A Girl Scout’s love
November 11, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 7 Comments
These little notes have been showing up a lot around the house lately, courtesy of my seven-year-old Girl Scout.
I found one waiting for me in the mailbox the other day. Turns out there was no need to perform that small part of my coming-home ritual. My Girl Scout had gathered the bills and junk mail for me. Yesterday when I went into the office to sort the mess of papers on my desk, I instead found four neatly stacked piles with one sign in the middle—A Girl Scout was here! And this evening I found another beside my washed and dried coffee cup that had been placed (handle facing toward me, no less) by the espresso machine.
I like having a Girl Scout in the house.
And I like these notes….
To read the rest of this post (and to find out what those notes really taught me), I’ll invite you over to High Calling Blogs, where I’ve hung my shingle for the day. And thanks to everyone for all the get-well wishes!
The night my son gave up
October 28, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
At five, my son is quickly learning the ways of the world when it comes to dealing with others. It’s a necessary skill. Maybe the most necessary.
He knows that a crying fit will likely get him nothing but a slap on the rear, and he knows he can sweet talk his mother into just about anything he wants. He also knows his father is a much tougher sell. I’m not much on sweet talking. So with me he tends to approach things from a more practical standpoint.
“Dad,” he said the other day, “I think I need a knife because you have a knife and I wanna be like you.”
So he got a knife. Plastic, of course. But still one that’s worthy of both his father and MacGyver.
He’s slick, I tell you. Very.
The way to deal with God has come much harder for my son, mostly because he can’t seem to figure out how to get what he wants. I’ve spent the last few weeks as a spectator to this getting-to-know-you process. I’m not butting in. Not yet. Some things are best learned on your own, even when you’re a kid…
I’m at highcallingblogs.com today, and if you’d like to read more, just follow this link. I’ll see you over there. Have a great day, everyone!
On the porch
May 17, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 36 Comments
That’s why when I passed Davey Robinson’s house and observed the angle and the waggle of his wave, I stopped. The invite was there, even if the words weren’t.
I climbed onto Davey’s porch and saw the oil and the rags next to his shotgun. Not an uncommon sight in these parts. We take the second amendment with the utmost seriousness. When I asked what he was doing, Davey simply said, “It’s gettin’ dark.”
Davey’s wife poked her head out of the screen door just then. “Hey, Billy,” she said.
“Afternoon Rachel,” I answered.
She looked at her husband. “Davey, this is the last time I’m going to tell you. Put that stuff away.”
“Almost done,” Davey told her.
“Well, hurry up. Caitlyn’s almost ready.”
“What’s Caitlyn up to?” I asked them.
Davey said nothing. Rachel, however, did: “It’s prom night.”
I looked at Davey and smiled. “You’re actually cleaning your gun for Caitlyn’s prom?”
“It’s dirty,” he answered. “I’d be cleanin’ it no matter what Caitlyn’s doin’.”
Uh-huh.
“Honey, please,” Rachel said. “Put that stuff away. If Caitlyn sees you, she’ll go bonkers.”
“Gettin’ dark,” Davey said again.
Rachel rolled her eyes and went back inside, leaving the two of us alone on the porch.
“Caitlyn’s going to prom, huh?” I asked. “Seems like just a few months ago she was still running around here in pigtails.”
“Don’t I know it,” Davey said, running a cloth through the barrel. “I enjoyed every minute of it, too. Guess growin’ up was bound to happen sooner or later, though. This prom thing has been goin’ through her mind for months. Wasn’t much I could do about it.”
“Who’s her date?”
“Guy named Kevin. She’s had him over a few times. Seems like a good enough kid.”
“If he’s a good enough kid,” I said, “then why are you out here sittin’ on the porch with your shotgun? I’m sure they’ll be fine.”
Davey paused with his rag and said, “Fine, huh? Tell me, what sorts of stuff were you thinking about all the time when you were sixteen?”
I thought about that, then said, “Maybe you’d better load that thing.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Caitlyn came onto the porch just then. Her blue dress shimmered in the sunlight, and Rachel had done her hair up into a bun. I understood then why Davey was so nervous. Caitlyn had always been a pretty girl, but right then she looked almost stunning.
“Hi, Billy,” she said.
“Hey, Caitlyn,” I managed.
“How do I look?”
I had to be delicate here. I couldn’t well gush and say too much, not with her father sitting beside me with a shotgun in his lap. But if I said too little, Davey might shoot me anyway.
“You’re easy on the eyes, Miss Caitlyn,” I said. Davey nodded out of the corner of my eyes, and I let out a happy sigh.
“Daddy,” she said, “what in the world are you doin’?”
“Gettin’ dark,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means,” Caitlyn told him, “but please put that thing down before Kevin gets here. For me, Daddy.”
Kevin pulled up in his parents’ car a few minutes later. He was nervous when he saw Davey and me on the porch. He was more nervous when he saw Caitlyn. By the time the two of them had posed for a dozen pictures for Rachel and left, Kevin had nearly sweat through his tux.
Davey and I watched as they pulled away.
“You know,” he said, “I used to come out here on this porch every evening and call that youngin’ in. ‘Gettin’ dark!’ I’d tell her. Now here she is, going out in that dark. And I can’t call her in. Not anymore. She’s gettin’ older. Becoming a woman.”
“Guess so,” I said.
“But I know this,” he said. “She’ll always be my little girl. And I’ll always be waitin’ here on the porch until she comes home.”
Looking Back
May 15, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 24 Comments
He’s been at this for years, he says. And there’s no end in sight. It’s tough work, hard work, but ultimately very rewarding. He’s slowly gathering the pieces to the puzzle of his past, trying to answer the very riddle that we all at some time ponder:
Where do I come from?
He told me that as a child he found an old family Bible in his grandmother’s house. Inside were the names of her parents and grandparents, and theirs, and theirs, stretching back almost two hundred years. The writing was faded and the pages were yellowed, but he was captivated. Like rolling down the window of a speeding car to take one look back before the next curve.
Sadly, there were just the names. No locations or dates. And as his grandmother was elderly, she could unfortunately offer little help in the way of more information.
That Bible now sits on his bookshelf. A keepsake and a reminder, one that says this is where it started.
He’s Googled and Yahooed. He’s written letters to both our government and foreign ones. He’s corresponded with researchers and genealogists. And he’s uncovered much.
So far as he can tell, he can trace his family back to medieval Italy. Rome, to be exact. His ancestors were quite wealthy. Landowners and artists and poets. And even statesmen. Powerful people. Important people.
He likes this. He’s proud of his ancestors and their position in life. He may be a simple plumber, but he comes from good stock.
Me, I’m a little fuzzy on the history of the Coffey name. My particular branch came to this country in the mid-1600s, mingled with some Cherokee blood, and settled in the Shenandoah Valley. Before that they were mostly Irish and Dutch. Fishermen, from what I can tell, and farmers.
I could dig deeper of course, and someday maybe will. But the truth is that I’m not concerned about the more affluent members of my family tree. I don’t care about landowners and statesmen.
I want to know what cannot be known. I want to know about those fishermen and farmers. The Nobodies.
The ones who carried on my family’s name despite the poverty and the gruel and the taxes paid to oppressive kings. The ones who had to endure sickness rather than be treated for it. The common ones who lived a common existence and dared sail a perilous expanse of water to start over and live better.
I think of them often. And I often wonder if they thought of me.
Did they pause with their hand on the plow or the net to ponder if their name would still be uttered in this world a hundred generations later? Or did their gaze only go so far as the next row of crops or the next wave over the bow?
Was I as fuzzy and mysterious to them as they are to me?
I spend a lot of time convincing myself that only now matters. Only here. This. But as I continue on through my life, I’m finding that a little difficult to accept. Now isn’t the be all and end all. It is the only moment we truly possess, but not the only moment that truly matters. Because I am the result of many moments and many decisions that mattered to people with whom I share a common bond. And those who come after me, my children and their children and theirs, will be the results of my own moments and decisions.
It is, without a doubt, a heavy burden we bear. We, you and I, stand upon the cusp of history. Thousands of years of ancestors have led to us, and perhaps thousands of years more depend upon us.
Not to be powerful and important.
But merely to endure.
The Slippers
May 11, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 26 Comments
No one is happier than I to see spring finally entrench itself into this year. I am not a fan of winter, of cold mornings and colder nights and darkness at four-thirty in the afternoon. Ba. Humbug.
We are in the main course of May now. The robins have returned outside my living room window, the trees in the yard are heavy with leaves, and I’ve cut the grass three times (a magnificent task, by the way. You learn a lot about God by mowing the yard. Another story for another time, though).
But even with sunshine and seventy degrees here in the valley, the tops of the mountains outside my window were clouded in snowfall just a few weeks ago. I was here, winter was there. And as I looked at that cold, angry storm, I knew it also saw me. Snarling, “I can come down there too, you know. I’m not done just yet.”
Which, ironically, was fine. As anxious as I was to put away the snow shovel and bring out my softball bat, I wasn’t so sure I wanted the cold weather to go away. Because even though spring meant birdsong and porch swings and windows-down-radio-up, it also meant I would have to put away my new slippers.
That they had been on my feet daily since Christmas, gently warming my toes and therefore my very heart, is an unlikely thing for me to say. I’ve never been a slipper guy. They’ve always seemed so un-me, so…girly.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
When I unwrapped them last Christmas morning, my wife asked me to just give them a try. “Please,” she said, emphasis included. Not because I wanted them, not even because I thought I needed them. But to, in her words again, “Finally get you to shut up.”
I love my wife.
You see, the floors in our home were cold. Very. The frigid temperatures coupled with an unwavering determination to cut down on the gas bill kept our thermostat at a barely tolerable sixty-eight degrees this year. By November, I was chilly. By December, I was a Popsicle.
It was easy enough to throw on a sweatshirt or a thicker pair of jeans to make things a bit more comfortable, but that did little to improve the condition of my feet. I tried wool socks, which did the trick so long as I stayed on the carpet in the living room. Venture out from there and onto the hardwood floors of the rest of the house, though, and it was like an ice rink in both temperature and friction. I almost broke a leg one Saturday afternoon carrying a bag of carrots into the kitchen. Almost died from hypothermia waiting for someone to help me, too.
Stupid house, I thought to myself. Stupid cold house with its stupid cold floors. Why didn’t we buy a house with a fireplace in it? Or two fireplaces. And radiant heat in the floors. Oh, yeah. That would be nice. Radiant heat…
Those thoughts were translated into words later on to my wife: “I hate living here, and I hate our life.”
She looked at me, puzzled. What in the world had brought this on? she wondered. Has something terrible happened? Has he finally cracked?
“What made you say that?” she asked.
“My feet are cold.”
Which brought about an even more puzzled look.
But it’s like that with us, isn’t it? We all have the unique talent of turning small inconveniences into major problems. And while I spent months believing that the source of my trouble was a drafty house, the truth was that it was something much closer.
The trouble wasn’t the cold floors. Not the weather, either.
The trouble was me.
There is a lot in my little world I pray that God will change. “Give me more and give me better,” I ask Him. I wonder sometimes if He’s not saying the thing to me.
I wonder if rather than making the rain stop, He’d rather just give me an umbrella. Because you have to learn to smile in the rain as much as you do in the sunshine.
Or if rather than making me comfortable, He’d rather leave me uncomfortable. Because that’s when I learn the most.
Or if rather than giving me a nice warm house, He’d rather just give me a pair of slippers.
Because there isn’t much you can change about your circumstances sometimes. But there is plenty you can change about you.
P.S. – katdish over at Hey look, a chicken! has been kind enough to offer me a guest appearance on her blog every Monday. Nice of her, isn’t it? So why don’t you follow me over there, and I’ll tell you how I learned to live in awe again…
I’m a writer whose first novel, Snow Day, will be published by FaithWords in 2010.
But don’t let that fool you. I’m just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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