should have been.

And he’ll tell you that deep down in his dark places, if he and his wife would have known what would happen to Matthew, he would have preferred abortion over birth. There would be less pain that way. For everyone.

Yet now, twelve years later, he smiles.

I watch them from the privacy of a bench on the other side of the playground. See him push his grown son and yell “Woo!” as he does. I see the perfect and innocent smile on Matthew’s face as he’s launched out and up. Hear his own “Woo!” in reply.

When they’re done, Ken takes his son’s hand in his own and together they walk across the soccer field toward home. Their steps are light, they take their time. It’s as if their world has stopped for this moment between father and son to marvel at the bond between them, proof that the hardships life sometimes thrusts upon us don’t have to break our hearts. They can swell our hearts as well and leave more room for loving.

Ken has made his peace. Peace with God, with his life, with his son’s condition. It hasn’t always been easy, but nothing that is ever worth something is easy. There are still times when he looks at Matthew and wonders what his son’s life would be like if he were normal and healthy. He’s sixteen now, that age where a boy’s world should expand in a violent and glorious eruption of girls and cars and sports. But Matthew’s world will never expand. It will always remain as small as it was when he was four, and just as simple.

Ken says that’s okay. That it has to be. He’s learned that in a world that seems full of choices, there are really only two—we can hang on, or we can let go. Ken has let go. Of his anger and his disappointment, of his despair. And he’s found that what has replaced those things are peace and fulfillment and joy, things he’d always chased after but until Matthew came along never really found.

If Ken would change anything, it would be what he said to all those people who’d asked him if he wanted a boy or a girl. His one regret is what his answer always was, that it didn’t matter as long as the baby was healthy. Because an unhealthy baby is no less precious, no less valuable, and no less life-changing.

For when you’re weary

May 25, 2015 by Billy Coffey 7 Comments

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I’m not sure how long I’ve carried this picture, tucked inside the little notebook I keep in my back pocket. I no longer remember where I first stumbled upon it, or how, or the number of copies I’ve worn out by unfolding it and folding it again whenever I need the reminder. It’s served me well over the years. Kept me going. When you have a dream that sometimes feels close enough to embrace as fact and other times feels so far that it seems the two of you will always be destined as strangers, keeping on becomes the hardest thing and the most important. Victor Hugo once said that each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet. I would imagine that sentiment applies to women equally. The picture at the top of this post is a reminder of my own future hour. It makes me see that I’m not alone in what dreams I have. There are others out there—you, perhaps—whose aim in life reaches high. There always have been.

The picture was taken in 1961, at a place called the Aldershot Club. Where the club was (or remains), I cannot tell you. I suppose it’s enough to say it wasn’t a very popular place with the day’s younger folk, or perhaps it was the club’s entertainment that night wasn’t enough to draw a larger crowd. According to the note I scrawled on the back, a total of eighteen people spent that night dancing. I would imagine few of those cared to admit they were in attendance after the fact. It does seem to me, though, that they’re all enjoying themselves. I’ve often though that despite it all, that’s the most important thing.

Look close enough, you can make out three-and-a-half of the four faces on the stage—singer, guitarist and bass player, and part of the drummer. I doubt the photographer intended to make such a strong point in leaving the band to the shadows, but the result is poetic in a way and not at all ironic. Those four were surely in the shadows, lost among a sea of other bands with aspirations just as lofty. They are too far away for me to gauge their expressions. I like to imagine them fully involved in their music, feeling each note as it courses through with a precision that indicates not only inherent talent, but unending practice.

That’s how we all start out, don’t we? Doesn’t matter if your goal is to be a musician or a writer or a professional _______, this picture represents the beginning. Obscurity and under-appreciation. Playing to a crowd that barely reaches double digits or writing novels or short stories or blog posts read by about the same number of people. We toil under the assumption—the hope—that it won’t always be this way, that the hour Victor Hugo expressed when fact meets dream will surely come. We do this even as the inner critic, that realist to counter an almost holy optimism, shouts that you and I are only two of many, that our dreams are no less than the dreams of billions more, and how is it that we are so special to warrant fulfillment? Ours is a hard world, after all. Often enough, the goal becomes not to rise above but merely not to sink. Forget about overcoming, sometimes all we can hope for is to simply get by.

Worse, if we are strong enough to dream we must also be courageous enough to admit that dream rarely, if ever, truly arrives. A part of us already knows that no matter how tall the mountain we climb, at its peak will lie another, taller one in the distance. That is the cost demanded of those led beyond the doors of a boring life, an existence frittered away with passionless work, the only light a coming weekend or those seven summer days of vacation. There is an allure to the life of the masses that the life of a dreamer cannot match: that sense of being settled—that, good or bad, this is how you will spend your remaining days. It is a rut, no doubt, but at least one that is straight and relatively smooth and travels over no mountains.

I wonder, looking at this picture, if the four men on the stage are thinking about a life in one of those ruts. The men and women on the dance floor look happy enough. They are all perhaps married, all gainfully employed in jobs that offer steady pay to balance out mortgages and bills. A better life, perhaps, than that of an artist, living gig to gig and wondering if it will always be that way. Or maybe it is that those four men understand what many of us do—a life of settling hurts no less than a life of dreaming. Its pain is merely spread out, constant enough to dull us to it but there. We would hurt if we gave up just as we would if we keep going, because the world is made for bruising. That’s why I think in the end it doesn’t matter who chooses the ruts and who challenges the mountains. We are all extraordinary just by making it to the end of our lives. We all deserve a measure of rest after.

Maybe that’s what Paul is thinking. And John. And George and Ringo. Maybe they’re thinking that some people settle and some never do, and you put them both together and what comes out is music. Regardless, they kept on. And a year and a half later, the world would know the Beatles.

Maybe—just maybe—that’s you up on that stage. Standing away from and above the smattering of some crowd, vowing to play as if it were millions. If so, I say let’s keep on. Let’s play and sing and not grow weary. For there’s a mountain to climb, friend, and another on ahead.

The game of life

April 20, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Work at a college around a bunch of teens and twenty-somethings long enough, and you will begin to ask yourself some questions. “How can anyone wear flip-flops in December?” is one. “They actually call that music?” is another. And then there is the biggie:

“Was I really that stupid when I was their age?”

The answer, of course, is yes. Absolutely.

For instance. When I was twenty, I believed:

That life was simple.

That the future was set in stone.

That love was all I needed.

That there is good and there is bad and there is nothing else.

That faith would make everything better.

That the young had more to offer than the old.

That the new held more promise than the tried and true.

Twenty-two years have passed since then. Twenty-two very long, very frantic, and at times very painful years. Whichever of the above beliefs were not proven ill-conceived through marriage and children have certainly been proven so through experience. I know better now. Much, much better.

For instance.

I know that life is not simple. It is hard and scary and tiresome, but it is not simple. If you think it is, then you’re not really living it.

I know that the future may well be set in God’s eyes, but it certainly isn’t in mine. What happens tomorrow is most often a direct result of what I do today, which is most often a direct result of what I did yesterday. The choices I make this day, this second, reach further and deeper than I can possibly realize. Every moment is a defining moment. Every moment is a moment of truth.

I know that love is not all I need. I know that without such things as grace and forgiveness and effort love will crumble upon itself. Love is not the all-powerful cure that poets and dreamers have crafted it to be. It must be nurtured and fed and tended to. Love is not a firm rock that can withstand anything. It is a delicate rose that can wither without attention.

I know that there is good and bad. But I also know that there is more, and I need to look no further than my own heart for proof. For there resides the good man I could be, the flawed man that I am, and the man who must choose daily which he will become.

I know that faith alone is feeble, that only when it is polished with action does it truly shine. Too many times I have prayed for things to get better but did nothing to make them so. God may move mountains, but that’s because mountains can’t move themselves.

I know that the vigor and strength of youth may power society, but it’s experience that drives it. Life has rules, and unfortunately they are not given all at once, but bit by bit as we go. That’s why parents and grandparents are so important. They’ve been there. And because they have, they know a lot more than we do. Time changes. The times do not.

And lastly, I know the new may be exciting, may be revolutionary, may even be promising, but I also know they may not be that way for long. The very things that have sustained us in the past are the things that guarantee us a bright future, things like the importance of family and God, things like the virtues of kindness and loyalty and forgiveness. Such things are woven into us. They are the foundation of who we are and who we will become.

That’s what I know now. Will those beliefs change? Maybe. Check back in twenty years and I’ll let you know.