hope – Page 2

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.

Beauty from ashes

July 9, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2015-07-08 at 1.11.18 PM The car exploded without warning on a day this past April, at a stopping center in an area of Baghdad called Al Mansour. Dozens were killed. The market was left charred and in tatters. The air carried a sickening smell of smoke and burnt flesh and the sounds of sorrow and rage and panic, that music of our age.

This is life for a great many people in the world, a daily existence upon which is balanced a need for the basic essentials of food and water, the universal desire for safety and comfort, and the very real possibility that an act as simple as going to the local grocery store may well end in death. People call our time the Digital Age or the Information Age, but there are times it seems more the Fearful Age.

That this bombing occurred somewhere in Baghdad doesn’t really matter. It could have just as easily been London or Paris, Moscow or whatever city is closest to you. The reality is that none of us are truly safe, and it’s been that way for a long while. Unlike my children, I never had to worry about terrorism as a boy. But I do have the memory of hiding beneath my school desk during a nuclear war drill, of glancing up at wads of chewing gum and scribbled names of children long gone and knowing even then how ridiculous it all seemed. As if my tiny school could keep the Russians away. As if a one-inch piece of laminated desktop would save me from death.

But we’ve learned to carry on in spite of it all, haven’t we? We outlasted the Cold War and Saddam and Osama. Chances are we’ll outlast whatever perversion of religion leaks out of the Middle East, too. Iran. China. North Korea. Maybe we’ll even be forced to outlast ourselves. But the shadow of death will still hover over this world as it has hovered since Cain slew Abel, and even in our safest and most quiet moments, we feel that shadow there. We take our children’s hands and tell them to keep close, worry when they don’t, all because of that shadow.

Yet somehow we still prosper. Our children grow on with us, we still find reason to laugh and sing and devote a large measure of our worry to things that don’t matter at all. We adapt to the shadow of death, that rot in the world. We get used to it. Humanity’s ability to accustom itself to all manner of horrible situations to the point where even the worst things become accepted as normal could be our greatest attribute. Without it, how could we have survived this long? And yet that knack for adjusting could also be our worst curse, because it allows evil to continue on unfettered.

I don’t know if that’s what Karim Wasfi was thinking when he heard of the bombing in Al Mansour, but I’m betting it was something close. Because while the dead and grieving were being taken away and the market workers were cleaning up—telling themselves and each other, perhaps, that this day was lost but tomorrow would perhaps be better—Karim Wasfi decided to do something about it. To do something profound. He didn’t reach for a gun, didn’t vow vengeance. He instead dressed in his best suit, reached for his cello, and went to the market. He placed a chair on the burnt ground, and there in the midst of all that carnage and ruin, he played.

One Iraqi said that Karim “is playing music for the souls of the people who died just a few hours ago. I can imagine them listening too, and wondering, ‘Why?’”

You don’t have to be dead to ask that question: Why? It is just as much the call of the living, a single word that has passed through the lips of every person who has drawn breath, one syllable that has both sparked faith and doubt. Why? Why must things be this way? Why is this allowed?

And here’s the answer—I don’t know. You don’t. No one does. We can couch our guesses in religious terms and say God has a plan. We can drown in the shadow of death and call it evidence that there is no plan at all. Either way, the reality remains. Life is merely a string of ever complex questions. The answers, for the most part, only come after.

But that reality doesn’t mean we’re powerless, nor does it take from us the burden of responsibility. We have a task in this life, you and I, and while that task can at times seem pointless and even false, it remains the only task that matters. We are not only to seek out the beauty that remains plentiful and vibrant in our world, but to make that music ourselves and in whatever way best suits us. It is to do as Karim Wasfi did on that April day. To fill the air with hope and love and peace, and to call that the music of our tomorrow.

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.

The future tree

April 23, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

There is an acorn on my son’s bedside table. Found by the two of us on a Sunday afternoon walk through the backyard.

That acorn is special to him. He now has inside knowledge that he formerly did not. He is privy to the acorn’s secret.

Which is this: There is a tree inside it.

Before, my son didn’t really know the true purpose of an acorn. He once saw a cat narrowly escape a falling acorn and surmised it was the tree’s method of self defense if something got too close for comfort–tree bullets. But then on another occasion he witnessed an acorn falling for no apparent reason at all. He didn’t know what to think then.

So. Seeing as how he had found another one and seeing as how I happened to be there with him at the time:

“Daddy, what do acorns do?”

Well. Acorns are seeds, I told him. And that in the Fall they drop from the trees to the ground. If all goes well and nothing bothers it much, the acorn will grow a root. When the warm weather comes back, a tree starts to grow.

“A tree?” he wondered.

“Yes. Inside the acorn is a tree.”

It was one of those times in my son’s life when validation comes for some of his more fantastical opinions. Are their dragons and fairies and pots of gold at the ends of rainbows? Yes. There had to be. If it’s true that a giant tree lives in a tiny acorn, then those things have to be true as well.

Wonderful!

But: “What do you mean if all goes well and nothing bothers it?”

Without going into the whole biological process (which I really didn’t know), I told him in broad strokes that the acorn needs things in order to turn into a tree. Water, for one. And good soil. Sunshine, too. If it has all of those things, it will grow.

We looked around and found four more acorns scattered across the yard. Those, he said, should stay were they were. But he first one went into his pocket.

I understood. Sometimes we need small examples of larger truths.

Like that acorn, we all have something big inside us. And like that acorn, what lies there must be tended to and cared for in order to grow.

It won’t be easy. That acorn is small. We are, too. And both of us are stuck in a world where there are plenty of things determined to keep us that way.

A world worth saving

January 8, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Piney Mills may sound like a good enough place to live—one of those neighborhoods that offer a mixture of Cape Cods and ranches and the occasional bricked manor home, all with the stars and bars hanging from a pole, each with mats at the front door that say WELCOME. But it’s not like that at all. Piney Mills is instead a sprawling trailer court just outside of town that borders an expanse of national forest that is largely untrodden save for moonshiners, meth dealers, and love-struck teenagers in search of somewhere private to do some heavy petting.

In other words, every town has that one place where you don’t go unless you absolutely have to. For my town, Piney Mills is that one place.

It was a favor for a friend that took me there a couple weeks ago. He had a sofa that needed to be moved, I had the truck to move it. It was a minor errand that would take no more than an hour, but I still dreaded the trip. Piney Mills is an underbelly. When you go there, it’s best to prepare yourself for the things you’ll likely see—the poverty, the want, the neglect, yes. But mostly it’s the crass, profane attitudes the people there have adopted, either because of the sorry states of their lives or their bleak prospects of their futures.

I wasn’t disappointed in that regard. The decayed (and bullet-ridden, I might add) wooden PINEY MILLS sign at the entrance was guarded by a boy no older than six. He was dressed in jeans that were a size too short and a stained sweatshirt that read AUSTIN 3:16 SAYS I JUST KICKED YOUR ASS that was at least three sizes too big. As I pulled from pavement to gravel, he looked at me and offered a tiny middle finger.

I wound my way along the park’s main avenue. Trailers in various states of disrepair offered clues as to what the inhabitants considered important and not. I saw a bevy of duct-taped windows, porches littered with empty beer cases, and pristine satellite dishes clinging to sagging roofs. What few people that mingled about in the cold stared through dead eyes with a mix of resignation and distrust.

The guilt I felt wasn’t because my life had been offered more, but that I had to go to a place like that to be reminded of it.

The sofa in question was colored in a microfiber lime green and seemed to weigh as much as the truck that would transport it. My friend and I managed to hook it out of the narrow doorway and into the bed without causing further damage to either. He offered me coffee that I eagerly accepted. We spent the next half hour talking on his front stoop.

There is a rhythm to every place, even a place like Piney Mills. As the minutes wore on and the talk drifted from Christmas to work, the neighborhood awoke to a point where I was tolerated if not accepted. A woman across the street came outside long enough to wave and ask if we needed further help with the sofa. The man in the trailer beside us walked out to fetch his morning paper. He wore a threadbare purple bathrobe and nothing more. That didn’t stop him from noticing the errant newspaper that straddled the boundary between his trailer and the next, which he promptly delivered to an expectant and thankful elderly woman next door. Children appeared to play football in the street. For a while, even in that sad place, there was the sound of laughter and fun.

I realized then that I’d been missing something besides that appreciation for my life’s bounty. It was an important lesson, one I think is worth sharing here. It is simply that there is still joy in this world, still beauty. Still good. We might believe those things to be sparse and that might be true, but I don’t think so. Even in Piney Mills, that place the local police know well, you can find glimpses of our better selves. You can be reminded that while we are all fallen, dirty, incorrigible people, we are also capable of good and laughter.

I’m going to remember that the next time I turn on the television or pick up a newspaper. I’m going to hang on to that notion the next time my eyes are drawn heavenward and I’m tempted to say Come now, just come on and put an end to all this mess.

Because this world is still worth saving. It’s still worth our faith. It’s still worth living in.

Old Saint Fred

December 15, 2014 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

I’ve always had trouble with the parking lot at Wal-Mart. Don’t ask me why. Maybe because it’s so big or my mind is usually on what I need and what aisle I can find it. Not sure. But regardless, a trip there usually concludes with me wandering around looking for my vehicle, thinking that this must be what old feels like.

Take the weekend, for instance. Nice Saturday afternoon. Sunny. Cold but not frigid. Christmastime. And me, wandering around the west end of the parking lot feeling like one of the misfit toys.

As it is the weekend and it’s only another couple weeks until Christmas, the parking lot is full of cars. Squeezing between cars and trucks, I happen upon a green mini-van. The driver is nestled snug in his seat, seatbelt on, and dead to the world.

Lucky guy, I think. Lets his wife go into the throng of crazed discount shoppers. Lets her fight and claw and scream for the last Elmo or Barbie, and then lets her stand in line alone for half an hour while since only three of the forty checkout lines are open. And he gets to snooze in the mini-van.

Then something about him catches my eye. Not something in particular, but overall: longish white hair and beard, red shirt and pants, and a jelly-like pudge in the midsection.

This was no mere guy.

This was Santa.

One of his eyes opens and stares at me staring at him. We’re locked that way for a moment, each trying to figure out what’s going on and what’s happened. I smile. He smiles.

“Hiya,” he says, rolling down the window.

I nod. “Guess if anyone’s tired this time of year, it’d be you.”

He lets out a long exhale, shakes his head, and says, “Buddy, you don’t know.”

Santa, as it turns out, isn’t Santa at all. Fred’s his real name. Just finished his shift at a local store and was on his way home when Mrs. Fred called. Could he stop by Wal-Mart and pick up a few things?

He’d made it, but barely. Having kids sit on your lap for four hours tends to tucker a person out, Fred said. As soon as he put the car in park he felt that warm sunshine streaming through the window. Next thing he knew, he was awake and staring at me.

“Been a rough year,” he told me. “I’m used to kids wanting things, you know? ‘I’d like a truck’ or ‘I’d like a dolly’ or ‘Could you bring me a dinosaur?'”

“What’s the big gift this year?” I asked him.

“Hope,” he said. “Kids want hope.”

Those words stunned me. I swallowed nothing and furrowed my brow.

“What you you mean?” I asked him.

“Shoot, son,” he said. “Take a look around. It’s bad out here. Money’s dryin’ up, parents losin’ their jobs. I had a kid sit on my lap this morning and ask me to find his daddy a job. Had another who just wanted her mommy to stop crying all the time. And one, one said his daddy told him Santa might not come this year, but he knew that since he’d been a good boy, Santa’d have to come and leave him something. And that’s just today. Just today, you see? Hey, don’t get me wrong. I love Christmas. But between you and me, I’ll be glad when this one’s over.”

“Guess so,” I said. “I’ll leave you to your napping, then.”

“Thanks,” Fred answered. “And Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.”

I found my truck right where I left it and decided to drive by Fred on my way out of the lot. He was asleep again.

My ride home wasn’t filled with Jimmy Buffett’s Christmas Island or Harry Connick Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas. There was instead only silent contemplation.

Hope. That’s what Fred said the kids want this year. I would imagine that’s what a lot of grownups want this year, too.

Sad, isn’t it, that for many people this time of year isn’t a time for hope? For presents, certainly. And for family. But not hope. Christmas was turned into X-mas, which has now been turned into Holiday (that story comes tomorrow). All of this was conceived to keep everyone happy. To include everyone and give no reason for offense. But by doing so, I fear we’ve buried the very hope so many people seek this year.

The hope that was born on Christmas day a couple thousand years ago in a tiny manger in a tiny town. Hope wrapped in a baby.