control – Page 2

Helpless, but not powerless

February 3, 2014 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Screen Shot 2014-02-03 at 9.34.42 AM There are degrees of heartache in life, each plotted on some imagined graph with “stubbed toe” on one end and “paper cut” farther up, up on through “loss” and “failure” and whatever else, but at the very top will be found a jagged black border surrounding bright red letters that read “sick child.”

I know this because I’m at the doctor’s office with two of them. What exactly is wrong with my children is beyond me, which is why we’ve taken the lengths to drive to the other side of town on such a hard winter’s day. The flu, perhaps—one of those strains not covered by this year’s shot. That, or two bad colds. I suggest the likely culprit is remorse for the cold and snow that has cancelled school these past few days. My son nudges me in the shoulder for that little remark. He tries to laugh. It comes out more a phlegmy snort and I think No, not a flu. Bronchitis, maybe. The doctor will know for sure.

My wife is on my opposite shoulder. Beside her is my daughter. She sniffles, and that small act brings a bit of rosy color to an otherwise pale face. Her coat is zipped to her chin, her blue scarf cinched tight, her legs tucked under her, yet she still shivers against the fever. It’s been two day now. My son’s discomfort is largely auditory—sharp sneezes and deep coughs, each punctuated by sudden and sometimes frantic sprints to the bathroom. My daughter’s condition is more silent and worrying. A diabetic since the age of four, maintaining her sugar is a constant walk upon a tightrope easily swayed and poorly moored. Any virus can ravage her. While you and I have a glucose level that holds steady anywhere from 80-110, hers just clocked in at 396.

And so we sit. And so we wait, huddled together in a tiny corner of this doctor’s office.

Our view is of a bleak outside and the bleaker faces that come in from it. It is a sad parade of the weak and the dying, and I think to myself that however stricken these poor souls are, it is at least themselves who are sick and not their children.

Hung in the middle of the far wall is a framed reprint of Sir Luke Fildes’ The Doctor, first painted in 1887. I’ve sat in this cracked vinyl chair and stared at that painting many times over the years through many discomforts, studying the central figure of the Victorian doctor gazing intently at his patient—a little girl lying sick on a makeshift bed of mismatched dining room chairs, two large pillows, and a ragged blanket.

It’s not the doctor I focus upon this time, but the two figures in the background—father and mother watching from a distance, he with a look of anxious worry and she with her head on the table in despair. Both regulated to the shadows, helpless to do anything.

That’s how I feel right now.

Even a bad parent would not want his or her child to suffer, to writhe and wince with cough and fever. Even a bad parent would wish to suffer in that child’s place. And yet life teaches us all that very often the power we believe we possess is a lie, nothing else. Ours is an immense world, and we are such small things. The virus coursing through the two children beside me is mean and debilitating, and so is the defenselessness felt by their parents. We’ve done all we can. It wasn’t good enough.

Yet in the small minutes I’ve sat here, I’ve learned this one important thing—we are often helpless in this life, but we are never powerless. What we cannot mend we can ease, and where we cannot cure we can comfort. I can’t make my son better, but I can offer him a shoulder upon which to lay his head and a joke to make him smile. I can’t chase my daughter’s fever, but I can put my arm around her and kiss the top of her head. I can listen as she tells me of the book she’s reading.

I cannot spare my children from the troubles of this life, but I can love them through those troubles.

Maybe in the end, that’s what matters.

Ambitious goals

January 23, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Spencer said, “I ain’t never doin’ it. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

The words were slurred because his tongue was still hanging out of his mouth, giving the impression that this five-year-old had been drinking a little more than his customary Kool-Aid.

“Do you have to keep sticking your tongue out like that?” I asked him.

“Yeth,” he slurred again. “If it’s in my mouff, I can’t control it.”

“Ah,” I answered and nodded in approval. It was a good idea, I thought. A more practical way to tame the tongue. “Good luck with that. If it works, you’ll be famous.”

“Why?” he asked, eyes bulging.

I shrugged. “It’s never been done before. Not as far as I know. Folks say it’s impossible.”

Spencer hadn’t considered the prospect of fame. Riches, yes. But renown might be even better.

“I ain’t never doin’ it,” he repeated. Meaning that was that and I should probably be moving along.

So I did. Away from the Sunday school rooms and through the foyer to grab this week’s church bulletin, then finally into the sanctuary to settle my family. It just so happened that Spencer and his family settled in two rows behind. Just after the first hymn and just before the first prayer, I stole a look over my shoulder.

Spencer’s tongue was still out, despite the repeated attempts by his mother to rectify what she no doubt considered ill manners. I raised an eyebrow at him and got a thumbs up in reply.

His father takes the blame for the entire situation. He was the one who took care of Spencer’s loose bicuspid with a bit of fishing line and a doorknob. “Quick and painless,” he’d told his son. Spencer didn’t think that was quite so. Turned out that both of them were right.

The trick was quick, yes. And also painful.

Fathers often resort to desperate measures to put a stop to a crying child, and Spencer’s tried everything in the book up to and including an impending visit from the Tooth Fairy. That perked Spencer’s ears a bit and brought the wailing down to a somewhat manageable sob, but that only lasted until Spencer found out all the Tooth Fairy was good for was a dollar. To him the pain and suffering alone was worth at least ten, not to mention the mental distress.

Knowing his son was quite the budding capitalist, Spencer’s dad decided to up the ante with an old wives tale.

“Better stop cryin’,” he told his son, “or else your tongue might slip into that hole in your mouth.”

Spencer stopped. “Why?” he mumbled.

“You mean you don’t know what happens if you keep your tongue clear?”

“…no.”

“If you never let your tongue touch that spot, the tooth that comes in will be gold.”

It was without doubt a stroke of genius, a psychological ploy designed to divert Spencer’s attention away from the pain he was feeling. More than that, he gave his son a goal. And we all know that a little pain is nothing if there’s a goal to be reached.

However.

There is that unscientific yet utterly concrete law of unintended consequences. Each cause has more than one effect, which will lead to any number of side-effects. In this particular case, the effect was what Spencer’s dad intended—his son stopped crying. The side-effect, though, was that Spencer walked around the house for a full day and a half with his tongue hanging out.

His parents didn’t mind (though his mother would have preferred her son not stick his tongue out while in the house of the Lord). In fact they encouraged it, going to far as to tell Spencer that it was considered permissible to house his tongue inside his mouth during sleep. Evidently consciousness is a prerequisite in the cultivation of a gold tooth.

In the end his parents have experience on their side. They understand the desire to accomplish a goal, no matter how intimidating the odds. They also understand that very often the thing we’re trying so hard not to do is the very thing we end up doing. Life is all about the constant battle between the two.

The pastor delivered a fine sermon that Sunday, but I have a feeling no one will remember it. What they will remember is the sound of a little boy shouting “Aww heck!” in the middle of the service. The Bible does indeed our desires are tough to tame. We’re always getting in our own way. Which is why the real sermon that day came from a child in a pew rather than a preacher at the podium.

Willsey the dog

October 29, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Having the evening breeze blow over you and make ripples in your glass of tea is a pretty nice way to end your day, which is why I love my porch. It’s a good vantage point to my own little slice of world, one that unfolds before me in the sort of high-definition that far eclipses my television.

My porch serves as a good object lesson, too. It’s proof that if you hold still and listen long enough, something pretty insightful will happen.

That didn’t seem to be the case last night. I was holding still well enough. That wasn’t the problem. And the problem really wasn’t the listening, either. I was doing that, too.

The problem was what I was hearing.

The dog was a mutt. Half beagle, half Australian shepherd, with maybe a little bit of border collie thrown in. Having all that muddled DNA inside you would surely cause more than a little confusion. Trust me when I say that dog was more than a little confused.

So was its owner, who at the moment seemed a little perplexed as to if he was walking the dog or the dog was walking him. He tripped and pulled and pushed. The dog ran and stopped and tangled the leash around its owner’s legs. It was a sight.

And over and over between the barks came pleas of despair and sorrow:

“Willsey, stop!” “Willsey, come!” “Willsey, hold still!” “Dang it, Willsey!”

It took a full five minutes for the two of them to get from the corner of my block to the front of my house. And even though I was enjoying the cool of the evening, the man was sweating as much as a boxer after a ten round fight.

Willsey stopped and sniffed at our mailbox post. Just before he was ready to do his business, I let out a small cough. The owner looked at me on the porch and gave the dog a quick jerk. He’d have to hold it for the next post down the road.

We smiled at each other and said hello.

“Wouldn’t want a dog, would you?” he asked me.

“Sorry,” I said. “Looks like he’d be a full time job.”

“Buddy,” he said, “you don’t know the half of it.”

I nodded toward the mutt hanging from the end of the leash. “Kind of a strange name for a dog. Willsey?”

He laughed and said, “Yeah well, happened by accident.”

He bent down, rubbed the dog on its head, and was rewarded by a face full of slobber. He snorted, the dog snorted, and I snorted.

“My little girl brought him home,” he said. “Just had to have a dog, and she worried me to death. You think this dog’s ugly now? You should have seem him when he was a pup. Looked like Satan himself had coughed him up. And she says, ‘Daddy, can we keep him?’”

“And what’d you say?” I asked.

“I said, ‘Well, we’ll see.”

“Which I’m guessing became Willsey.”

“Yep,” he said. “Seven years ago. Hated him at first. Still kinda do. But you know what? He’s growin’ on me.”

He patted the dog again and got another face full of slobber.

“I like it,” I told him. “The name and the story.”

The man laughed and then proceeded to drag/push/pull Willsey on down the road.

“Neighbor’s got a fresh coat of paint on the mailbox post,” I shouted to him.

“Oh, Willsey’s gonna love that,” I heard.

I smiled to myself and resumed my rocking. I didn’t know who to feel sorry for the most, the man who was stuck with the dog or the dog who was stuck with the man. Maybe both should have been pitied in equal measure. Then again, maybe they both deserved each other.

But I wondered about all those things I’d said “We’ll see” to in my life, all those things I thought would happen or wouldn’t and then didn’t or did. And then I wondered about all the other people who used that phrase every day. We never know what’s coming in this life. We can seldom see what challenges or blessings wait just around the next corner.

And we can seldom see the blessings in our challenges, too.

Lightbulb moments

October 1, 2013 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Screen shot 2013-10-01 at 9.54.58 AM One of the tenets of redneck folklore is the belief that people die in threes. It’s a theory so ingrained around here that there is an influx of patients to the doctor’s office whenever a longstanding member of the community passes on. No one knows who will be next, and they don’t want to take any chances.

I’m not sure how much truth there is in that conviction. People might die in twos or fours just as often as threes. But I do know this—light bulbs die in threes. At least in my house.

It began last week with the light in my son’s bedroom, which much have died a quiet and peaceful death sometime in the night. He rose out of bed the next morning, flipped the switch, and…nothing. A few days later it was the light above the kitchen sink, which yelped a pop! when my wife tried to turn it on.

Then last night I came upstairs to my computer and fumbled for the light switch behind the door. Just as I flicked the switch upward, blue and white sparks sprayed from the ceiling fan in a burst of violence that actually managed to shatter the light bulb itself. It was quite impressive.

What brought about this light bulb mass suicide is beyond me. Our home is not old and the wiring was expertly done. I can only surmise that everything has its life cycle. At some point the odds are in favor of more than one sputtering out at the same time.

The blown light bulb is an exercise in both physics and inevitability. The cause is fairly straightforward: a light bulb’s filament does not evaporate evenly, leaving it to develop spots over time that are thinner than others. Since the electrical current heats the filament evenly, the thin spots heat more quickly. The result is a pop! and then darkness.

What struck me as I stood there staring at the bulb was my reaction, which so happened to be the one my son and my wife had, too. Not anger or frustration. Not even disappointment.

Confusion.

Because a light is supposed to turn on when you flip the switch it’s connected to. I had a vast amount of experience to back that assertion. It was one of the few of my life’s givens, so much so that I’d perform the act without giving it a second thought. Flipping a light switch is faith at its purest, the embodiment of if-I-do-this-then-this-will-happen.

It’s easy to take such things for granted, though. I’ve spent my day keeping track of every light I turned on, from the bathroom light when I first got up to the light in my office nearly sixteen hours later. My total thus far? Thirty. I’ve turned thirty lights on today, and none of them has broken.

I’m already taking the light switch for granted again.

So maybe I needed the gentle reminder that all those everyday things I put my faith in are neither permanent nor flawless. Things that go well beyond light bulbs and into the very center of my life. The job I have today may go pop! tomorrow. The savings account to cushion a fall may be pulled from beneath me just before I land. And the very ones I love most may be the very ones who let me down the hardest.

That’s the nature of life, the consequence of living in a world that isn’t quite what it should have been. We’re all searching for something to hold onto, something that will give us a sense of security and knowing, and yet everything we have is like that light bulb—at some time and in some way, they will all fail in an impressive fashion and leave us standing in the darkness. Which is all the more reason to place more trust in God than man.

Our hearts are pocked with the scars of failed faith and broken trust. There’s nothing we can do about that. Disappointment is built into this world. But despite the fact that those light bulbs in our lives will shatter and explode from time to time, we still must flip their switches. We still must believe. That’s what life is. What Love is, too.

Handling the remote

August 2, 2013 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Sexist I’m not, though I must admit I believe there are a few things men have a firmer handle on than women. Just a few, mind you.

Chief among these is the proper handling of the television remote control. This is most likely due to an almost childlike ignorance concerning its proper function on the part of the female. The remote is not used to simply turn the channel or adjust the volume. It’s purpose is much more intricate–to obtain an overall grasp of station selections, striking an elegant balance between quality viewing and commercial evasion. Or, in more simplistic terms, to channel surf.

My wife has long abandoned any hope of holding the remote control. Not that I do not trust her with it. But watching her use it is painful to me in the way that a composer would be pained by watching a hillbilly use a Stradivarius. It is a skill, the handling of a remote. Something that cannot be taught but must be inborn.

Over the past few weeks, however, an insurrection has begun over our family’s remote control. One led not by my wife. Not even by my son.

By my daughter.

It began innocently enough. I walked into the living room one evening and found her on the sofa and the remote on the ottoman. During a commercial break on her favorite cartoon, I decided to see what else was on. When I reached for the remote, however, I found a hand already there. Hers.

The ensuing standoff was both temporary and bloodless, and my Alpha role within the family remained intact. But as these remote control battles increased in frequency, I began to lose a bit of face. The last one, yesterday, ended in a tickle fight that was only broken up with my son whopping me with a pillow.

I’ll be honest here. I really don’t understand the whole remote control thing. I don’t really know why it must be in my hands and no one else’s. I am not a callous snob. I will gladly watch what my family wants. But I must be the one to turn the channel.

True, there is a certain amount of power involved in the remote. Those buttons are alluring. I have a control over the television that is not offered in my life. Possibilities that are difficult at least and impossible at best.

Zoom, for instance. With a push of a button, my remote will enlarge a certain area of my screen and bring greater detail to the larger picture. The ramifications are enormous. I have outwitted both Shawn Spencer on Psych and the dude in the vest on The Mentalist by the careful manipulation of that button. I don’t miss anything. Which is quite unlike my own life, in which I miss too much.

And there is the Swap button. A wonderful feature that lets me instantly trade what I’m seeing for something else. Easy on my remote. Harder in my reality.

The Exit button is even more handy, enabling me to quickly escape from a screen I have no idea how I managed to get to. The Exit button works wonders for me when it comes to the television. Not in life, though. Most of the time I have to find my own way out of all the self-inflicted confusion.

I would also like to have Pause, Rewind, and Fast Forward buttons in my life, just so I could take a break or try something again or skip over the parts I don’t like.

Play, too, would be a necessary function. I would like more play in my life.

That, I think, is why I’m so passionate about the remote. And if you’re honest, I don’t think you can blame me. Because no matter who you are, we all want a little more control over our lives.

I will say, however, that there I have one function in my life that is much better than its counterpart on my remote control: the Guide button. A push of that button and I know how to navigate around on my television. Handy.

But handier is the Guide in my life, the One who can navigate me through all of those parts in my life I would like to skip over or redo or exit. The One who can help me zoom in on what needs to be seen.

And Who can help me swap earth for heaven.

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