Billy Coffey

storyteller

The Father’s Love

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image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com
My grandfather gave me my first Bible. I was four. He called me into the small office he had just off the kitchen and sat me down like I’d done something wrong (which I had, in fact—many, many somethings, and I didn’t know which one I’d been caught doing or how), then removed a small, wrapped rectangle from his desk drawer. “Yours,” he told me. “I want you to have it.”

It was one of those small New Testaments with the Psalms and Proverbs in the back, the kind you still see passed out by the Gideons, of which my grandfather was one. I remember carrying that bible around with me everywhere. I’d sit and leaf through the pages, run my fingers over the words. I even underlined a few verses here and there, like I’d seen my grandmother do in her worn King James. I couldn’t read a word of it, of course. But I liked to pretend I could, and I couldn’t wait until I could for real.

I still have that old Bible. The back cover is gone and the pages are thinning and yellowed, but you can still see my name in pencil on the first page and “Love, Granddaddy” written beneath. I don’t use it anymore. It stays atop one of my bookcases, there more as a relic to admire than something to take down and handle. The one I use daily and haul back and forth to church is not unlike the one my grandmother owned, old and worn. I like it, though. Someone once told me a Bible in tatters is indicative of a life that is not.

Still like to write in my Bible, too. And underline. Leaf through the pages of mine and you’ll find marks and notes many years old, all of which form a kind of spiritual timeline for my life. I’ll read a note scrawled in the margin or find a circled verse, and I can tell you exactly what was happening in my life at the time. I can tell you what I was going through or wrestling with. I can tell you if I was stumbling or flying.

I have one verse that’s been highlighted and underlined and noted more than any other. So much, in fact, that I now have to squint and raise the page close to be able to read it.

Romans 8: 38-39:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In the thirty years I’ve owned that Bible, I’ve circled and commented on nearly every one of those forty-nine words. Because I needed them, you see. There was a time when I needed to know that nothing could separate me from God’s love. There was another time when I needed to know it didn’t matter how high I was or how low, another when I needed to know I didn’t need to mourn my past, fear my present. Not even death was an end—there was a time when I needed to know that as well.

It’s the one verse I’ve gone to again and again. It has sustained me. It sustains me still.

I came across that verse this morning and paused to read it again. And I noticed something that had escaped me all this while, something I believe only time and experience has allowed me to see. One word in those two verses had been left unmarked, almost as if I’d never needed it or really understood why it was there.

That word was “life.”

Life can’t keep me from God’s love, either.

I’d never really considered that, never really understood what it meant. Until this morning, at any rate. Like I said—time and experience.

I’d presume you and I aren’t all that different. We’ve both been around enough. Done enough. Lived enough. We know to a certain degree what’s waiting when we get up every morning—the slog to work, the slog back home, the bills waiting in the mail and the people screaming on the TV that the world’s going to hell and we’d all better hang on. There are kids to worry about and retirement, and there’s that bum knee or the lump we feel or the arthritis settling in that lets us know we’re fast approaching the downward slope of life. There’s busted pipes and the clunking sound in the car and the dog to take to the vet. There’s dreams we once had and maybe still do, and there’s a sense of guilt and anger that maybe—maybe—what we are now is all we’ll ever be.

There’s life.

And you know what? All that stuff I just wrote can be as tiring and stressful and soul-crushing as any tragedy. I know people who have lost their faith through war or divorce or the death of a loved one. I know far more who have lost their faith by simply living day after day and year after year, trudging through the muck and the mire of life.

I underlined that word in my Bible this morning. Drew a box around it. To me, it’s the most important part of that verse now. Because God is determined not to keep death and the past and the future between Him and me. He won’t let life do it, either.

The boys of summer

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image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com

In the late springs it was always school and chores after, and when the grass was cut and the garden weeded, there would be time for an inning or two. Then May would give to June. I cannot fully convey just how special that time of year was to me growing up—those few weeks when the air would first warm and then the mountains blossom, and that long string of big, black X’s on the calendar I’d begun in September finally ended. Summer vacation. That’s when the season would really start. That’s when the lot would open.

There were five of us neighborhood kids, and we’d always get together once school was out. There was me and Greg and Chuck and Noel and Jonathan. Sometimes there was a sixth named Duane, but it wasn’t often he was allowed to play. Duane’s daddy was a preacher—not the holy roller kind but something close—and his momma always frowned on us neighborhood kids running around, shooting each other with pretend guns and playing cops and robbers. It was always better when Duane got to play. He was the only one willing to be the cop. It all turned out for the best, though. Duane, he never had much of an arm anyway.

That’s how we measured ourselves back then—by our arms. Not how big they were or how strong, but how far and how fast we could throw a ball. Because let me tell you—back in our old neighborhood, baseball was king and the lot was our castle.

It wasn’t much, that piece of land Maybe half an acre wide and that much long, with a row of big pines marking the left foul line and Mr. Pannill’s house marking the right. The road was our fence.

Come the first day of summer, we were at the lot every morning at 9:00 sharp. We’d play until the sun got too hot. Sometimes Greg’s mom would feed us, and it’d be peanut butter and banana sandwiches in the shade of those pines. Other times, we’d bike it down to the 7-11 and poll what money we had for the biggest Slurpee we could afford. One time Noel said he couldn’t share a straw with all of us, there were too many germs. Don’t you know we let him have it for being such a wuss. Then it’d be back to the lot for more of the same until the sun went down and our mommas started hollering.

The thing about childhood is that you don’t know how special it is until it’s over. All those memories you make will stay in your pocket for the rest of your life, and you’ll take them out from time to time just to handle them and remember. But I think we all understood that back then. I know I did. Even that young and even in the midst of those moment, I knew how special they’d become one day. How long-lasting.

I grew up in that lot. We all played on the Little League teams in town, but whatever we did on the big field didn’t matter. Our reputations—good or bad—were made between the pines and Mr. Pannil’s backyard, and we all knew it. I hit my first home run there, clear to the other side of the road. Broke my first bone in the outfield. I learned about divorce from listening to Noel talk about his parents, and I learned about sex from listening to Jonathan talk about his.

Things like that, they stay with you. They get tucked into your pocket and are never lost.

I learned this at the lot, too—nothing is ever permanent in this world. Even the good things go away eventually. We spent almost nine good summers on that lot and I remember each and every one of them, and I remember how it all began to slowly disappear. Noel moved away. So did Duane, though we never really missed him. The rest of us . . . well, I guess we all just grew up. We got cars and got older. Too old for the lot.

I’ve lost track of most of them now. That happens often in life too, and I think it’s one of the saddest things. There’s now a house where our lot used to be. It’s a nice ranch with a big front porch and flowers planted all the way down the sidewalk, but to me it’ll always be an ugly thing. To me, it will always be the thing that covered over my castle. But I drove down there tonight and just sat. It’s getting on in May and June is right around the corner—just the sort of evening when we’d get together for a few innings. I sat there with the window down and the breeze rustling through those old pines, and I swear I could hear the laughter of five young boys trying to figure out what it meant to be alive. I swear I would hear the ping of the bat. I swear I could hear someone say the next game’s tomorrow.

Tribes and tribulations

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

I can’t remember the name of the tribe, which is mildly ironic given the nature of their story. And it’s quite a story.It amazes me that regardless of how smart we are and how much we can do, we still know so little about the world.

Only 2 percent of the ocean floor has been explored. Species thought long extinct still turn up every once in a while. And just last year, scientists stumbled upon a valley in New Guinea that had gone untouched by man since the dawn of time. There were plants and insects never seen before. And the animals never bothered hiding or running from the explorers. They didn’t have the experience to tell them humans were a potential threat.

But of course it’s not just plants and animals and hidden valleys that are being discovered. People are, too. And that can lead to all sorts of things.

Take, for instance, the tribe I mentioned above.

They were discovered in 1943 in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon jungle. Contact was carefully arranged. Easy at first, nothing too rash. That seems to be rule number one in those situations–don’t overwhelm the tribe.

It didn’t work. Here’s why.

The difference between these particular people and the others that pop up every few years was that their uniqueness was foundational to their belief system. They’d been so cut off from civilization for so long that they were convinced they were the only humans in the world. No one outside of their small tribe existed. And they liked that idea.

Finding out that not only were there other people in the world, there were billions of them, was too much. The trauma of learning they were not unique was so debilitating that the entire tribe almost died out. Even now, sixty-nine years later, only a few remain.

Sad, isn’t it?

I’ll admit the temptation was there for me to think of that tribe as backward and primitive for thinking such a thing. But then I realized they weren’t. When you get right down to it, their beliefs and the truth they couldn’t carry made them more human than a lot of people I know.

Because we all want to be unique.

We all want to think we’re special, needed by God and man for some purpose that will outlast us. We want to be known and remembered. We all know on a certain level that we will pass this way but once, and so we want whatever time we have in this world to matter.

That’s not a primitive notion. That’s a universal one.

I think at some point we’re all like members of that tribe. We have notions of greatness, of doing at most the impossible and at least the improbable. Of blazing a new trail for others to follow. It’s a fire that burns and propels our lives forward.

I will make a difference, we say. People will know I was here.

But then we have a moment like that tribe had, when we realize there are a lot of other people out there who are more talented and just as hungry. People who seem to catch the breaks we don’t and have the success that eludes us. And that notion that we were different and special fades as we’re pulled into the crowd of humanity and told to take our rightful place among the masses.

It’s tough, hanging on to a dream. Tough having to talk yourself into holding the course rather than turning back. Tough having to summon faith amidst all the doubt.

But I know this:

That tribe was right.

We are all unique.

We are all here for a purpose, and it’s a holy purpose. One that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else and depends upon us.

We are more than flesh and blood. More than DNA and RNA and genes and neurons. And this world is more than air and water and earth. Whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, our hearts are a battleground between the two opposing forces of light and dark.

One side claims we are extraordinary. The other claims we’re common.

It’s up to us to decide the victor.

Can’t wait to die

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image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com

Dear Ms. Elementary School Counselor,

Chances are fair that I really don’t need to do this, not with the great number of other tasks that need to be crossed off what I’m sure is a long list. Still, a part of me expects your call at any moment.

I imagine your voice would be kind but grave, telling me in the most professional way possible that my son is afflicted with suicidal thoughts. You will probably suggest several courses of action, all of which should be immediate and most of which will involve varying arrays of medications and counseling. If that call should indeed come, I intend to put you at ease and email you this short note as an explanation, hoping you are of a mind to understand. Because, yes, my son did announce to the half-dozen or so of his classmates at the lunch table that he couldn’t wait to die, but that’s not what he meant. At least, not really.

Like most things, context is what’s important. That’s what I’ll give you. And if by some chance you haven’t received the full account of what my son and his friends were discussing, he said they were all ruminating on death. I’m not so intelligent, nor am I a licensed school counselor, but I would imagine such a topic wouldn’t raise too many red flags. It’s been my experience that children do not shrink from the thought of dying, that they see it as something what will always come sooner rather than later. It’s only when we grow up that death becomes a menace, something that should be ignored lest it be considered.

I say all that so I can say this—my son was merely stating a fact. He has told me often that he cannot wait to die, and I must confess the idea is not wholly his own. I was the one responsible for planting that thought in his head. I can’t wait to die, either. Nor my wife, nor my daughter. Nor, in fact, most of our friends and acquaintances. Before you panic and think you’ve just stumbled upon some hillbilly suicide pact, let me assure you that’s not the case. We—my son and his family—simply believe there isn’t death at all. There’s only life followed by more life.

I realize this may come as no surprise to you, and that you in fact may share this conviction. In a town in which there are nearly four times as many churches as stop lights, the odds are good that’s the case. And yet I am realistic enough to know the changing times—even here, many of the pews in many of those churches are emptying, life has grown too busy for the Sabbath, etc. If that’s true in your case, I’ll do my best to explain in greater detail.

You see, we believe there is more. More to life, more to the universe, more to everything. That all we know is but a sliver of what is actually true and real, and that hidden behind all we can perceive is a single thread that traces its beginning to a God beyond all understanding. That holy, loving God imbued us with more than a mind to ponder and a heart to feel. He gave us a soul as well, and he placed inside us all a spark of eternity that not even death can destroy.

I know—that might not make much sense. It sounds a bit irrational. Even childish. That’s fine. Much of what we believe seems as such to those who don’t. We’re used to being misunderstood and even mocked, but this is who we are, and this is what we will forever be.

I’ll only say this: yes, we are looking forward to that greater life beyond. We see that world as much brighter and more real than this tired and frail one we live in now. But that’s not to say we are eager to leave. We have much to do here, much more to grow. We have a purpose and meaning. So I ask that you not worry about my son. He’s in good hands. Worry instead for those who believe this life is the end, and only darkness waits hereafter.

With kind regards,

Helpless, but not powerless

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Screen Shot 2014-02-03 at 9.34.42 AMThere are degrees of heartache in life, each plotted on some imagined graph with “stubbed toe” on one end and “paper cut” farther up, up on through “loss” and “failure” and whatever else, but at the very top will be found a jagged black border surrounding bright red letters that read “sick child.”

I know this because I’m at the doctor’s office with two of them. What exactly is wrong with my children is beyond me, which is why we’ve taken the lengths to drive to the other side of town on such a hard winter’s day. The flu, perhaps—one of those strains not covered by this year’s shot. That, or two bad colds. I suggest the likely culprit is remorse for the cold and snow that has cancelled school these past few days. My son nudges me in the shoulder for that little remark. He tries to laugh. It comes out more a phlegmy snort and I think No, not a flu. Bronchitis, maybe. The doctor will know for sure.

My wife is on my opposite shoulder. Beside her is my daughter. She sniffles, and that small act brings a bit of rosy color to an otherwise pale face. Her coat is zipped to her chin, her blue scarf cinched tight, her legs tucked under her, yet she still shivers against the fever. It’s been two day now. My son’s discomfort is largely auditory—sharp sneezes and deep coughs, each punctuated by sudden and sometimes frantic sprints to the bathroom. My daughter’s condition is more silent and worrying. A diabetic since the age of four, maintaining her sugar is a constant walk upon a tightrope easily swayed and poorly moored. Any virus can ravage her. While you and I have a glucose level that holds steady anywhere from 80-110, hers just clocked in at 396.

And so we sit. And so we wait, huddled together in a tiny corner of this doctor’s office.

Our view is of a bleak outside and the bleaker faces that come in from it. It is a sad parade of the weak and the dying, and I think to myself that however stricken these poor souls are, it is at least themselves who are sick and not their children.

Hung in the middle of the far wall is a framed reprint of Sir Luke Fildes’ The Doctor, first painted in 1887. I’ve sat in this cracked vinyl chair and stared at that painting many times over the years through many discomforts, studying the central figure of the Victorian doctor gazing intently at his patient—a little girl lying sick on a makeshift bed of mismatched dining room chairs, two large pillows, and a ragged blanket.

It’s not the doctor I focus upon this time, but the two figures in the background—father and mother watching from a distance, he with a look of anxious worry and she with her head on the table in despair. Both regulated to the shadows, helpless to do anything.

That’s how I feel right now.

Even a bad parent would not want his or her child to suffer, to writhe and wince with cough and fever. Even a bad parent would wish to suffer in that child’s place. And yet life teaches us all that very often the power we believe we possess is a lie, nothing else. Ours is an immense world, and we are such small things. The virus coursing through the two children beside me is mean and debilitating, and so is the defenselessness felt by their parents. We’ve done all we can. It wasn’t good enough.

Yet in the small minutes I’ve sat here, I’ve learned this one important thing—we are often helpless in this life, but we are never powerless. What we cannot mend we can ease, and where we cannot cure we can comfort. I can’t make my son better, but I can offer him a shoulder upon which to lay his head and a joke to make him smile. I can’t chase my daughter’s fever, but I can put my arm around her and kiss the top of her head. I can listen as she tells me of the book she’s reading.

I cannot spare my children from the troubles of this life, but I can love them through those troubles.

Maybe in the end, that’s what matters.

Missing me

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image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com
It was laying in an old box marked BILLY’S STUFF in a forgotten corner of the attic, near where the insulation had been bitten and chewed by a family of long-ago mice. The words were faded and the cardboard brittle. When I pulled the top off, both one corner and a cloud of dust flew.

Normally, I would have moved on. It was only one box among dozens in my parents’ attic and one that was not marked CHRISTMAS, and thus not of interest. Normally, I would have gone on to the wreaths wrapped in trash bags and the candles that have gone in their windows every year since I was a child and the other boxes of ornaments and decorations and pushed them to the door, into my father’s hands.

Normally. But I didn’t this time, not with that box. Because this one said BILLY’S STUFF.

There is a kind of magic in such situations, as though time is blurred such that the past and present become the same in one small tick of life. That’s what I felt right then, crouched down under the eaves. This was the Me I once was tapping the Me I am now on the shoulder, wanting to sit for a while. Wanting to talk. Given all that, I had to open the box. Even if Dad was hollering into the attic, wanting to know where I was.

So I reached down and folded back the remaining sides, feeling like I had just discovered some long lost tomb. Inside were memories long forgotten—notebooks and newspaper clippings, an old T shirt gifted to me by someone who must have been important but whom I’d forgotten, an old fountain pen. And buried beneath it all, a single cassette tape with the word LIFE written on the label.

Dad hollered again, telling me Christmas would be over by the time I got all the decorations down. I felt the stuff in the box. I took the tape. Partly because it was the only thing I could fit in my pocket. Mostly because it intrigued me. I had no idea what was on there, and I wanted to know what LIFE meant to a seventeen-year-old me who believed the world lay at his feet.

I got back home and dug out an old cassette player from the closet, amazed not only that I had one, but that it still worked and I’d remembered how to use one. I sat it at my desk, popped the tape in, and pushed Play. What came over the speaker wasn’t my own voice expounding upon my adolescent wants and dreams. It was music.

Of course it had to be music.

Back then, at that age, everything was music. I had so many of those cassettes back then my truck couldn’t hold them. Half were kept in the glovebox, half in my room. Mix tapes, we called them. I guess you can do the same with CDs now, but I don’t know what they’re called.
Honestly? I was a little disappointed. Was I really so shallow that long ago to think sixty minutes of spandex-pantsed, makeup wearing, hair metal music was the one thing of my past worth preserving for the future?

It wasn’t the first time the person I am shook my head at the person I was and called him an idiot.

But I kept the tape playing. One song melted into the next, and before long I wasn’t only playing air guitar and singing along, I was remembering. Where I first heard that song. Who I was with. What I was doing. What I felt.

Then I understood. And suddenly I realized it wasn’t the person I am cursing the person I was at all, it was the other way around. These weren’t songs at all. This was the background music to a former life.

I’ve just spent the last hour on iTunes, downloading every one of those songs. I miss cassette tapes (heck, I’m old enough to still miss vinyl records), but digital really is the way to go. Right now, I’m turning my past to my present and plan to enjoy the person I was while listening to those songs on my phone while I mow the yard. Listening and remembering.

Because you know what? I haven’t talked with that old me in a long while. Sometimes, I miss him.

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