endurance – Page 5

The banner still waves

July 4, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I’ve heard there are grumblings that “The Star Spangled Banner” should be removed as our national anthem. It’s too antiquated, those grumblings say. And the words are not only hard to understand, but hard to sing. What kind of national anthem do you have if it’s hard to sing?

And to tell you the truth, some of those grumblings are right. I’ve heard the anthem positively butchered by well-meaning folks who were simply mystified by the phrase “O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.” I couldn’t sing that, either.

That isn’t to say, though, that I’m all for replacing the words of Mr. Francis Scott Key with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” or “America the Beautiful.” I’m not. I like things the way they are just fine. Not because I love our anthem. Not because I love the words.

But because it’s endured.

We are a people who look ever forward. Hope and change are our new touchstones, and neither of those are readily found by glancing over our shoulders. No, the promised land of better times lies ahead. Just there, over the horizon.

We say that the past doesn’t matter, just the future. Not where we’ve been, but where we’re going. And while that may be correct in some aspects, it isn’t in others. In many ways the future is dependant upon the past, and you don’t know where you’re going unless you take a look behind to see where you’ve been.

That’s true in both the life of a person and the life of a country. We are not the product of our tomorrows, but our yesterdays. The freedoms we enjoy may be sustained by the continued sacrifice and vigilance of today, but they were granted by the courage of those who have gone before us. Men who held firm to the believe that freedom was worth persecution and that death should be favored over oppression.

Men who put country and people ahead of party and self. Who believed leaders were not above the public but subject to them.

Who believed that the ultimate authority was not themselves, but God.

That we continue to cling to what some see as a worn and outdated song for our national anthem is to be reminded that there was a time in our country when such men existed. Perhaps that’s why there is this slight but steady push to modernize the singing of praise for our country. It will help us cope with the knowledge that such men seem to be more difficult to find now.

Whereas our leaders of yesterday are revered, our leaders today are ridiculed. Our trust with those first great Virginians, Washington and Jefferson and Madison, have been replaced by a mistrust for those who lead us today. This, I suppose, is inevitable. The natural consequence of favoring a winning smile and a photogenic face over substance and wisdom.

Those ideas of freedom and liberty that inflamed the hearts and minds of our forefathers seem to have burned to embers now. What caused them to stand and fight now allows us to sit and rest.

So this Fourth of July weekend when we’re surrounded by the present and looking forward to the future, perhaps it would do us well to pause and look back, far back, and remember the kind of people it took to found this country. Because that is exactly the kind of people we need in order to continue it.

Let the words be sung, and let that flame of freedom and liberty ignite again. Let us all make sure that when the question is asked, “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” the answer will always be yes.

The Grace of a Normal Day

May 6, 2014 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

It’s 5:30 in the morning. Or, as a friend more poetically puts it, “Oh-dark-thirty.” The alarm has just gone off. It’s one of those programmed to offer the most irritating, high-pitched buzz possible. My first thought it to turn the stupid thing off before it wakes everyone else. My second is that I need to find something—anything—that will wake me a little more calmly. Getting jolted straight from sleep to awake can’t be good for you. It just can’t be.

The clock is slapped and hit and thrown until the noise stops, and I settle back into bed to take stock. I’m awake. Awake is good. All of my body parts seem functional with a minimal amount of soreness. Also good.
I already know what the day ahead will bring. I know where I’m going and what I’m doing. I know who I’m going to see and in many cases what exactly they will say to me.

Sure, anything can happen. There are always tiny variations; nothing in life is ever truly fixed. I may choose to alter my schedule a bit and therefore miss someone whose path I usually cross. Or, of course, my schedule may be altered by something other than choice. You never know, as they say. But the truth of it is that we actually do in most cases.

For many of us, life immersed in routine. We get up at the same time and go through the same ceremonial acts of preparing for the day, just as we tend to reverse them to prepare for the end of it. The in between, that time spent out in a chaotic world swimming in chance, is really just as predictable. Sure, bad things happen. But not often. That’s why they always end up on the news.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe your life is the opposite of mine, full of adventure and derring-do. Maybe there isn’t an alarm clock by your bed because you don’t need one. You wake up on your own and fling your covers back, eager to tackle anything—everything!—if for no other reason than because it’s new and unexpected.
Aside from the occasional Saturday, doesn’t happen to me. My life is a long run-on sentence that is only occasionally interrupted by a comma or a dash. And while I hope there’s an exclamation point at the end, I’ll settle for a period.

I say all this not for your pity, because that’s not what I want. I live the quintessential normal life, and most of the time I’m proud of that fact. I say it instead for those few times when I’m not.

Growing up, the sort of life I wanted was one where I would wake up excited to be alive. My mouth would already be salivating over the endless possibilities before me. The world back then wasn’t something to endure, it was something to conquer. And life seemed to stretch out before me rather than close in around me.

We always have big plans for ourselves when we’re young. We’re just cocky and sure enough to think we know what’s going on and what the world is really about.

That doesn’t last long, of course. Things change. Not just our dreams. Not just our perceptions of life, either. Our perceptions of other things change as well. About three years ago I woke up just like I did a few minutes ago—5:30 a.m. on the button. And I beat the alarm clock into submission and took stock of both myself and my life (also just like a few minutes ago), and my perception was this:

I was in hell.

Which meant my perception of hell had changed as well. I always thought hell would be colored with a fiery red. Turned out it was a dull gray instead.

I was lost back then. I had blessings I was blind to and a future that called but couldn’t be heard. That’s what happens when you allow yourself to go numb. You miss the bad, yes. But you miss the good, too.
I’m better now, which is good. But I know that being unhappy with the much that God has blessed you with is a human condition, and if I am one thing, it is most assuredly human.

So as I’m lying here in bed, I’m reminding myself that it’s easy to forget that the ordinary is just the extraordinary that’s happened over and over again.

Sometimes the beauty of your life is apparent. Sometimes you have to go looking for it. And just because you have to look for it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

My exhale is the here-we-go-again sort, but with a smile. And before I throw back the covers, I offer this small prayer:

God, grant me the grace of a normal day.

The value of our art

April 14, 2014 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

image courtesy of google images. Spangled Blengins, Boy King Islands. One is a young Tuskorhorian, the other a human headed Dortherean by Henry Darger

Let me tell you about Henry Darger, the man who wrote one of the most detailed and bizarre books in history.

Never heard of him? Me neither. At least, not until I happened to stumble upon his story a few weeks ago. Seems strange that someone who did something so grand could be so unknown, doesn’t it? But it’s true. In fact, you could even say that’s why Henry was so extraordinary.

He was a janitor. Nothing so special about that, but nothing so wrong with it, either. There is no correlation between who a person is and what that person does for a living. Einstein was a patent clerk. Faulkner a mailman. Henry Darger mopped floors.

An unassuming man. A quiet man. He never married, never really had friends. Just a regular guy living a regular life, one of the faceless masses that occupy so much of the world who are here for a short while and then gone forever.

Henry left in 1973.

There are no accounts of his funeral. I don’t know if anyone attended at all, though I like to think they did. I like to think there was a crowd huddled around his casket that day to bid him farewell.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that so many people are discovered to have been truly extraordinary only after their passing. Such was the case with Henry. A few days after his passing, his landlord went through his apartment to ready it for rent. What he found was astonishing.

What he found hidden among Henry’s possessions was a manuscript. Its title may give you a clue as to the story’s scope and magnitude:

THE STORY OF THE VIVIAN GIRLS, IN WHAT IS KNOWN AS THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL, OF THE GLANDECO-ANGELINIAN WAR STORM, CAUSED BY THE CHILD SLAVE REBELLION

Did you get that? If not, I can’t blame you. I had to read the title three times to even understand a little of it, and that doesn’t count the time I actually wrote it out.

The breadth and scope of Henry’s book went well beyond epic. The manuscript itself contained 15,000 pages. Over nine million words. Over 300 watercolor pictures coinciding with the story. Some of the illustrations were so large they measured ten feet wide.

A lifetime’s worth of work. Years upon years of solitary effort, hundreds of thousands of hours spent writing and painting, creating an entire saga of another world.

And all for no apparent reason. Not only did Henry Darger never seek any sort of publication for his work, he never told a soul about it. His book was his dream and his secret alone.

I’ve thought about Henry Darger a lot since I first read about him. Which, as change or fate would have it, just to happened to be the very week my newest novel released. A tough thing, that. You’d think it wouldn’t be, perhaps, but it is. No matter who an author is or how successful he or she may be or how many books or under his or her belt, the most important thing to us all is that our words matter. Matter to others, matter to the world. We want what we say and think and feel to count for something.

But Henry Darger reminds me that none of those things mean anything. In the end, we cannot account for how the world will judge our work, and so, in the end, the world’s opinion really doesn’t matter. Simple as that.

What matters—what counts—is that our words stir not the world, but ourselves. That they conjure in our own hearts and minds a kind of magic that neither the years nor the work can dull. The kind of magic that sustains us in our lonely times and gives our own private worlds meaning. The kind of magic that tinges even the life of a simple janitor with greatness.

Cheating the seasons

April 10, 2014 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Three weeks ago…

I’m standing on my front porch in the early a.m., as is my habit before starting the day. A cup of coffee and a view of the neighborhood serves as my morning news, and it’s all the news I need. The mountains and the creek are right where I left them last night. I need that assurance. It reminds me that even if the world’s a mess, the mountains and the creek are still here and so am I.

My eyes wander to the flower beds below me, and then to the green something poking up from the mulch and dirt. To me, flowers have always been like people I meet once and then again months later—I can place what they look like but can’t seem to remember their names. So ask if me if we have roses and daisies and begonias, and I’ll answer no. I will say, however, that we have red flowers and white flowers and pink flowers.

But these green things shooting up from the earth? These I know.

Tulips.

The tulips are the first spring flowers to sprout around here. Which to me makes them much more than just a plant, but a vital part of nature’s calendar. When you begin to see tulips, you know better times are at hand. No more cold, no more snow, no more gray skies and bare trees. Everything is about to be make new again.

Seeing that first tulip means I’ve made it. That I’ve survived one more long and dreary winter.

That’s how it usually is, anyway. But as I stand there staring down at this first true sign of spring, all the joy and peace I know I should be feeling isn’t there.

Because I’ve cheated, you see. These aren’t the first tulips I’ve seen this year.

The local nursery is owned by relatives of mine, Mennonites with green thumbs. They can grow anything. And thanks to the modern marvels of both science and climate controlled greenhouses, they can grow anything at any time. Even in the middle of the worst winter I could remember.

So in the middle of January and our third consecutive snowstorm, I stopped one day to say hello and buy some tulips. Things were getting pretty blah at that point, and so was I. I was tired of having to endure and scrape by. Tired of the sadness and outright heartache that winter always seems to bring.

I needed an act of defiance. A symbol of hope.

So I brought the tulips home and sat them right in front of the window. I’d stare at them as the snow fell and thumb my nose at Old Man Winter. When they died, I bought more. And then more. I’ve had tulips for about two months now in an effort to thwart the one barren and agonizing season I dread most.

It’s worked, too.

Maybe too well.

Because as I look down upon this miracle of God below me, it doesn’t seem like a miracle at all. It just seems like a tulip.

The rusty tumblers of my mind click into place and open, revealing a very important truth. I had wanted to skip a season. Winter and I have never gotten along, so I thought keeping a steady supply of spring on hand would cheer me. I was right about that. I did.

But I never considered the consequences of having those flowers by the window. I was so consumed with the now that I dismissed the later. I surrounded myself with a symbol of joy and warmth for so long that it became the same old. My tulips lost their luster not by becoming rare, but by becoming familiar.

Which is why next year I think I’ll leave them at the nursery down the road. I’ll let someone else give it a try. I will instead take the seasons as they come. I’ll revel in the sunshine while I have it and then stumble through the months of cold and gray as best as I can.

We’re not meant for perpetual joy, I think. There are seasons in the world and there are seasons in us, and each have their own purpose.

We are made for winter as much as spring. Made for tears as much as for laughter.

And we are here not just to dance, but to endure.

The waiting (is the hardest part)

February 27, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

For two months he has saved every penny and dollar, every bit of allowance and report card money, counting it all weekly and sometimes daily, all for the Lego train set that is due to arrive upon our doorstep sometime today. My son is proud. I’m proud of him. It takes a lot of work and discipline to save that much when you’re nine years old, to say No and No again to the pack of baseball cards or the long aisles of toys down at the Target. To say instead, This is what I want, and even if I can’t have it today, I’ll have it eventually.

It got easier as it went. Saving so much money, I mean. When you’re first starting out, all you see is how little you have and how much you need. You think you’re never going to get there. The road is too long, the temptations too great. That’s when most give in. That’s when I give in. And my son nearly did, but then twenty dollars turned into fifty, and that became seventy-five, and then a hundred and fifty, and now all that’s left is to stare out the window to a dull February day and wait for the sound of the UPS truck.

It’s been a great lesson, really. Saving up, sacrificing immediate gratification for something better down the line, learning the value of hard work and determination. Kids need a lot of that nowadays, I think. Adults too, for that matter. But now comes another great lesson, and in many ways a much more difficult one to digest and endure.

Now comes the wait.

So he sits in the recliner with the dog (who knows something important is happening but isn’t sure what, and so just waits with her ears back and her nose to the air) and rocks because he’s too anxious to hold still. Every sound of an approaching engine is greeted with a sudden jerk of his head, body flexed, chest puffed, waiting to charge the door like a sprinter out of the blocks.

So far, there have been four trucks, three cars, and a woman on a horse. No UPS truck.

It’s not coming, he says.

Yes it is, I say.

Well then, where’s it at? he asks.

Out for delivery.

How do you know?

Because that’s what the tracking says.

But what if he wrecks before he delivers it? And what if my train goes flying out of the truck because it’s rolled over five times and some other kid picks it up and takes it home and doesn’t help the driver at all, and the driver just sits there and bleeds to death? What then?

I don’t have an answer to that, other than to think my son may make a good novelist one day.

Just hang on, I tell him. Just wait.

And then he says the two words that sum up so much of what it means to live in this world, to want and dream and strive and hope—

Waiting sucks, he says.

It does, I tell him, and then I tell him that “sucks” really isn’t the kind of word he’s supposed to be saying, especially with his mother right in the next room. But since he referenced it with regard to waiting, I let it slide. Because he’s right, you know. Waiting really does suck.

We spend so much of life doing that. We wait to grow up, wait to graduate, wait to fall in love and graduate from college, wait for a good job and to have kids and to retire. Sometimes, we even wait to die. I’ve read the normal person will spend fully ten years of their lives waiting in some sort of line, whether it’s the post office or the grocery store or the bank.

With all that time spent waiting, you’d think we would get pretty good at it. But we aren’t. Waiting hurts. Waiting reminds us too often of the thing we want and how miserable we are without it, whether it’s something to have or someone to love. It convinces us we’re somehow less without it. We ache and we pine and we pout. And it doesn’t have to be something big, either. Sometimes, it can be something as insignificant in the big picture as a Lego train. But that’s the thing. I don’t think most of us really want a lot in life, we just want a little more than what we have.

So I’ll just sit here for a while with my son and stare out the window with him. We’ll talk while we wait. We’ll laugh and giggle. We’ll discuss the deeper things of Lego creation and growing up. Because that’s the thing, too—waiting might indeed suck, but it sucks a lot less when you have someone else there, waiting with you.

Welcoming the storm

February 13, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

There’s a storm coming. No one around here needs to turn on the news to know this, though if they would, they’d be greeted with an unending stream of weather updates and projected snowfall totals. “Gonna be a bad one, folks,” the weatherman said a bit ago. But I knew that when I walked outside. It was the way the sun hung low in a heavy, gray sky, and how the crows and cardinals and mockingbirds sounded more panicked than joyful. It was the five deer coming out of the woods and the raccoon in the backyard, how they foraged for enough food to last them these next few days.

We are no strangers to winter storms here. Still, it is cause for some interesting scenes. There are runs on bread and milk, of course, and salt and shovels, and there must be kerosene for the lamps and wood for the fire and refills for whatever medications, an endless stream of comings and goings, stores filled with chatter—“Foot and a half, I hear,” “Already coming down in Lexington”—children flushing ice cubes and wearing their pajamas inside out as offerings to the snow gods.

It is February now. The Virginia mountains have suffered right along with the rest of the country these past months. We’ve shivered and shook and dug out, cursed the very snow gods that our children entreat to give them another day away from school. Winter is a wearying time. It gets in your bones and settles there, robbing the memory of the way green grass feels on bare feet and the sweet summer smell of honeysuckled breezes. It’s spring we want, always that. It’s fresh life rising up from what we thought was barren ground. It’s early sun and late moon. It’s the reminder that nothing is ever settled and everything is always changing.

But there’s this as well—buried beneath the scowls of having to freeze and shovel, everywhere I go is awash with an almost palpable sense of excitement. Because, you see, a storm is coming. It’s bearing down even now, gonna be a bad one, folks, I hear a foot and a half, and it may or may not already be coming down in Lexington.

We understand that sixteen inches of snow will be an inconvenience. We know the next day or two will interrupt the otherwise bedrock routine we follow every Monday through Friday. And yet a part of us always welcomes interruptions such as these, precisely because that’s what they do. They interrupt. They bring our busy world to a halt. They slow us down and let us live.

Come Thursday morning, I expect to see a world bathed in white off my front porch. I expect to put aside work and worry and play instead. I’ll build a snowman and a fort. I’ll throw snowballs and play snow football and eat snowcream. I’ll put two feet so cold they’ve gone blue by the fire and sip hot chocolate. I’ll laugh and sigh and ponder and be thankful. For a single day, I’ll be my better self.

That’s the thing about storms. We seldom welcome them, sometimes even fear them. Too often, we pray for God to keep them away. Yet they will come anyway, and to us all. For that, I am thankful. Because those storms we face wake us up from the drowse that too often falls over our souls, dimming them to a dull glow, slowly wiping away the bright shine they are meant to have.

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