story – Page 3

As plain as the nose on my face

March 17, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Screen Shot 2014-03-17 at 5.56.12 PM Here’s one of those seemingly random and inconsequential facts about the human body: your nose is always in your field of vision. Cross your eyes. See? It’s right there, right where it’s always been, centered as a ridge just below and between. And yet uncross your eyes again, and it’s gone.

I read that seemingly random and inconsequential fact about the human body about a half an hour ago. Now, I can’t stop seeing my nose. Nothing has changed about me or my field of vision. The only thing that’s different is that I know my nose is there now. I’m aware of it, just as I’m now aware that the only reason we never really notice our noses is because our brains basically edit them out.

That last point—that our brains edit out our noses—is maybe what’s bugging me most of all. I can’t let it go.

Blind spots are things we all no doubt learned at some point in our schooling, but also something that gets misplaced as the years wear on. They are considered meaningless when it comes to real living, like the Pythagorean theorem or the capital of Turkey—trivial things that lose their value in an adult life that revolves around keeping one’s head above water. But I think this particular bit of trivia is very important indeed, if only because it teaches us so much about ourselves. It means that the world we perceive isn’t the world as it is, isn’t even really the Truth at all. It’s just our brain’s best interpretation of Truth.

So now I’m wondering what else I’m missing when I look out into the world. The human mind is a wonderful instrument. It is capable of pondering the mysteries of the universe and solving our most pressing problems. It has built pyramids and skyscrapers. It has mastered fire and agriculture. And yet even that wondrous lump between our ears can’t process everything that is going on around us. It must filter the things we do not need in order to focus upon the things we do. It’s the important stuff that the mind allows us to see. Or at least, what our minds consider as important.

Which has gotten me wondering—what other blind spots do I have? I’m not talking about the ones that affect my brain. I mean the more important ones. Ones that affect my heart. What am I missing not in my world, but in my life? What things are there that I don’t always think are important but really are? How do I spend my time, and how can that time be better spent?

Am I chasing after something that I believe will add to my life but will instead only lessen it?

Are the priorities I’ve set for my life the same priorities God has set for me?

Heavy questions, all. But it’s the hard questions about who we are that require hard answering. After all, it doesn’t bode well for us to move through our lives half blinded. Not just to the world, but to ourselves.

When the gray seeps in

March 3, 2014 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

I blame the writer in me for the messes I sometimes get myself into, all of which I tell myself were begun with the best of intentions. Label something as “research,” for instance, and a writer can give himself permission to do almost anything. “Education” is another good example. We should always be learning something, growing, both in mind and in heart: becoming both better and more.

That thought was running through my head several times over the course of the past couple of weeks, when I decided to sit down to watch three of the most celebrated television shows to have come along in a while. The writing is spectacular, I heard. The ideas immense. Deep characters. Deeper mysteries. All things that appeal to me in my own work. The best way to improve your own craft is to immerse yourself in the craft of others. That’s what I was thinking when I sat down to watch marathons of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and True Detective.

If you’ve yet to see any of these shows or only a couple, I’ll say they are at their core the same thing: Broken people doing some very bad things. Their worlds could not be more dissimilar—the monotony of suburbia, a feudal Dark Age, the stark backwater of the south. And yet the view of each of those worlds is much the same in that each show portrays the world as ultimately meaningless and empty, therefore power is the only means to safety. The critics I’d read and the friends who had recommended those shows were indeed right. The writing really was spectacular, the ideas really were immense. The characters were layered. A few of the mysteries were nearly imponderable.

But still: yuck. After all of that, I needed a shower.

Here’s the thing, though: given bits and pieces of those shows, I don’t think it really would have been a problem. I’m no prude when it comes to entertainment; I’ll admit I sometimes enjoy my share of a gray worldview, though I’d much rather see it from my sofa than in my own life. But immersing yourself in it? Watching over and over until it seeps into the deepest places inside you? Well, that’s a different thing all together.

Yet that’s our culture now, isn’t it? There really doesn’t seem to be any hope out there, whether it’s in music or television or literature. There was maybe a time when the arts existed to prod society onward, to inspire and lift up. More often than not, they now serve as a mirror, showing what we’ve become in a series of melodies or flashing frames. Television, movies, music, and stories have grown increasingly dark because we’ve grown increasingly dark, not the other way around.

The other day, I came across an article written by a neuroscientist that affirmed much of what our mothers once told us: garbage in, garbage out. The article cautioned great care in the sorts of stories we allow ourselves to be exposed to, whether it’s the nightly news fare of war and recession and political meanness, or whatever slasher film is playing down at the local movie theater. Because those stories all carry meanings, and those meanings will, consciously or not, impact the way in which you view life and the world around you for good or bad. If you don’t know how to draw something positive out of what happens in life, the neural pathways you need too appreciate anything positive will never fire.

That’s evolution, the neuroscientist said. Maybe. I’d call it human nature.

It’s easy to succumb to the notion that everything is random, meaningless. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that the world is too big and too far gone to ever be able to make a difference in it. The key is not to rise above, but merely survive (which, by the way, is my theory of why the zombie culture is so prevalent now). What’s hard is to believe. What’s hard is to carry on. It is to find purpose in where you are and in what you’re doing, no matter how insignificant it seems. It is to find dignity in this thing we call life, and to bring beauty to it.

A Charlie Brown Christmas surprise

December 16, 2013 by Billy Coffey 6 Comments

Facebook is one of those things that tend to eat up more of my time than necessary. The idea that face-to-face interaction is a necessity for forging friendships is one the internet age seems to have laid to rest. It can, and in fact does, happen. I’ve met a great deal of people online that I willingly call friends, and the fact that I often have little more to go on than their avatar and the words they type doesn’t matter.

Funny, isn’t it?

Over the weekend, I posted something on Facebook about one of my all-time favorite Christmas specials. I’ve watched A Charlie Brown Christmas every year since I can remember, can quote vast passages from it word for word. But this year, I spotted something I’d never seen before. Something important. I flung it out on my Facebook wall, hoping it might provide some food for thought. The response was enough that I wanted t post it here as well:

Linus has always been my favorite Peanuts character, all because of that blanket. How he always carries that thing around. It’s his peace and his confidence and the most treasured thing in his life. To him, it’s the one thing that keeps him safe.

But even though he’s my favorite, I never noticed until this morning what Linus does during the most important scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Charlie Brown breaks down into a fit, asking if there’s anyone who knows what Christmas is all about, and Linus takes the stage to recite from Luke 2. He gets to the shepherds abiding in the fields and the angel appearing, and that’s when it happens—the one tiny act that, after watching that show every year since I was a boy, actually made me tear up a little:

Linus says, “And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not,’” and then he lays down his blanket.

Leaves it on the dusty, dirty stage. As though telling everyone that all the peace and confidence and safety wrapped up in that blue blanket pales to what the swaddled babe lying in that manger offers us all.

I’ve always missed that. I never will again. To me, that second or two of a child’s cartoon is some of the most profound storytelling I’ve ever witnessed.

Eddie’s story

October 7, 2013 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Screen shot 2013-10-07 at 10.15.27 AM I see him raise a hand out of the open passenger window and think he’s shooing a bee at first. He’s allergic to bees and swears the little buggers can smell that in a person. But no, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s instead waving to the bum who has taken up residence at the guardrail abutting the interstate onramp. That isn’t so surprising. Neither is the fact that the bum waves back, flittering his cardboard sign (HUNGRY, LONELY, TIRED is printed in black Sharpie on the front) and grinning back.

“That’s Eddie,” he tells me.

“Eddie.”

“Yep.”

I keep my eyes to the windshield and nod. “And you know this because—”

“—I stopped to talk to him the other day—”

“—Of course you did,” I say. Because that’s what the man beside me does. He talks to people. Talks to anyone. Anywhere. He’s a property owner by day, running a mini-kingdom of rented homes and apartments. I think he’s secretly a combination of St. Paul and Andy Griffith. To him, there are no strangers, there are simply people he isn’t friends with yet.

“And he’s Eddie?” I ask.

“Yep.”

He turns and sticks his head out the window. I look in the rearview. Eddie’s still looking, still shaking his sign. A blue SUV stops beside him. The driver hands him something that might be a dollar bill.

“Did you give him something?”

I’m nodding even before he says, “I bought him lunch,” because that’s what the man beside me does, too. The HUNGRY and LONELY and TIRED are the people he tries to love most because those are the ones he says Jesus loves most. We both love Jesus, my friend and I. Sometimes I think he might love Him a little more.

I smile and ask, “What’d you get in return?”

“What I always get.”

And here is my favorite part, it always is. Some say no act is truly altruistic, that there is a bit of selfishness in everything. That might be true, even with my friend. Because he wants to help and he wants to love just as Jesus said we all should, but he always asks for something in return. He always asks for their story. They all have one—we all have one.

“Did you know Eddie’s been to every state?” is how he begins. I just drive and listen. “Born in Cleveland, but he didn’t stay there long. Parents were awful, that’s usually how it goes. Drunks that beat on him. He ran when he was sixteen. That was twenty years ago.”

“So what’s he do?”

He shrugs and says, “Just drifts. Went west first, all up and down the coast, then made his way east slow. Even went to Thailand once. Worked on a steamer. Only job he’s ever had.”

I don’t say anything to this and wonder for a moment if it’s a trap. We’ve had this discussion many times, my friend and I. I’ll start by saying people like Eddie really could find work. Menial work will still bring money. There’s help out there if Eddie wants it, I’d say, but a lot of people like him live the way they do through choice rather than necessity. My friend agrees in principle. He also doesn’t think that matters much.

“He was married once,” he continues. “She died. Had cancer while they stood in front of a justice of the peace. Eddie knew it and married her anyway. Told me he loved her, and that was reason enough. That was eight years ago. He came east after that. I think he’s trying to run from the memory.”

“I think we all do that,” I say.

“Eddie’s smart. Not with that,” he’s quick to add, “I mean smart like other people are smart. He has dreams.”

That’s the last my friend says of Eddie—“He has dreams.” We end up at the Lowe’s to get what we’ve driven to town for. By the time we head back, Eddie’s gone. I don’t know where he’s gone. My friend probably does, but he doesn’t offer.

I’ve told him many times I wish I could do what he does—stop someone, notice them, help them. Ask them their story. I guess such a thing just isn’t in me. I’m a shy person. Maybe I don’t have enough Jesus.

Still, I think we all need the reminder that all those lost souls we see and read about—those people we sometimes lie to ourselves and think aren’t like us at all—really are. They’ve loved and lost. They’re still searching. We’re all people, and in many ways we’re all hungry and lonely and tired. It’s such an obvious statement, and maybe that’s why it escapes us so often.

A middle finger like mine

January 7, 2013 by Billy Coffey 9 Comments

I figure I’m much tool old to bother with New Year’s resolutions. I’ve learned my lesson. So many of their broken bits trail along behind me now, all well-intentioned but doomed to failure. We all strive and wish and work for our own vision of wholeness, however right or wrong that vision may be, and yet we will always be broken. That brokenness, I think, is half of what it means to be human. To try and mend that brokenness nonetheless—to stare ahead into some yet unformed tomorrow and see ourselves becoming the people we are meant to be—that is the other half.

At ten and on the cusp of eleven, my daughter suffers no such constraints of worldly wisdom. She not only embraces the concept of resolutions, she devoted much of her Christmas vacation to them. She filled pages upon pages of the small black notebook she carries with wondrous ideas of self-improvement. I cautioned her to narrow things down a bit, cut five pages down to one and then whittle things even further, to a single focus. After much deliberation and crossing out, she announced to me on New Year’s Day her goal for the coming year:

To have a middle finger like mine.

My first thought—God forgive me—was that she meant something along the lines of the lewd gesture to which we are all familiar. Not so. She took my hand and stretched it out, showing me the hump of hard skin just inside the first knuckle of the middle finger on my right hand. She pressed it, then smiled and said, “Feels like a marble. I want one.”

“Doesn’t look too good,” I told her. “Which doesn’t really matter with me, since I’m a guy. Guys tend to think the rougher their hands are, the better. Means they’re doing stuff.”

“I want one,” she said again. “I want to do stuff. Think that’s fine?”

“I think that’s very fine.”

She sat down beside me. A worn nub of a pencil appeared from one of her pockets. That black notebook of hers came out of the other. She opened to a page near the middle and took the pencil in her hand, placing her forefinger along the barrel and wrapping her middle finger around it just so.

I asked, “What are you scribbling?”

“I don’t know. Just words. Sometimes I don’t know what’s gonna come out until it does. Is that bad?”

“Nope,” I said. “I think that’s the best.”

She wrote for twenty minutes maybe, working on those words she didn’t know, working on that writer’s bump she wants on her middle finger. I told her it would take time. Lots of time and lots of scribbling. My daughter doesn’t care.

She says she has stories to tell and everyone does, and if we keep those stories locked up inside us they’ll die and maybe an important part of our hearts will die right along with them. She’s a smart one, my daughter, and wise.

I only told her some of what that hard hump of skin on my finger means. Time and practice, yes, but there is also more and harder. Because if she really wants to tell her stories, my daughter will find the going rough. There is no journey in this life fraught with more peril than the journey inside ourselves, no land more arduous and unexplored, and we cannot ever hope to venture there and return unscathed. Every writer bears ugly scars, just as every person does. The hump on my finger is merely the one most visible.

Waiting for applause

April 30, 2012 by Billy Coffey 23 Comments

The other day my wife found a notebook tucked beneath a pile of kindergarten papers and rainy day projects. It was my daughter’s. Her first notebook, as a matter of fact. With chewed corners and squiggly lines instead of sentences.

She’s a chip off the old block, my little girl—equal parts bookworm, nerd, dreamer, and writer. That last bit has taken hold over the last few years. She wants to be a writer, just like her daddy. I’m good with this.

This past week, she had the honor of attending a gathering of county elementary school students known as Young Authors, which included a genuine flesh-and-blood children’s writer. Maybe even cooler than that, each student had to write his or her own story that would be read during the event.

This was big stuff. Important stuff.

My daughter worked for three weeks on her story. She wrote and rewrote, edited and cut, pasted and revised. And fretted. There was a lot of fretting. That’s when I figured she was closer to becoming a real writer than I’d thought. The result was nearly seven hundred words concerning a Middle Ages princess who found herself in very deep trouble.

I wasn’t there when she read it, but I received the blow-by-blow later that evening between sniffles and those wet, whispery hiccups young girls tend to develop in the midst of an emotional breakdown.

It wasn’t because she faltered while reciting her story, nor was the story itself horrible (on the contrary, I was quite smitten with it). No, it was something else. Something much, much worse.

No one applauded at the end.

That no one applauded for any of the other stories offered seemed to me an extremely relevant fact. Not so to her. To her, it didn’t matter at all that none of the other children’s stories was met with adulation. All that mattered was that HERS didn’t.

She was crushed, wholly and completely. Ruined to the point where she vowed to never write a single word again. The simple act of writing hurt itself, she said. But writing without applause at the end? That was a pain beyond description, one that could only be expressed by sniffles and wet, whispery hiccups.

That’s when I knew my daughter wasn’t just close to becoming a writer, she was actually on the precipice. She was there, mere steps away.

There are things writers are supposed to say when asked why they do what they do. They say it’s because they want to define the world, and once that’s done, change it. They say its because there is a story in them that begs telling. They say it’s because writing is their ministry or their passion or their calling.

And yet while those things may be true in some respect, the plain fact is that all of it is mostly bull. Because deep down in places we’d rather keep shadowed, we’re really doing it for the applause at the end.

Despite whatever sin we think this involves, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Writing is work. Hard, sweaty, painful work. It is what Hemmingway called “hard and clear about what hurts.” It is the tilling of the packed soil within us, the dredging up of our angers and fears not so we may hide them further, but so we may show them to the world.

The applause we seek isn’t for that; we do not want to be congratulated for our valor. No, it’s for something more fundamental. We want claps so that we may know we’ve been heard, that by exposing our pain we have built a bridge that spans Me and You and creates an Us.

To a writer, the only thing that is worse than derision is silence.

I write this post with my daughter on the other side of the couch. She just asked me for a synonym for the word “courageous”. I stopped pecking at this keyboard long enough to glance over and see another notebook on her lap. She’s begun another story.

I tell her to use “intrepid,” but inside I’m thinking a better word would be her.

Connect