Billy Coffey

storyteller

All will wash away

(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.

Would you rather

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com
The bad part about my son getting sick is that he’s sick and my heart breaks with each cough and hasty trip to the bathroom. The good part about my son getting sick is that I often get to take a day off work and stay home to help him recuperate.

That’s how I spent last Thursday. Him and I together on the sofa, he with a blanket and his DS, me with pen and paper. The goal was a simple one—to get him better, and to get me a thousand words on my next novel.

Of course, goals seem to fly out the window when it comes to tending to a sick child. Especially when that child is more intent to play and talk than to rest and heal. We reached an agreement when we both decided watching a movie was what we really wanted to do. He voted for Star Wars. I voted for Lord of the Rings. We compromised for Pirates of the Caribbean.

I actually thought we’d watch the movie, he being sick and all. But no. My son is much like myself in that he’s quiet unless around someone he knows well. And since he knows me well…

“Daddy?”

“Yeah bud?”

“Would you rather be Jack Sparrow or Captain Barbossa?”

“Jack,” I said. My answer was both immediate and a little embarrassing. I didn’t want my son to think I spend a lot of time thinking about such things. Which I do. “I guess, I mean. I guess Jack. Never thought about it, though.”

“I’d rather be Jack, too.”

The movie went on. Cannonballs and swords and cries of “Arrgh!”

Then, “Daddy?”

“Yeah bud?”

“Would you rather be a cursed pirate or a girl?”

“A cursed pirate.”

“Me, too. Wanna know why?”

“Tell me.”

“Because cursed pirates are cool and girls are not.”

“Maybe. But one day you’re gonna think girls are cool.”

More movie. A buried treasure. A battle at sea. But by then those things didn’t matter much because my son had begun playing his favorite game.

Would You Rather.

It started with a book he brought home from school one day filled with all sorts of questions. Would you rather this or would you rather that. Some were comical—Would you rather eat boogers or lick a frog’s face? Others were difficult—Would you rather hit a game-winning homerun or score a game-winning touchdown? A few were even thoughtful—Would you rather make someone’s wish come true or make your own wish come true?

You get the idea. He was enthralled. And as I subscribe to the philosophy of I-don’t-care-what-you-read-as-long-as-it’s-not-Tiger Beat when it comes to my kids, I allowed it.

Sometimes I think that philosophy needs to be reexamined.

Because after an entire day of playing Would You Rather, I decided I Would Rather Not.

Then again, I discovered that an entire day of playing Would You Rather allowed me a long look into the way my son sees the world and the way he sees himself. And by that I don’t mean just that he’d rather be a fish rather than a person because “If I was a fish, I could pee anywhere.”

Other things. Deeper things.

Things like the fact that he’d rather live an exciting life than a long life. And that he’d rather wait for spring than wait for winter.

And my favorite—that he’d rather have me as a dad than even Captain Jack Sparrow.

I suppose in a way games such as this play an important role in a young child’s life. It gets them used to making choices, and life is nothing but a series of choices.

Would you rather be someone else or your best self?

Would you rather not risk failure or chase your dreams?

Would you rather suffer a broken heart or never dare to love?

Would you rather spend your eternity with God or apart from Him?

See what I mean? Choices. That’s what life is all about. That’s where our battles are fought.

Where our present is made and our future fashioned.

What I was doing when the Rapture didn’t happen

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

Saturday, May 22, 5:50 pm.

I could tell you the reason why I’m presently walking the widow Pence’s dog has nothing at all to do with Harold Camping’s promise that the Rapture is mere minutes away, but I’d be lying. The truth is that I’m doing this precisely because we’re all going to die.

You’ve heard of Harold Camping, yes? Me neither. Not until this week, when the Drudge Report got hold of his story. Seems Mr. Camping, who runs some sort of religious broadcasting network in California, fancies himself a bit of a math whiz. He’s crunched the numbers and decided that according to the Bible, Saturday is the beginning of the end. Better hang on folks, he says, because this ain’t gonna be pretty.

This is what I’m thinking about while walking widow Pence’s dog—Buttercup is her name, a white poodle who looks like the business end of the mop I use on the wood floors in the house. She’s a happy dog, unlike her grouchy owner.

The problem with Buttercup in general and the widow Pence in particular began a few Saturdays ago. Ms. Pence had moved into the house down the road and minded her own business. There was no neighborliness about her. Rumor on the street was that she chased away a few neighborhood kids whose kickball had strayed into her front yard. That seemed to be the sum total of her social interaction.

She’s a non-waver too, which does not help her case. Neighbors wave to one another. It’s common courtesy. Ms. Pence was not interested in waving, much less saying hello. She walked Buttercup nightly around the block, their heads both high and pompous and their eyes fixed straight ahead.

So, Saturday a few weeks ago.

Busy day, lots to do, the first of which was to pile a load of trash and brush onto the back of my redneck hoopty truck and haul it all to the dump. I pulled out of the driveway and turned left—why it was left and not right I do not know, I can only assume God decided to teach me something—past the widow Pence’s house.

I assumed the white mass in the middle of the road was a bit of discarded trash whipped there by the wind, but then it moved. Wagged, actually.

Buttercup.

She did not move, merely sat right there where she was and looked at me. I stopped ten feet in front of her, the hoopty’s engine growing, impatient, as if asking me what was going on and hurry up already because we had a lot to do that day.

I put the truck into neutral and gunned the engine, thinking that would be enough to scare her out of the middle of the road. No such luck. Tried the horn. Same result. She just sat there with her tongue out, which was likely because she was hot but I nonetheless took for mockery.

I couldn’t pull around her to either side; a boat and a car were blocking the way. So there I sat, my Saturday and my pride in peril because some little pansy dog wouldn’t get out of my way.

I stuck my head out the window. Said, “Hey dummy, get outta my way.”

Nothing.

So I tried louder, “I’m gonna squish you into a fluffy white pancake.”

At which point Buttercup sauntered toward her front yard. Not because of me, mind you. Because of the widow Pence. Who had been standing there watching and listening the whole time.

“You have some nerve, young man,” she said. “How dare you speak that way?”

What followed was not among my brighter moments. In deference to space and time, I’ll skip over that. Suffice it to say that by the time I pulled away, the widow Pence and I did not like each other. At all.

And that’s how it stood between us until this week, when I read about Mr. Harold Camping’s math skills. The truth is that I fully expect this world to chug on as it always has in the next ten minutes. If Jesus doesn’t know when the end is going to come, I doubt some guy with a pencil and a piece of paper does.

But still, the end will come. Sometime.

We don’t know when or where, but it’ll happen for each of us. We’d better be ready. Say the things we need to say, do the things we need to go. Love and make amends.

Which is why I walked over to the widow Pence’s house and apologized. Why I talked her into letting me take Buttercup for a walk. And why she is at this moment two steps in front of me on the leash, no doubt relishing in the snickers I’m getting from the other people on the street.

But that’s okay. Because if my end doesn’t come in the next few minutes, it will eventually. At least I’ll have one less thing on my mind when I go.

Jimmy’s long road ahead

img_4724There are fewer places more depressing to be nowadays than at the gas station. Especially around here, where those tiny hybrid cars are known as “roller skates” and spoken of in the same mocking tones reserved for liberal politicians and terrorists. Everyone has an SUV here. Or a jacked-up truck. Or both. Having to spend close to a hundred dollars to fill up your tank does not make for a pleasant experience.

It also invites certain periods of discomfort and outright sadness when waiting in line at the cash register. Which is what happened to me the other day. And strangely enough, it had nothing to do with gas.

There were five of us, all lined up in succession in front of a somewhat shaken seventeen-year-old high school cashier who no doubt was tired of being held as the person responsible for the $3.85 per gallon price. That did not stop the farmer at the head of the line from asking how in the world he was supposed to plow his fields with the price of diesel so high, diesel being even more expensive. The cashier shrugged, said “I dunno,” and then offered a qualifying “Sorry, mister.”

Their short conversation would have likely been an interesting one, but my attention then turned to the mother and son in front of me. Both wore the dull layer of weariness common to a hard life, she in her baggy sweatpants and flannel button-up, he in a pair of too-short jeans and a Wrestlemania T-shirt. The mother sighed often—I think it was the deep, tired sigh that drew my attention away from the farmer and the cashier—her hand gripping a twenty dollar bill as if she were trying to squeeze out the ink.

Bored with standing in line, her son wandered away to the candy aisle. Mama’s eyes followed him and then drifted to me. “Hello,” she said. I helloed back.

The boy was back—“Ma, can I have this?”

He held up a bag of Big League Chew, the grape flavored. Not my first choice, as the regular flavored was much better, but still a valid request. Every boy worth his salt is a Big League Chew fan, my own son included. I thought at that moment that maybe I should grab him a bag, too. He’d like that.

“No Jimmy,” said the mother. “That stuff’s too expensive.”

I stole a look at the tiny orange sticker that had been placed just under the batter’s chest on the bag–$1.29.

“Please?”

Rather than answer, mama gripped her twenty harder. But Jimmy wasn’t about to let silence be her final answer.

“Mama?”

The line moved forward. Mr. Farmer Guy was gone now, as was the lady behind him and the man behind her. It was now an elderly man’s turn to excoriate the poor cashier on evil oil companies and corrupt government officials. Mama and Jimmy were next in line, and the question of the Big League Chew was still in the air.

“Mama?”

“No,” she said, and with a sharpness that revealed the hidden facts she was trying to keep from her son. Just one word, one no, that really meant, “Don’t you see that we don’t have the money, that this twenty dollars will maybe get us enough gas to go to the store and back home and you to school tomorrow and then I’ll be on fumes again? Don’t you see?”

But Jimmy didn’t see.

“But Mama…”

“No” again. Then a very sad and very final, “We ain’t got the money.”

The elderly man left—“Damn oil companies” was his parting shot—and mama and Jimmy moved to the register.

The cashier sighed in a here-we-go-again way and said, “You get some gas, ma’am?”

“No,” she said. Jimmy had by then managed to sneak the bag of bubble gum onto the counter in a desperate attempt to somehow leave the store with it, but mama’s eyes caught it.

“I said NO.” She grabbed the bag and held it out. “Take this back,” she told her son. “And do it before I tan your hide.”

I could see the tears in Jimmy’s eyes and thought there were perhaps tears in his mother’s as well, and I thought then that the four of us—mother, son, cashier, and me—were being privy to yet another example that life is unfair. That no matter what we do or how hard we try, some children will always want and some parents will never be able to provide.

“Ma’am?” asked the cashier.

Mother’s attention snapped back to the moment, sighed again. She held out her twenty and said, “I need a pack of Marlboro lights and fifteen Powerball tickets.”

This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Road, hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. For more posts about this topic, please visit him at PeterPollock.com

A love without end, amen

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

I blame the wedding for all of this. The royal one, I mean. William and Kate, the Duke and Dutchess of…something or other. Yes, it’s all their fault.

I share part of the blame, of course. I didn’t have to record their nuptials, even if my daughter looked at me with those pleading eyes and asked me to do so. And I didn’t have to let her see the ceremony. Or the pretty white dress. Or the fancy church or the waving crowds and the first kiss.

Didn’t have to. But I did.

Those pleading eyes are going to get me into trouble someday.

Now I have to deal with the aftermath of all this. Since then, my little girl (MINE, mind you) has been all atwitter about her own wedding.

She’s made lists. Many lists. What kind of dress she will wear, where the ceremony will be, what sorts of flowers, what colors. She even told me I should go ahead and put in for vacation now, just in case I won’t be able to in fifteen years or so.

My answer to that—all that—was the sort of “Humph” that is code for “You better start talking about something else in the next five seconds.”

Because despite race or age or ethnicity or faith (or lack thereof), all fathers share this one thing in common—they will always see their daughters as little girls. Their little girls.

Yesterday:

Daughter and I are in the truck, on the way home from a stop at Lowe’s. Conversation is both light and shallow, touching upon school and work and writing.

Then, “Daddy, when I get married I think I want it to be outside.”

“Humph.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I looked at her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were thoughtful. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“What if it rains?” I asked.

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“I don’t think you need to be pondering such things. Plenty to do between now and then.”

“But I ponder it a lot,” she said.

I looked away and through the windshield. Fiddled with the radio. Rolled the windows down a little more. Anything to distract her, to get her mind off a subject I had no desire whatsoever to elaborate upon. And, truth be known, I thought that maybe it would have been better if my son were sitting in the backseat of the truck and not her. Because we would be talking about baseball and dirt and mulch. I understood those things. Those things, I could freely talk about.

“I wonder where he is,” she said.

“Where who is?”

“The boy I’m going to marry.”

I doubt I can fully describe the magnitude of what she said. Suffice it to say it was enough for all the blood in my body to succumb to dread and pool in the toes of my boots. My arms went numb, my vision fuzzy. And I swear my heart stopped beating.

I’d never thought of that. I’d never paused and considered the fact that the boy my daughter will someday marry is alive right now. Growing up, just like her.

“I don’t know, honey.”

We drive home in silence, each of us staring out the nearest window. Thinking about him.

For my daughter, I have no doubt her thoughts revolved around how handsome he was and how kind. How he was perhaps a farmer or a scientist or a teacher.

For me, I thought more of who he would be than what, and what his parents were doing about all of that right now. Were they teaching him about honor and respect? Responsibility and hard work? Were they instructing him of the proper way to treat a woman? Were they slowly indoctrinating him to the truth that life is a hard thing and that love is a fragile one?

I hoped so.

Because one day the little girl in the backseat of my truck—my little girl—will be shared with someone else. The heart she has given me will be his. She will lean on him and love him and trust him, not in the same way she does with me now, but in a way similar.

The radio station went from commercial to a song we both knew. George Strait is a favorite in our home. He sang, I hummed. My daughter hummed, too. And when he reached the chorus, we both sang.

And I said, Let me tell you a secret about a fathers love,
A secret that my daddy said was just between us.
He said daddies don’t just love their children every now and then,
It’s a love without end, amen.

Amen.

You only go around once

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

A favorite saying of my mother: “You only go ’round this life once.”

Drilled into my head since I was a boy. It was a warning, though one I never truly heeded because it was only partially understood. “You only go ’round this life once” was sort of like my father’s “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” Catchy, but vague.

I’m going to be thirty-nine this summer, which is just close enough to forty to get me worrying. Not that I fret too much about the grinding of the wheels of time. Forty doesn’t mean as much as it used to. In fact, I’ve read that forty is the new thirty. That’s supposed to make me feel better, I suppose. And it does. But still…

It’s fair to say that forty can be considered a good halfway point in most people’s lives. That’s about the point where a lot of us look back over our shoulders and realize there’s a whole lot behind us, then look ahead and swear we can see a speck of something on the horizon. And though death’s great sting isn’t as great as I once thought it to be, I still feel like there’s a lot left for me to do.

And lately I’ve come to realize the gravity of the fact I only go ’round this life once. Time, now, is the issue. Much more now than it’s ever been.

But it’s not just the time I have left to do things I’ve always wanted to do, it’s the time I have left to fix the things I’ve broken. I’ve broken a lot of things in my life. Done things I shouldn’t, said things I shouldn’t. I look back on a lot of my past not in reverie, but in regret. So much so that I now find myself at this magical midpoint thinking a do-over of my first forty years would be nice.

I think about all the time I’ve wasted. Not just wasted by watching television or daydreaming on the front porch, but wasted by worry and fear. Often I realize I have lived vast parcels of my life in reverse and upside down—the things that really should have bothered me never did, and the things that really bothered me were things that didn’t shouldn’t have bothered me at all.

I still act like this. A lot.

But now I’m beginning to realize I shouldn’t, that life is too short and too precious to be mindful of tiny irritations and bothersome fears. The first half of one’s life is viewed through the lens of ourselves—our needs, our wants, our desires. The second half is viewed through the lens of eternity. That’s when we begin to see that as big as this world can seem, it’s really the smallest thing we will ever experience.

I wish I could have figured all of this out earlier. Time and experience have a way of teaching us what we’ve always ignored, though. I spend a lot of my day with people who say if there was a God, He would do something about all of the pain in the world. I tell them I stumble over that sometimes too, but that I also understand if it weren’t for the pains in my own life, I wouldn’t know anything.

That part, at least, I’ve gotten right.

But there is much I haven’t.

It seems a bit pessimistic to be looking ahead at my coming years with the express purpose not to screw them up as badly as I managed the previous ones. That’s what I’m going to do, though. And I’m going to try and love more and worry less. I’m going to try to have faith instead of fear. And I’m going to make the attempt to smile as much in the pain as in the happiness.

Because my mother was right, you only go ’round this life once.

But if you do it right, once is all you’ll need.

Life is a gift to be treasured.

***

This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Treasure hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. For most posts about Treasure, please visit him at PeterPollock.com

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