fear

Longing for Just Us

June 6, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

We’ve just about had it all this year, haven’t we?

A pandemic; a recession; fires; earthquakes; murder hornets; murders of innocent men caught on camera; riots. Jobs have been lost. Families have been broken. Dreams have been put on hold at best, crushed at worst. We all hate each other. Everything is a lie unless it confirms what we knew all along, at which point it’s true, but it’s only true if the people saying it are people we agree with, people who look and talk and act like us. Conservatives are evil. Liberals are evil. The virus is fake. The virus is real. If you wear a mask when you go to the store, you’re doing your part to keep your family and your community safe. If you wear a mask when you go to the store, you’re bowing down to authoritarianism and yielding up your rights.

I’m sure I’ve missed something else, but I’ll stop there.

Adding to that list won’t do anything but add to our collective aggravation. You know what’s going on out there as well as I do. Much like the coronavirus itself, few of us are immune. There are days when it feels like we’re all being pushed right to the edge of something terrible, and we’re clawing at whatever we can to just hang on but we know we can’t hang on much longer. I’ll say that when this nationwide quarantine started, I compared it to 9/11 — a horrible thing we would endure but which would also bring us all together. I believed that. As painful as 9/11 was for those who experienced it, 9/12 was one of the best days in our country’s history. We mourned together. Set aside our differences. Saw one another as neighbors. For a few precious days we were not believers and atheists, right and left, pro-life or pro-choice.

We were just Us.

That hasn’t happened this time, has it? Far from bringing a broken nation together, these past months have only widened the gap between us. We can’t seem to agree on anything anymore.

I make it a point to keep this space somewhat light. Find out the big things hidden in the little things. Usually that means telling you about people I know or people I’ve met, ordinary folks who see life in extraordinary ways. Every writer faces a choice each time he or she sits down to a keyboard or a piece of paper: write something good about how we’re all different, or something great about how we’re all the same. Time and again, I steer myself toward the latter. Because I don’t care who you are or where you live or how you vote or how your skin is colored, you and I are the same in more ways than we’re not. That idea has always been foundational to the way I see the world. Sadly, it seems a lot of people don’t agree.

Somewhere along the line we quit seeing each other as human beings and started seeing them as their opinions.

We’ve forgot that people are precious, valuable not for what they believe but simply because they exist.

I wish I had a story this week. Nothing would make me happier than to tell you of some good ol’ boy I ran into at the store, or share a story from my childhood, or relay what some of the kids are doing around the neighborhood. I don’t have any of that. All that’s left to me this week is mourn what we’ve become, and maybe that’s a good start.

Maybe mourning is the only way we’ll ever change.

Turn the page (The grocery store, Part II)

April 15, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

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

Consider this Part II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This ain’t no goddamned fairytale here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Try answering that in a supermarket aisle.

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

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

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

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

So don’t put your book down just yet.

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

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

The best things in us

April 6, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

A quick look at my website tells me that it’s been almost two years since I added a single word to this blog.

Aside from the (very) occasional update to social media, I’ve largely been absent from the internet. There are reasons for this, good ones and many, which will likely come up from time to time in the weeks and months ahead.

For those who have kindly reached out privately to make sure I am still alive, thank you. I very much am. And for those who have wondered if I’m still writing — yes, I also very much am.

But again, we’ll get to that.

Suffice it to say for now that there was some question if Billy Coffey should remain Billy Coffey or perform a bit of literary magic and become someone else, and that at some point in the last two years, the internet became little more to me than just a place where people shouted at each other. Both of those things made me realize that maybe the wisest decision was to take a nice long break and head back out into the real world.

It’s ironic that heading back out into the real world is what ended up bringing me back to my own little corner of the virtual one.

Because it’s crazy out there right now, isn’t it?

One month ago we were all under the impression that our lives were as solid as the world we walked upon. Now we’re coming to understand that was just a story we told ourselves to keep the monsters away. The truth is that life is a fragile thing, much like our happiness, our peace, and our plans for the future. Any one of them can be threatened at any time by any number of things. We’re nowhere near as big and strong as we think. A lot of us are figuring that out right now, myself included.

Like most of you, I’ve spent the last few weeks at home. My wife the elementary school teacher is still teaching, though only to those students blessed with internet access and only from our sofa. Our children are here. I am fortunate enough to continue my day job here here in my upstairs office. We take the dog on long walks and play basketball in the driveway, spend our evenings on the front porch listening to the wind and the birds and our nights watching movies. We’ve fared better than most. The sickness has stayed away from our little town. Though its shadow creeps in everywhere, I’m even more glad than usual to call this sleepy valley my home.

Social distancing, that’s the key.

Keep others safe by keeping yourself safe. Don’t go out unless you have to. That’s life for all of us right now, and it looks like it’s going to stay that way for a while. One day at a time, wash your hands, sneeze into your elbow, wear a mask, call and text the ones you love.

Get by. I keep hearing that from people — we all just need to hang in there right now and get by.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that, and for many of us that has to be enough. Let’s face it, hanging in there and getting by is exhausting. Most days feel like we’re all having to swim against a constant current. Victory doesn’t mean progress, it just means holding in place.

That was my thinking up until about two days ago. I figured the best way through this was to keep apart and keep busy, so that’s what I’d been doing. Lots of work. Lots of walks. Lots of writing and reading. Getting by. I thought I was doing everything right.

Then I had to go to the Food Lion in town.

It can be a harrowing experience to go to the store now, and next time I’ll tell you how that trip to get some groceries made me feel a lot better about things. But right now I’ll leave you with what the little old Amish lady in line told the cashier. I couldn’t hear the beginning of their conversation (the rest of us in line were standing six feet apart and looking at each other like we were all infected), but I did catch the end, that warm smile and a gentle voice that said:

“The worst things in the world can never touch the best things in us.

We just have to try and get our eyes off the one and put them on the other.”

Not the first time an Amish lady told me exactly what I needed to hear.

The truth is that I’ve been practicing as much distraction these last few weeks as distance, keeping myself busy so I wouldn’t have to stop for a minute and really think about what all of this is and what it means. I’m not going to beat myself up over that. Sometimes the things that come into our lives feel too big to handle. Too scary to look at. For a lot of us, this time is one of those things. There’s nothing ever wrong in getting by.

But that little Amish lady at the Food Lion stirred something in me that had gone asleep.

I’m tired and stressed and worried and can’t stop washing my hands. But for as much as I just want all of this to be over, I also don’t want it leave me the same as I was a month ago. If we believe that nothing in life is random and everything means something — and I do — then there must be a purpose to all things, even the bad ones. For me, that means wondering what my purpose is in this, and what purpose this has in my own life.

Somewhere along the line, I lost myself. I bet I’m not the only one who can say that.

If that’s you, then maybe we can find ourselves together. Because in the end, that’s how we’ll all get through this.

Together.

A case of The Feels

July 19, 2016 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

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.

Darkness and light

June 15, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Eyes in the dark A big part of my duties around the house involves taking care of those things everyone else finds objectionable. Getting rid of any creepy-crawly beyond the size of a fly? My territory. Also most accidental discharges by the dog. I’m the Poop and Pee guy.

I am also, as it turns out, The One Who Gets The Clothes Off The Line When They’ve Been Forgotten And It’s Close To Midnight guy, which is what I’m doing now. It’s a new one for me, and one that never would have happened if my wife hadn’t gotten up a little bit ago and glanced through the window into the backyard.

Can’t leave the clothes on the line, she said. The dew would get them by morning; she’d have to wash them again.

Both of the kids were in bed, though I’ll add that it wouldn’t have made much of a difference if they’d been awake. My daughter is thirteen and my son is eleven (going on twenty), but neither one of them do the dark. Nor, for that matter, does my wife. She said she would be happy to take the clothes off the line. All I had to do was stand guard at the backdoor.

So: me.

She’s standing at the backdoor now. Keeping watch, I suppose. You’re asking what exactly my wife is keeping watch for? Well, I suppose it’s any number of things. Our neighborhood is large (too large, if you’d like my opinion), but our house abuts thirty thousand acres of woods and mountains that served as the inspiration for a place called Happy Hollow in my books. Talk to many around here, they’ll warn you away from those woods at night. There are stories. But aside from tales of ghosts and unknown beasts, there really are things around here that creep in the night and are best left alone. Our neighbors woke one morning not long ago to find a bear on their front porch. I’ve killed too many copperheads in our creek. So, yeah. Maybe that’s why my wife’s standing on the other side of the screen while I take down these clothes.

I told her there’s no need to watch. She knows that. She also knows the dark doesn’t bother me, that in fact I’ve come to find a feeling in it that, while not comfort, is something akin to it. I don’t mind the dark. That’s when I can see the stars.

They’re out here tonight, right over my head. Bits of light tossed into the sky like millions of tiny dice, planets and suns and a band of the Milky Way all keeping time to some celestial music that beats not in the ears but the heart.

Growing up, I learned to pray in the dark. I’d go outside every night and look up at the sky, and if there were stars I’d start talking. If there weren’t, I’d just listen. I learned a lot that way. It’s highly recommended.

Almost done. Half the clothes are off now. I pull the pins away and put the pins in the cloth sack hung on the line, fold each article of clothing and place it in the basket. I’m assuming my wife is telling me to hurry up. I don’t, even though there’s something in the bush nearby. Maybe a possum. Or a rabbit. Too small to be a bear. Could be one of those adolescent Bigfoots I heard about a few weeks ago. Seems a guy was fishing out in the woods and came across an entire family. Swears it, and never mind that he was drunk off his rocker at the time. Probably isn’t one of those in my bush, but I still catch myself wondering what I’d do if it was. Talk about a story.

Speaking of which, I had someone last week ask me why my stories had gotten darker as the years have trundled on. I didn’t know how to respond to that. I suppose they have (The Curse of Crow Hollow will be out in less than two months, and it’s both my best so far and a far, far cry from my first novel), but I can’t really speak as to why that’s the case. I suppose if I had to, I’d say it’s just me getting back to my roots. My kin have long told stories about those caught along the thin line that stretches between worlds, and the darkness that lurks both there and inside the human heart. Besides, it’s light that I really want to write about. Where better to see that light than in a bit of darkness?

And really, we’re all living in a kind of darkness, don’t you think? This great world we inhabit, all the fancy toys we carry with us and all the knowledge we possess, doesn’t change the fact that there are dangers everywhere, hungry things lurking about, and whether it’s cancer or terrorism or crime or simply the slow winding down of life, those things are always close. That’s what makes living such a hard thing, and what makes all of us so courageous.

There, done. The last pair of jeans, the final T shirt. My wife can go to bed now knowing there won’t be any clothes to wash again in the morning. I take the basket and make my way to the porch, casting one last look at all those stars. Pausing to say Thanks, for everything. At the door, I catch a glimpse of two glowing eyes from the bush. And you know what? I say thanks for that, too.

Being cursed

May 4, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

I remember the morning he rang the doorbell sometime after one, waking me and the dog and everyone else. Your bell rings that time of night, you know it’s either trouble or bad news.

The kid was no more than seventeen, short and thin and scraggly-looking. I cracked the door and he said, “You seen my dog, Sir?”

I told him I hadn’t and neither did anyone else, whole neighborhood asleep and most of the woods, and a kid who goes around knocking at doors this time of night is looking to get killed, dog or no. Especially a kid stoned out of his mind. He said yessir and sorry sir and went on his way.

I knew where he lived, down the next block in the big red house most of the people around here know to be cursed and maybe is. The family who last moved out of there did so out of necessity. The father gone to jail and the mother gone to rehab, their kids scattered. Even here drugs are plentiful, their pull just as strong as in any fancy city. I knew the father well, watched him turn from aspiring businessman to addict and watched his money disappear right along with his hair and weight and teeth. He told me after he moved in that the builder, a preacher in town, stamped the heads of all his nails with scripture verses. Said it felt good to live in such a house. Might bring luck, he said. It didn’t.

The boy was shooting hoops in the road when I walked by with the dog that next day. He never said a word to me and I never said a word back. My dog growled, but that was all. The boy didn’t know who I was and never had a clue he’d stood on my porch the night before, rousing us all and nearly getting himself shot. His eyes were wide as moons and bloodshot. For every two steps he took, one was a stumble. A man down the street paused in his mowing to say hello. He shook his head at the boy and said, “House got a curse.” I told him about the heads of those nails, how they’d all been stamped with Jn 3:16 and Phil 4:12. The man just chuckled and went back to cutting his grass.

The big news here is the high schooler who got himself killed in a wreck a couple weeks back. Ran his car off the road. There may have been a telephone pole or an old oak involved. No one knows for sure. It was early when it happened, after midnight.

The red house filled up with cars and people, neighbors paying their respects. It’s a tragedy when life stops so short and cuts down someone so young. What went unsaid was how inevitable it all felt. Kid like that, always stoned or high or drunk, the sort who goes out knocking on doors at night. Something horrible was bound to happen. I think maybe so.

I’ve noticed the neighborhood kids giving the red house a wide berth now. They’ll scooch their bikes and skateboards to the other side of the road until that pass that house, won’t use the basketball goal. Word of the curse is getting around. If I allow my backwoods nature to get the better of me, I will admit the whole place does carry a heavy feeling. Like that house is full now but it’ll get hungry again soon enough.

I know that’s not true. Not to say there aren’t such things as curses, because there are. That young man, he was cursed. I watched hundreds of cursed people in Baltimore lately, looting and setting buildings on fire. Saw pictures of cursed cops, too. It’s not limited to place or race or economic standing. That curse is everywhere. It’s even you. Even in me. The more I watch the news and look down my quiet little street, the more I see it. Feel and know it. All it selfishness or apathy or sin, we’re all infected. We see the symptoms, but the curse is something I’ve missed only until recently.

Hopelessness.

That’s it.

That’s how people and neighborhoods and societies act when they have lost their hope. When they look into the mirror or peer into their tomorrows and see nothing looking back. And you know what? Such a thing can’t be fixed with money or policy. Can’t be fixed in Washington.

It has to be fixed in us.