life

Longing for Just Us

June 6, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

We’ve just about had it all this year, haven’t we?

A pandemic; a recession; fires; earthquakes; murder hornets; murders of innocent men caught on camera; riots. Jobs have been lost. Families have been broken. Dreams have been put on hold at best, crushed at worst. We all hate each other. Everything is a lie unless it confirms what we knew all along, at which point it’s true, but it’s only true if the people saying it are people we agree with, people who look and talk and act like us. Conservatives are evil. Liberals are evil. The virus is fake. The virus is real. If you wear a mask when you go to the store, you’re doing your part to keep your family and your community safe. If you wear a mask when you go to the store, you’re bowing down to authoritarianism and yielding up your rights.

I’m sure I’ve missed something else, but I’ll stop there.

Adding to that list won’t do anything but add to our collective aggravation. You know what’s going on out there as well as I do. Much like the coronavirus itself, few of us are immune. There are days when it feels like we’re all being pushed right to the edge of something terrible, and we’re clawing at whatever we can to just hang on but we know we can’t hang on much longer. I’ll say that when this nationwide quarantine started, I compared it to 9/11 — a horrible thing we would endure but which would also bring us all together. I believed that. As painful as 9/11 was for those who experienced it, 9/12 was one of the best days in our country’s history. We mourned together. Set aside our differences. Saw one another as neighbors. For a few precious days we were not believers and atheists, right and left, pro-life or pro-choice.

We were just Us.

That hasn’t happened this time, has it? Far from bringing a broken nation together, these past months have only widened the gap between us. We can’t seem to agree on anything anymore.

I make it a point to keep this space somewhat light. Find out the big things hidden in the little things. Usually that means telling you about people I know or people I’ve met, ordinary folks who see life in extraordinary ways. Every writer faces a choice each time he or she sits down to a keyboard or a piece of paper: write something good about how we’re all different, or something great about how we’re all the same. Time and again, I steer myself toward the latter. Because I don’t care who you are or where you live or how you vote or how your skin is colored, you and I are the same in more ways than we’re not. That idea has always been foundational to the way I see the world. Sadly, it seems a lot of people don’t agree.

Somewhere along the line we quit seeing each other as human beings and started seeing them as their opinions.

We’ve forgot that people are precious, valuable not for what they believe but simply because they exist.

I wish I had a story this week. Nothing would make me happier than to tell you of some good ol’ boy I ran into at the store, or share a story from my childhood, or relay what some of the kids are doing around the neighborhood. I don’t have any of that. All that’s left to me this week is mourn what we’ve become, and maybe that’s a good start.

Maybe mourning is the only way we’ll ever change.

Learning how to die

April 24, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

“I seen this,” he told me, straightening his legs outward from the wooden bench as he hitched a thumb into the front pocket of his overalls. “Twiced, I did. Twiced was too many.”

He leaned forward and spit a runner of brown tobacco juice onto the pavement between us. Six feet, that’s where I kept it. That’s what they say is to keep six feet between you and anybody.

The little old lady at the register inside the 7-11 had reminded me of that just a few minutes before, and then she’d winked and said she didn’t like that six-feet rule, it being so hard to hug on anybody. Six feet, but I stepped back anyway when I saw that spit coming at me like a bullet.

I guess that’s how things are now.

“Twiced,” he said again.

I knew he was right, knowing him all my life. Daddy used to bring me here every Saturday morning. I’d ride with him to haul our trash to the dump, then we’d stop by the 7-11 for a Coke and a Zero bar.

Even then, all those years ago, that old man would be sitting on the bench in his overalls, chewing his tobacco as he looked out on the road and the houses and the mountains like it was all his own. Even then, all those years ago, he was old. Now he was older, with lines on his face like worn leather and a Dale Earnhardt hat that had seen too many sunny days under too many plowed fields. Weren’t no corona gonna keep him hid inside the house, he’d told me. Besides, it was just him out there on that bench.

He went quiet, no doubt thinking of the two times he had lived through a thing like this.

Sickness, he meant. The first time back in the early 60s or so, and then again going on a dozen years. Had it really been that long? I counted them off in my head and decided it was. Time truly does pass.

“Pammy,” he said. He smiled at the name the way a father will. And then he said “Rachel” in a quieter way with a mist in his eyes that showed in a brief tick of time the remnants of a heart torn in two, one half beating on an old wooden bench, the other half sunk in the ground across town at the cemetery beside the Church of the Brethren.

Anyone that old was bound to have seen death. Parents, siblings, friends, enemies. He had seen it closer than most, first holding his daughter Pammy as she took her last breath before the age of 10, struck down by scarlet fever. Then all those years later saying goodbye to his wife of nearly sixty years while the cancer wasted her away.

“I hear you old folk shouldn’t be about,” I said, wanting to steer his thoughts from sadness. And as I figured the best way to do so was to get him riled, I added, “Too frail, I reckon.”

He leaned forward and spat again, this time coming within an inch of my boot. Then he smirked at me. “Still whip you, boy.”

It was true. He could.

“Ain’t afraid a no germs,” he said. “Though I keep well enough away, for others more’n myself. Don’t nobody want to catch the death, but death’ll catch everybody in the end.”

I said, “Lord, Hubert, that’s a hell of a thing to say.”

He looked at me that way he always did, like I was the child and he was the wisened old man God kept around just to keep everybody in line, just to remind us all of the way things used to be back when the world made sense.

“You tellin me I’m wrong? That’s the problem. Folk forgot that. When’d folk forget that?”

I didn’t answer. Partly because I wasn’t sure what Hubert was asking. Also because I knew that was one of those questions he asked that required no answer, because he already had one.

“Come down here ever’day to sit on this bench,” he said. “Gets me away from the farm for a bit, and I like it. I like it here. Seein all these folk, talkin to them, seein how they gettin along.” He waved out toward the parking lot. “Now they don’t stop. Get out they cars with they masks and they gloves on, which ain’t no problem and I think is fine. Masks are, least ways. I wouldn’t be wearin no gloves myself.”

And he wasn’t. Not a mask, either. Hard to spit with a mask on.

“That don’t bother me, though. Know what bothers me? That look on’m all. They scared.”

“Reckon we should all be scared,” I said. “Scared means you’re careful.”

“Scared means scared,” he said, then waved out to all that pavement again. “That’s their problem. Half these people all worked up because up until a month ago, they all thought they was to live forever. Hear me? That’s what happens when folk get away from the land. They should come live with me a spell, spend some time on the farm. I see it all the time, death. My fields die every winter. Cows and pigs. Crop. Don’t nothin in this world last. Not even them mountains’ll last in the end. Ain’t supposed to. We all just passin through, man and woman and beast the same. Best thing you can do is keep that in mind. Think on it, like I do. You forget it, you got the biggest problem they is. Cause I seen it. Twiced.”

Hubert was right. Those old farmers usually are. I stood there with him a little while longer, keeping those six feet between us, chatting and watching those cars roll in and out. I saw people scared to death to go in and buy a gallon of milk, watched them sprint to the doors and back again like it was death itself chasing them. And it was, just like it chases us all.

I saw Hubert too, sitting on that bench and enjoying the sunshine like it was any other April in any other year. Laughing and joking and telling me of new calves born and that old tractor of his that was always acting up. Sitting there as calm and happy as he could be while to the rest of us it felt like the world was burning down.

All because we were the ones still learning how to live, and he was the one who’d spent his years learning how to die.

Turn the page (The grocery store, Part II)

April 15, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Last week I wrote about my trip to the grocery store, and the Amish woman in the checkout line who offered us all a little wisdom on how to approach everything that’s happening. But there’s a lot more to that story.

Consider this Part II.

To recap, I thought I’d be smart and get to the Food Lion out on Route 340 right when they opened. The problem was half the town had the same bright idea. You should have seen us all
— rednecks and farmers and factory workers, everybody trying to get what we could without getting too close. What struck me as I weaved in and out of the aisles were the many ways everyone approached the experience.

For the produce guy, that Tuesday morning was just another day. It was business as usual. There’s not a finer human being than the produce guy at our Food Lion.

Always smiling, always talking, always ready to help. “How you doin?” he asked as we crossed paths. I was fine. “Great day, great day,” he said. “Everything’s beautiful.” Business as usual.

There was the woman who came in through the doors as if those were her final steps from a long trip home. Smiling, waving to everyone. Saying, “What y’all doin keepin yourselfs all the way over there?” before cackling at her own joke. Because who says humor has to die during a pandemic?

Workers coming off the graveyard shift at the Hershey plant, just trying to get a few things so they could go home and sleep before doing it all over again. For them, life hasn’t changed much at all. That’s good in some ways, bad in others.

Farmers roaming the aisles for their wives, confused about where the flour and cooking oil were but not confused about some virus, because whether they get sick or not, the cows still need fed and the corn grown.

The business man in his suit and tie walking up front with a loaf of bread and a bag of coffee tucked under one arm, pausing only to nod at a stock boy who said, “Hope you sell some tractors today, Ed,” and to which he replied, “Hope I do too, because things is thin.”

But it was the man in the cereal aisle I remember most.

The one who looked as if he’d arrived at the Food Lion that morning prepared to enter the mouth of hell itself. Mask and gloves, along with a pair of thick overalls designed not only to repel dirt and mud, but any virus this nasty old world could throw at him. He held box of Cheerios in one hand and a box of Fruity Pebbles in the other. Lifted them up like to judge their quality by their weight. As I walked by, he flashed me a look of pure hate and even purer fear. Someone up front laughed. He turned his head that way. Beneath the cover of his mask, I heard:

“This ain’t no goddamned fairytale here.”

I kept going. None of it was particularly shocking. You hear a lot of cussing in the grocery store, mostly from men who are at the same time confronting their own ignorance along with why in the world the jelly isn’t stocked next to the peanut butter. But it did bother me in a way that only now I can describe. It wasn’t what he said, really, but how he said it. Sure, he was angry, but he was scared most of all. And who among us can blame him for that?

I’ve long lived by the notion that life’s big things are better understood when viewed through the little things.

That idea was proven true once more by that trip to the store. Every one of us can be found in one of the people I shared those fifteen minutes with. Some of us are trying to keep our heads up, trying to focus on the beauty and the good that this world still offers in spite of everything. Others are just trying to get by. Some are taking it one shift at a time. And there are a lot of us who are just plain scared.

It’s true that we’re all in the same boat, but it’s also true that we’re all given a different view of the dark waters around us.

We’re all asking the same things right now. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to think? What’s going to happen? Anyone who claims to have an answer is either fooling themselves or hasn’t thought about it enough. Because there is no answer, or at least no answer that we could ever understand.

It’s easy for people like me to say “We just need to keep our heads up, do what we’re supposed to do, support each other, and we’ll all get back to living soon.”

But for millions of people around the world, that advice simply doesn’t apply. They can’t keep their heads up because their burdens are too great. They did what they were supposed to do but still lost loved ones. They’ll say, How can I support other people when I can’t even support myself now? And how can I get back to living when the life I’ll find once this is over will be so different, so much less, than the life I’ve always known?

Try answering that in a supermarket aisle.

But I have thought about it since then. I’ve thought about it a lot. And if I could meet that man again (adhering to the six-feet rule, of course), I’d tell him he was wrong. Because I think a fairytale is exactly what we’re living, or at least something very close to it.

There are those who think life is best thought of as an equation. It’s something that should be approached logically and methodically, and every truth will reveal itself through careful poking and prodding. What is Real constitutes only those things that can be seen, studied, manipulated, or understood; all else is deemed Unreal.

Then there are those who think that every life is less an equation to solve than a narrative being written. We are all in a great story being told by a power infinitely greater than ourselves. And while we know a little about that story’s beginning and a little more about its end, those chapters in between are being written one day and one sentence at a time. It’s a story that tells the truth about us, and what it means to be human., and that truth isn’t timeless like a formula, but timely in the sense that it “comes true,” little by little with every breath we draw.

That’s what I would tell that man in the cereal aisle. That’s what I’ll tell you. Our days aren’t like a formula that needs solving, they’re a tale that needs living.

So don’t put your book down just yet.

Don’t throw up your hands and say you can’t bear another page.

The story’s not done, and the best part is yet to come.

The “What You Do” List

May 25, 2018 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

Our daughter is but a few days away from joining the ranks of legal drivers in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

In preparation (as well as to decrease, however slightly, a father’s angst), I’ve done my best to offer whatever advice and warnings I can. Don’t speed. Don’t text. Don’t pick up hitchhikers. Always do your best to avoid hitting dogs and rabbits and raccoons, but don’t worry about squirrels. We have no deal with the squirrels. You get the idea.

Driving around with her has sharpened my own view of driving, most of which has drifted into the realm of instinct over the years. I’m paying more attention what I’m doing on the road through the filter of “I need to tell the little girl this” or “I need to make the the little girl knows that.” The list has gotten so long as to be somewhat unwieldy. There’s nothing like one of your kids getting a driver’s license to make you realize how dangerous driving can be.

I came across one of those Need To Tell Her This things a few days back along a stretch of road known around here as Brands Flats.

Long straightaways and gentle curves and a 55 mph speed limit which is all but impossible to obey. Coming around one of those curves, I managed to catch a glint of early sun off a windshield hidden among the median’s thick trees. I braked (that instinct thing) and held my breath. Good thing I was doing under sixty, or ol’ Smokey would’ve had me.

What I did next was what I’ve always done, what my daddy taught me to do and what was taught him: I went on around the next curve and flashed my lights at the three vehicles coming the other way.

That’s when things got a little wonky.

The first car was a purple hatchback driven by a young lady who promptly offered me a middle finger.

The country boy in the jacked-up F-150 behind her flashed his lights right back at me.

And the third, an ancient man driving an even more ancient Dodge truck, only gawped in confusion.

I’m not going to sit here and say I hoped each and every one of their names ended up in Smokey’s ticket book.

Don’t mind if it’s implied, though.

Granted, I’ve always been a little behind the times. But when did flashing your lights to let someone know a speed trap is waiting up ahead stop being a thing? Or is it still a thing, and i’d just run upon a few grouchy and dim-witted folks down in Brands Flats?

I figured I’d ask around. Turns out I’m in the minority of people who still do this. The reasons why varied from laziness (“I ain’t got time to go flashing my lights at everybody”) to fear (“You know that’s how you get shot at, right?) to outright orneriness (“I figure if the bastards is speeding, he deserves himself a ticket”).

The younger drivers I asked even turned my question back on me, wanting to know why they should bother flashing their lights at all. Don’t people need consequences for their actions? Don’t speeding tickets help pay for our roads and schools and help that policeman keep his job? Aren’t I in some way circumventing the law by helping those breaking it avoid punishment?

My answer to each was the same, however confusing to them it was. Why was I taught to flash my lights? For the same reason I was taught to pull over for a funeral procession and remove my hat until all those cars went by. The same reason I was taught to get into the left lane when anybody’s coming off an on ramp:

Because that’s what you do.

A simplistic answer, maybe. But also a telling one. I remember a time when That’s What You Do was answer enough. It spoke to something much deeper than the act itself, straight the meaning beneath it. Our society was filled with That’s What You Do’s. Those words helped hold things together.

The sad thing, the terrible thing, is I don’t see much of that anymore. Blame politics or Twitter or the onslaught of a 24/7 news cycle. Blame a culture where people demand they not be defined but go around defining everyone else. Whatever it is, we’re just not getting along. We don’t see others as very much like ourselves, all holding on to the same fears and needs and wants, all getting out of bed each morning for the same reasons—to do our jobs, play our parts, and feed our families. It isn’t We now, only Us and Them.

I think I’m going to start a new list for my daughter. My son, too. A That’s What You Do list. Not just for driving, but for living.

It isn’t a matter of them learning anything, either. All my kids have to do is remember that in the end we’re all in this together for good or ill. We’re to watch out for each other and help each other and be ready to offer a hand when needed.

Forget color.

Forget Conservative or Progressive.

Never mind religious or atheist.

We’re all family in the end.

Perfectly Normal

May 11, 2018 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Screen Shot 2018-05-11 at 6.54.10 AM Now well into their teenage years, both of my kids have found themselves stuck in the middle of a problem I can well understand:

the only thing worse than standing out among their peers is fitting in.

I’d tell them that’s normal, all part of growing up, and anyway they’re likely to feel some hint of that for the rest of their lives. None of it would do any good. You can’t tell teenagers much. I should know, seeing as how I was one of them once.

Sometimes I’ll catch either one of them looking into a mirror and watch their eyes moving back and forth, up and down, taking in their hair and face and cheeks, how wide their hips are or aren’t. (Don’t let anybody fool you—boys look into mirrors just as much as girls do, and they’re just as picky about what looks back at them.) Though neither one will ever say it, I know what they’re thinking:

Ugh. Look at that hair. That’s stupid hair. Just laying there like some kind of roadkill. And those pimples — sheesh. Gimmie a large pepperoni with extra cheese, will ya. I need more muscle in my arms. My legs are too big. I need makeup. When am I going to start growing whiskers already? I wish I was taller. I wish I was shorter. I wish I could play better/sing better/look better but I can’t, and no one will ever love me because I’m just too normal.

I get it. Like I said—been there myself. And I’m right to say that sort of thinking isn’t going to change for them anytime soon. There are still days when I linger in the mirror and curse my own normalcy. There isn’t much that sets me apart. Normal looks, normal brains, normal talents, normal experience. Just like you. Just like everybody.

In fact, you could say the great majority of people who have ever lived aren’t so special.

Sure, you have your da Vincis and your Beethovens and your Einsteins, your Alexander the Greats, but such people are really few and far between. They come along maybe once every few hundred years to remind us of what we all could be but aren’t. We read about them in books and watch documentaries about their lives and then sit around wondering what’s so wrong with us that we can’t be like them.

Writers are notorious for this sort of thing. We say it’s all about the art. That’s a lie. What it’s really all about is being admired. It’s standing out. It’s putting words on a page that are so pretty and compelling that you stand out from everyone else.

Every writer dreams of not being normal just like every person dreams of not being normal. Because normal sucks.

Adolphe Quetelet may have the answer to all of this. Born in the French Republic on the eve of the nineteenth century, Adolphe ended up building an astronomical observatory in Belgium a few years before revolution took hold in the country. His job was effectively cut when rebel soldiers took control of the observatory. That’s when Adolphe began looking around at people instead of up at the stars.

He began poring over population data collected by governments all over Europe. Studying things like height and weight and general appearance, income and marital status, sorting them all in pursuit of discovering unified rules and models for human behavior.

It worked. Some few short years later, Adolphe Quetelet had succeeded in constructing the idea of what we now consider the average human. You, in other words. And me.

But before you go blaming this poor little Frenchman for all the sorry feelings you harbor for yourself, remember this: Adolphe was a scientist. He was an important astronomer and a highly gifted mathematician (which means he wasn’t very normal at all, I guess) and so could not think in anything more than scientific terms.

In scientific terms, the average of a thing is whatever places it closest to the true value.

And what is true value? Beats me, so I looked it up. Pay attention now, because this is important:

According to the GCSE science dictionary, true value is “the value that would be obtained in an ideal measurement which would have no errors at all. In other words, this is a value that is perfectly accurate.”

Perfectly accurate — I like that phrase. Sort of goes along with Psalm 139, which states that we are “perfectly and wonderfully made.”

Personally, I think Adolphe was onto something. I just might keep him in mind the next time I look into the mirror. Maybe you should, too. Don’t see the wrinkles and the fluffy places and the disappearing hair. Look instead for the true value and then give a nod to the Good Lord above for making you so normal, because that just might mean you’re as close to perfect as possible.

The Saturday in between

March 30, 2018 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

If like me you are counted among the mass of Christians in this country, you consider these seven days among the holiest of the year.

I’ve always been a great fan of the Easter season. You slog through yet another seemingly endless winter of bare trees and gray skies thinking things will never get better, and then comes along a day upon which everything turns—your mood, the season, even history itself. Flowers begin to bloom. Trees bud. Daylight stretches a little farther. Life is called forth from death. That is Easter to me.

Church will play an important role in the Coffey home this week. On Friday evening we will gather at a building in town to sing songs of a Man who was more than a man, Whose words of love and forgiveness led to His sufferings upon a cross. It will be a somber service as far as church goes. That is by design. The point will be to put our focus on the sorrows felt by Christ on that long-ago day, as well as the sadness and fear in His followers. At the service’s end, our pastor will stand before the congregation and say,

“Go from this place, for Jesus is dead.”

The sanctuary lights will then dim nearly to dark, leaving us all to feel our way out in shadow.

It’s powerful stuff.

But what will make Friday night’s service even more powerful is the one which will follow on Sunday morning, when we will all gather once more. Gone will be the sadness and the fear, all the shadows. Then will be joy and the light of day. For He is no longer dead, this Jesus. He is risen, and by His wounds we are risen as well.

That is what we believe. What I believe.

You can hold to otherwise, and that’s fine. Plenty who visit this place do not consider themselves religious at all, and I won’t begrudge them one bit. We’re all trying to make sense of this world and our place in it. Christianity is simply the way I make sense of mine.

But that’s not really the point of this piece. What’s struck me this week is the entire range of emotions Easter offers, and how that fits into much of the time we spend in this world. Two days during the Easter holiday receive the bulk of our attention—Good Friday and Easter Sunday. One a time of utter hopelessness and faith dashed, the other a day of unending joy and a hope so real and undeniable that it came to change the world. The gospel accounts share much of those two separate days. Even if you’re not a believer, I encourage you to read them. Yet I’ve often thought something missing from the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A hole in the narrative I sometimes wish would have been filled.

We know what happened on that first Good Friday. Know what happened that first Easter Sunday. But the Bible is silent on what Jesus’s followers felt and did on the day in between.

That Saturday—that’s what I want to know.

Because when you think about it, that’s where the majority of our lives are lived. We are not so despondent that we have come to know all we once believed as worthless. Our lives do not feel devoid of purpose. Our very foundations have not been shaken. But nor are our days filled with such hope and assuredness that we feel shot through with a love beyond any this world could ever provide.

We don’t spend most of our days in the sorrow of Good Friday or the joy of Easter Sunday. No, most often we find ourselves living in the Saturday in between. Trying to figure out what to do next, what to let go of and what to hold onto. Trying, sometimes, just to get through the day.

It would be nice to know how Mary got through that day. Or Peter or John. But we don’t.

Maybe that’s on purpose, though.

You would think something as important as that Saturday would have been included in scripture. That it isn’t would suggest that maybe it isn’t important at all.

Maybe the point here is that life isn’t supposed to make sense all the time. That all of our questions and pains are here for the purpose of helping us to grow more and better. To become. It is to embrace the mystery of our lives fully and to always be searching. Our days are so often like the end of our Good Friday service at church—just a bunch of bodies groping about in shadow, searching for a way out. That isn’t such a bad thing. You never know what you’ll find while groping about in dim light, whose hand yours will brush against or who’s smile you will meet. What cause you will find to laugh.

The point of that first Saturday is an important one, I think—hang on. Always hang on. Do your work and smile and laugh and hang on.