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Longing for Just Us

June 6, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

We’ve just about had it all this year, haven’t we?

A pandemic; a recession; fires; earthquakes; murder hornets; murders of innocent men caught on camera; riots. Jobs have been lost. Families have been broken. Dreams have been put on hold at best, crushed at worst. We all hate each other. Everything is a lie unless it confirms what we knew all along, at which point it’s true, but it’s only true if the people saying it are people we agree with, people who look and talk and act like us. Conservatives are evil. Liberals are evil. The virus is fake. The virus is real. If you wear a mask when you go to the store, you’re doing your part to keep your family and your community safe. If you wear a mask when you go to the store, you’re bowing down to authoritarianism and yielding up your rights.

I’m sure I’ve missed something else, but I’ll stop there.

Adding to that list won’t do anything but add to our collective aggravation. You know what’s going on out there as well as I do. Much like the coronavirus itself, few of us are immune. There are days when it feels like we’re all being pushed right to the edge of something terrible, and we’re clawing at whatever we can to just hang on but we know we can’t hang on much longer. I’ll say that when this nationwide quarantine started, I compared it to 9/11 — a horrible thing we would endure but which would also bring us all together. I believed that. As painful as 9/11 was for those who experienced it, 9/12 was one of the best days in our country’s history. We mourned together. Set aside our differences. Saw one another as neighbors. For a few precious days we were not believers and atheists, right and left, pro-life or pro-choice.

We were just Us.

That hasn’t happened this time, has it? Far from bringing a broken nation together, these past months have only widened the gap between us. We can’t seem to agree on anything anymore.

I make it a point to keep this space somewhat light. Find out the big things hidden in the little things. Usually that means telling you about people I know or people I’ve met, ordinary folks who see life in extraordinary ways. Every writer faces a choice each time he or she sits down to a keyboard or a piece of paper: write something good about how we’re all different, or something great about how we’re all the same. Time and again, I steer myself toward the latter. Because I don’t care who you are or where you live or how you vote or how your skin is colored, you and I are the same in more ways than we’re not. That idea has always been foundational to the way I see the world. Sadly, it seems a lot of people don’t agree.

Somewhere along the line we quit seeing each other as human beings and started seeing them as their opinions.

We’ve forgot that people are precious, valuable not for what they believe but simply because they exist.

I wish I had a story this week. Nothing would make me happier than to tell you of some good ol’ boy I ran into at the store, or share a story from my childhood, or relay what some of the kids are doing around the neighborhood. I don’t have any of that. All that’s left to me this week is mourn what we’ve become, and maybe that’s a good start.

Maybe mourning is the only way we’ll ever change.

The Hero’s Journey (aka If I would have spoken)

May 25, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Our daughter would have celebrated her high school graduation last week.

Instead, what formal ceremonies to mark the occasion will be limited to a small service next week with family at the high school, and this past Sunday, when she donned her cap and gown to walk across the church parking lot during an outdoor service. There were horn honks instead of applause.

She is fine with all of this. Our little girl has been through quite a lot in her short life, resulting in a heart that is ever bent toward the hurts and needs of others. A pandemic? Doesn’t phase her.

But even as our daughter doesn’t considered herself cheated in any way by what’s taken place in the past two months, I can’t say the same for her father. Last year, the high school principal asked if I would be available to speak at their 2020 graduation. I told him the honor would be mine. Whether things would have worked out that way is something I’ll never know, but I like to think they would. After all, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to speak on one of their child’s biggest days?

Since that day has come and gone in a way that’s wholly different than anyone imagined, I thought I’d post something here. Whether these would have been the words I gave to my daughter and her graduating class, I don’t know. Likely it would have been something completely different. Regardless, this is what I’m thinking about on this warm but cloudy May morning with the dog snoozing beside me and the creek singing past my upstairs window:

I had to wonder why when I was asked to give this speech.

Why me, considering that in my time here, I was little more than a jock with a C average. What could someone like me offer in the way of wisdom to the class of 2020?

I’ll admit that I don’t know that answer. I don’t know much, actually. But I do know what makes a good story, and I think that sort of knowledge is well-suited for the few minutes I have with each of you today. Because whether you believe it or not, whether you accept it or not, right now you are all living out your own story.

And my advice to you is simple: make your story a good one.

But how? I’ll tell you how.

Many novelists, myself included, hold to a theory called the hero’s journey, which was conceived in 1949 by a mythologist and literature professor named Joseph Campbell. The idea is a simple one on the surface: every great myth and every great hero, from Gilgamesh to Moses to Bilbo Baggins, no matter how different they are, follow the same steps along the same path of life.

Campbell named 17 stages of the hero’s journey. For the sake of time and your attention, I’m going to limit those to the high points. I want to give you a guide of sorts to go by, because your lives have changed dramatically over the past few months. In many ways, they’re going to change even more over the next few years. It’s going to be easy to get lost along the way. Easy to start doubting, whether it’s yourself or your place in the world. It’s important to know the dangers waiting for you out there, and the hurts that are coming. Most important of all, you have to know the rewards waiting if you endure.

The hero begins in what Campbell called the Ordinary World. It’s the world you’ve always known, the world of your everyday. You’re in that world right now, but you won’t be for long, because you are about to start your own journey by moving to the next step — the Call to Adventure.

That step for you begins right now. The diploma in your hand is a key to unlock a door moving you deeper into a world filled with as much fear as possibility. There are wonders out there beyond any you realize, and there are also terrors you cannot fathom.

These first two stages, the ordinary world and the call to adventure, are the same for everyone. Hero and coward, victor and vanquished, the remembered and the forgotten, all face these two phases of life. The difference between them begins at the next stage, which is the Refusal of the Call.

Along with the talents you possess and the dreams you have come worries that any of it matters in the end, and doubts that you can ever achieve the goals you’ve set. You think, “I can’t do this. It’ll never work. I’m nothing, and I’ll always be nothing.”

That inward battle between doubt and faith, despair and hope, is one you will fight for the rest of your life. And right here is where the hero’s journey ends for most.

But while the ordinary person allows him or herself to be consumed by doubt and fear, the hero understands that in order to do great things, doubt and fear must be fought with faith and courage.

The ordinary person refuses the call to adventure and remains forever an ordinary person. The hero, however, doesn’t let fear and doubt take hold. That means you have to answer the call to adventure laid out here this afternoon. It means you don’t take this piece of paper home and shove it into a drawer. Look at it. Cherish it. Understand what it means.

Do that, and you’ll enter the next stage, Crossing the Threshold. The hero moves from the ordinary world into a world that’s more beautiful but filled with more danger than anything known before.

You’ll find that world soon enough, when you trade high school for college. You’ll find that world again, when you trade college for adulthood. Like all heroes, what you do once you cross the threshold will determine the course of your life. It will not be

easy going. You’ve discovered that already. You will discover it again. The world has teeth, and those teeth will find you. But without that struggle, life turns meaningless and empty. Without that fight, the hero cannot be made into a hero.

You’ll meet people to help you along the way, the stage called Supernatural Aid, when you’ll find your own Gandalf and your own Obi-Wan. You’ll find friends. Enemies. You’ll find ordeals and trials so difficult that you don’t know how you’re going to come through it whole.

You’re going to want to turn back, give up. You’re going to discover that the greatest enemy you will ever meet is in the one living in your own thoughts, and you’re going to know just how weak you really are.

These, too, are all stages of the hero’s journey. These are the things you must struggle with in order to fulfill your destiny. The things that will nearly break you. The things that will become your own personal dragons.

But that act of becoming, of learning and growing and leading and suffering, leads to the stage called the Reward. The hero is transformed from an ordinary person into the person he or she is meant to become. It’s that degree you want. That job you dream of. It’s the climax, the final and harshest battle, the moment that defines a meaningful life and the worst death possible, the death of dreams, the death that leaves you alive but numb.

If you work hard, if you endure, you’ll find the very treasure that you left your ordinary world to discover.

I’m proof of that.

But then comes one of the most important steps of your hero’s journey: the Road Back. There will come a moment when you must make a choice between your own personal wants and a higher calling. And just like the refusal of the call, some will

choose selfishness and return to their lives as ordinary people. But the hero will always choose the higher calling of placing the good of others above the self.

The last stage is the Return, that day you finally present your changed self to the world. The day you step forward armed with all you’ve learned to bring hope to others. The day when you realize that nothing will ever be the same, when you understand that what is past does not have to define you, and that God put your eyes in front of you so you can see where you’re going, not where you’ve been.

That is the hero’s journey. That is your journey beginning right here. So embrace it. Take it seriously. You understand more than anyone that the world is a mess. The world has always been a mess. There has always been darkness crouching at the door. But in every generation, there have always been lights that shine outward to keep that darkness at bay.

Every one of you today has a decision to make. You can be one of those lights, or you can add to that darkness. Those are the only choices you have.

You can hold this diploma in your hands go back to your lives like nothing’s changed. You can refuse that call and let someone else do the hard work of making the world better. You can be ordinary. That’s fine. The world is filled with good, ordinary people.

Or you can start your own hero’s journey right here, right now. You can understand that you come this way only once. That you have a purpose no one else can fulfill.

There are dragons out there. Slay them. There are monsters in the dark. Stand up to them. There are hurts in the hearts of everyone you meet. Help heal them.

The world needs you. So shine your light. Starting right now.

Thank you.

Honor and Integrity

May 15, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I still talk to people.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say people still talk to me, since I’m most often doing a greater amount of listening than speaking, which is where the ideas of most of these stories begin. It’s harder now, of course. Hard to have a conversation when you’re six feet away from the person you’re trying to communicate with. And I won’t even get into the difficulties involved in talking through a mask.

Still, it’s rare that I seek anybody out in order to write something. I’ve always just tried to keep my eyes and ears open and trust that a story will come to me. But that’s not the case this time. This time, I went out looking for somebody. I needed some answers.

Take a drive in my little town and you’ll likely get a very small picture of what’s going on most everywhere else. People are like that, I think — they grow up and live in one place or another, and I have no doubt that place shapes them like few things can, but at the bottom we’re all the same no matter where we call home.

And here in my little town, people are getting tired.

Tired of staying home. Tired of worrying every time they go to the store. Tired of not working, tired of having their lives on hold. Stop anywhere for even just a few minutes, and you’ll find that far from this virus bringing us together, it’s dividing us even more than we were a few months ago.

There are the folks who stay home because that’s what they call right, and the folks who go out because that’s what they call right. Ones who wear a mask every time they leave the house, and ones who say wearing a mask is about the worst thing you can do for a whole host of reasons. This whole mess is just one more flaw in a flawed world, or it’s a sign of something sinister in the flawed hearts of politicians.

If I scroll through my social media feeds (something I put strict limits on, by and way, especially now) the divide is even more apparent. We’re all gonna die if we’re not careful, or we’re all gonna die if we keep giving up our rights.

It’s true, it’s fake. I believe, I don’t believe. I’m right, you’re evil.

I read an article the other day that suggested a lot of this comes down to moral exhaustion. We’re all tired of not only thinking we’re going to get sick, but we’re going to somehow get the people we love sick, too. And if I’m honest, I’ll say I’m starting to worry about a whole lot more than a virus that can kill you. I’m starting to worry if we’ll ever be able to agree on anything again.

Which is why I drove out to the edge of town the other day to look for Eli. I’ve known Eli and his family for most of my life, sharing a common if distant ancestry. My mother was Amish growing up, and then Mennonite, which is kind of the same thing but not really. Eli has remained Amish, along with his wife, their six children, and enough grandchildren and great-grandchildren to fill up a church.

There are times when I’ll turn to my more earthly kin for a little perspective on things. Then there are times when only the Amish will do. Times like this one, when I needed someone who generally lived apart from society to tell me what in the world was going on with society. We sat on his back porch (six feet apart and masked) along with the birds and the sunshine. I asked Eli if he knew what was going on out there in the world. He did. He nodded and stroked his beard when I said it was getting a little hard to know what to do. Then he let out a quiet

“Mmmm” and held up one gnarled hand.

“Honor,” he said. He kept that one raised and lifted the other. “Integrity.”

I think Eli meant for that to be it. Lesson over. But I’ve never been a very good student.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Mmmm. Honor,” he said again, shaking his right hand. “Integrity,” again, shaking the other.

“You’re gonna have to help me out a little more here, Eli.”

“That’s your choice.”

“Always thought they were pretty much the same.”

He looked at me in a way that said if he was allowed to take the Lord’s name in vain, he would.

“We live by honor,” he told me. “Was a time when most others did as well. Not your father’s time. Your grandfather’s, maybe.

Now it is integrity. Everything is integrity.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Mmmm. Who am I?”

I sat there trying to figure if that was a trick question. “Eli.”

“What am I?”

“A man.”

“Mmmm.”

“That sound you keep making a sign of disgust, Eli?”

“What else am I?” He asked.

“A father. Grandfather. Great-grandfather.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. Farmer. Deacon. Amish.”

He waved his fingers at me like that was enough. “I am Eli,” he said. “I am a father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. I am a farmer and a deacon. I am Amish. I am all of those things, but honor says I am all of those things before I am Eli. Honor says I tend to these needs before I tend to my own wants. Why? Because I am a part of something greater than me. A family, a community, a faith. See?”

Starting to.

“You,” he said, and then he pointed — at me, I guess, but also everyone like me, “you say I am a father and grandfather and great-grandfather. You say I am a farmer and a deacon and Amish, but you say I am Eli first. I am a person with rights that will not be taken and freedoms that will not be curtailed no matter the reason.

Because I am an individual, and only that matters — me, Eli. See?”

Yes.

“I wear this mask not to keep me safe, but my Sarah. We stay home not to keep ourselves safe, but our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We share food and what money we can to those who have less. We pray for them before we pray for ourselves, because that is what we do. Because I will die. Soon, I think.

And then I will stand before a Lord who will not say to me, ‘What did you do for Eli?’ but ‘What did you do for others?’”

That was two days ago. Normally when I come across a story, I’ll jot some notes down in my notebook, write it all up, and then throw those notes away. But those notes are still sitting here on my desk, and I think that’s where they’ll stay.

Honor or integrity. I think that’s the choice all of this comes down to.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m fearful of the choice we’re all about to make.

The crazy neighbor

May 5, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I’m pretty sure the man down the street is losing his mind.

Let’s be honest, we’re all probably doing the same thing at this point in one way or another. But this guy is turning a special kind of crazy, to the point where I’m starting to worry about him.

His descent from Buttoned-Down Businessman to Something Completely Other is something I can’t seem to avoid, since his house sits on my daily walking route. I’ve walked more in the last six weeks than I probably did in the last six years. Our dog has gone from wagging her tail and yelping with joy every time I grab the leash to curling up in the corner and uttering a kind of not-this-again moan each time I tell her we’re taking yet another jaunt through the neighborhood. But it’s healthy and it gets us out, and everybody says that sunshine doesn’t just help beat back the invisible scourge, it helps beat back the blues as well.

Our route generally begins with a left out of our driveway and a straight shot about a quarter of a mile, where pavement yields to gravel and then a dirt trail leading into the woods. Our dog Lucy always heads there first. Like she’s telling me that if I’m going to drag her two and a half miles down one street and another, she’s going to get her fill of the woods first. And I always oblige her, because I like me some woods too. The problem — if I can call it that — is the man’s house sits right near the end of the street where the trail sits, meaning I get to watch him just about every day.

It began innocently enough. After all, I don’t think anyone goes crazy all at once.

It’s more a gradual thing, nice and easy and bit by bit until maybe it’s too late to turn back. I don’t know many of his particulars. Not his name (there’s just a number on his mailbox), or what he does for a living (though it’s a suit-and-briefcase kind of job; there were mornings before the quarantine when I would see him dashing from his door wearing one and carrying the other), or how much he makes (plenty, given that fancy car he drives). He does have a wife and at least one child. I’ve seen both, and first impressions told me they weren’t nearly as high strung as he seemed to be.

Like most everyone else, he’s either working from home or home and not working. Being stuck where you are in the midst of so much uncertainty tends to weigh on the mind and the heart. Tends to make us a little jittery sometimes. We’re all dealing with this as best we can. That’s what I told myself a few weeks ago when I passed by his house on my afternoon walk with Lucy and saw him lying in his front yard. I didn’t know what bothered me most as I passed, whether it was the fact that here was a grown man splayed out on his grass and staring at the clouds, or the fact that he was wearing a faded pair of jeans and a plain T shirt. It just didn’t seem to fit the picture I’d always had of him, you know? Like seeing a polka-dotted elephant.

Two days later he was out there again, this time in one of the rocking chairs on his porch. Different jeans and different shirt (both of them a little more ragged than before). Feet kicked up onto the railing. Glass of tea on the table beside. His jaw held a thin layer of scruff, and his hair had gotten long enough to touch the tops of his ears. I noticed some gray in there as well — the Food Lion was running out of everything at that point, and I figured that included Just for Men.

And you know what he did? He waved. At me.

I don’t think I can overstate the shock I felt. Even the dog looked at me like one more thing in the world had just fundamentally shifted. I was so thrown off guard that I don’t even remember if I waved back.

He was back the following Thursday. We heard him before we saw him. His garage door was open to catch an unusually warm April sun. Lucy pinned her ears back on her head as the first chords to Poison’s “Nothin’ but a Good Time” blared from somewhere inside. He didn’t wave that day. Too preoccupied, I guess. What with him playing air guitar and all. Seriously.

I’ll be honest — it all preyed on my mind. Lucy and I started taking our walks with the singular purpose of strolling past his house. Forget the sunshine. Forget the woods. I just wanted to see what that guy was doing, see how far he had fallen. Terrible, I know. I equated it with driving past a car accident and just having to look, if only to tell myself,

“Things might not be great, but at least I’m not that guy.”

Then came yesterday. Me and Lucy and a bag filled with her daily deposit, out enjoying the warmth. Mountains? Clear as a bell. Sky? Empty. Streets? Quiet. Crazy man down the road? Crawling around his front yard. Literally.

At this point, Lucy was just as interested in him as me. She held him up as just another example of how humans are bumbling idiots and only dogs can truly save the world. We slowed as he inched along on his belly, aiming for a rabbit munching on a bit of grass near a maple tree. There the both of us stood, watching him watch it. Lucy’s growl chased the rabbit around the house.

The man looked at us and shook his head, grinning like a kid on Christmas, and what he said convinced me that everything I’d thought about his mental state was dead on:

“Dude, wasn’t that GREAT?”

I said sure, thinking it was just a rabbit. This guy gets worked up over a rabbit? Has he never seen a rabbit before? What’s he going to do when he sees a coyote out here? Or a bear?

“Steve,” he said.

“Billy.” I waggled the leash. “Lucy.”

“You guys doing okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “You know, just waiting for things to get back to where they were.”

Steve shook his head then in that slow sad way that you often see parents do with their young children. “I keep hearing people say that,” he said. “But not me. No. Way. I don’t want to get back there to the before. Back there sucked. Why does anybody want to go back when we got this gift?”

I was sure then: nuts. Certifiably nuts.

“I mean, I know,” he said. “It’s terrible, all these sick people. All these people out of a job. I’m out of a job. You know that?”

I shook my head.

“But it’s okay, you know? All this is gonna be okay.”

I wanted to ask if the rabbit had told him that but didn’t.

“How many times does somebody get to start over?” he asked. “Fix things? Try something different, something better? How many times does somebody get to see how screwed up their life was and then get to do something about it? You know?”

I didn’t, not really. But as we said our goodbyes and Lucy and I left him lying in the grass and looking at the clouds again, I got to wondering. We’re all trying to get through this moment in our lives the best way we can. For some, it’s filled with fear and grief. For others, a kind of numbness. But for those like Steve, there is hope to be found even in so dark a time.

Happiness, even. Even joy. You just have to look for it.

If I’m honest, there were things in my life that I didn’t much like back before the world went wonky. Things I wished I would have done differently, things about me that I always wanted to change. We always seem to settle, don’t we? Always aim for just good enough. Always want to just go back.

That’s why I just got up from writing this to stand by the upstairs window and crane my neck down the street just to see if I can get a glimpse of Steve’s house. Get a glimpse of Steve. I wonder what he’s doing.

But I’m wondering even more which of us is really the crazy one.

When Mockingbirds Sing free promotion

August 10, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I know that The Curse of Crow Hollow is still hot off the presses, but I wanted to share an opportunity to download When Mockingbirds Sing for free for a limited time. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, this would be a great opportunity to do so from

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If you’ve already read When Mockingbirds Sing, would you consider helping us spread the word about the free download?

Useless information

July 28, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

It’s somewhat alarming to think about how many things I forget during the course of a normal day. The exact number eludes me; I forget how many things I’ve forgotten.

There are little things like forgetting where I’ve put my keys and wallet, and also big things like where I’ve put my children. I’ve forgotten appointments, to eat, to set my alarm, and, I noticed today, the fact that the oil needs to be changed in my truck.

The reasons for this may be many or one, depending upon whom I ask. My wife says it’s because I’m too tired, my friends say I’m too busy. Standard excuses for everyone with a short attention span. My mother, however, offered her own reason in her typically loving way:

“Your head’s too full of useless stuff,” she said. “There’s no room for things that matter.”

I thought about that and had to agree that what she said was at least partly right. I wasn’t sure if it were possible to have so much in my head that nothing else could get in, but I did have a lot of seemingly useless stuff stuck in there.

Stuff like the fact that a dragonfly can eat its own weight in thirty minutes. Or that Hollywood was founded by a man who wanted to build a community based on his conservative religious principles. Couvade is a custom in which a father simulates the symptoms of childbirth. Einstein went his entire life without ever wearing a pair of socks. I could go on.

Where I’ve managed to scrape up such tidbits of uselessness is beyond me. So is the manner by which I can remember that John Milton went blind because he read too late at night but not the name of someone I see at work every day.

The fact that I may simply be absent-minded occurred to me. It’s a distinct possibility. I come from a long line of absent-minded people. But that seems like a poor excuse in itself, and I keep thinking about what my mother said to me.

There’s little doubt that we all fill our lives with things that don’t matter, thereby sacrificing some of the things that do. Worry robs our faith, doubt our hope, and discord our love. But is that true for knowledge? Can we know too much for our own good?

Some people think so. I have friends who believe that faith is all they need, that thinking has done nothing but bring the world a whole lot of trouble. Communism, moral relativism, and Keeping up with the Kardashians wouldn’t exist if someone hadn’t thought them up and ruined all of our lives. Sometimes I think that’s true, especially with Keeping up with the Kardashians.

Faith is pretty much the most important thing a person can have. I also think having as much knowledge as possible easily breaks the top three. Because despite what everyone says, ignorance is not bliss. It’s more like a prison cell with walls of our own making.

Of all the inborn traits God sees fit to give us, few are exercised less than our curiosity. Spending some time with the nearest child will convince you that we’re all born with a probing mind. But that somehow gets lost as we get older. We all are tempted to reach a point where we just don’t care to know anything else. We already know enough about the world to realize it’s all spiraling downward. Why pile it on?

I get that, I really do. There are plenty of things I would rather not know, things that would keep my life chugging along rather nicely if they weren’t stuck on one giant playback loop in my brain.

But then there’s this to consider—our world really is a wonderful place. Flawed, yes. And a bit ugly in some places. But it’s also amazing and inspiring and so utterly almost-perfect.

The truth? I want to know everything. Even the stupid stuff. After all these years, I’m still curious. I still want to know. Because I’ve found that the more I can know about God’s world and the people who inhabit it, the more I can know about God and me. If that keeps me from checking my mail every once in a while or not realizing the truck’s almost out of gas, then so be it.

I think we would all be a little better off if we cracked a book every once in a while. There’s too much ignorance in this world. Life, like music, must contain several parts equally. There must be melody and beat. And there must be heart and head. That’s how we dance through our days. And God is a musician at heart.

Just ask the common housefly. Whose wings, by the way, hum in the key of F.

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