simplicity

Harriet’s masterpiece

March 5, 2015 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Sitting beside me as I write this is a robin’s nest. Dislodged by a recent gust of wind, it tumbled from the oak tree in my backyard and was caught in a pillowy blanket of fresh snow, where it was picked up by me.

The finding of the nest did not catch me by surprise. I knew the nest was there and that it would soon not be. I am generally well educated on the goings on of the winged and furred creatures who inhabit my tiny bit of Earth. We coexist well, them and I. Their job as tenants is to remind me of the world I sometimes neglect to consider. My job as caretaker is to feed and water them as best I can. And, as a side benefit, to name them whatever I think is most fitting.

The robin who resided in my oak tree was named Harriet. How I arrived at that particular moniker escapes me and I suppose doesn’t matter. What does matter, however, is that Harriet was my favorite. The rabbits and squirrels and blue jays and cardinals were all fine in their own way, of course. But Harriet was my bud.

She was my security system in the event the neighbor’s cat decided to snoop around for a quick meal. She was the perfect mother to the four robinettes she hatched. And she sang. Every morning and every evening, regardless of weather. Even after the worst of storms, when the rains poured and the thunder cracked and the winds whipped, she sang.

I envied Harriet and her penchant for singing regardless. And when the weather turned cold and she sought her refuge in warmer climates, I missed her too.

And now all I have left is this nest to ponder.

An amazing piece of workmanship, this nest. Bits of string, feathers, dead flowers, twigs, and dried grass woven into a perfect circle, with a smooth layer of dried mud on the inside.

The resulting combination is protective, comfortable, and a wonder to behold. Harriet likely took between two and six days to construct her home and made about a hundred and eighty trips to gather the necessary materials. She may live up to a dozen years and build two dozen nests. I like to think this one was among her finest.

Scientists have taken much interest in this facet of bird behavior. They’ve even come up with a fancy name for it: Caliology, the study of birds’ nests. Artists and poets have found bird nests to be a fertile subject matter. During the 2008 Olympic games, when the Chinese erected the largest steel structure in the world to serve as center stage, it was built in the shape of a bird nest.

Why all this interest? Maybe because of its inherent perfection. You cannot make a better bird nest. The form and function cannot be improved upon. Even more astounding is that Harriet built this nest without any education. Where to build it and with what and how were all pre-programmed into her brain. No experience was necessary. And though my brain protests the possibility, I know that this flawless creation of half craftsmanship and half art is not unique. It is instead replicated exactly in every other robin’s nest in every other tree.

Instinct, the scientists say.

We humans are lacking in the instinct area, at least as far as building things goes. In fact, some sociologists claim that we have no instincts at all. I’m not so sure that’s true. I am sure, however, that things do not come so natural to me. I must learn through an abundance of trials and many errors. My education comes through doing and failing and doing again, whether it be as simple as fixing the sink or as complicated as living my life. Little seems to be pre-programmed into my brain. When it comes to many things, I am blind and deaf and plenty dumb.

I said I envied Harriet for her singing. The truth, though, is that I am tempted to envy much more. How nice it would be to find perfection at the first try. To know beforehand that success is a given.

That I am destined to struggle and stumble and fail sometimes prods me into thinking I am less.

Maybe.

What do you think? Would you rather be a Harriet and get it right every time? Or is there much to be said for trying and failing and trying again?

Real Simple

January 22, 2015 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Screen shot 2013-01-28 at 1.20.14 PM — image courtesy of photobucket.com

It wasn’t the proximity of the magazine (right there on the table beside me) that caught my eye, it was the title. And since there is little else one can do in a doctor’s waiting room than leaf through germ-riddled periodicals, I did just that.

Real Simple, it read.

Though I’ve since learned it’s quite the popular publication, I had no idea it existed. Did not even know such a subject had been deemed to interesting as to devote an entire magazine to it. My wife has corrected my ignorance on the matter. She said simple is in now. Simple is cool.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I can understand why. It’s a mess out there in the big, wide world. All that shouting and pointing of fingers, all that angst and unease. There was a time not too long ago when most people felt we were all charging headlong into the future, and the future was going to be a wonderful place. No more war, no more hunger, no more want and hurt. Science and technology was going to save us from ourselves.

I think it’s safe to say that’s not really the case anymore. I think a lot of us are beginning to see that we certainly are charging headlong, but the future isn’t as bright as it once was. That our science and technology might help us a great deal, but it also sucks our time and, in the process, maybe a little bit of our souls. Everything seems so complicated, and that same hidden part of us that whispers a random cough might be a building cold is whispering that complicated isn’t good, complicated makes things harder. And the cure for complicated? Simple.

I think of a relative of mine living up in the mountains. A simple man with a simple home. Woodstove for heat, well for water. He doesn’t have much, but he has what he needs and is all the better for it. Sometimes I think riches are best measured not in how much of something we have, but how much of something we can let go of.

Snow is falling just outside my window right now. The smart man on the radio doesn’t really know how much will end up on the roads and grass, only that it will be “measureable.” And even now I can see men and women coming home after a long day with gallons of milk and loaves of bread in their hands. I’ve written before about how and why people turn to the basics when the world bares its teeth. I think the same applies here.

There is much to be said for simplifying things, of cutting back and trimming down. Let’s face it, ours is an imminently blessed nation to call home, and as a result we have an overabundance of stuff we could really do without. And by that, I mean things we possess and things that possess us, things on our outsides and others inside. Because most of us don’t just own a lot, we carry a lot as well.

I’m still on the fence with a resolution for this year. Maybe simplifying my life fits the bill. Maybe instead of getting more, I’ll give more. Maybe instead of hanging on, I’ll let go. Maybe we should all get back to the basics. Maybe getting away from them is the cause of much of the world’s hurts.

The heartbeat of this world

January 14, 2014 by Billy Coffey 16 Comments

My uncle has passed. The cancer took him.

He left the world at five o’clock this morning. Saturday morning, it is. January 11. As I write this I glance up to a cold rain falling through the fog that rolls down from the mountains. It seems right that death should be greeted by such weather. We know where he is, and we know that place is fine and beautiful and has no cancer in it, but that does not mean there is no grief. There is grief for my family. And there is heartache for my aunt and two cousins.

He was a simple man who lived a simple life. A farmer who spent much of his time tending to land that has been his kin’s for generations. A devout man, a hard worker, a provider for his family. When you are from my part of the country, such qualities lead people to call you Good. He was a Good man.

The cancer had been in his family, felling several. I suppose the thought that he could meet a similar end was in my uncle’s mind. He abhorred doctors. He chose to ignore the pain that began months ago rather than have it investigated. He knew, I think. I think in some way he always knew. By the time there was no choice but to seek help, it was too late. The cancer was everywhere by then.

To the end, he rose each morning to feed the animals with a strength none of us can fully fathom. The land was his life, all he knew. Several days ago, as the cancer spread into his brain, he wandered outside without a shirt in below-zero temperatures. My aunt and cousins let him, too wearied by their long fight against the death that stalked him. He stared out over the hills and fields and came inside when he finally grew too cold. So far as I know, it was the last time he gazed upon his tiny part of the world.

The pain was too great for him last night. No amount of medicine could ease it. Death saved him from more life. That’s how I’m trying to see it.

Upon his death, my cousins washed his body and dressed him in a suit. The simple cherry box he will lie in was handmade by a local Amish man. He will go into the ground today in a family plot that overlooks his home, watched over by a preacher, my aunt, and her children and grandchildren. It is the way my uncle wanted it, and how the country and mountain folk have buried their loved ones for hundreds of years. You may think that strange, backward almost and excruciatingly difficult. That’s fine.

We do not choose how we are born into this world and we do not choose how we leave it. It’s the wide spaces in between that are ours to live and do—to craft something of worth, something that will last, something that will honor the God who blesses us all.

My uncle did that in his own quiet way, and that is why I write of him now. Because on this and every day, there are many more like him in the hills and hollows of our country. They grow the food you eat and the cows that give you milk and beef. They live by the whims of weather and the grace of God. They are the heartbeat of this world, and they should be remembered.

Blissfully disconnected

January 8, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

There is nothing but night and fire on this early morning. All else is gone. Word has it that a substation twenty miles away has blown. Crews are still trying to figure things out. At last count, nearly twenty thousand people are without power. A minor inconvenience, really, were it not that this is one of the coldest days of the year.

But there is a fire in the fireplace to warm the house and a dog on my lap to keep me company. As luck would have it, I managed to brew a pot of coffee just before everything went kaput. Here I sit under a blanket, watching the orange flames dance off a wall that in thirty minutes will catch the first rays of sun over the mountains. All is quiet and sleeping. And I have just realized that in this moment, I am as peaceful as I have been in a very long while.

Funny how that happens, isn’t it? Sitting here on this dark January morning with all of modernity’s trappings stripped away. Back to the nuts and bolts of living. It’s worth nothing that human civilization thrived for thousands of years with little more creature comforts than I am enjoying right now. I feel a strange kinship that reaches far back from where and when I sit. I wonder how many men how many times before have greeted their day with nothing but a fire and their dogs.

No email to check, no news to watch. Right now, I am blissfully disconnected from the world and utterly attached to everything that is real.
That this has happened so close to the New Year has gotten me thinking about resolutions. There was a time when such a thing was a priority in my life. I greeted every January 1 with not one vowed To Do but several, a long list of things to change and improvements to make. That mostly ended right around the time the kids arrived. It isn’t their fault. I just got tired of the constant disappointment of beginning the new year a new person, only to find the old me was really there all along.

I was always adding something, you see. Always thinking the way to move forward in my life was to either get or become more of something. There’s a certain logic to it, however childish that logic may be—more equals better. I think a lot of us fall for that one.
Sometimes it takes mornings like this to see things as they really are. There are times in life when everything is as silent and dim as it is in my living room right now. We blame others for that. We blame God. Sometimes we even blame ourselves. But maybe it isn’t a matter of blame at all. Perhaps it’s more an opportunity to understand that having more often means needing less.

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.

The lost art of snail mail

November 21, 2013 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

Screen Shot 2013-11-21 at 6.33.49 PM “Can you help me?”

A common enough question in the course of my workday as a college mailman. Asked by the old and the young alike, but mostly the young. And I am generally in a well enough mood to reply Yes, I certainly can help you, even if I am generally not in a well enough mood to be excited about the prospect. Because if there is one thing I’ve learned in my long and storied career of postal delivery to a bunch of 18-21 year-olds, it’s that they often need a lot of help. A LOT.

So, just a bit ago—“Can you help me?”

Yes.

Young lady, nineteen-ish. I pegged her as a junior. Not because I knew anything at all about her, but because I’ve been here long enough to be able to guess such things with a modicum of accuracy. It was the way she dressed—pajama bottoms and a raggedy sweatshirt, which told me she’d been here long enough to not care anymore but no so long that she understood it just may be time to start growing up a little—and the way she addressed me—in the eye. She’d laid the envelope, pen, and stamp on the counter in front of her. When I walked up, she was staring at all three as if they were all pieces to some exotic puzzle.

I asked what sort of help she needed, which could have been anything from needing a zip code to how much postage was needed to mail something to China. But no, neither of those.

Instead, she said, “I don’t know how to mail this.”

“Just fill it out,” I told her. “I’ll mail it for you when you’re done.”

“No. I mean, I don’t know . . . how.”

“How to what?”

“You know. Like, fill this out.”

She pointed to the envelope and stared at it. I stared at it, too. Because I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You mean,” I asked, “you don’t know how to address an envelope?”

“No.”

“You mean, No, that’s not it? Or do you mean, No, I don’t know how to address an envelope?”

Now she looked at me. Her brow scrunched. I got the image of her seated in some classroom desk, trying to split the atom.

“I don’t know how to address an envelope,” she said.

I’ll be honest—it took me a while. Not to show her how to address an envelope (which, as it turned out, took much, much longer than a while, took what felt like an eternity), but for what this young woman told me to finally sink in. She really didn’t know how to address an envelope. Had no idea where to put the stamp, where to write her home address (it was a card, she said, to her mother) and not only where to write the return address, but what a return address was.

Nineteen years old. Junior in college. I can assume this young lady was bright, or else she wouldn’t be in college. And resourceful. And driven. Capable, too—she whipped out her iPhone and danced through so many apps to find her mother’s address that it nearly gave me a seizure. But when it came to something as commonplace as sending a letter? Nothing.

“Nobody sends letters anymore,” she told me. “It’s so 1800s.”

She finished her envelope and affixed the stamp (after being told where that went, too). I had to sit down for a bit afterward. My head was killing me.

Now I’m thinking:

Is this really where we’ve come? Have we really raised a generation of children who are so dependent upon technology that anything without a button is an unsolvable mystery?

But there’s something more as well, something far worse. In our instant world of texts and emails and Facebook posts and tweets, that poor girl has missed out on one of the true pleasures of life. She has never sat at a quiet desk with paper and pen to write a letter. She has never pondered over the words that have leaked through her hand and fingers, never slowed enough to find the rhythm of her words and her heart. She has never felt the trepidation of folding those words (and her heart) into thirds and stuffing them in an envelope sealed with her own saliva—her own DNA—and placing it in a mailbox. Never worried that her letter maybe wouldn’t get to where it was meant to go. Never felt the exhilaration of finding a sealed reply waiting for her days or weeks later.

Give me the new, the world says. Give me the shiny and the bright. I say take it. I’ll keep my paper and pen.

Connect