mystery

The key

August 4, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

The key has been sitting here on the desk for a week now staring at me, wondering when I’m going to find some use for it. The truth is that I have no idea. No idea at all.

I found it a while back in a dresser drawer I was cleaning out. It was stuck in the back corner behind some pens, a stack of old pay stubs, and my high school ring. There’s no telling how long it had sat there, but it must have been a while. A very long while. Because try as I might, I couldn’t remember what it unlocked.

I’ve checked all the locks in the house, including the one on the shed in the backyard and the diary my daughter keeps. I’ve asked my wife if it happens to go to anything school-related and called my father to ask if it was his.

No all the way around.

It’s too big for a key to a shed or a mailbox. Not enough teeth to unlock a door. Not fancy enough to start a vehicle. Too real to fit a child’s toy.

So…what?

I don’t know. I figure I have two options here, both obvious. I can throw the key away and be done with it, thinking that if I haven’t needed it for longer than my memory allows, I likely won’t need it again. Or I can keep it. I’m leaning toward keeping it. I can’t throw the key away. Doing that will all but guarantee I will find whatever lock it fits, and that on the other side of the lock will be something I will likely need very badly.

There are a lot of people who say it’s the big moments in our lives that show us who we really are, warts and all. I’m not one of them. I think it’s the little moments that do that. Moments like this one, with me and my key.

So I stare at it and wonder. Is this all about my tendency to hang onto things and not let them go? Or is it about my subtle distrust in the shaky maxim that “everything work out fine in the end”?

Maybe it’s neither. Maybe all this proves is that I tend to think about some things a little more than I should. Regardless, it’s all very discombobulating. I feel like I have an answer to a question I don’t know how to ask.

Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe I need to consider this as something I’ve found something that I don’t really need right now but might need later. I think that alone is reason enough to hang onto it. I know this from experience.

I’ve often found some truth, some answer, only to lose it and have to go searching again. Most of the mistakes I make are ones I’ve made before and never learned from or, worse, thought I learned from but really didn’t. And there have been a lot of times I’ve been left wondering “Why in the world did I have to go through that?” only to say later on “Oh, now I understand. It was so I could handle this.” We find the keys to a lot of life’s problems long before we come across the locks.

That’s why we have to hang onto them and keep them safe. Why the struggles we have now can grow into future blessings. Because often the key to life lies more in remembering than learning.

The tension between truth and magic

January 6, 2014 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

My wife—God bless her—is a person of many virtues. She is kind. Compassionate. Faithful, to both her family and her God. And she is as honest a person as you will ever meet in your life.

It’s that last one that’s been causing all the trouble lately.

It began the day after Christmas, when my son decided to spend some quality time with his new Calvin & Hobbes comic book, whereupon he found The One. You know—The One where Calvin rushes downstairs because it’s Christmas Eve and he thinks he hears Santa. The One where Hobbes rushes down, too. The one where both child and toy discover not jolly old Saint Nick setting out Calvin’s gifts, but Calvin’s parents.
My son is not stupid. Two and two were put together in short order, leading him in a straight line to his kind, compassionate, faithful, and honest mother, who cannot bear to lie to her children. About anything. And so with our son staring up at her with two brown, saucer eyes, she had no choice but admit the truth.

Now, more than a week later, our family is still in collective mourning. Christmas vacation ending and school beginning once more has not buoyed my son’s mood. These are dark times in the Coffey home. Dark times indeed.

Good thing we have a dog. Daisy is her name. Part lab, part retriever, part crazy. A rescue from the local pound, and a paragon of many virtues herself. Kind. Compassionate. An expert snuggler. She is also quite the escape artist.

Daisy managed to finagle her way out of her crate today. The damage was minimal and upon first inspection limited to moving every chew toy in the house to my bedroom closet. When my son and I left to walk the dog, all seemed well.

A second pass by my wife, however, revealed something else. At some point during the day, Daisy decided to attack my son’s favorite stuffed animal. I suppose I can blame myself for what happened next. Upon arriving home, I asked if she had spotted any further wanton destruction.
My son flashed his brown, saucer eyes once more. I am convinced such a thing operates as some kind of parental polygraph. My wife held up the stuffed animal. She didn’t stand a chance.

As it turned out, the damage required nothing more than a little cosmetic surgery to reattach a fuzzy nose. And yet three hours later, my son is still crying over Winston The Stuffed Dachshund. You would think our dog had mauled Santa.

I haven’t said much about this to anyone else, though I did offer this bit of advice to the mother of my children:

Lie. Lie to our kids. Lie like a freaking dog.

She still can’t, of course, nor will she ever. It’s not in my wife’s nature to do such a thing, and it’s all a very large part of why I love her. But the fact remains that I have no compunction to lie to my kids when I feel the situation warrants it.

Is Santa real? Absolutely. He lives at the North Pole and has a bunch of elves and rides around in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.
Did the dog tear anything up? Nope, not a single thing. Now you go wash up for supper and ignore the needle, thread, and severed puppy nose in my hand.

See? Not that difficult. And yet…

And yet a part of me feels horrible knowing I’m spreading such falsehoods. It’s guilt and remorse and everything bad, and the only way I can feel better is to tell myself all those nasty feelings are okay because those lies are keeping my kids believing just a little while longer, and safe just a little more.

Deep down I know my wife is right. But here’s the thing—she knows I’m right, too. Parenting is compromise, after all. That is why when circumstances warrant a truth from now on, whether soft or hard, my wife will be the one to deliver it. But when situations call for a little magic, that cue is mine.

We’ll see if it works. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go arrange some Matchbox cars. My son’s still convinced they come alive at night from time to time and race around his room. Should he ask his mother about this, she’ll tell him to go ask me. Should he ask me, I’ll tell him this:

Hang on, son. Trust in magic. Because that’s the stuff of dreams.

There still be dragons

January 24, 2013 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

My maternal grandparents were Amish/Mennonite. To this day I don’t exactly know how to write those two words, if they should be separated by a slash or a dash or some other form of punctuation. I suppose it doesn’t matter so long as you understand this one important point—when I stayed there, I had to entertain myself.

No television. No radio. No electronic games. Nothing.

It wasn’t all bad. Strip away all those technological whiz-bangs we surround ourselves with, and what’s left is real life. Sunshine and sweet breezes and garden dirt. That’s what became my childhood. And books. Lots and lots of books.

My grandfather’s den was where I’d mostly hole up when the weather was cold or wet. An old recliner, a massive roll top desk, and shelves of books. One in particular was always the first I’d reach for—a giant volume of ancient maps. Europe, Asia, the Americas, darkest Africa. I loved poring over those old things. To this day, I believe that’s where my love of all things mysterious began.

I have my own collection of books now, complete with my own volume of old maps. Replicas of those drawn by explorers and seafarers from a time when the world was wider and deeper. I still take that book down from time to time, just to think and imagine. That’s what the best books do.

My daughter was wondering about the Pacific the other day. Something about school. I came up here to my office and brought out my book of old maps, she reached for the Google Earth app on my iPad. Sometimes the space between generations seems more a chasm than a span.

We sat together on the sofa, she swiping and pinching the screen, me turning the pages and tilting the spine. She saw detailed photos of remote and uninhabited islands surrounded by clear waters. I saw vast stretches of faded emptiness pockmarked with mermaids and swelling waves.

She leaned on my shoulder and pointed to a spot in the bottom corner of the page. Coiled there was a serpent, mouth open to devour. “What’s that, Daddy?”

“That’s where nobody’d gone yet. They used to mark those places with pictures like that. Sometimes, they’d just write ‘Here There Be Dragons.’”

“Why?”

“Because it was a mystery. Something had to be there, I guess. Why not a dragon?”

My daughter went back to her screen. She couldn’t find any dragons on Google Earth. I figured she wouldn’t. We don’t think there are any mysteries in the world anymore. Everything’s been mapped and plotted by satellites whizzing above our heads. We think we have all the answers, know exactly where we are. There was a time when the center of the world was Jerusalem or Rome or London. No more. Thanks to GPS and Google Maps, the center of the world is wherever we happen to be. I suppose that’s pretty empowering in a way. And sad.

It’s worth mentioning that there are still plenty of dragons in the world. Only 2 percent of the ocean floor has been explored. Thousands of new plants and animals are discovered every year. Just recently, a group of scientists stumbled into a hidden valley in New Guinea that had never been seen before. The animals didn’t even run and hide from them. They had no reason to. They’d never seen a human before.

If there is anything I want my kids to know, it’s that there’s still plenty out there for us to find. I want them to love the mystery of life just as much as their father does. I want them to bask in the unknown. I want them to ponder it and find their places in its midst.