Blog Rocket
March 23, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 4 Comments
I’ll be the first to admit that blogging can be a tough thing. It takes time to design a good site, more time to write good posts for that good site, and even more time to figure out how in the world to build an audience when there are literally millions of other blogs out there. It can all seem like a daunting task, which is exactly what it is.
So when someone comes along with an idea to help bloggers navigate the heady waters of audience and platform, I figure the least I can do is help spread the word.
Chances are you’ve heard of Bryan Allain. He’s been blogging since 2001 at BryanAllain.com, where he offers a daily mix of comedy and inspiration. He’s managed to build quite the empire over the years, writing for such outlets as RELEVANT Magazine, COLLIDE Magazine, Stuff Christians Like, The Burnside Writers Collective, and The Daily Beast. And I can vouch for the fact that he’s a nice guy. I met Bryan and his wife a couple years ago at Waffle House. There’s a bond between people who meet at Waffle House.
Bryan’s started a new website called BlogRocket.com, where he helps fellow bloggers overcome their blogging frustrations and achieve their blogging goals. The site features a membership community and a 12-week Booster Course designed to help small to mid-sized bloggers increase their traffic numbers, hone their blogging voice, and develop a strong community.
Head over there and join the BlogRocket Mailing List, and you’ll get a FREE download of The 29 eBook, a 32-page eBook that offers advice and insight on the Top 29 Frustrations bloggers face. I signed up last week, so I can vouch for what the eBook offers. You’ll also be entered to win a $109 Amazon Gift Card, and you can’t beat that with a stick.
Like I said, blogging can be a tough thing. Whenever an opportunity presents itself to get a leg up on the competition, it’s best to take it.
Trust me.
The changing tides
March 14, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 16 Comments
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June 1992:
Everyone’s telling us to leave, but we’ve already decided that’s not an option. Vacation comes once a year, which means I can only see the ocean once a year, and I didn’t make the four-hour drive from the mountains to the coast just to turn around and go home. Besides, what will soon rage outside is just a tropical storm. It’s not like it’s violent enough to be considered a hurricane.
And there is a strange beauty in all this swirl. The thin line on the horizon that usually separates sapphire water from cobalt sky is gone. Before me instead is a gray that gives the illusion of hole a torn in the universe that threatens to swallow us all.
The boardwalk is empty save for the brave and the stupid. I wander about, unsure if I should be included in the former or the latter. The tide flexes and roars, sending water where beach should be and breakers over the guardrails. Policemen in SUVs rove as sentinels, shouting in loudspeakers over the wind and rain for everyone to seek shelter.
I linger nonetheless, awed by the power of the sea and the smallness of myself. I grip the bench in front of me and squeeze as a sudden gale threatens to send me backward, rain now falling sideways, at first kissing and then slapping my face, and I celebrate that I am alive.
Blue lights in the distance to my left and sirens to my right converge in front of my hotel. Police and rescue personnel pour out of flung-open doors, their binoculars fixed outward toward the raging water. One of them brings a bullhorn to his mouth. Says, “Return to shore immediately.”
I crane my neck around them, out towards the gray hole in the universe. A lone figure on a surfboard pops out among the whitecaps. Swallowed. Pops up once more. He sees the flashing blue lights and the man yelling at him. Reaches up with an arm and waves. Behind him comes a swell that seems stories high. He paddles after it, grips the sides of his board as the wave lifts him. He is to his feet, his arms outstretched, as if hugging the storm itself. Even in the wind and the rain, all this howl, I can hear his joy.
The wave deposits him close to shore but too far for the police to reach him. The man with the bullhorn tries once more—“Return to shore. NOW.” The surfer pauses, stares at us, and smiles. He turns to head back into the maelstrom. One more wave, he asks the storm. Just one more.
When it is over, the police handcuff him and unceremoniously toss his board into the back of an SUV. It’s an unfortunate end to his glorious morning. But I see the smile on his face as he’s placed into custody, and it’s a smile that says it was all worth an arrest.
And as I watch them leave, I know I would say the same.
March 2011:
The weather outside my window this morning reminds me of that long-ago day—gray skies, sideways rain, a gale that rattles the windows. The wavy horizon I’m used to seeing of sapphire mountains and cobalt sky is now a gray tear in my world.
I stand and stare, a cup of coffee in my hand. My thoughts drift back to the man on the surfboard, out there that day in a tempest of water and wind, all to catch that one big wave and to celebrate that he was alive.
I remember what I thought as well, that his deed was a noble one. Not in the eyes of the law, perhaps, but in the laws of existence. I remember envying his courage and the will with which he embraced that one small moment.
Yet as I sip and stare I realize how much I’ve changed in the years since. If I would stand and watch that man dance amongst the waves at thirty-eight instead of nineteen, I would see him as more dunce than hero. Far from believing he was embracing his life, I would think he was spoiling in an act both dangerous and stupid.
I would watch the policemen cuff him and take him to jail, and I would say he’d gotten what he deserved.
That’s what I would think now, and it is not what I thought then.
And honestly, I do not know if that should make me mourn or rejoice.
Junior Griffin reconnects
March 2, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 13 Comments
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No one knew for sure what Junior Griffin would do with all his free time once he finally retired from the phone company.
Some said he would likely just do more of what he did on the weekends—fish. Folks say there’s nary a pond around here that Junior hasn’t thrown a line into at least once in his sixty-five years.
Others said Junior’d finally have time to fix up the old truck he bought years ago and had since sat on cinder blocks beside or house. Or maybe he’d just fix up his house. He liked to do that on Saturdays.
We all supposed it didn’t matter what he did really, so long as it was something. It’s good to stay active when you retire.
It surprised us all when the fishing and fixing didn’t take. Junior said those things had always been weekend pursuits, and having to do them during the week kind of felt like cheating. Those things were special, he said. He didn’t want the shine that was on them to rub off from overuse. So he puttered around town—the hardware store, the gas station, loafing and gossiping with the other retirees.
When that didn’t take either, Junior went out and did something no one expected.
He went to Staples and bought a computer.
The world was passing him by, he said. Nowadays everyone was connected—“computerized,” he called it. On the Internet and surfing the web and chatting it up. A neighborhood kid hooked everything up and taught Junior the basics. Showed him what sties everyone used, things like You-Tube and Google and Bing.
But it was Facebook and Twitter that caught Junior’s fancy. Imagine, being able to talk to people anywhere. Imagine being able to make friends with total strangers clear on the other side of the country. On the other side of the world, even. It was a pretty amazing thing to consider for a man who’d hardly ever ventured far from the hollows of Virginia.
Junior dove headfirst into the magical world of social media. He Facebooked and tweeted with all the vigor of a bona fide professional. Had friends as far away as South Africa. Took him a while, of course (we all know how long it takes to really get the hand of such things), but before too long ol’ Junior was yakking it up on the web almost ten hours a day.
He met writers and artists, housewives and businessmen, the powerful and the pain. It was glorious and new and exciting.
And then it wasn’t.
Junior disappeared from the world of the Internet just as quickly as he’d arrived in it. One day he wasn’t there, the next day he was, and then he wasn’t again.
Gone.
I was up in the mountains over the weekend when I ran into him. Sitting on the tailgate of his old truck looking down over the valley, a sandwich in one hand and a mason jar containing a questionable liquid in the other. As happy as he could be.
He asked me how the Internet was doing. I told him it was still there and doing fine. He asked me if I’d noticed his absence, and I told him I had. I wasn’t about to ask what happened to chase him away, not with that view of the valley sitting there for me to look at. Besides, I figured he’d tell me anyway.
He chewed his sandwich and gulped from his jar. “It’s fun, bein’ on there,” he said. “Get t’meet all kind of folk. Nice folk, too. I needed that, you know, ’cause I retired. And Ellen’s been gone three years now—d’you know it’s been that long since she passed? Anyways, gets lonely bein’ at home all by m’self. Havin’ all that company on the computer made things easier.
“But you know what? That weren’t the company I needed. I started sittin’ in front of that dad-blamed thing while the whole world went by. The more I did it, the more I wanted to do it. Got to be too much. I was yappin’ my mouth off, but I’s never sayin’ anything. Got to be too much. People’s always sayin’ how great all that Facebookin’ and tweetin’ is, and I guess they’re right, but tweetin’ ain’t no better’n livin’ is what I say. You hear me?”
I said I did.
Junior finished his sandwich and said he’d best be going. There was still some daylight left, and he wanted to get some fishing in. He always liked fishing, he told me. Gets you outside in the quiet so you can think and breathe and be.
Can’t do that on the Internet, he told me.
I couldn’t disagree with that.
Small cuts and deep wounds
February 28, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 16 Comments
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It was actually a job-related injury. A paper cut. I was writing, went to turn the page, and sliced my index finger.
In my defense, it did bleed. And it hurt.
I decided to take a break from writing and watch a little television while I healed. The news was on—the news is always on in my house, and I hate myself for it. There was an interview with a man who had lost his family during a demonstration in some Middle Eastern country. I’m sure they said which particular country it was, but I was busy sucking on my index finger. Paper cuts are awful.
Anyway, this man.
Went to a demonstration with his wife and child. Not a protest, mind you. No violence or shouting or burnings in effigy. He just wanted to participate in a gathering of like-minded people who were fed up with totalitarianism and fear. The ruler—king, perhaps?—had been in power for years, siphoning off money meant for his people to line his own pockets.
The name of the ruler (or king) was…something. Abdul, maybe? I remember it was a long name, four or five words, but I can’t remember exactly. I suppose that was around the time I was looking for a Band-Aid.
Back to the man. Everything was going so fine for a while. The people were excited. Hopeful, even. That in itself was a miracle, as this man’s country, these millions of people, had not known hope for generations. The protests in Tunisia and Egypt had emboldened them. If change could come to those countries, why not there? Why not then?
The police came. I remember seeing footage of that. Men with guns and sticks and tear gas, firing into this peaceful crowd, snatching that hope away. I remember a reporter’s voice, then the man again, crying and bloody and talking of his family—his wife and child. They were lost. Or dead. One of those two.
My Band-Aid was too tight. I took it off and tried putting it on again, but the ends rolled up and it wouldn’t stick to the skin. I had to go find another one. By the time I got back from the bathroom, the station had gone to a commercial about how wearing Old Spice and make the ladies love me like they do that cool black guy with the deep voice.
That’s when it hit me, how horrible I am.
I like to think I have a soft heart. People have told me such on quite a few occasions, and I’ve always taken it as a compliment. I know well this world can harden a person, leave him uncaring and apathetic. Not me. I care. I do. Any other time I would have watched that entire segment with my undivided attention. I would have mourned for and with that man. I would have prayed for him and his family.
A soft heart is a virtue, I think. No less than love or courage or honor. And I suppose such things are called virtues for the simple reason that they are so difficult to obtain. I discovered that just a little bit ago. That at our core, we are helpless, fallen creatures who forever put themselves before others.
For proof, all I need to do is look at my hand and know that the smallest cut on my finger gave me more concern than the suffering of millions of my fellow human beings.
No less precious
February 23, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 24 Comments
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It was a little over sixteen years ago when Ken Copeland’s wife woke up feeling a little queasy. It was a Sunday, he remembers. The big deal that day was the football game later that afternoon. Redskins and Cowboys.
Ken never saw that game, because his wife decided to take a pregnancy test later that morning. In the two years they’d been trying to conceive a child, she’d gone through dozens of those tests. All had produced nothing but a disappointing minus sign. On that day, however, a vertical line appeared and bisected that familiar horizontal one. It was a plus.
Ken and his wife celebrated that day with tears, fears, and a steak dinner at the Sizzlin’ in town. They told everyone (even the waitress, who discounted their steaks as congratulations). Everyone wanted to know if Ken wanted a boy or a girl. His answer was the usual one. Ken didn’t care, just so long as the baby was healthy.
Matthew Brent Copeland was born nine months later at the local hospital.
Fast forward sixteen years to the playground at the local elementary school. Father and son are at the swings, Ken pushing Matthew. It’s the younger Copeland’s favorite activity, one that somehow calms the storms that rage in his mind. Ken thinks it’s the back and forth motion that does it, that feeling of flight and peace. He takes Matthew there every evening.
There are smiles on both their faces, though that hasn’t always been the case. The Copelands went through a tough time when Matthew was diagnosed with autism at age four.
In quiet conversation, Ken will tell you that almost killed him. He’ll admit the anger he felt toward God and the despair over his son, whose life would now never be as full and as meaningful as it should have been.
And he’ll tell you that deep down in his dark places, if he and his wife would have known what would happen to Matthew, he would have preferred abortion over birth. There would be less pain that way. For everyone.
Yet now, twelve years later, he smiles.
I watch them from the privacy of a bench on the other side of the playground. See him push his grown son and yell “Woo!” as he does. I see the perfect and innocent smile on Matthew’s face as he’s launched out and up. Hear his own “Woo!” in reply.
When they’re done, Ken takes his son’s hand in his own and together they walk across the soccer field toward home. Their steps are light, they take their time. It’s as if their world has stopped for this moment between father and son to marvel at the bond between them, proof that the hardships life sometimes thrusts upon us don’t have to break our hearts. They can swell our hearts as well and leave more room for loving.
Ken has made his peace. Peace with God, with his life, with his son’s condition. It hasn’t always been easy, but nothing that is ever worth something is easy. There are still times when he looks at Matthew and wonders what his son’s life would be like if he were normal and healthy. He’s sixteen now, that age where a boy’s world should expand in a violent and glorious eruption of girls and cars and sports. But Matthew’s world will never expand. It will always remain as small as it was when he was four, and just as simple.
Ken says that’s okay. That it has to be. He’s learned that in a world that seems full of choices, there are really only two—we can hang on, or we can let go. Ken has let go. Of his anger and his disappointment, of his despair. And he’s found that what has replaced those things are peace and fulfillment and joy, things he’d always chased after but until Matthew came along never really found.
If Ken would change anything, it would be what he said to all those people who’d asked him if he wanted a boy or a girl. His one regret is what his answer always was, that it didn’t matter as long as the baby was healthy. Because an unhealthy baby is no less precious, no less valuable, and no less life-changing.
Pujols: More than the Game
February 22, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
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For a long time, I never had a hero.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. I had many growing up. Ballplayers, mostly. My parents like to joke that I was born holding a baseball glove, which isn’t too far from the truth. Even now, years after I played my last game, I often dream I’m hitting a baseball. Those dreams are so convincing that my body will turn in my sleep to swing at a pitch that exists only in my mind. I always wake not knowing if I’d missed or put one in the seats.
Baseball was a part of me. It still is.
Which is why I often turn to the game for solace during those long and dark months of winter. My shelves are lined with tomes of baseball history. I recently added another.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of Pujols: More than the Game, by Scott Lamb and Tim Ellsworth, courtesy of a friend who thought I might enjoy it.
I did. So much so that it’s gotten me thinking.
For those of you who don’t know, Albert Pujols is a professional baseball player for the St. Louis Cardinals. A good one. So good, in fact, that at the tender age of thirty-one, he’s already considered among the best to ever play the game.
I knew that.
He is a nine-time All-star, a three-time MVP, a batting champion, a Silver Slugger, and the National League Rookie of the Year in 2001.
I knew that, too.
What I didn’t know before reading this book was the man behind the uniform, the Clark Kent to his proverbial Superman. Honestly, the prospect of that left me cynical. Remember, I’d spent years without a hero, and for good reason. When a boy grows up admiring athletes who turn out to be gamblers and drug addicts, it’s the play on the field that becomes most important. What happens off it is usually reduced to boys being boys.
But not Albert.
I didn’t know that.
I could tell you the stories I read in those pages. Of how Albert was born in a neglected neighborhood in the Dominican Republic and raised by an alcoholic father he adored nonetheless. Of how he said, “Sometimes we didn’t have anything to eat for breakfast, but if we could eat lunch and dinner, we weren’t poor.” Or how his family moved to New York when Albert was sixteen, but then left for Missouri weeks later when he witnessed a shooting.
I could tell you of his rise to the major leagues or his love for Deidre, his wife. I could tell you of Buddy Walk in the Park Day, “when children with Down syndrome went on field during pregame ceremonies, rubbing shoulders and running the bases with big leaguers.” Two boys asked Albert to hit home runs for him that day. He hit three.
I could tell you that and more. But I won’t. Because that’s not Albert Pujols.
Albert Pujols is the man who says, “Every time I go out there, it’s to glorify God.”
He is the man who considers his faith to be a verb instead of a noun. Who, along with his wife, started the Pujols Family Foundation to “benefit people with Down syndrome, disabilities and/or life threatening illnesses, and children and families living in impoverished conditions in the Dominican Republic.”
He is the man who said, “What people don’t understand is that this work is what I’ve been put on earth to do, and when baseball’s gone and I’m not famous, I’m still going to be doing this work because this is what God’s called me to do.”
Albert Pujols is the only baseball player I’ve ever heard of who thinks he’s not called to play baseball. He’s called to help people.
Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Almost impossible to believe. That a famous, multi-millionaire athlete could see his life in such a manner.
What was even more impossible was how I felt when the book was over—that Albert’s Clark Kent was even better than his Superman.
In an age of steroids and lurid tales and unbridled pessimism, not just of celebrities but of everyone, what we need is not more transparency, but more honesty. More light in the dark places.
More heroes.
Yes, even grown men need heroes. Maybe grown men most of all.
Sports Illustrated ran a cover story on Albert in March 2009. The cover shows him staring into the camera with a bat on his shoulder. The headline read, “Albert Pujols Has a Message: Don’t Be Afraid to Believe in Me.”
Waiting on the fixing
February 16, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 16 Comments
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My son plops down beside me on the sofa and says, “Dad, can you fix this? I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”
He holds up the Lego spaceship he’d bought with report card money. Three hundred pieces, complete with two figures, three lasers, and an ejection seat. It took us—me, rather—almost an hour to put it together. Now it’s in twenty pieces. Crash landing, he said.
“Sure I can fix it,” I tell him. “No problem.”
And it isn’t. I know what’s wrong with is spaceship, and I know where the pieces go. All I need is a few minutes.
I set to work. My son sits beside me, fidgeting. He wants to play with his spaceship. Now.
“Hurry up, Daddy,” he says.
“Hang on.”
I fix the landing gear first so I can have a stable platform to fix the rest. Two pieces are missing. I find them on the carpet.
More fidgeting. Then, “Daddy?”
“Yep?”
“I don’t think that piece goes there.”
“Sure it does,” I tell him. “I remember how I did it before. Trust me.”
And he does trust me. It’s an uneasy trust though, the kind that is silent and doubting. He looks over my shoulder and sighs. Points to which pieces I should put together next and which I should save until the end. He mumbles. The whole process makes fixing what’s been broken longer and more aggravating. For him, not for me.
“Daddy?”
“Yep?”
“I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re taking too long.”
“Just wait and see,” I tell him. “I’ll have it fixed in a minute.”
But he can’t wait, and so he doesn’t see.
“Never mind,” he says. “I think I can fix it myself.”
He offers me a sad little sigh and gathers up the pieces in the towel he used to bring them to me. Off he goes back to his bedroom.
I shake my head at his impatience. My son is too young and too inexperienced to know how to fix his toy. He’ll try, of course, and trying is a good thing. But in the end he’ll succeed only in putting it together wrong. It will be imperfect, less than it should be. My son will know that, but he’ll take a flimsy sort of solace in the fact that at least the fixing is done and the playing can begin.
I can’t blame him for this.
There are a lot of times when I bring a mess to God and say, “Father, can you fix this? Fix this problem or this situation. Fix this life. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I just know it’s crashed and broken.”
“Sure I can fix it,” He tells me. “No problem.”
And it isn’t a problem. God knows what’s wrong. And He can fix it, too. He knows what’s wrong and where all the pieces go.
He sets to work. I want it fixed now, so I fidget. Hurry, I tell him. Hang on, He answers. I fidget more. Time passes, and I begin to wonder if He really knows what He’s doing. I’ll look over His shoulder and offer my own advice about what goes where and what needs done now and what can wait.
You’re not doing it right, I say. Wait and see, He tells me.
But I can’t wait. And because I can’t wait, I never see.
“I’ll just fix it myself,” I finally say. Then I pick up my problems and trudge off.
But this I know: my son will be back soon. He’ll see that getting things fixed right is worth the wait. Especially when he realizes he can’t fix it right on his own.
And God knows I’ll be back, too.
The best conversation I never had
February 14, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 23 Comments
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I’m tempted to do drive faster than normal every weekday at 4:00. Or find some good music on the radio. But I never do. Because I know that just down the road where the city opens up and two lanes turn into four, he’ll pull up beside me in the left lane. Just two guys heading home from work, ending their day with an exhale.
He’s a policeman; that’s apparent by the car he drives—an unmarked sedan with meshed steel separating backseat from front seat. He has the face of a cop, too. Not serious, but steady. Guardian-like. It’s a face that says Don’t worry about it buddy, I got your back. Just don’t let me catch you speeding or playing with the radio.
I’m not sure how long we’ve been sharing the road on our ride home, but I noticed him about three months ago. It’s never for long—anywhere between thirty seconds and three minutes, depending upon the flow of traffic. Exactly why he stood out is an answer I do not have. Chances are I share the road at that time of day with plenty of the same other people, too. I suppose the same could be said for him. After all, I’m just a guy in a truck trying to get out of the busy city and back to the quiet country.
Then came yesterday.
Weather: dreary, cold, February-like. Mood: sour. Workday: bad. There was nothing more I wanted than to do than mash the accelerator put the day behind me. Couldn’t do that, not with the knowledge that the Holy Spirit on four wheels would shortly be pulling up beside me. And he did, of course, at the stop light where he usually does.
Most days a fleeting glance is all I offer. The bulk of my attention is focused on the traffic and the stoplights. But yesterday my glance lingered long enough for him to return one of his own.
I lifted my chin hello. He lowered his and helloed back.
The light turned then. We both drove the hundred yards or so until the next intersection. The light was red.
I felt his gaze and tried not to look. That’s common, I think, whenever you’re in the presence of a police officer. But I kept feeling it and looked anyway. He saw me and pointed to the sign in front of the gas station to our right. I looked. A gallon of regular was $3.09.
I looked back to him and shook my head in a sad way. He offered me a What-are-you-gonna-do? shrug.
Green light, another hundred yards. At that intersection a group of teenagers were milling about in typical teenaged fashion, waving to pretty girls and taunting everyone else. They stopped when they saw the policeman beside me. Even pulled up their sagging pants. He looked at me. This time it was he who offered the sad shake of the head and I who answered with the What-are-you-gonna-do? shrug.
Green light, red light. I slumped back into the driver’s seat, sure that the universe had aligned against me in an attempt to sour my mood even more. The man beside me did the same. I made a motion with my hands that suggested he could turn his flashers on and get us both out of there. His laugh told me that probably was not going to happen.
The last stoplight was where we parted ways. I took a right toward the peaceful roads of the backwoods, while he pushed onward through the city. I offered him a wave before I pulled away, which was returned. Another one down, we seemed to say to each other. See you again tomorrow.
I hope so.
Funny things, those little moments. Just two guys putting up with the minor inconveniences of their lives. Two guys just trying to make their way and get back home.
It’s easy sometimes to build a cocoon around yourself, to think that your problems are unique and unshared by others. I found out yesterday that wasn’t true at all. We’re all daily on the front lines of living, trying and stumbling and trying again. What unites us aren’t our joys as much as our challenges.
I’m going to try and keep that in mind. And I’m thankful for what taught me that lesson—
The best conversation I never had.
It’s not fair
February 9, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 24 Comments
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Sometimes a certain phrase will stick out in my mind through sheer repetition, like a mantra told and retold by everyone I meet. It was like that yesterday.
It started early at breakfast, when my daughter said it wasn’t fair that she had to eat eggs. Eggs don’t taste like anything, she said. The box of Pop Tarts she found in the cabinets was more to her liking. We tried explaining to her what she already knew, which was that Pop Tarts do not usually make a good breakfast for diabetics. That’s when she said it.
“It’s not fair.”
My son repeated those very three words not a half hour later, when he was finally convinced there would be no sudden and violent snowstorm and that he would have to go to school. He pouted on the sofa and pushed back tears. Tried to make himself cough. Tried to say he had a fever and chickenpox. When those things didn’t work, he slung his backpack over his shoulder and muttered, “It’s not fair.”
Heard it on the radio on the way to work, too. Someone called in to say it wasn’t fair that we had a Democrat in the White House. Someone else called in to say it wasn’t fair that we didn’t have an all-Republican Congress.
A student told me later it wasn’t fair that she had to wait for her mail.
Shortly after, I told myself it wasn’t fair that I had to be a mailman.
I went through the whole day like that, analyzing all the things people said to me. It was amazing just how often the issue of fairness crept into our conversations, whether outright or implied. In almost every case that fairness was something absent rather than present. Whether it was someone who was sick or out of work or just plain mean, it could all in some way be traced back to the simple fact that life isn’t fair and that we all suffer because of it.
Civilizations are built upon the notion that unfairness can be fixed. The laws we have are largely based on eliminating the inequality among us and replacing it with a sense of evenhandedness. It’s the concept behind things such as mediation and negotiation. It’s all done to make things fair, even if the results sometimes are not. Just ask my kids, who would much rather have Pop Tarts for breakfast and enjoy a perpetual summer vacation.
It’s something I hope they both grow out of and something I know they never will. After all, I’m pushing forty years old, and I don’t think much in my life is fair, either.
But for the past few days I’ve been watching the scene in the Middle East unfold. Like you, I’ve seen riots and protests. I’ve seen people beaten and robbed. I’ve heard the frantic pleas of people afraid for their families, for their futures, and for their very lives.
The vast majority of them are poor and undernourished. I’ve heard the average Egyptian worker makes just over four dollars per week. For thirty years they’ve been under the heel of a tyrant, and now most of the world fears that tyrant will be replaced by Islamic extremists who are even more tyrannical.
If someone would ask these people who have marched and shouted (and now bled and died), I’m sure they, too, would say it isn’t fair. They don’t enjoy the sort of life we Americans have. They don’t have the freedom to say and do. We have plenty, they have nothing. We have comfort, they have pain. Like us, they want to work and provide for their families and give their children a future. Unlike us, chances are they’ll never have those opportunities.
So I tell myself and my children this:
We all have struggles, not the least of which is that indwelt desire to obtain what we think will make our lives better. In this life we are subjected to things we do not deserve and must conform to things we do not like. We want fairness, but we’ll never have it. Not on this side of life.
But far from bemoaning that fact, you and I should be thankful for our position in all that unfairness. Because but for the grace of God, we would be the ones rioting and bleeding in the streets.
Difficult losses
January 31, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 20 Comments
image courtesy of gamescrafters.berkeley.edu
We Coffeys are a competitive bunch. Life most character traits, that particular one has both its plusses and minuses. But by and large, our competitiveness has served us well. We are not content to be merely good at something. We have to be the best. And of course, in order to be the best, you first have to beat the best.
Which I suppose is why my son kept challenging me to games of Connect Four. You know the game, right? Big yellow rectangle on a pair of blue plastic stilts. One person has black checkers, the other red, and the winner is the first to get four of his or her colors in a row. Santa brought it for Christmas. Mostly because I played it all the time when I was a kid.
My son took to the game just as I did in my once-upon-a-time. We played a game under the tree on Christmas night, then again the night after, and then every night since. Until tonight, anyway. But I’ll get to that.
The thing about playing games with your kids is that you wonder when and if you should let them win. I’ve let my kids beat me at wrestling and boxing and Scrabble and chess. Not often, mind you, but often enough. It’s important they learn graciousness. Both when they win and when they lose. But I never let my son beat me at Connect Four. Some things needs to be a challenge. And to be honest, I like my kids to think I’m a genius at something for now. I know it won’t always be like that.
So we played. He tried, I toyed. He lost, I won.
Until last night.
My son beat me. Snuck in a backdoor diagonal of four red checkers. I never saw it. And what’s worse—what’s maybe worst of all—is that by that point I really was trying to beat him. He had homework to do, and so did I. I’d used my last move to set up my third black piece in a row, hidden from his sight on the opposite side of the board. It was a brilliant move. His was more so.
He dropped in his fourth checker and bulged his eyes.
I bulged mine.
“I win!” he shouted. Then he jumped up and crawled around to my side of the board just to make sure. “I win!”
There had to be some mistake. He’d miscounted. There were three checkers, not four. Or four, but not in a row. Something. Anything.
But. No.
“You win,” I whispered.
He danced. He screamed. He told his mother and sister. He even took a picture of it.
I was happy for him. And not. Like I said, I’m competitive. I don’t like to lose, especially when I’m trying to win and ESPECIALLY when I’m trying to impress my son with my staggering strategic intellect. That’s bad, I guess. But honest. At least I was a gracious loser. I allowed him his celebration. All three hours of it.
He was still awake when I went to bed, though barely. The excitement had worn off by then, leaving behind a sheen of quiet reflection on his face. I tucked his blankets and kissed him on the forehead, then headed for the hallway.
“Dad?” he asked.
“Yeah, bud?”
“I’m sorry I beat you.”
I smiled and told him not to be, that he’d won fair and square and should be proud because I was proud. The next morning, he said he hadn’t slept well. Neither did I.
I waited tonight for him to suggest another game. He didn’t. The box still sits untouched in the basket behind the recliner. I supposed it will be untouched for a while.
I suppose every child must inevitably arrive at that moment when he realizes his father is not the perfect man he’s always believed. That he in fact makes mistakes and misses things. That he loses. That he is a fallible, fallen person. It is a difficult moment, but a necessary one.
Both for the parent and the child.
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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