Billy Coffey

storyteller

When things were right

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creekMy kids tell me they’d rather be growing up when I did.

Trade 2017 for, say, 1978. Anything with a “19” as the first two numbers will do. I’m certain the bulk of their evidence for this conclusion can be handed to the stories I tell about how life was once lived in our little town, which isn’t little so much anymore. “Back in the day,” as some would put it. Or, as I’m apt to say, “When things were right.”

Like how during the summer you might go all day without seeing your parents and your parents were fine with that, because they knew you were safe and you’d be home either when you got hungry or when the streetlights came on.

Or how you’d just keep your hand raised above the steering wheel when you drove down Main Street because everybody knew everybody else. You either went to school with them or went to church with them or were kin to them through blood or marriage.

How there was Cohron’s Hardware right across from Reid’s mechanic shop, and if you were a kid and knew your manners you get a free piece of Bazooka! gum at the former and a free Co’Cola in a genuine glass bottle that was so cold it puckered your lips at the other.

How, back then, you rode your bike down to the 7-11 to play video games—Eight-ball Deluxe on the pinball and Defender and RBI Baseball—and then pool what money you had left for a Slurpee and a pack of Topps baseball cards.

How maybe in the afternoons there’d still be change enough in your pocket to buy a Dilly bar from the hippie who drove the ice cream truck around the neighborhood. You’d hurry up and eat before the sun could melt it away and then head over for pickup games at the sandlot which rivaled any Game 7 of any World Series, and after, once all the playing was done and the arguing finished, you’d have the best drink of water in your life out of Mr. Snyder’s garden hose.

Evenings were for supper and bowls of ice cream fresh from the machine your daddy spent and hour cranking on the porch. You spent the nights catching lightning bugs and lying in bed slicked with sweat because there was only that one fan in the hallway. You’d go to sleep listening to the lonely mockingbird singing through the open window from the maple in the backyard.

So, yeah. I get it when my kids say that’s the life they want. Who wouldn’t want a childhood like that?

Truth be known, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I’d like to grow up back then again, too. Not so much to right certain wrongs (I have none, other than the day when I was six that I crushed a frog with a cinderblock just to see what it’d look like), but just to go back. To feel that sense of freedom again, and safety, and to know the world as wide and beautiful instead of small and scary.

I’ve talked to others over the years who feel the same way. Some grew up with me in this tiny corner of the Virginia mountains. Many more did not. They were born elsewhere in towns and cities both, yet each carry a story not unlike my own as one would a flame in the darkness. Even many who suffered horrible childhoods look back over them with a sense of fondness. They tell me things like, “Those were some good years, weren’t they?” Even when they weren’t.

This is part of what it means to be human, I think. We spent the first years of our lives wanting nothing more than to get away from where we are, only to spend the rest of it trying to get back.

My kids will be the same way. Yours, too. They will grow and flourish and have kids of their own, and those kids will be regaled with tales of how much better the world was back in the day. When things were right.

It’s only been in these last few years that my own parents have begun telling me the truth about my golden childhood. How they often struggled to keep a roof over my head and food on my table and clothes on my back. How it seemed like the country was on the cusp of some great abyss. People at each other’s throats. War looming. Nuclear missiles. How it was hard to tell the truth from the lies. Sound familiar?

My parents don’t look back on that time with fondness at all. To them, it was their childhood world of the 50s that was back in the day. That was when everything was right.

I’m sure my grandparents would disagree if they were yet here.

There were no good old days. I think we all know that deep down.

But that doesn’t stop us from believing there were, from wanting so desperately to know that one lie a truth in its own right. Because that’s part of what it means to be human, too. Maybe the best part. That deep longing and need for a time when things are right.

There are some among us who believe that will never be the case. Things were never right and never will be. I’m not one of them. Sure, deep down I know that my childhood wasn’t always the bright summer day I remember it to be now. But on some distant tomorrow? Well.

I’ve heard that heaven will be made up of all those secret longings we carry through our lives. I hope that’s true. Because if it is, I can take comfort in the fact that I’ll be spending eternity on a quiet street in a quiet town in a quiet corner of Virginia. I’ll be listening to mockingbirds and playing a pickup game of baseball and drinking from a water hose.

That’s all I want. Nothing more.

The lost art of snail mail

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Screen Shot 2013-11-21 at 6.33.49 PM“Can you help me?”

A common enough question in the course of my workday as a college mailman. Asked by the old and the young alike, but mostly the young. And I am generally in a well enough mood to reply Yes, I certainly can help you, even if I am generally not in a well enough mood to be excited about the prospect. Because if there is one thing I’ve learned in my long and storied career of postal delivery to a bunch of 18-21 year-olds, it’s that they often need a lot of help. A LOT.

So, just a bit ago—“Can you help me?”

Yes.

Young lady, nineteen-ish. I pegged her as a junior. Not because I knew anything at all about her, but because I’ve been here long enough to be able to guess such things with a modicum of accuracy. It was the way she dressed—pajama bottoms and a raggedy sweatshirt, which told me she’d been here long enough to not care anymore but no so long that she understood it just may be time to start growing up a little—and the way she addressed me—in the eye. She’d laid the envelope, pen, and stamp on the counter in front of her. When I walked up, she was staring at all three as if they were all pieces to some exotic puzzle.

I asked what sort of help she needed, which could have been anything from needing a zip code to how much postage was needed to mail something to China. But no, neither of those.

Instead, she said, “I don’t know how to mail this.”

“Just fill it out,” I told her. “I’ll mail it for you when you’re done.”

“No. I mean, I don’t know . . . how.”

“How to what?”

“You know. Like, fill this out.”

She pointed to the envelope and stared at it. I stared at it, too. Because I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You mean,” I asked, “you don’t know how to address an envelope?”

“No.”

“You mean, No, that’s not it? Or do you mean, No, I don’t know how to address an envelope?”

Now she looked at me. Her brow scrunched. I got the image of her seated in some classroom desk, trying to split the atom.

“I don’t know how to address an envelope,” she said.

I’ll be honest—it took me a while. Not to show her how to address an envelope (which, as it turned out, took much, much longer than a while, took what felt like an eternity), but for what this young woman told me to finally sink in. She really didn’t know how to address an envelope. Had no idea where to put the stamp, where to write her home address (it was a card, she said, to her mother) and not only where to write the return address, but what a return address was.

Nineteen years old. Junior in college. I can assume this young lady was bright, or else she wouldn’t be in college. And resourceful. And driven. Capable, too—she whipped out her iPhone and danced through so many apps to find her mother’s address that it nearly gave me a seizure. But when it came to something as commonplace as sending a letter? Nothing.

“Nobody sends letters anymore,” she told me. “It’s so 1800s.”

She finished her envelope and affixed the stamp (after being told where that went, too). I had to sit down for a bit afterward. My head was killing me.

Now I’m thinking:

Is this really where we’ve come? Have we really raised a generation of children who are so dependent upon technology that anything without a button is an unsolvable mystery?

But there’s something more as well, something far worse. In our instant world of texts and emails and Facebook posts and tweets, that poor girl has missed out on one of the true pleasures of life. She has never sat at a quiet desk with paper and pen to write a letter. She has never pondered over the words that have leaked through her hand and fingers, never slowed enough to find the rhythm of her words and her heart. She has never felt the trepidation of folding those words (and her heart) into thirds and stuffing them in an envelope sealed with her own saliva—her own DNA—and placing it in a mailbox. Never worried that her letter maybe wouldn’t get to where it was meant to go. Never felt the exhilaration of finding a sealed reply waiting for her days or weeks later.

Give me the new, the world says. Give me the shiny and the bright. I say take it. I’ll keep my paper and pen.

A letter to me

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

When helping your parents clean out their attic, it helps if you approach the task as a recovery mission. You aren’t discarding, you’re salvaging. I know this from experience. I did it three weeks ago.

We found the normal things—Christmas decorations long forgotten, toys long neglected, and several items of which no one can remember using, much less purchasing. We found not-so-normal things as well. Like the box of notebooks.

You could say I caught the writing bug early; I was filling notebooks before I understood what words were, drawing pictures of the sun and trees and describing them with an jumble of mismatched and incoherent letters. These, sadly, were not in the box.

The high school stuff was.

Lyrics mostly, as if the words to Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Cinderella’s “Coming Home” were so moving, so utterly profound, that they warranted preservation for the ages.

There were thoughts as well. Plenty of them, all sopping with the angst and shallowness that define the teenage years. Some were laughable in their naivety—“The suddenness of life is a guarantee the soul is eternal.” Others, to my surprise, weren’t so bad at all—“We have lost much of the language of religion, but little of our longing for a faith in something larger than ourselves.”

Memories, all. Not the false ones either, the ones that are saccharine in the remembering. These were more a mixture of sweet and salty, proof that my recollections were true. Regardless, the decision of whether the box was to be discarded or salvaged was an easy one.

It all went to the junk pile save for a single sheet of paper torn from the notebook on top. The last page, as a matter of fact. Written two days before I graduated.

It was a letter. Not to the me I was then, but to the me I am now.

A portion:

“I don’t know who you are (hard to do that, especially since it’s tough enough knowing who I am). I don’t know what you’re doing, either. But I can make the sort of guess with both that people do when they see a falling star or a discarded eyelash, the sort of guess that has a wish at the end. So I’m guessing you’ve made it. I’m guessing you’re rich and famous and happy, and I’m guessing you’re far away. And I figure as long as I guess and wish those things, I’m going to be okay. Because that means I’ll eventually be you.”

I remembered writing that. It was late at night. I was outside, scribbling in my notebook while watching the stars and sneaking a Marlboro red. I remembered how I felt then—sweet and salty, so it must be true—knowing that part of my life was about to fall away and another was ready to begin.

I was afraid. Afraid of the world and my place in it. And in that fear I wrote that night with a sense of purity and honesty that even now I try to capture each time I reach for pen and paper.

I wrote those words in secrecy, and now, all these years later, I snatched them away in secrecy as well. No one saw me stash that letter into my pocket. I’ve kept it since on the top of my office desk, there and not there, like a sickness hidden from a doctor for fear it is a symptom of something more serious.

“So I’m guessing you’ve made it. I’m guessing you’re rich and famous and happy, and I’m guessing you’re far away. And I figure as long as I guess and wish those things, I’m going to be okay. Because that means I’ll eventually be you.”

I couldn’t let those four sentences go. They weren’t supposed to be disposed. They were supposed to be salvaged. I needed to answer myself.

Today is my birthday. I suppose by some sort of twisted logic, that’s why I waited until now to send a note of my own back in time. After all, birthdays are much like graduations. They are a falling away and a beginning.

So on my porch this morning in front of the mountains and the birds and the rising sun, I wrote this:

“I’m not rich. I’m not famous. And though twenty-five years separate us in time, only five miles separate us in distance. But I’ve found things greater than those, and I’ve become happy in the finding. Because the things you search for as a child are not the things you stumble upon as an adult, and thank God for that.”

One unselfish act

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It is a known fact that one of the main reasons why I’m friends with Tommy Fuller is because of what’s in his backyard. I realize this paints me in somewhat of a bad light on the surface. In my defense, though, Tommy is not only aware of this, he’s fine with it. He figures it’s a trade off. One of the main reasons he’s friends with me is because he borrows my golf clubs.
It’s a good deal as far as I’m concerned. Tommy’s a great guy. Even better than that is the fact that he has an open door policy when it comes to his backyard. I can visit any time I like, even if he isn’t there. The kids are welcomed, too. Sometimes we even make an afternoon of it. They can jump on his trampoline, and I can climb his oak tree.

Tommy has one of the biggest back yards in town with THE nicest tree smack in the middle of it. Tall and full, and the limbs are spaced just far enough apart to let through the perfect amount of sunlight. Home to squirrels and robins and friendly bugs. It’s the sort of tree that belongs more in a Disneyland attraction than a redneck’s backyard.

The farm has been in the Fuller family for generations, and it’s one of the oldest in the area. Tommy’s grandfather and father were both raised there, as was he. When his mother passed away ten years ago, he moved in and got control of the property. And when the time comes, Tommy will pass the torch onto one of his sons. In the Fuller family, the circle never ends.

There aren’t many properties around here that carry charm like that anymore. Most of the farmers in town have sold their acres of fields and forest to developers, giving in to the promise of a life of comfort rather than sweat. Tommy won’t bow to that false promise. There will be no subdivisions on his land. Not because his principles are too strong or his faith too unwavering, but because of that tree.

Because it is quite literally a family one.

Look on the back side and you can see the faint outlines of his father’s pledge to his mother back when they were mere boyfriend and girlfriend. BF Loves KT, it says. Tommy says his mother and father would sit beneath that tree often during their courtship, resting in the shade of their love.

And on the other side are the marks Tommy carved to his own bride to be, pledged in wood on the night they became engaged.

In the upper reaches of the oak is a tree house that Tommy built for his boys. Though worn, it’s still in good shape. He sees his future grandchildren playing pirate there.

But the best part? The best part isn’t the tree, It’s the stone plaque beside it.

03 MAY 1901, it says.

According to Tommy, his great grandfather planted that tree himself on a calm spring afternoon. Dug the hole, gently placed the seedling inside, then covered and watered it. And after that he stuck his shovel in the ground and just smiled. Tommy remembers his grandfather saying that it was a strange smile, part sadness and part joy. The sort of smile a dying man wears. Tommy doesn’t know what was wrong with his great grandfather, just that he didn’t have much longer. And he didn’t. If you drove over to the church nearby you would see that the date of his death and the date the tree was planted are less than a month apart.

It’s amazing that something so small and fragile could grow into something so large and strong. But love is like that. Hope, too. That’s what I think about when I sit in that tree.

And I also think about this—on a calm spring afternoon more than a century ago, a dying man’s last act was to plant something he would never be able to see grow. He would never get to rest in its shade or climb its branches. He would never get to enjoy it, but he planted it anyway. Not for himself, but for those who would come afterward.

I like that idea.

According to some, there is no such thing as an unselfish act. But this comes close. And I think that for all the lofty goals the human spirit can strive to accomplish, this is the most noble—that we spend our days in pursuit of something that will outlive us. That we plant seeds destined to bless not only ourselves, but generations.

2015: Anywhere but here

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Class of 2015These days it’s not only the bright colors and long sunshine that tells me summer is close; the cars and trucks tell me, too. Specifically, the back windows on the rusting hoopties the neighborhood teens drive. That’s where the messages go, whether in soap or, more often, traced through a layer of dirt and pollen with a finger.

SDHS 2015, they say.

GRADUATE!!

And this one, seen often from my porch in the last evenings, which sums up the general thinking of anyone between the ages of sixteen and eighteen—

ANYWHERE BUT HERE

I get that, I really do, at least in some way. I was eighteen once. Yet while my friends for the most part succumbed early on to the virulent strain of wanderlust that infects the young, I remained largely unaffected. The talents I’d grown up believing would carry me away from the valley and into the wide world were gone by the time I became a senior, and I had made peace with that long before I walked off the stage a high school graduate. By then, I no longer wanted to leave the mountains, had no desire to go off in search of anything. I’d already found what I needed right here. Here was—is—home, this speck sunk deep into the Blue Ridge that I share with deer and bear and coyote, rivers as clear and smooth as glass, fields golden and peaceful in the sun, and where the bones of my kin are buried, their souls sung to heaven.

Why would I ever want to leave such a place, if only for a while?

But as I said, I get it: the wanderlust. Though much larger now than the summer I graduated, ours is still a small town. Little happens here. In face, outside of a skirmish in the early spring of 1865 and an Indian war in some dim part of time (the evidence of both still here if you know where to look), nothing much has ever happened here. We are generally lower-middle class, blue collar, and Christian—farmers and factory workers and teachers who slog through five days so we can catch our breath for two. Sounds fine if you’re forty-something and want a peaceful place to roost your family. Not so much when you’re eighteen and suddenly, wonderfully, free. When you’re that age, wherever you are isn’t good enough. What you crave is adventure. What you dream is ANYWHERE BUT HERE.

Sometimes I think that describes us all to some extent. We’re all searching for a way to get ourselves over the hump, that one special thing that would bring a sparkle to the dullness that seeps into every life. I guess in that respect we could all be said to wander, even if we never venture beyond our doors.

I’m not the only member of the class of 1990 who’s stayed and carved out a life in this quiet corner of the world. Plenty more stayed, too. Those who went on to college and career have been flung not only across the country but also across the globe. I talk to some of them upon occasion, catching up. And each time, no matter what great things they’ve done or what magical places they’ve seen, I’m always asked the same question:

“How’s home?”

Because in the end it doesn’t matter where they all have gone or what they’re doing, this little town of field and mountain and holler remains that. Home. This place they once could not wait to flee and forget is now the place they know they can run back to if the world ever bared its teeth, and what dark memories remain of their former lives here have gone soft at the edges.

If I could say one thing to all those pending graduates, I think it would be that. I would tell them to go, light out into the territory, seek what treasures wait just over the horizon. But as you leave, know that the traveling is lighter if you carry home in your heart.

And know that should your eyes ever turn this way again, we’ll be waiting.

The game of life

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

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.

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