manhood

Playing catch

October 10, 2013 by Billy Coffey 3 Comments

He’s nine now, a beast of muscle weighing more than seventy pounds, but my son still jumps. Most times it’s designed to catch me off guard—when I come home from work, maybe, or as I’m walking into the living room. I’ll catch a blur out of the corner of my eye, a small, fuzzy flash, and then he’s airborne. Reflex takes over from that point; whatever may happen to be in my hands gets dropped or tossed or fumbled, and I stretch out my arms. Next comes the entire force of his body crashing into me, driving me backwards. He wraps his arms and legs around me and pauses, leaving the two of us slowly rocking. It reminds me of how Navy jets land on carriers.

I don’t ask him why he still does this. To the best of my recollection, that act remains one of the few holdovers of years now gone and never to return. My son’s Fisher Price toys are collecting dust in the attic and his teddy bears are gone and so are the Lightning McQueen footie pajamas, but for some reason jumping into my arms isn’t considered childish at all. And given the frequency of these flying sneak attacks, I’m even led to consider that such a thing is important to him. Necessary, even.

Still, I don’t ask why. I suppose some of the reason is because I’m afraid broaching the subject will somehow end things. Maybe the next time my son gets it in his head to leap from the couch and aim for my chest, he’ll think twice. Maybe he’ll wonder himself why he’s doing it, or wonder if the reason I asked in the first place is because I really don’t want him doing it anymore. It’s a complicated thing, having a son who’s nine. Those are boys who want nothing more than to be men. I don’t want to mess this up. And to be honest, I’m not too anxious to see him as a man just yet. I’d rather keep thinking of him as my little buddy for a while longer.

He told me once that he can’t wait for the day when he jumps into my arms and bowls me over. He’ll know he’s big then. I don’t doubt that, but I also don’t think that’s the whole story. I think it boils down to something deeper than wanting to have muscles like The Rock (my son says this often) and to walk around all tough like Chuck Norris (which he says just as often).

I think it comes down to faith.

He’s a smart kid, my boy. Knows more about the world than I think he does. The television is still largely off in our home, especially with regards to the current goings-on in the world, but he still knows. His friends talk at school, as do his teachers. And even if he’s young enough to still be kept safe in a small-town bubble, he knows there is a shadow over the larger world. My son hasn’t seen evil yet, but he knows it’s there. And even if he’s brave enough and old enough to have discarded the notion that there is a monster in his bedroom closet, he’s beginning to see there really are monsters out there, and that most times they look just like people.

He knows that many of the kids in his school don’t have both a mommy and a daddy, and that some of them don’t have either. He’s seen classmates shuffled in and out never to be seen or heard from again, scattered here and there through divorce or job loss or so much pain that their tiny minds simply broke into pieces. A notion like grace is still somewhat foreign to him, but he can grasp the truth that all of those kids could have been him in another life.

That, I think, is why my son still jumps. Because he wants—needs—to know that when he does, his daddy will catch him. His daddy will drop everything and stand firm and hold out his arms, and even if it’s scary flying through the air the end is always both soft and hard and full of love.

That’s what I think. I don’t know if that’s right or not, but I know this—I’ll always catch my son. Every time.

Anatomy of a good day

July 8, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Nothing says father/son bonding time quite like throwing stuff into a creek. Rocks, leaves, twigs, dirt, leftover acorns, whatever. There are few restrictions. So long as God made it and people didn’t, it’s considered current fodder.

We’re men, my son and I. He’s only nine, but he still feels the same male tendencies as his father. Which means any talk must be done under the cover of some activity that will dull the sneaky suspicion that something is being shared.

Men are generally fickle when it comes to sharing. Tools and trucks are one thing, thoughts and feelings quite another. The former may be doled out to any and all. The latter is reserved for only those closest to us, and then only maybe.

My son lifts a rock the size of a softball and heaves it into the water. The resulting splash covered the bottoms of our jeans and most of the wildflowers on the opposite side.

“Nice one,” I say.

With bellies full of dinner and the sun yawning over the mountains, this is the time of day when a certain amount of reflection is in order.

“How’s your day, bud?” I ask.

“I dunno,” he answers, this time dropping a handful of pebbles into the water, giving the sound of a miniature machine gun.

“Didn’t you have a good day?” I ask.

“Dunno,” he says again, now plopping a twig into the current and marveling as it gets marooned in a small whirlpool.

Like I said—thoughts and feelings are not the normal male’s strong suit. Better to throw stuff and make big splashes.

Then, just as I’m about to toss another rock as well, he says, “Daddy, what’s a good day?”

What’s a good day? What kind of a question is that?

Then again, when you’re nine years old and enjoying a lazy summer of sleeping in, eating sno-cones, and throwing stuff in the creek, it’s easy to misplace the notion of what makes a good day. Because that’s what every day is.

Grow up, however, and that all changes. There are bad days aplenty. Sure, there are some who say every sunrise is cause for celebration. Every day is a good day. And to them I say bull. I’ve had some truly awful days in my life, and having the knowledge that I was alive to face them did nothing to make things better.

Still, whether a day is good or bad is not just a matter of whim and circumstance. Certain ingredients are necessary. Things we must add in equal portion and in a timely manner that determine whether our days rise or fall.

“What’d you do today?” I ask him.

“Stuff,” he says, crouching down to stare at the minnows.

“Like what?”

“I watched cartoons until Momma said to play, then I played until I tripped over my Legos. That hurt. I didn’t cry, though.”

“That’s okay,” I tell him.

“Then Momma said to clean my Legos so I don’t trip over them again, so I did. It was a mess Daddy. And then I helped her pull some weeds. Then we ate lunch. I said the prayer. And then I just chilled. Did that mean I had a good day?”

I think about that while we toss more rocks into the water.

We believe a day is good as long as it’s filled with more excellence than failure. Lots of sunshine, little rain. But I don’t think so. I think a good day is one that achieves a certain balance, one that allows us to see as big a glimpse of life as we can get in twenty-four hours.

A balance like laughing at cartoons and wincing over a stubbed toe. Because seeing the joy in life doesn’t always mean avoiding the pain. Sometimes it means crying first and laughing second.

Or a balance like doing for yourself like cleaning your room, but also doing for others like snapping some beans.

It can be a balance like playing hard and resting easy.

And both acting and praying.

Balance. Yes. That’s what makes a good day. Which I guess places most of the responsibility on our shoulders, because in the end our lives depend much more upon what we do than what is done to us.

He tosses one more rock into the creek and looks at me for approval.

“I think you had a great day,” I say.

Manhood and my son’s big toe

September 24, 2012 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

“LOOK,” is what he said, but I was too busy looking to hear him. It was the way he’d come through the door—right leg extended outward, left leg bent at an angle, hopping like he’d been wounded in some sort of pitched battle.

I leaned forward on the sofa (the show I’d been watching, something about how ancient Romans used human urine imported from Portugal as mouthwash, now blessedly forgotten) and tried to see what had happened. Tried to see the blood, actually. Or a wound. Or, at the very least, some sort of bug that had somehow landed on my son’s foot between the car and the front door. But I saw none of these things.

He said it again—“LOOK.” Shooting his right foot out like the kicks he does in karate, the ones he swears are so fast that his toes break the sound barrier.

I leaned forward more. Still, nothing.

“What’m I looking at, bud?” I asked.

He wiggled his big toe, which wasn’t so big at all. It was an eight-year-old toe. There was dirt beneath the nail. At first, I thought that was what he wanted me to LOOK at.

“You need a shower,” I told him.

“No.” Then, “NO. Look at my toe, Dad.”

He wiggled it again.

“See?” he asked.

“Nuh-uh.”

A sigh then. It was the kind of exhale I’ve begun noticing has come more frequent from my children as they’ve grown older—part exasperation and part disappointment.

He placed his foot at the end of the sofa and motioned me closer. I followed his finger to the knuckle just behind the nail, where a thin, barely-there wisp of something had sprouted.

And in an awed whisper that was barely heard, he said these three words:

“It’s. A. Hair.”

No. Couldn’t be. Dirt, maybe. Actually, dirt most likely (it was the same dull brown color as the stuff under his toenail). I tried to rub it off. It stuck.

“I tried that,” he said. “Look.” He took the first and middle fingers of his right hand and pinched the spot, stretching it out. “See?”

I did.

“Do you know what that means?” he asked. “It means I did it. I’m a MAN.”

Then a smile—wide and tall and all teeth, the kind so big that his face didn’t seem able to hold it.

“Well, look there,” I told him.

I smiled back. Mine, I’ll confess, wasn’t so big. Oh, there were teeth. And if you’d ask him, I’m sure he’d say that smile was plenty tall and wide, too. But my face held it. It held it fine.

He went on then. My son may have been a man, but one not adverse to playing with his Legos after school. Me, I forgot about my television program. I just sat there thinking. Wondering.

I was like him once—a boy who often wished to be a man. Now I’m a man who often wishes to be a boy again. Such is life, I think, and for all of us. Always going to some far-off place that promises to be wonderful and perfect, only to arrive there and wish to be someplace else.

I guess I should have told him something like that, but I didn’t. I let him enjoy his moment. When your kids take another small step along that great and winding road of life, I think letting them enjoy it is best.

But later, I’m going to have him sit with me. I’m going to pat him on the leg and tousle his hair, and I’m going to tell him to always remember to slow down. To enjoy this moment, this day. Because there will come a tomorrow when he may look at those tiny hairs on his toes and think back to when they were naked, and I would have him remember those times well.

What a man looks like

January 25, 2012 by Billy Coffey 14 Comments

The picture you see to your right is of a man named John Gebhardt, a Chief Master Sergeant who was assigned to the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group at Balad Air Base in Iraq. The child he’s holding is a girl whose entire family was executed by insurgents. She survived despite the gunshot wound to her head.

The picture was taken in October 2006. Chances are you’ve seen it and know the story of how that little girl wouldn’t stop crying and moaning unless Chief Gebhardt held her. So that’s what he did every night in that chair, he recovering from another day of war, she recovering from a horror she likely always be shackled to.

I could go a lot of places with this story. I could talk about the fact that Chief Gebhardt is back home in Kansas now and that the little girl (whose name he never knew) was eventually released to a surviving family member. I could talk about the cruelty of war and the darkness of the world. I won’t. I’m sure you know all about such things.

The website where I rediscovered this picture offered only the picture and the bare bones of the circumstances surrounding it, followed beneath by hundreds of comments. I will say I tend to skip over comments when it comes to news stories. They tend to quickly devolve into politics and meanness, both of which are things I see enough of every day. I don’t have the heart to go in search of more. But my eyes drifted nonetheless, and though what I found didn’t surprise me, it did offer me a chance to ponder.

The vast majority of the comments were from women, many of whom professed a deep admiration for the Chief’s actions and offered thoughts or prayers (or both) for the girl. What political commentary was offered leaned toward the fact that while we may disagree with the wars our country has fought, we should all agree on the fact that our soldiers deserve our praise.

But what caught my eye was that despite all of these hundreds of voices and the different lives they each must live, nearly all of them shared a common sentiment:

This is what a man looks like.

It seemed almost sad that so many were led to offer such a reminder. It was even sadder to know that such a reminder was needed. Blame the culture, blame Homer Simpson, blame the government, blame whatever—the truth is that somewhere along the way males forgot how to be men. And though our national ills can be traced back to a great many things, I have no problem saying that the fall of men has something to do with it.

We live in a country of fathers who are not dads and spouses who are not husbands, where honor has been replaced by X-Boxes it’s not only acceptable to act like a boy, it’s cool.

That’s why we need people like Chief Master Sergeant Gebhardt. To show us that a real man has the capacity to fight and to love. He will risk his life to defend the oppressed, and he will comfort the brokenhearted. That he will believe in the goodness that lies within us all but know that darkness lies there as well.

Connect