music

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?

Busyness, beauty and light

December 4, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Screen shot 2013-01-14 at 1.57.18 PM — image courtesy of photobucket.com

On January 12, 2007, over a thousand commuters passed through the L’Enfant Plaza station of the Washington, D.C. subway line. A rush of people, reading their morning papers, talking on their phones. Hurrying out for another day of the grind. The vast majority of these Everymen and Everywomen never noticed the violinist playing near the doors. Panhandlers are common enough in the subways, playing their instruments for dimes and quarters that will feed them for another day.

This particular panhandler remained at his spot for forty-five minutes and collected a grand total of $32.17. Of the 1,097 people who passed by, only twenty-seven paused long enough to listen. And only one recognized the man for who he was—Joshua Bell, one of the most talented violinists in the world.

I wonder about all those people who passed through the subway station that day. I wonder if they ever saw the newspaper articles and television reports and figured out they had been there, had walked right passed him, without even knowing who he was.

I wonder of Joshua Bell, too, and what he was thinking. All of those people so near on that gray January morning, too hurried to hear the music he played. It was Bach, mostly. And the sound—the most beautiful sound a violin ever made. A sound like angels. That day, Bell used the 1713 Stradivarius he’d purchased for nearly four million dollars.

You might say you’re not surprised by any of this. You’ll say it’s the modern world we live in. People are always in a rush to get from point A to point B. There’s so much we have to keep track of, so many things to do. So much vying for our attention. It’s a generational thing. Our parents and grandparents were the ones who enjoyed a slower life. We don’t have that luxury.

Maybe so.

And yet the very same thing happened in May of 1930. Seventy-seven years before Joshua Bell played inside the D.C. subway, Jacques Gordon, himself a master, played in front of the Chicago subway. The Evening Post covered the story this way:

“A tattered beggar in an ancient frock coat, its color rusted by the years, gave a curbside concert yesterday noon on an windswept Michigan Avenue. Hundreds passed him by without a glance, and the golden notes that rose from his fiddle were swept by the breeze into unlistening ears…”

Jacques Gordon collected a grand total of $5.61 that day. Strangely enough, the violin he used on Michigan Avenue was the very Stradivarius that Joshua Bell would use in L’Enfant Plaza station all those years later.

I ask myself what I would have done had I been present there in Chicago or Washington. I wonder if those golden notes would have reached my ears and if I would have paused to listen.

I want so badly to answer yes.

I want to believe that I’m never so busy that I have no time for beauty.

I want to know that in such a dark and shadowy world, I will still make room for music and light.

Missing me

November 6, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

It was laying in an old box marked BILLY’S STUFF in a forgotten corner of the attic, near where the insulation had been bitten and chewed by a family of long-ago mice. The words were faded and the cardboard brittle. When I pulled the top off, both one corner and a cloud of dust flew.

Normally, I would have moved on. It was only one box among dozens in my parents’ attic and one that was not marked CHRISTMAS, and thus not of interest. Normally, I would have gone on to the wreaths wrapped in trash bags and the candles that have gone in their windows every year since I was a child and the other boxes of ornaments and decorations and pushed them to the door, into my father’s hands.

Normally. But I didn’t this time, not with that box. Because this one said BILLY’S STUFF.

There is a kind of magic in such situations, as though time is blurred such that the past and present become the same in one small tick of life. That’s what I felt right then, crouched down under the eaves. This was the Me I once was tapping the Me I am now on the shoulder, wanting to sit for a while. Wanting to talk. Given all that, I had to open the box. Even if Dad was hollering into the attic, wanting to know where I was.

So I reached down and folded back the remaining sides, feeling like I had just discovered some long lost tomb. Inside were memories long forgotten—notebooks and newspaper clippings, an old T shirt gifted to me by someone who must have been important but whom I’d forgotten, an old fountain pen. And buried beneath it all, a single cassette tape with the word LIFE written on the label.

Dad hollered again, telling me Christmas would be over by the time I got all the decorations down. I felt the stuff in the box. I took the tape. Partly because it was the only thing I could fit in my pocket. Mostly because it intrigued me. I had no idea what was on there, and I wanted to know what LIFE meant to a seventeen-year-old me who believed the world lay at his feet.

I got back home and dug out an old cassette player from the closet, amazed not only that I had one, but that it still worked and I’d remembered how to use one. I sat it at my desk, popped the tape in, and pushed Play. What came over the speaker wasn’t my own voice expounding upon my adolescent wants and dreams. It was music.

Of course it had to be music.

Back then, at that age, everything was music. I had so many of those cassettes back then my truck couldn’t hold them. Half were kept in the glovebox, half in my room. Mix tapes, we called them. I guess you can do the same with CDs now, but I don’t know what they’re called.
Honestly? I was a little disappointed. Was I really so shallow that long ago to think sixty minutes of spandex-pantsed, makeup wearing, hair metal music was the one thing of my past worth preserving for the future?

It wasn’t the first time the person I am shook my head at the person I was and called him an idiot.

But I kept the tape playing. One song melted into the next, and before long I wasn’t only playing air guitar and singing along, I was remembering. Where I first heard that song. Who I was with. What I was doing. What I felt.

Then I understood. And suddenly I realized it wasn’t the person I am cursing the person I was at all, it was the other way around. These weren’t songs at all. This was the background music to a former life.

I’ve just spent the last hour on iTunes, downloading every one of those songs. I miss cassette tapes (heck, I’m old enough to still miss vinyl records), but digital really is the way to go. Right now, I’m turning my past to my present and plan to enjoy the person I was while listening to those songs on my phone while I mow the yard. Listening and remembering.

Because you know what? I haven’t talked with that old me in a long while. Sometimes, I miss him.

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.