memories – Page 2

Burt’s everlasting legacy

December 8, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Burts tree Say there, Burt.

Been a while, hasn’t it? Since April. Feels like that’s a long way back but I guess it isn’t. Time slips away when you’re not looking. Today gets turned into tomorrow, and nobody can’t help but get dragged along.

There’s mornings I still think you’re around. I see that old trash truck pull around the corner on campus and I think, There comes old Burt. Did that a lot back in the summertime too, even with the memory of your funeral still fresh. Back then it wasn’t so much seeing the trash truck as it was the sound of all those mowers. I’d hear one fire up outside the bookstore or down by the Administration building and I’d just wait, tub full of mail in my hands, for you to come on by. I’d wait so I could say hey and you could talk about your truck and how good the college looked. Nothing ever much more than that, just two guys passing the time. And then you’d always say, “Well, I gotta go make myself useful. Hey, I’ll see you.”

You remember that? I swear I can still hear it. Heard it back then too, last summer. I’d hear that mower and I’d think, There comes old Burt. And then I’d think, No, Burt’s not around anymore.

I don’t know for sure, but I’d say I’m not the only one who does that. We all took your passing hard.

Some people say those gone to heaven know nothing of those left behind. Others say the departed can see every tear and smile their loved ones offer. I hope the second is true. I hope you got to see all those people crowding the inside of that church back in April, the ones who knew you and loved you and called you a friend. You always said you were a simple kind of man. That might be true. But for a simple man, you sure touched a lot of lives.

Christmastime’s here, Burt. Crazy how that’s snuck up on us, but it has. I got to looking for you even more these past weeks. Everybody knew what time of year it was when December first rolled around and you started wearing that Santa hat. This was always your favorite holiday, wasn’t it? You always said Christmas was the one time of the year when everybody acted like they enjoyed each other.

So I guess this made it the perfect time for everyone at the college to gather last week and remember you. Because we miss you, sure, but also because we want to make sure some part of you remains even if the very best of you is now elsewhere.

Your boys in the shop planted this tree in your honor, out by the fountain and the fire pit, right where everyone can see. It’s a Norway spruce. You know all about evergreens, so I don’t need to say more. But I think it’s a fine thing they picked a symbol of both Christmas and eternal life—two things you enjoyed the most. They even put some lights on it. We’ll do that every year from here on out. That’s your tree, Burt.

And you know what I’ve been thinking? Having this tree here means you’re being useful still. This evergreen will be here long after the rest of us are gone. It’ll grow tall and wide and give shade in the summer and shelter in the winter. The robins will sit in its limbs and sing of spring. Come fall when all else looks dead and gone, you’ll still look green and alive. You’ll stand straight against the wind, pointing to the sky, reminding us all the way to home.

That little ceremony was a beautiful thing to see, Burt. The day as cold and damp and there were more than a few tears shed, but that’s how the beautiful things are—they hurt you in a way that makes you feel good. I like to believe all wounds heal eventually. If not in this life, then surely in the next. But that doesn’t mean those wounds won’t heal to a scar. That’s how it’ll be with all of us. We’ll get on because that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’ll ride our todays on to our tomorrows. But I’m sure there will always be plenty like me who will stop by this tree and have a word from time to time.

In the meantime, though, I guess I better get going . . . make myself useful.

But hey, I’ll see you.

Leaving our stories

October 9, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I try to schedule field trips into my writing life as often as possible. Sitting at a desk and staring at a sheet of paper can dull the senses. It contracts you. The Out There gets lost in all of the In Here. It’s nice to get out every once in a while and wander about the world.

That’s how I found Archie’s store. Because when you are driving down a lonely country road and you happen across a dilapidated building masquerading as an antiques store and the sign on the marquee says Dead People’s Junk, you have to stop and look. You just do. Very often the places that seem too good to be true are true after all.

The creaky wooden door finally gave way with a hard push, ringing the bell that sat suspended over the archway. The old man behind the counter—“Name’s Archie,” he said, and then added, “You break it, you buy it, even if t’ain’t worth nuthin’”—offered me both a Coke and the general layout of the building. “Furniture’s in the back. Art—and I use that term loosely—is to the right. Guns are over by the far wall.”

I sipped and walked, letting my mind wander. Antiques are such because of their age and their scars. They have endured through the years, survived countless moves and deaths and threats of the landfill. And it is because they have endured that they are all rich in story. Antiques are a form of living history.

That’s what I was after in the land of Dead People’s Junk. The stories.

Like the kitchen table that sat stately and dignified in the corner of the back room. Solid oak, with the worn shine of countless years of meals and gatherings. The price tag made me wince and whistle a long exhale. 1927 was written on the tag beneath the dollar amount, as if to justify the value. I took a step back. This was not something I was interested in breaking.

But still, a part of me felt the price would be more than satisfactory if the story of the table was included along with the chairs and the center leaf. Two years after it was built, the stock market crashed. Then Hitler rose. The Japanese attacked. The bomb was dropped. Kennedy was shot. Interspersed between those were times both hard and soft, the ebbs and flows of the great tide that was life. Who had sat at that table through the years? What family had broken bread there? What joys did they share, and what sorrows? To me, those answers—those possibilities—were worth more than the quality of the construction or the grain of the wood.

I exercised my mind in that manner for about an hour, moving through the crowded aisles of castoff belongings. There was a rocking horse I imagined once belonged to a small boy who grew up to be deathly afraid of horses after taking a tumble from that wooden substitution on one long ago Sunday afternoon. A desk where a young lady once sat to write a Dear John letter to her boyfriend at war. An opulent set of china—Never Used, said the tag—that was an expensive wedding gift to a couple who chose a simple life over the extravagant lives of their parents.

I roamed and touched nearly every surface of every object, listening. I thought about the sign out by the road and wondered if that had been Archie’s idea. I wanted to ask him. But by the time I made it back around, he was asleep in his chair. His half-finished bottle of Coke sat by the cash register—an antique in itself. Orange crumbs from the pack of crackers he’d snacked on littered the front of his shirt.

I managed to leave without waking him and pointed my truck toward home. I was satisfied. In my opinion, no better field trip could be had.

But I thought about that sign again as I passed it and decided it was all wrong. That was not Dead People’s Junk. Archie’s store may have been filled with remnants of the past, but they also spoke to our shared future.

To a time when perhaps our own dining room tables will be stuck in the corner, and when people will come and touch them and wonder. That brings me a great deal of comfort. Because we leave more than our belongings to this world when we pass on to the next.

We leave our stories, too.

The key

August 4, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

The key has been sitting here on the desk for a week now staring at me, wondering when I’m going to find some use for it. The truth is that I have no idea. No idea at all.

I found it a while back in a dresser drawer I was cleaning out. It was stuck in the back corner behind some pens, a stack of old pay stubs, and my high school ring. There’s no telling how long it had sat there, but it must have been a while. A very long while. Because try as I might, I couldn’t remember what it unlocked.

I’ve checked all the locks in the house, including the one on the shed in the backyard and the diary my daughter keeps. I’ve asked my wife if it happens to go to anything school-related and called my father to ask if it was his.

No all the way around.

It’s too big for a key to a shed or a mailbox. Not enough teeth to unlock a door. Not fancy enough to start a vehicle. Too real to fit a child’s toy.

So…what?

I don’t know. I figure I have two options here, both obvious. I can throw the key away and be done with it, thinking that if I haven’t needed it for longer than my memory allows, I likely won’t need it again. Or I can keep it. I’m leaning toward keeping it. I can’t throw the key away. Doing that will all but guarantee I will find whatever lock it fits, and that on the other side of the lock will be something I will likely need very badly.

There are a lot of people who say it’s the big moments in our lives that show us who we really are, warts and all. I’m not one of them. I think it’s the little moments that do that. Moments like this one, with me and my key.

So I stare at it and wonder. Is this all about my tendency to hang onto things and not let them go? Or is it about my subtle distrust in the shaky maxim that “everything work out fine in the end”?

Maybe it’s neither. Maybe all this proves is that I tend to think about some things a little more than I should. Regardless, it’s all very discombobulating. I feel like I have an answer to a question I don’t know how to ask.

Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe I need to consider this as something I’ve found something that I don’t really need right now but might need later. I think that alone is reason enough to hang onto it. I know this from experience.

I’ve often found some truth, some answer, only to lose it and have to go searching again. Most of the mistakes I make are ones I’ve made before and never learned from or, worse, thought I learned from but really didn’t. And there have been a lot of times I’ve been left wondering “Why in the world did I have to go through that?” only to say later on “Oh, now I understand. It was so I could handle this.” We find the keys to a lot of life’s problems long before we come across the locks.

That’s why we have to hang onto them and keep them safe. Why the struggles we have now can grow into future blessings. Because often the key to life lies more in remembering than learning.

My daughter’s fingernails

July 15, 2014 by Billy Coffey 8 Comments

Buy all the books you want about how to raise a child into a fully functioning and responsible adult, and you’ll be wasting your money. I know that’s a pretty broad statement, but I stand by it. Because it doesn’t matter what Ph.D. says what or how much Biblical wisdom people can give you, in the end you learn by experience. This I know.

I know this, too—you learn to pick your battles with your children. Which means making them earn an allowance to buy the toy they desperately want rather than simply handing over the money, but treating them to a Slurpee when they pine for one as you drive by the 7-11. Simple enough. At least, it usually has been.

But then came my daughter’s fingernails.

Coffey women tend to have the reputation of being both ladylike and tomboyish, depending upon which the situation warrants. Which means my daughter will strut around all day long giving tea parties in her Sunday finest, only to hit me in the head with a pillow and want me to wrestle. I honor both. It’s good for girls to have tea parties. Good for them to know how to scrap, too.

The problem was the fingernails. Good for pouring tea and wearing dresses. Bad for rolling around on the floor with daddy. So when our impromptu grudge match the other night resulted in me looking as if I’d been attacked by a Komodo dragon, I called time out and grabbed the clippers.

“Time to cut your nails,” I said.

My daughter didn’t protest. Not yet. She simply stood there and stared, wondering how she could explain what she needed to.

“Come on. Sit. It’ll just take a minute.”

More staring.

She sat down with the sort of thump that would one day evolve into something that would seriously frighten her husband. When I took her hand, it was a fist.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“I don’t want you to cut my nails.”

“Well, unless you want me to go upstairs and get the boxing gloves, I’m gonna have to.”

“I don’t want you to cut my nails.”

The thought occurred to me that this was some sort of game, the object of which was for the both of us to see if I could get her fist open. I tried. She didn’t like it.

“Okay,” I said. “Why don’t you want me to cut your nails? Girls cut their nails. It’s popular.”

“That’s not why.”

I stared, waiting.

“If you cut my nails,” she said, “I won’t know if I had a good day or not.”

What?

She said she would explain, but I had to put the clippers down first. I did. Then my daughter raised her hands palm up and fingers wide, and told me the story of her day.

The bits of brown and green on her nails were from her work in the garden that morning. A smidge of white paint was on her thumb from the picture she made after breakfast. She pointed out a spot on her pinky that seemed indented, put there by a stubborn drawer she’d helped her brother open. An orange stain from that afternoon’s popsicle. And though the evidence was scant, she swore there was a spot on the ring finger of her right hand where a firefly had landed and made her smile.

“How am I supposed to remember all that,” she asked, “if you cut my memories off?”

How indeed.

Like I said, you have to pick your battles as a parent. You have to learn when to raise and when to fold. I folded. A little pain on my part would be a good enough trade to keep her memories safe.

I wonder a lot whether I’m living the way I should be. Life can get so complicated when you’re an adult. I try to make sure I do more good than bad, but it’s hard to keep track of it all.

Which is why I’ve been paying attention to my own fingernails lately. It’s something I don’t normally do but maybe should do more of. Because I know if there’s evidence there that I’ve worked and created, helped and smiled, then I’ve had a good day.

Then I’m living right.

ANSWERS

February 10, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

To a certain extent, ritual plays a part in every life. We all adhere to our own ceremonies to mark the important occasions that come along. It can be something as extravagant as a neighbor of mine plans every Thanksgiving, when his home becomes a meeting place for family scattered to all corners of the country. Or it can be as small as the shot of whiskey a friend of mine takes at 4:12 in the afternoon each July 27, in remembrance of his father’s passing.

My own ritual—smaller than either of those I mentioned, yet to me no less significant—revolves around cleaning out my desk before the start of every novel. It is no mammoth undertaking, usually requiring no more than an hour’s time and involving no more than shelving books and filing papers. But I like to start fresh with each story I write, and nothing says fresh more than an empty slab of oak upon which to write.

As I cleaned and filed and shelved this morning, I came upon a tattered manila envelope at the bottom of a stack of papers. ANSWERS had been written diagonally across the front in red permanent ink, in a hand I can scarcely recognize now. The inside bulged with notes and scraps; newspaper clippings; magazine articles; letters written to me and copies of letters I’d written to others. Some were dated as recent as last year. The oldest had 4 Oct. 89 scrawled along the top.

I spread them out before me, reading each one until I remembered, trying to place the where and why of myself—what it had been that led me to include those stories there, in my envelope. I am not to the point that I can say I have lived many years upon this earth, have accumulated many things along the way, and yet I have always counted that envelope among my most important possessions. Because, what you see, what rests in there are all the questions I wish to ask God when I am able to see Him face to face. They are the things I wish to know.

I will stop short of calling that envelope EVIDENCE FOR PROSECUTION, though I admit it was very nearly labeled that instead of ANSWERS. And whom was I determined to prosecute, way back in the very dawn of my adulthood? God, of course. And for the single reason that I did not approve of the way He did things.

Laugh at that all you will. Take a look inside my envelope, though. You may change your mind.

You’ll see an obituary for a high school classmate of mine, who was killed in a freak accident not two years after our graduation—a bright, funny, loving boy, full of life until he wasn’t.

You’ll find a story of a missionary tortured and killed.

A small girl who wandered from home and became lost in the woods, never to be found.

A single mother of three, dying of inoperable cancer.

Accounts of oppression, disease, and injustice. Diary entries of heartbreak and doubt. Themes of death and evil. Tales that over the years forced me to wonder what you or anyone else have wondered at one time or another—

How can a good and loving God allow such things?

At a certain point, I understood there would be no answers to that question on this side of life. People have been questioning the origins of evil and it’s place with God for thousands of years, and we are not too far down the road to answering it. So I’ve kept all my questions here, in this envelope.

How exactly I would get that file to heaven with me was something I never quite figured out. In the past few years, I’ve devoted less and less time to pondering that problem. Not because evil no longer bothers me—it does, perhaps more now than ever—but because of the very likely possibility that I won’t care much about my questions in heaven. I’ll be too full of joy. I’ll be too busy spending time with all those who passed on before me, and preparing for those yet to arrive.

I still don’t understand a great many things in life. I suppose I always won’t. I don’t know why there must be cancer, and why that cancer must take so many innocent people. I don’t know why there is evil, or why there seems to be so much more of it than good.

I don’t know why God does the things He does, or allows what He allows.

But I can do one thing. I can approach those questions now as though they were parts of a story, one I would write just as God writes His own upon all of creation. And I would say—not as a pastor or theologian or philosopher, but as a storyteller—that it is far more beautiful a thing to be redeemed than be innocent. It is far more amazing for fight for peace in a fallen world than to maintain peace in a perfect one.

And it is far more noble to spend your life in search of something than have nothing to search for at all.

Maybe next year

January 2, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

I found the invitation on the front door last Saturday afternoon, affixed there by a thick strip of camouflage duct tape. The New Year’s Eve party at a neighbor’s house around the corner has been an annual affair for as long as we’ve lived at the edge of the wood. According to the card, they’d decided to step things up a bit. Barbecue was on the menu. Entertainment would be provided by the big screen that arrived on Christmas morning and the pool table that arrived the Christmas before. Fireworks at the stroke of midnight. As if to employ one last effort to state the obvious, underlined on the inside of the card was a promise that it would be “The best damn night I’ll ever have.”

I didn’t go.

I laced up my boots and grabbed my hat and took a stroll around the corner to deliver my regrets in a proper way. The neighbors understood. We’ve known one another for quite a while.

New Year’s has always been a quiet time for me. The circumstances lend itself to a certain introspection. The last of December to the first of January is always a good time to take stock of things. It’s a fine spot to pause in our travels and look around, to see how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go, and to make sure we haven’t somehow gotten lost along the way. Serious stuff that, to me, requires a good dose of solemnity. There is an almost spiritual quality to those final hours of the year, when all is dark and quiet and it feels as though the whole world is holding its breath. It’s a holy time, one nearly on par with that grand morning seven days prior when I woke to magic and joy.

I tried the New Year’s Eve party idea exactly once, as a senior in high school. It was all fine until the hands of the antique clock on the mantle neared their union. Drinks were poured and toasts raised. Couples clutched one another in anticipation. Those who had come in search of company scrambled to find someone—anyone—to kiss at midnight. The home was an old colonial built well before the Revolution, surrounded by woods and barren cornfields. I ended up in the middle of those fields as the old turned to the new, staring at the stars. To this day, that is the best New Year’s I’ve ever had. It has become the standard by which I have measured all the rest.

That’s what I do now. No parties, no alcohol, no whooping and hollering. Come midnight on the first, I take a walk outside. I look at the stars and I breathe deep, and I ready myself for one more trip through the calendar. Did it this January first, too. I could hear the neighbors celebrating. I wished them well.

For years I thought myself a misfit for preferring quiet to clamor during this time of year. I don’t any longer. I finally figured out that to me every new year is a blank page, and there is nothing that fills me at once with more excitement and fear as that. It’s a chance to write a new story, to begin again, even as I know failure is inevitable. I will stumble through many of my days just as I stumble through many of my words, trying to find the right order and the right tone, all the while understanding that perfection will be impossible.

It’s a tough thing, this living. It hurts and scars. Maybe that’s why so many choose to trade one year for the next by plunging themselves into the nearest party. I know for sure that’s why I choose a little quiet. A little perspective.

When the clock at my house turned from 13 to 14, I was sitting in a lawn chair in my backyard. Above me, the Milky Way stretched in a dull ribbon from one end of the sky to the next. The silence was broken by the boom and shine of fireworks. I watched as they burned bright, only to fade to quiet once more. Just like us, I suppose. Oh, but how they burned. They lit the sky in wonder and daylight and chased the shadows away, and I toasted them with a glass of iced tea.

Maybe I’ll go next year.

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