creativity

Castles in the sand

June 16, 2017 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

First you make a hole and labor along the walls to make sure they are thick and tall,

and only after do you build up the center. The order of steps is not negotiable. Most folks—amateurs mostly, at least in my estimation—lead themselves to believe it can be done any way they darn well please, that if they want to start at the center, then at the center is where they’ll start. I look upon these people with a measure of piteous scorn: Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do. Then what I do is sit back and watch as the entire enterprise comes to its slow and inevitable end.

All of which invariably proves my point: there are rules to building a sandcastle as there are rules to living a life. Ignore both to your own peril.

For as much as I act a grown man, being in sight of the ocean tends to unleash the little boy still pent up inside me. Nothing speaks to this more than standing in the midst of miles of untouched beach with a plastic shovel in my hand and a son more than willing to do his part helping (and, as the years have gone on, taking the lead role) in shaping the environment around us into monuments to ourselves.

And I will not kid myself in thinking otherwise. A sandcastle is nothing more than a monument. They are deeply personal things. The shape and diameter of the walls is shaped by our own personalities as much as they are by the implements we use. The depth of the moat and position of the channels designed to divert water away rather than toward. The detail of the turrets and spires. The choice of shells to decorate the sides. My son and I are doing more than building a mere mound of sand, we are staking a claim. Leaving our mark. We are announcing to the wind and sand that we are here.

Of course we know what will happen eventually. You know.

A person has no need of ever seeing the ocean to understand the way of tides. Sooner or later the surf will roll closer and there is nothing—absolutely nothing—we can do to keep our sandcastle safe. No amount of engineering know-how will prevent the water from overcoming our defenses. We know that going in. We build our monuments in full view of white water and cresting waves. We hear their crashing.

We create even while knowing it will be uncreated.

Take a walk down this beach to the end of the island and you’ll discover it isn’t only the sandcastles that are taken. Giant holes dug by children (and men, plenty of men) are gone, too. Messages carved with sticks of driftwood (FREE YOUR MIND; SHE SAID YES; MICHAEL EATS BOOGERS). Shells neatly stacked like cairns pointing the way to a better paradise. Sandbars walked upon mere hours before. All swept away and washed clean without a trace against the Atlantic’s overwhelming power. Say what you want about the ocean bringing a sense of calm and renewal. What you learn most here is that you are a very tiny thing in a very big world, and the big world is often hungry.

Yet that never stops us. Our monuments are whisked away and our marks are obliterated, but still we create.

We tell the world we are here and the world shrugs us away and we tell the world again. Maybe that’s why I love the ocean as much as I do—because it so encapsulates the the sort of lives we all find ourselves living. On a lonely stretch of beach with a child’s shovel we want to know we count, we matter, and that the world would be a little less brighter without us. The waves and brittle sand always disagree.

It’s up to us, then, to decide which is right.

The symphony of us

January 26, 2017 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

I’m not sure how I’ve come to share my house with a group of musicians, but such has been the case for the last few years.

Between both kids and my wife, no less than seven instruments can be heard playing within our walls on a nightly basis. For hours, I’ll add. Which is nice, don’t get me wrong, if there’s anything the world needs more of it’s music, but when you have a piano and flute and guitar playing three different songs in your ear at the same time, it can get hard to read your book. Or think. Or keep from going crazy.

The dog and I spend a lot of time outside in the evenings. It’s quieter out there.

Not that they’re bad, mind you. My family is gifted in ways I never was with the songs they play and the manner by which they play them. The kids especially. Though in all honesty, I’ve had my doubts.

Take the past week. Both kids have been hard at work practicing for a special district symphony performance—think an All-star game for band nerds. One plays flute, the other sax. Nights now they’ve sat in their respective bedrooms wailing away, and to be honest—to be very, very honest in a very loving way—I must admit this:

It sounds awful.

Seriously.

Now, sure, I have zero musical training beyond a fifth-grad stint with a plastic recorder. The only thing I can play well is the radio. But still. It’s bad. Off, somehow. They’re hitting the notes they’re supposed to, but there’s not doubt something is missing. Something vital.

Aside from you, the only living thing I’ve shared this with is our dog Lucy. She agreed and wanted to go outside.

But here’s the thing—my kids might sound awful and off, but they’re not.

I know this because I’ve been through the whole district thing before. Last year I sweated through the days leading up to their performance, thinking both of my kids would get up there with everyone else and hit one clunker of a note after another. Didn’t happen.

What did happen is they both played their notes to perfection in the same way they’d played them in their bedrooms, only now there were dozens of other instruments around them to fill in the gaps. My daughter played her flute, my son his sax, and where they left off other parts took over before my children swooped in again. The broken and jumbled sounds I’d heard them play at home weren’t broken and jumbled at all, those were merely the parts for them to play.

I’d forgotten they weren’t solo performers, they were part of a symphony.

I say all of this because it’s easy sometimes to take a look at my own life and see nothing but a jumbled and broken mess that sounds a little off. Maybe a glance at your own life would reveal the same. Days of the same old and nights spent so tired you can barely get one foot in front of another. Living for the weekend or the next day off. Watching the years tick by and wondering where they’ve all gone and what the point of it all is, and running beneath it all is a soft current of desperation because you just don’t know if it matters at all.

It’s easy for me to think that way when I catch myself believing I’m a solo. But what if I’m not? What if none of us are? What if we’re all playing our own parts in some greater orchestra instead, letting our instruments mingle with billions of others, leaping out and in such that we add to a melody so pure and beautiful the sound of it carries and carries on forever?

What if it’s not about us at all, and instead it’s about us all?

Beauty from ashes

July 9, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2015-07-08 at 1.11.18 PM The car exploded without warning on a day this past April, at a stopping center in an area of Baghdad called Al Mansour. Dozens were killed. The market was left charred and in tatters. The air carried a sickening smell of smoke and burnt flesh and the sounds of sorrow and rage and panic, that music of our age.

This is life for a great many people in the world, a daily existence upon which is balanced a need for the basic essentials of food and water, the universal desire for safety and comfort, and the very real possibility that an act as simple as going to the local grocery store may well end in death. People call our time the Digital Age or the Information Age, but there are times it seems more the Fearful Age.

That this bombing occurred somewhere in Baghdad doesn’t really matter. It could have just as easily been London or Paris, Moscow or whatever city is closest to you. The reality is that none of us are truly safe, and it’s been that way for a long while. Unlike my children, I never had to worry about terrorism as a boy. But I do have the memory of hiding beneath my school desk during a nuclear war drill, of glancing up at wads of chewing gum and scribbled names of children long gone and knowing even then how ridiculous it all seemed. As if my tiny school could keep the Russians away. As if a one-inch piece of laminated desktop would save me from death.

But we’ve learned to carry on in spite of it all, haven’t we? We outlasted the Cold War and Saddam and Osama. Chances are we’ll outlast whatever perversion of religion leaks out of the Middle East, too. Iran. China. North Korea. Maybe we’ll even be forced to outlast ourselves. But the shadow of death will still hover over this world as it has hovered since Cain slew Abel, and even in our safest and most quiet moments, we feel that shadow there. We take our children’s hands and tell them to keep close, worry when they don’t, all because of that shadow.

Yet somehow we still prosper. Our children grow on with us, we still find reason to laugh and sing and devote a large measure of our worry to things that don’t matter at all. We adapt to the shadow of death, that rot in the world. We get used to it. Humanity’s ability to accustom itself to all manner of horrible situations to the point where even the worst things become accepted as normal could be our greatest attribute. Without it, how could we have survived this long? And yet that knack for adjusting could also be our worst curse, because it allows evil to continue on unfettered.

I don’t know if that’s what Karim Wasfi was thinking when he heard of the bombing in Al Mansour, but I’m betting it was something close. Because while the dead and grieving were being taken away and the market workers were cleaning up—telling themselves and each other, perhaps, that this day was lost but tomorrow would perhaps be better—Karim Wasfi decided to do something about it. To do something profound. He didn’t reach for a gun, didn’t vow vengeance. He instead dressed in his best suit, reached for his cello, and went to the market. He placed a chair on the burnt ground, and there in the midst of all that carnage and ruin, he played.

One Iraqi said that Karim “is playing music for the souls of the people who died just a few hours ago. I can imagine them listening too, and wondering, ‘Why?’”

You don’t have to be dead to ask that question: Why? It is just as much the call of the living, a single word that has passed through the lips of every person who has drawn breath, one syllable that has both sparked faith and doubt. Why? Why must things be this way? Why is this allowed?

And here’s the answer—I don’t know. You don’t. No one does. We can couch our guesses in religious terms and say God has a plan. We can drown in the shadow of death and call it evidence that there is no plan at all. Either way, the reality remains. Life is merely a string of ever complex questions. The answers, for the most part, only come after.

But that reality doesn’t mean we’re powerless, nor does it take from us the burden of responsibility. We have a task in this life, you and I, and while that task can at times seem pointless and even false, it remains the only task that matters. We are not only to seek out the beauty that remains plentiful and vibrant in our world, but to make that music ourselves and in whatever way best suits us. It is to do as Karim Wasfi did on that April day. To fill the air with hope and love and peace, and to call that the music of our tomorrow.

Holy vandals: Changing things for the better

June 18, 2015 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

message rocks These have been sprouting up around the neighborhood lately. I’ve counted at least half a dozen on my walks, scattered about in some unlikely places: at the end of sidewalks and the tops of porch steps, on the ledge of a sandbox and in the hollow of a Japanese maple. The one you see in the picture is currently resting at the base of my neighbor’s mailbox.

The rocks look to be colored with some sort of paint — not sprayed on, but brushed. Bright colors, too. No earth tones with these. They’re lime and pink, magenta and electric blue. Definitely not meant to stay hidden. These rocks scream out to be found. To be seen, and immediately.

The ribbons and quotes are as different as the coloring. Some I recognize but many I do not, poets and writers and philosophers from ages past, their words serving as a kind of immortality. I like this. In a time when the Gone is frowned upon in favor of the Just Ahead, it’s nice to be reminded that the world may always be changing but people never do. What was true in the Bronze Age or the Renaissance or in Victorian England remains true now, and will be true still upon some dim tomorrow. The times may evolve, but not the human heart. As a race, we are as good and as evil as we have always been and will always be.

I didn’t get that from one of the cards tied to the rocks. That’s just me talking.

I was lucky enough to catch someone finding their own message, this the day before yesterday while walking the dog. An elderly woman in her front yard, pail and trowel in hand, aiming herself for the rose garden in the middle of her front yard. She stopped with a suddenness that made me think she’d stumbled upon a copperhead searching for some sun. She picked up a near circular stone, bright yellow with a red bow. I saw her lips move as she read the note. Saw the edges of her mouth curl upward.

On my way back, I took a detour through her grass. The rock was still there, placed by her in a position of prominence in the middle of the garden. In black script so carefully written that it appeared printed from a computer was this quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: “The Amen of nature is always a flower.”

I’m going to say that I think I have a pretty good idea of the ones behind all of this. These holy vandals, these ninjas of comfort and inspiration. I will guard their secret. Some day they may be unmasked, but never by me. In the meantime I will feign ignorance, and when my neighbors come calling, scratching their heads and smiling in something very much like wonder, I will say I have no earthly idea where the rocks came from or who put them there. I’ll even show them my own, the orange one I found against the side of the shed this morning. The one with the Robin Williams quote that says, “No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”

I guess that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Changing things for the better. I don’t know of a single person who doesn’t pine for that, and to play their own part in it. It’s why I write books and why my wife teaches school, why my mother worked as a nurse for thirty years and my father drove a truck almost forty. I would even say that’s what drives you as well — to make things better. For the world, your family, yourself. I suppose in that respect, we’re not so different than God is to us. We love things too much to keep them as they are.

But here’s the thing that always seems to trip me up: those momentous events that are told and retold in books and movies and classrooms often began not with a rushing wave, but a ripple. Something tiny. Something almost inconsequential.

Something like a bunch of painted rocks.

Big things don’t always make a change. Most times it’s more little things done over and over again, laid out one after another, marking a path that leads us on. We don’t have to do great things to bring sunshine to the world. All it takes are little things done with great hearts.

Harriet’s masterpiece

March 5, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Sitting beside me as I write this is a robin’s nest. Dislodged by a recent gust of wind, it tumbled from the oak tree in my backyard and was caught in a pillowy blanket of fresh snow, where it was picked up by me.

The finding of the nest did not catch me by surprise. I knew the nest was there and that it would soon not be. I am generally well educated on the goings on of the winged and furred creatures who inhabit my tiny bit of Earth. We coexist well, them and I. Their job as tenants is to remind me of the world I sometimes neglect to consider. My job as caretaker is to feed and water them as best I can. And, as a side benefit, to name them whatever I think is most fitting.

The robin who resided in my oak tree was named Harriet. How I arrived at that particular moniker escapes me and I suppose doesn’t matter. What does matter, however, is that Harriet was my favorite. The rabbits and squirrels and blue jays and cardinals were all fine in their own way, of course. But Harriet was my bud.

She was my security system in the event the neighbor’s cat decided to snoop around for a quick meal. She was the perfect mother to the four robinettes she hatched. And she sang. Every morning and every evening, regardless of weather. Even after the worst of storms, when the rains poured and the thunder cracked and the winds whipped, she sang.

I envied Harriet and her penchant for singing regardless. And when the weather turned cold and she sought her refuge in warmer climates, I missed her too.

And now all I have left is this nest to ponder.

An amazing piece of workmanship, this nest. Bits of string, feathers, dead flowers, twigs, and dried grass woven into a perfect circle, with a smooth layer of dried mud on the inside.

The resulting combination is protective, comfortable, and a wonder to behold. Harriet likely took between two and six days to construct her home and made about a hundred and eighty trips to gather the necessary materials. She may live up to a dozen years and build two dozen nests. I like to think this one was among her finest.

Scientists have taken much interest in this facet of bird behavior. They’ve even come up with a fancy name for it: Caliology, the study of birds’ nests. Artists and poets have found bird nests to be a fertile subject matter. During the 2008 Olympic games, when the Chinese erected the largest steel structure in the world to serve as center stage, it was built in the shape of a bird nest.

Why all this interest? Maybe because of its inherent perfection. You cannot make a better bird nest. The form and function cannot be improved upon. Even more astounding is that Harriet built this nest without any education. Where to build it and with what and how were all pre-programmed into her brain. No experience was necessary. And though my brain protests the possibility, I know that this flawless creation of half craftsmanship and half art is not unique. It is instead replicated exactly in every other robin’s nest in every other tree.

Instinct, the scientists say.

We humans are lacking in the instinct area, at least as far as building things goes. In fact, some sociologists claim that we have no instincts at all. I’m not so sure that’s true. I am sure, however, that things do not come so natural to me. I must learn through an abundance of trials and many errors. My education comes through doing and failing and doing again, whether it be as simple as fixing the sink or as complicated as living my life. Little seems to be pre-programmed into my brain. When it comes to many things, I am blind and deaf and plenty dumb.

I said I envied Harriet for her singing. The truth, though, is that I am tempted to envy much more. How nice it would be to find perfection at the first try. To know beforehand that success is a given.

That I am destined to struggle and stumble and fail sometimes prods me into thinking I am less.

Maybe.

What do you think? Would you rather be a Harriet and get it right every time? Or is there much to be said for trying and failing and trying again?

A middle finger like mine

January 5, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

I figure I’m much tool old to bother with New Year’s resolutions. I’ve learned my lesson. So many of their broken bits trail along behind me now, all well-intentioned but doomed to failure. We all strive and wish and work for our own vision of wholeness, however right or wrong that vision may be, and yet we will always be broken. That brokenness, I think, is half of what it means to be human. To try and mend that brokenness nonetheless—to stare ahead into some yet unformed tomorrow and see ourselves becoming the people we are meant to be—that is the other half.

At twelve and on the cusp of thirteen, my daughter suffers no such constraints of worldly wisdom. She not only embraces the concept of resolutions, she devoted much of her Christmas vacation to them. She filled pages upon pages of the small black notebook she carries with wondrous ideas of self-improvement. I cautioned her to narrow things down a bit, cut five pages down to one and then whittle things even further, to a single focus. After much deliberation and crossing out, she announced to me on New Year’s Day her goal for the coming year:

To have a middle finger like mine.

My first thought—God forgive me—was that she meant something along the lines of the lewd gesture to which we are all familiar. Not so. She took my hand and stretched it out, showing me the hump of hard skin just inside the first knuckle of the middle finger on my right hand. She pressed it, then smiled and said, “Feels like a marble. I want one.”

“Doesn’t look too good,” I told her. “Which doesn’t really matter with me, since I’m a guy. Guys tend to think the rougher their hands are, the better. Means they’re doing stuff.”

“I want one,” she said again. “I want to do stuff. Think that’s fine?”

“I think that’s very fine.”

She sat down beside me. A worn nub of a pencil appeared from one of her pockets. That black notebook of hers came out of the other. She opened to a page near the middle and took the pencil in her hand, placing her forefinger along the barrel and wrapping her middle finger around it just so.

I asked, “What are you scribbling?”

“I don’t know. Just words. Sometimes I don’t know what’s gonna come out until it does. Is that bad?”

“Nope,” I said. “I think that’s the best.”

She wrote for twenty minutes maybe, working on those words she didn’t know, working on that writer’s bump she wants on her middle finger. I told her it would take time. Lots of time and lots of scribbling. My daughter doesn’t care.

She says she has stories to tell and everyone does, and if we keep those stories locked up inside us they’ll die and maybe an important part of our hearts will die right along with them. She’s a smart one, my daughter, and wise.

I only told her some of what that hard hump of skin on my finger means. Time and practice, yes, but there is also more and harder. Because if she really wants to tell her stories, my daughter will find the going rough. There is no journey in this life fraught with more peril than the journey inside ourselves, no land more arduous and unexplored, and we cannot ever hope to venture there and return unscathed. Every writer bears ugly scars, just as every person does. The hump on my finger is merely the one most visible.