Billy Coffey

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Treasures found

June 27, 2011 by Billy Coffey 22 Comments

A last vacation post…

One would think that in an environment filled with literally thousands of these:

surf shells

a young boy’s attention would be sufficiently diverted from the fantasies that define him to the reality that surrounds him. Not so for my son. If a vacation allows for anything, it is that opportunity to become someone else for a small amount of time. For me, that someone else was a beach bum. For him, it was a treasure hunter.

And he was after treasure. Not the normal sort of treasure, either. Gold bullion and precious jewels weren’t enough, oh no. What he wanted—what he was determined to find—were the remains of Blackbeard’s ship.

He knew we were generally in the right place—in 1996, archaeologist’s discovered the remains of the Queen Anne’s Revenge just a few miles down the road—and he arrived with the proper equipment. The two plastic buckets would be enough to haul his findings, he said. The two corresponding plastic shovels would be enough to dig them. And the metal detector he borrowed from his grandfather would be enough to find them.

The plan was foolproof.

The remains of Blackbeard’s ship were nowhere to be found. Plastic buckets and shovels would be of limited use, but still more than a metal detector finding a wooden boat. Those were the facts, facts I kept concealed from him. Because as any child knows about finding treasure, facts have little value. He was determined, my son, and I was determined to help him.

We set out early each morning (“We gotta get out there before anyone else finds it,” he told me). Just the two of us along the lonely beach, he with the green pail and I with the pink, because, as he said, “Boys don’t carry pink stuff, but daddies can.” We roamed among the shells and the surf, watched the dolphins and the turtles, and watched for treasure.

It was slow going, as was intended. My son inherited both my looks and my impatience—two things that will no doubt curse him for life—but we learned tolerance together that week. We understood the value of taking our time and looking.

Each day we would return for breakfast with our pails full, though of shells rather than wood. Neither of us were disappointed in our failure; by then we’d learned that venturing out together, talking and laughing and dodging the waves, could be described as many things but never failure. And we told stories as men of the sea are inclined to tell, accounts of big fish that were really small and entire planks of Blackbeard’s wood that were snatched by the tides before we could snatch them. And each night at bedtime we would recount our day together and end it with the promise that the next day his treasure would be found.

For five mornings, we looked. Pails at our side, eyes cast downward, only to return with pails of conch shells and scallops.

His steadfast countenance was failing. We were leaving the sixth day, which meant only one more walk, and by then he’d figured out the metal detector would be useless. I told him not to worry, that treasure is one of those things that are usually found when one isn’t looking at all, but he didn’t believe me.

We searched long that last morning. Walked longer, too. To the very tip of the island, where the ocean met the sound in a mash of tides and waves. We’d agreed not to pick up any shells that day and focus our attention better. By the time we neared our temporary home, our pails were empty.

I was preparing the sort of disappointment-will-happen speech that fathers hate to give when he shot out to my left and picked up something from the sand. He yelled (“Here it is! I found it!”) and ran back to my side. Then he showed me this:

wood

A piece of driftwood. Utterly plain and worthless. Those are the facts, facts I kept concealed from him. Because as any child knows about finding treasure, facts have little value. He was determined, my son, and I was determined to help him.

That piece of driftwood now proudly sits on my son’s dresser. He looks at it every day. It’s his treasure, he says. Found on the beach with his father.

Me, I say it’s treasure, too. Utterly unique and priceless. I hope he guards it well.

And I will guard the treasure I found that day as well. It too is unique. Priceless. Not a piece of wood, not a pretty shell. Just this:

Will and me

Filed Under: Adventure, encouragement, family, vacation

Longing for elsewhere

June 22, 2011 by Billy Coffey 10 Comments

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

What I pondered last Thursday morning:

I suspect the ocean is one of those precious things in life that one never tires of seeing; every time is as the first. Always the same sense of awed silence, always the deep exhalation of weights left behind to be picked once more later, once the ocean is still there but you are not. If the evolutionists are right, we all come from the sea. My yearly first glance at the ocean always makes me wonder they may be correct—I feel as though I’m home.

There’s little doubt the sea is in my blood, tucked somewhere in the folds of my DNA alongside a craving for sweet iced tea and an affinity for all things old. My parents have a copy of the Coffey family crest prominently displayed on their living room wall. Among all the colors and adornments are three dolphins in the center. Family lore states that the Coffeys of old were fishermen and sailors who left the Irish shores for the adventure of lands unknown. That would explain a lot in my case, though for me those faraway and mysterious places I long to explore lie not in the hidden corners of the world, but in the hidden corners of my own self.

It is freedom that the ocean symbolizes, at least to me. Possibility. A sense that despite how much we know, there is much more that waits. In a strange way that comforts me. There is a certain beauty in knowing you are small that cannot be found in adopting the lie that you are large. Humility may not be the most desirable of the virtues, but it is among the most valuable. And if the ocean gives me anything, it is that needed sense of knowing my place in the world.

I have no knowledge of what first drew my ancestors to the sea. As much as I’d like to believe it was pure wanderlust, I understand it may well have been a simple matter of economics. The first Coffeys arrived in Virginia around 1609 as indentured servants. I have a feeling we’ve always been a common lot, scraping and struggling and working to survive.

Still, the sea called them as it calls me these many centuries later. We have that in common. In the end, time is the only thing that separates us. Despite everything I have that my ancestors didn’t, I suspect I’m much the same as they once were. Same worries, same fears. Same dreams. The only difference between us is that they listened to that siren song over the waters and I have not.

But there are times—many of them—when I long to do just that. For the freedom, as I’ve said. And the possibility.

That’s what I was thinking last Thursday morning, all in the span of a few brief minutes as I stood on my balcony with a pair of binoculars and watched as a shrimp boat made for the distant horizon. I watched the rising sun cast its light against a white hull that bobbed in the currents. Thought of the men on deck—who they were, where they were going, the ones, if any, they were leaving behind. And despite the comforts of place and family that surrounded me, I quietly longed to join them. To break free. To sail away. Just as my forefathers.

As those thoughts clunked around in my head, the binoculars found one sailor on the stern of the boat. Though the distance between us was far, he appeared scruffy, grizzled. A veteran of the sea. A man you would want next to you when the sky and sea turned angry. In him I saw a ghost of a man I could have been in another life had I been born to mountains rather than water.

He was my mirror, this small speck of man through my lens—the me I never was.

As he stood there I saw that he was not looking outward toward the horizon, but inward toward land. To home. And though our eyes never met, I knew his thoughts.

I was weary of the earth and longed to escape to the freedom of the sea.

He was weary of the sea and longed to escape to the warmth of the land.

And I thought then that perhaps that is all of us in our secret hearts, you and I and all who have come before us—seldom content to be here, always longing to be elsewhere.

Filed Under: longing, truth, vacation

Time well wasted

June 20, 2011 by Billy Coffey 19 Comments

IMG_4316

I bought a cheap watch from a crazy man
Floating down Canal.
It doesn’t use numbers or moving hands,
It always just says Now.
Now you may be thinking that I was had,
But this watch is never wrong.
And If I have trouble the warranty said
‘Breathe in, breathe out, move on.’

—Jimmy Buffett

I spent last week on vacation. Traded seven days of Virginia Mountains for seven days of North Carolina beaches. Emerald Isle, to be exact. If there was ever a name more fitting of its location, it’s that.

I’d spent a good four months looking forward to the trip. It’s been a tough time at work, a tough time all around, and of course everyone knows the cure for a tough time is an easy place.

But the truth? As the day of our departure drew closer, I didn’t want to leave. There was so much that needed to be done. So much that must be finished or started or continued. Dropping everything to sit in the sand seemed a little selfish and irresponsible. I was too busy to go on vacation. That’s not to say I thought the world would fall apart in my absence. I guess it had more to do with the notion that I’d held on tight for so long that I’d forgotten the value in letting go.

And there is value in letting go. There’s a lot.

At some point we’re all introduced to the fact that we do not make the world spin. But in this age of technological wonder where so many of us are driven—and at times even expected—to share our thoughts and happenings to the world with a simple click of a button, it’s easy to convince yourself that even if you don’t make the world spin, it will nonetheless go wobbly without you. I won’t say I fell for that lie. I will say I was headed in that general direction.

I spend much of my life on the written page. I count that as a blessing rather than a curse. And yet after so much time spent looking outward at the world, I found I was losing a bit of me in the process. Over the past year I have heard from a great many people about a great many things, and yet I realized I rarely heard from myself about the things that mattered most.

In the end that’s why I fled to the ocean, that vast expanse of nothingness that is so big it drowns out the little things and renders the big things bare. No writing, no news, no computer. Just deer, crabs, and the three dolphins that played tag just beyond the waves each morning outside my window.

And you know what I found when I returned home? That I didn’t miss much. Anthony Weiner resigned. More jobs were lost. There were floods and drought. Wars. Accusations. More of the same. The earth spun and I followed, though for seven precious days I chose to trail at my own speed rather than to flail at keeping up with everyone and everything else.

What I learned there will likely fill these pages for the time being. There’s much to ponder and memories to sift. My week at the shore resembled a fine wine in that the flavor is only truly tasted upon swallowing.

In the meantime, I leave you with this:

It isn’t how full our days are that matter, but how fully we live them.

Not how fast we go, but how closely we look.

Not how much we hear, but how often we listen.

Not how often we laugh more than cry, but how often we’re willing to do both.

Time well spent is valuable, but so is time well wasted. I know that now. Because it’s in those minutes and hours that we are still and quiet and watching and listening that the truths we seek are made manifest. They appear like glistening shells washed upon endless shores, offerings for the taking.

Before I left I was convinced that wealth was best measured in happiness and peace and good memories. I know better now.

I know now that wealth is best measured in moments.

Filed Under: distance, Happiness, living, memories, time, vacation

All will wash away

June 15, 2011 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

(Originally published June 17, 2009)

You can’t beat a stroll along the surf in the evening. It is the perfect desert for a day that has offered plenty of feasts for both the eyes and the spirit.

Using the setting sun as my compass, I skirt the incoming tide and pause every few steps to snatch a stray shell before the retreating waves can steal it away. My toes dig into the wet sand as the pipers and gulls flutter around me, searching for one last snack before finally calling their day done.

This will be my last evening at the beach. Sometime early Thursday morning we will brush the sand from our clothes, pack our suitcases, and head west for home. (A secret, though, between you and me: I’m not shaking my sand off. I want to walk around with it on me a little while longer.) So tonight I am enjoying one last walk to take it all in.

And I’m not the only one. A few yards in front of me is a young surfer just out of the water and taking the long way home.

He places his board down just beyond the surf and bends as if tying an imaginary shoe. He slowly traces something into the wet sand with a finger and, still stooping, considers the marks. A slow and solemn nod displays his approval, then he rises and walks on.

So do I, pausing after a few steps to pick up a clam shell for my daughter. I look back up to see the surfer now heading for dry sand and the boardwalk, where a battered red bicycle waits to take him home. Curious, I walk ahead to the spot where he had bent down and find these four words:

ALL WILL WASH AWAY.

I look over and see him climb onto the bike and tuck his surfboard under his right arm. There he sits, staring out at the beach.

And here I stand, staring down at these profound words.

You don’t generally expect such deep thinking from hip surfer dudes, just as you don’t generally expect it from redneck hicks. In that, we are kindred spirits. And in more, too.

Because these past few days have brought much the same sentiment from me. I’ve been coming here since I was a child, and that sense of permanence has always been a source of comfort. The ocean never changes. It is immense and beautiful and old and will always be such. Yet while it is fixed, I am not. I may visit this same place every summer, but I always bring along a different me.

The me this year is much different than the person who last gazed upon these waters, though exactly how different I cannot say. Rather than time dulling the edges of our lives, I think it sharpens them. It makes clearer the things that matter and the things that do not. Perhaps it is because my visit this year falls just a few weeks shy of my birthday that my thoughts have been centered more upon the future than the present. Thoughts that are best summed in the four words below me.

ALL WILL WASH AWAY.

There are times when life becomes simply unbearable for me, when the tides crash in much more than ease out and the treasures life gives me are snatched away and demanded back. And I’m sure I’m not alone. I have a feeling the young man on the red bike has recently suffered through something like that. I have a feeling you have suffered through that as well. Because we all have things in our lives that scare us and leave us to quake at the possibility that we are to merely borrow them for a time instead of holding them forever.

We all fear that all we love will be consumed by the enormity of this world and erased forever.

Yet still we arrive daily in our lives to write upon the shore, to cast our hearts and our hopes into the ebb and flow of our days in faith that we just may happen upon something that neither time nor tides can erase.

That is our quest in life. To find the eternal. To find that which cannot be washed away.

Filed Under: change, dreams, future, journey, time, vacation

Planning for reality

April 6, 2011 by Billy Coffey 12 Comments

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

Despite the fact it snowed last weekend, I’m still told spring is on the way. There is enough evidence of that to give me hope. The robins have returned, for one. Baseball season is officially underway. And I am getting ready for a vacation.

Looks like the family will be heading to Emerald Isle, North Carolina sometime this summer. Never been, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s a ways, of course—seven hours or so on the road. Which means there’s a lot to plan.

Temporarily moving both myself and my family seven hours to the south and east is quite the undertaking. There are reservations to make and deposits to send. Routes to map out. Prescriptions to have in hand. Lists to make. Eventualities for which to prepare. The logistics can be overwhelming. It’s almost as if the Coffeys are preparing to land at Normandy. I’ve even resorted to buying a notebook so I can keep track of things.

I’m sure your household isn’t much different. There’s a lot involved in planning for a vacation. And though all that planning isn’t what I’d call fun, it isn’t work, either. Sorting out where we’ll go and what we’ll do makes me think of hot sand and warm water, and that’s a comfort in the midst of this cold Virginia March.

Lately I’ve been wondering about all this planning, though. Not the necessity of it, but why I don’t do more of it elsewhere. I can tell you with exact precision where I’ll be on a North Carolina beach in a few months, but not where I’ll be tomorrow. I can tell you what I’ll do then, but not what I’m going to do now. And I can describe my vacation goals (they’re on page 3 of my notebook), but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what my goals are for this afternoon.

See what I mean? I have discovered the great shame of my life, and it is this—I plan my vacations better than I plan my life.

The opposite should be true, right? But it isn’t. I justify everything I’m doing now by telling myself that vacation comes only once a year for me, and for only a week. Better make it count, then. Better make it as wonderful as I can, because for the next 358 days after, the memory of it is going to have to hold me over.

And while that makes a certain degree of sense, it’s the sort of reasoning that falls apart when you look at it hard enough. Isn’t it kind of ridiculous to spend so much of my time planning on one week out of the year when there are fifty-one other weeks that should demand just as much attention? How much better would my life be if I thought of every week as a vacation week, here once and then never here again?

It’s a question I’m sure to ponder for a long while, and one I think we all should. We let too many of our days pass us by with the false promise that tomorrow is sure to come. As much as I’m all for slowing down, I do think a healthy sense of urgency is required for any good life. It passes so fast. We assume time is on our side. It isn’t. Every tick of the clock, every beat of the heart, is one less moment we have.

I’ll have to keep that in mind, that and the knowing that it is much easier to plan an escape from reality than to plan for reality itself.

Filed Under: holiday, living, planning, vacation

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