This teeter totter life
August 24, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 22 Comments
- image courtesy of photobucket.com
I spent much of last Friday at the hospital with my wife, who had been feeling particularly ucky of late. The doctors had (and as I write this have) no idea what’s wrong. Tests were in order. So off we went, her to be poked and prodded for two hours, and me to pass the time in the waiting room.
As I am not a fan of feeling ucky or being poked and prodded, hospitals rank just above funeral homes on my list of Places I Wish Not To Go. It isn’t the germs that bother me, not the echoes of coughs or the abundance of wheel chairs and gurneys. It’s the despair, I think. That thick dark cloud of inevitability that seems to hang over everyone and everything. Going to the hospital makes me confront the fragility of life. That’s something I’d rather not consider.
I brought enough work to keep my mind off things. I knew the waiting area had a television, but the possibility of watching Sportscenter all morning quickly evaporated when I was told the only channel offered was HGTV (according to the nice old lady with the clipboard, anything else may be construed as “controversial.”) I had a notebook—1,000 words a day every day is what I was taught, even when you’re sitting in a hospital—and my i-Pod—the new Trace Adkins album? Gold.
I was ready, oh yes I was. The only pondering of life and death that day would come from my characters rather than myself. Yes sir, I was going to mind my own business.
The only thing I didn’t take into account was that there would be other people in need of the sort of modern medical technology that only the local hospital’s radiology department could provide. Though the waiting room was relatively empty when we arrived, by the time my wife’s name was called, it was nearly full. And five minutes later, I had company.
The woman who sat down beside me with the crutches looked eighty but swore she wasn’t a day over fifty-seven. We exchanged hellos and I resumed my scribbling. She asked what I was doing. I said work (never say you’re a writer, I was taught that as well). She nodded and leafed through a ten-month-old magazine for exactly thirty seconds, at which time she sat it back down on the wooden table between us and asked what was wrong with me.
“I don’t think you’d have the time,” I joked.
She chuckled and touched my arm—eighty-year-old women who swear they’re not a day over fifty-seven love to touch arms—and said, “I mean what brings you here?”
“My wife’s getting a once-over,” I told her. “You?”
She tapped the crutches and then felt her leg. “Busted myself. Fell down the stairs. I blame the cat.”
“Cats are evil,” I said.
She gave me a knowing smile.
“Cats are not evil,” said the woman across from us. A sling was wrapped around her neck which made her left arm form an L. She looked as though she were leaning on an invisible fence post. “I have three, and they’re darlings.”
“Bet your cat did that to your arm,” I said.
“Nope. I fell out of a wheelbarrow.”
“Pardon?” the woman beside me said.
“Yep, wheelbarrow.” She looked down at her arm and up to us. The look on her face was a mix of embarrassment and pride. “My son said I was too chicken to let him push me down the hill in it. Guess I showed him, huh?”
“Guess so,” I said.
The man to her left had been listening this whole time under the guise of being immersed in his sports magazine. I doubt any of us thought he was actually reading it. Hard to do with a neck brace.
“I did that once,” he said. “Made it down our hill just fine. Shut that cocky son of mine’s mouth up, sure enough. I don’t take chances anymore, though.”
“What happened to you?” the old lady beside me asked.
“This?” He pointed to the brace, just in case she were asking of anything else. “I got up off the couch. Seriously. All I did. Felt something pull, just…pop goes the weasel.”
I never got any writing done. It was better to sit and talk, I think. Better to be reminded of the fragility of life, that strange thing that seems so hard but is instead so soft. I was reminded of just how clumsy we all are and how we can get hurt even when we take no chances.
Because our existence is but a thin strip of breath upon which we teeter and totter and, eventually, will tumble off.
For reasons unknown
July 11, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 18 Comments
Josh Hamilton image courtesy of photobucket.com
Josh Hamilton was just a kid in 1999. The only difference between him and most other kids was that he was given four million dollars to play baseball.
He was a can’t-miss pick, the scouts said. A golden boy. A natural. But two years later he was involved in a car accident, and shortly thereafter began a downward spiral into drugs and alcohol. He was suspended by major league baseball for failing several drug tests. And just like that, The Natural was gone.
His story could have ended there, yet another sad tale of a promising athletic career ruined by personal demons. But somewhere along the way Josh Hamilton found something special that not only helped them beat those demons, but helped resurrect a career most considered dead.
He found faith.
The road back started with The Texas Rangers, who traded for him in 2007. Last year, he won the award for Most Valuable Player in a year that ended with the Rangers winning the American League Championship. When they celebrated afterward, the traditional champagne was replaced with ginger ale for Josh’s benefit.
He’s a favorite with baseball fans and open with his faith, giving glory to Christ rather than turning attention to himself. Josh Hamilton is a humble man. A good man. A natural.
Last Thursday a 39-year-old father named Shannon Stone took his young son Cooper to Arlington to watch the Rangers play. Cooper loves baseball, and he’s a big Josh Hamilton fan. And though the game itself was enough, both father and son knew what they were really there for. As they took their seats in the front row along the railing in left field just in front of Cooper’s favorite player, all they wanted was to catch a ball.
In the second inning a foul ball was hit down the line that Hamilton tossed into the stands. Someone yelled, “Hey, Hamilton, how about the next one?” He turned and saw Shannon sitting with Cooper and gave him a nod.
Another foul ball, this again in Hamilton’s direction, which he picked up and tossed in Shannon’s direction. The father reached for it, thrilled to get the ultimate souvenir.
He fell headfirst twenty feet over the railing onto the concrete below.
Paramedics rushed to the area. Shannon was bleeding was conscious—“Please check on my son,” he said. “My son was up there by himself.” He died before the paramedics could get him to the hospital.
It isn’t enough (at least not enough for me) to say in circumstances like these that sometimes bad things happen. Not enough to say that some things just don’t make sense, that dwelling upon them serves no purpose and the best thing to do is move on. I doubt little Cooper Stone is managing that feat at this moment. I doubt Josh Hamilton is, too.
“It was just hard for me, hearing the little boy screaming for his daddy after he had fallen,” he said, “and then being home with my kids, really hit home last night.”
He said his faith was not shaken, nor would the experience plunge him back into the abyss from which God pulled him four years ago. He plans to speak with Cooper when the time is right, and I have no doubt he will. I can only imagine how difficult that conversation will be.
If I’m honest, I’ll say what bothers me the most about this is the fact that Josh Hamilton was the one who threw that ball into the stands. He with the story of redemption and the lasting faith, rather than another player with perhaps no faith at all. It’s difficult enough as a believer to abide by the jabs and assaults of an increasingly secular world. Harder to know that for reasons unknown, God somehow allowed this man of faith to be involved in the death of a father in front of that father’s son.
Had the ball been thrown a bit harder, had it traveled an inch farther, had it been thrown to someone else, had the pitcher thrown a curve rather than a fastball or the batter taken the pitch rather than swing, this would not have happened.
Or maybe it would have. Maybe all of this is set in stone and our time is our time and there is no changing these things. God has His reasons, however flawed those reasons may seem to pitiable creatures such as we.
I do not know.
That is not the first time I’ve come to that conclusion. I’m sure it will not be the last.
Swinging the hammer
March 16, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I just typed the final period of the final draft of what will hopefully be my third book. Always an ambivalent experience. You’re glad the story is done, but at the same time it’s hard to let the story go. Even now, my thoughts are away from this sheet of paper and on my characters. I wonder what they’d do next and if they all managed to carry on. The answer to the former is that I have no idea. The answer to the second? Yes.
I figure that between drafts of books, journal entries, and blog posts, I’ve written about a million words in the last ten years. That’s a lot. And I have proof, too—the trunk beside my desk at home is full of notebooks and papers, as are the bottom two rows of my bookshelves. Not to mention files upon files on my computer. You would think that considering such bountiful evidence, I would know a thing or two about writing.
I don’t.
It’s a sickness to believe otherwise, at least in my case. Each time I feel as though I’m coming down with a case of I-could-do-a-whole-book-about-writing, I remedy myself by actually sitting down to write something. Always does the trick.
Because it’s difficult, the crafting of words. It’s painful and draining, and more than once I’ve asked myself why in the world I do it at all (answer: because it’s more painful and draining if I don’t).
This has been especially true with the book I just finished. Though aspects of it are similar to my first two, much of it isn’t. It was a leap of faith designed to prevent the one feeling I want to preserve every time I sit down to write.
Not hope or faith or love.
Fear.
Yes. While I’m writing, I want to be afraid.
On the surface, that shouldn’t be a problem. Deep down, writers swim in fear. They’re terrified of rejection, anxious that their work will be perceived as infantile, troubled that there are thousands of other writers out there more talented and successful. We’re a tangled mass of neuroses and obsessions.
But those aren’t the sorts of fears I’m talking about. In fact, I’d say those fears should be battered into submission so the real fear—the necessary panic—can course through me unencumbered.
Whatever our words may be to readers, to ourselves they should resemble a sledgehammer taken to the barricade we construct to keep us a safe distance from the world. Each tap of the keys or stroke of the pen should in reality be a swing of the hammer. Each word should be a tiny chunk taken from our walls. Each paragraph a brick, each page a section, until finally we are left naked with nothing between us and our audience.
That’s the fear of which I speak.
That’s the only way writing works.
There are countless definitions of what good writing looks like. For me, only one counts—good writing doesn’t show how we’re all different, but how we’re all the same. And that’s impossible unless writers are willing to be vulnerable.
Vulnerable enough to commit to the page those hidden parts within themselves which they wouldn’t even whisper to their closest friends.
Allison
March 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 24 Comments
The dedication page from my first novel, Snow Day
I had life figured out by the time I was seventeen. My future was planned, crystal clear and meant to be.
I was the starting second baseman on my high school team and had already received interest from several colleges and even one professional team. I was going to play baseball forever. I had to. Because the kid who roamed the halls of my high school and drove his truck around town wasn’t me. Not the real me, anyway. No, the real me was the guy on the ball field. It was the only place where I ever really felt I belonged.
School was an irritant. Most high school seniors try to stretch out that last year as far as they can, enjoying every moment. Not me. I wanted to get out. I had a life to start living.
Not that high school was hard, mind you. I had the prototypical jock schedule of classes—math, history, English, and four study halls. Brutal. On day my English teacher decided I needed to do something besides sit around all day, so she pulled some strings and got me a job writing a weekly column for the local newspaper. Write about anything, she said. Just make it good.
Oh. Joy.
I obliged, partly because I had to but mostly because she was my favorite teacher. Every Tuesday evening, I would sit down with a pad of paper and write between innings of the Braves games on television. It was busy work, nothing else. Just something to pass the time.
Then everything fell apart.
I blew out my shoulder three weeks later. Trips to doctors and specialists resulted in a shared consensus that though I could kinda/sorta play baseball again, I’d never play the way I had.
It’s tough being seventeen and knowing that every dream you’d ever had was gone. Tough knowing that your entire life lay in front of you, but it wasn’t going to be the life you wanted. Tough.
Too tough.
So one night I got into my truck, drove into the mountains, and found the highest rock I could so I could jump off.
Almost did it, too. I got to two-and-a-half on my count to three when a voice popped into my head and said, “You’re not really afraid of dying, are you?”
No. Not at all.
“Then you’re afraid of living.”
Whether that voice was God’s or my own still escapes me. But I sat for a long while on that rock, thinking. Then I got back into my truck, drove home, and wrote my column. Really wrote. About how things sometimes don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to and how sometimes life can be more night than day. About how, in the end, we all just have to keep on.
That was the night I learned to strip myself bare on the page, to risk exposing fears and worries and doubts. To quit pretending I was someone I wasn’t. It was the biggest act of courage I’d ever displayed.
Three days later, a letter was sent to the high school with my name on the front. Thank you, it said. “I’m having a really tough time right now, and a few days ago I thought I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was going to end it. Then I read your article and, well, I’m still here. So thank you. You rescued me.”
It wasn’t signed, and there was no return address on the envelope. I didn’t know who sent it, but I did know this: God didn’t want me to play baseball. He wanted me to write.
At the mall, a month later. I was picking up my girlfriend from work and decided to walk down to the bookstore. Approaching me was a teenage girl in jeans and a leather jacket. I nodded as she passed, and then she called my name.
“Allison,” she said. “My name’s Allison. I’m the one who wrote you that letter.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. So I asked if she was all right, to which she replied she was, to which I replied that it was nice to meet her. I was so shy, so backward, so unnerved, that I simply nodded again and walked away.
I have had many bad moments in my life. That one? Top three.
I never saw Allison again. I do, however, still spend many a day wishing that I would have. Just once more. Just to say I’m was sorry for not saying more. To tell her to keep hanging in there and she’s not alone.
And to tell her she rescued me, too.
***
This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Future hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. To check out more posts on this topic, please visit his website, PeterPollock.com
Dyin’ Right
March 31, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 35 Comments
Four days ago:
What’s In A Name
January 13, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 14 Comments
Monday’s post about Allison brought a pretty interesting question from my spiritual sis, Jennifer Lee. She equated what I went through with Jacob and his wrestling match with God. Jacob, of course, came through that with a busted hip and a new name—Israel.
So, she asked me, “What’s your name?”
Looking back over that period in my life is something I rarely do nowadays. It seems too distant and too painful. But I think it’s worth it. If life is a journey, then it helps every once in a while to look back and see how far you’ve come. And it helps, too, to see that the God you were ignoring all that time, the God you talked to only before you ate your meals and visited only on Christmas and Easter, was still paying attention to you.
Jennifer’s question lodged itself in my mind and wouldn’t budge, demanding my attention. It’s something I never really thought about but certainly should have. If that really was God I met on that high rock in the mountains (and I do think it was), then I came down someone very different from the person who went up.
You cannot meet God and come away unchanged. Because God is all about changing you. Making you something more than you are. And better than you are.
God didn’t change my name, though. I believe He didn’t think it was necessary. He had already given me the name I needed.
Billy is a simple nickname for William. Not a lot of Billys out there anymore, especially my age. It’s a little old fashioned and dated. Which seems to fit me quite well, thank you.
But William is a middle name. Used for years to hide my first name, which is even more old fashioned and dated.
Homer.
My father’s name. I’ve never gotten around to asking him why he was stuck with that, mostly because it never really mattered. My father was and is the greatest man I’ve ever known. Mention his name to me, and I gather the mental images of someone teaching me not only to fish and hit a baseball, but how to be a man. Homer isn’t his name. Not to me. To me, those pictures are his name.
I, on the other hand, never looked too kindly on my first name.
I always dreaded the first day of school, when the teacher would go over the roll, unsure of what to call anyone.
“Homer Coffey?” the teachers would ask. Always.
My hand would shyly raise, and I would suggest, strongly, that Billy would perhaps be more appropriate. My request would always have competition, though, against the snickers of my classmates. The only thing that quieted them was a whispered threat to beat up anyone who was laughing after school. I was serious, too.
I went through a phase in high school where the name didn’t bother me as much. Homer, after all, was the greatest Greek storyteller who ever lived. It was an honorable name, worthy of distinction. Then Homer Simpson came along and pretty much ended that.
You could imagine the jokes. I’ve been referred to by some as “Homer Billy Simpson” for years.
After Jennifer’s question, though, I decided to do a little digging. I wanted to know what my name meant. Not Billy. Not William. Homer.
From the Greek, I found. The word has a double meaning. “Hostage” is one. The other, “promise.”
Yes.
Because that is what I am. A hostage to a promise. A promise from God that no matter what I may do in this life, no matter what wrong turns I make or how badly I stumble, He will be there. A promise that says He will walk with me in the light and carry me in the darkness. And that there is nothing, nothing, that could convince Him to think otherwise.
I am a hostage. Oh, yes. Because there are times when I am too weary to believe, too scared to try, and too beaten to get up again. But just when I am about to stick my head in the mud and sink, I remember that night not so very long ago when a holy hand was extended to me.
“I won’t pick you up,” God told me. “I love you too much for that. But I’ll help you up. Every time. I’ll make sure that you’re life isn’t the one you think you want, but the one you know you want. I’ll make you love this world and not hate it. And I’ll make sure that when the end really does come, people will know you were here.”
The choice, as always, was mine. On that night long ago, I took that hand for the first time.
And I’ve yet to let go.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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