Billy Coffey

storyteller

Longing for elsewhere

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

What I pondered last Thursday morning:

I suspect the ocean is one of those precious things in life that one never tires of seeing; every time is as the first. Always the same sense of awed silence, always the deep exhalation of weights left behind to be picked once more later, once the ocean is still there but you are not. If the evolutionists are right, we all come from the sea. My yearly first glance at the ocean always makes me wonder they may be correct—I feel as though I’m home.

There’s little doubt the sea is in my blood, tucked somewhere in the folds of my DNA alongside a craving for sweet iced tea and an affinity for all things old. My parents have a copy of the Coffey family crest prominently displayed on their living room wall. Among all the colors and adornments are three dolphins in the center. Family lore states that the Coffeys of old were fishermen and sailors who left the Irish shores for the adventure of lands unknown. That would explain a lot in my case, though for me those faraway and mysterious places I long to explore lie not in the hidden corners of the world, but in the hidden corners of my own self.

It is freedom that the ocean symbolizes, at least to me. Possibility. A sense that despite how much we know, there is much more that waits. In a strange way that comforts me. There is a certain beauty in knowing you are small that cannot be found in adopting the lie that you are large. Humility may not be the most desirable of the virtues, but it is among the most valuable. And if the ocean gives me anything, it is that needed sense of knowing my place in the world.

I have no knowledge of what first drew my ancestors to the sea. As much as I’d like to believe it was pure wanderlust, I understand it may well have been a simple matter of economics. The first Coffeys arrived in Virginia around 1609 as indentured servants. I have a feeling we’ve always been a common lot, scraping and struggling and working to survive.

Still, the sea called them as it calls me these many centuries later. We have that in common. In the end, time is the only thing that separates us. Despite everything I have that my ancestors didn’t, I suspect I’m much the same as they once were. Same worries, same fears. Same dreams. The only difference between us is that they listened to that siren song over the waters and I have not.

But there are times—many of them—when I long to do just that. For the freedom, as I’ve said. And the possibility.

That’s what I was thinking last Thursday morning, all in the span of a few brief minutes as I stood on my balcony with a pair of binoculars and watched as a shrimp boat made for the distant horizon. I watched the rising sun cast its light against a white hull that bobbed in the currents. Thought of the men on deck—who they were, where they were going, the ones, if any, they were leaving behind. And despite the comforts of place and family that surrounded me, I quietly longed to join them. To break free. To sail away. Just as my forefathers.

As those thoughts clunked around in my head, the binoculars found one sailor on the stern of the boat. Though the distance between us was far, he appeared scruffy, grizzled. A veteran of the sea. A man you would want next to you when the sky and sea turned angry. In him I saw a ghost of a man I could have been in another life had I been born to mountains rather than water.

He was my mirror, this small speck of man through my lens—the me I never was.

As he stood there I saw that he was not looking outward toward the horizon, but inward toward land. To home. And though our eyes never met, I knew his thoughts.

I was weary of the earth and longed to escape to the freedom of the sea.

He was weary of the sea and longed to escape to the warmth of the land.

And I thought then that perhaps that is all of us in our secret hearts, you and I and all who have come before us—seldom content to be here, always longing to be elsewhere.

Would you rather

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image courtesy of photobucket.com
The bad part about my son getting sick is that he’s sick and my heart breaks with each cough and hasty trip to the bathroom. The good part about my son getting sick is that I often get to take a day off work and stay home to help him recuperate.

That’s how I spent last Thursday. Him and I together on the sofa, he with a blanket and his DS, me with pen and paper. The goal was a simple one—to get him better, and to get me a thousand words on my next novel.

Of course, goals seem to fly out the window when it comes to tending to a sick child. Especially when that child is more intent to play and talk than to rest and heal. We reached an agreement when we both decided watching a movie was what we really wanted to do. He voted for Star Wars. I voted for Lord of the Rings. We compromised for Pirates of the Caribbean.

I actually thought we’d watch the movie, he being sick and all. But no. My son is much like myself in that he’s quiet unless around someone he knows well. And since he knows me well…

“Daddy?”

“Yeah bud?”

“Would you rather be Jack Sparrow or Captain Barbossa?”

“Jack,” I said. My answer was both immediate and a little embarrassing. I didn’t want my son to think I spend a lot of time thinking about such things. Which I do. “I guess, I mean. I guess Jack. Never thought about it, though.”

“I’d rather be Jack, too.”

The movie went on. Cannonballs and swords and cries of “Arrgh!”

Then, “Daddy?”

“Yeah bud?”

“Would you rather be a cursed pirate or a girl?”

“A cursed pirate.”

“Me, too. Wanna know why?”

“Tell me.”

“Because cursed pirates are cool and girls are not.”

“Maybe. But one day you’re gonna think girls are cool.”

More movie. A buried treasure. A battle at sea. But by then those things didn’t matter much because my son had begun playing his favorite game.

Would You Rather.

It started with a book he brought home from school one day filled with all sorts of questions. Would you rather this or would you rather that. Some were comical—Would you rather eat boogers or lick a frog’s face? Others were difficult—Would you rather hit a game-winning homerun or score a game-winning touchdown? A few were even thoughtful—Would you rather make someone’s wish come true or make your own wish come true?

You get the idea. He was enthralled. And as I subscribe to the philosophy of I-don’t-care-what-you-read-as-long-as-it’s-not-Tiger Beat when it comes to my kids, I allowed it.

Sometimes I think that philosophy needs to be reexamined.

Because after an entire day of playing Would You Rather, I decided I Would Rather Not.

Then again, I discovered that an entire day of playing Would You Rather allowed me a long look into the way my son sees the world and the way he sees himself. And by that I don’t mean just that he’d rather be a fish rather than a person because “If I was a fish, I could pee anywhere.”

Other things. Deeper things.

Things like the fact that he’d rather live an exciting life than a long life. And that he’d rather wait for spring than wait for winter.

And my favorite—that he’d rather have me as a dad than even Captain Jack Sparrow.

I suppose in a way games such as this play an important role in a young child’s life. It gets them used to making choices, and life is nothing but a series of choices.

Would you rather be someone else or your best self?

Would you rather not risk failure or chase your dreams?

Would you rather suffer a broken heart or never dare to love?

Would you rather spend your eternity with God or apart from Him?

See what I mean? Choices. That’s what life is all about. That’s where our battles are fought.

Where our present is made and our future fashioned.

Swinging the hammer

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

I just typed the final period of the final draft of what will hopefully be my third book. Always an ambivalent experience. You’re glad the story is done, but at the same time it’s hard to let the story go. Even now, my thoughts are away from this sheet of paper and on my characters. I wonder what they’d do next and if they all managed to carry on. The answer to the former is that I have no idea. The answer to the second? Yes.

I figure that between drafts of books, journal entries, and blog posts, I’ve written about a million words in the last ten years. That’s a lot. And I have proof, too—the trunk beside my desk at home is full of notebooks and papers, as are the bottom two rows of my bookshelves. Not to mention files upon files on my computer. You would think that considering such bountiful evidence, I would know a thing or two about writing.

I don’t.

It’s a sickness to believe otherwise, at least in my case. Each time I feel as though I’m coming down with a case of I-could-do-a-whole-book-about-writing, I remedy myself by actually sitting down to write something. Always does the trick.

Because it’s difficult, the crafting of words. It’s painful and draining, and more than once I’ve asked myself why in the world I do it at all (answer: because it’s more painful and draining if I don’t).

This has been especially true with the book I just finished. Though aspects of it are similar to my first two, much of it isn’t. It was a leap of faith designed to prevent the one feeling I want to preserve every time I sit down to write.

Not hope or faith or love.

Fear.

Yes. While I’m writing, I want to be afraid.

On the surface, that shouldn’t be a problem. Deep down, writers swim in fear. They’re terrified of rejection, anxious that their work will be perceived as infantile, troubled that there are thousands of other writers out there more talented and successful. We’re a tangled mass of neuroses and obsessions.

But those aren’t the sorts of fears I’m talking about. In fact, I’d say those fears should be battered into submission so the real fear—the necessary panic—can course through me unencumbered.

Whatever our words may be to readers, to ourselves they should resemble a sledgehammer taken to the barricade we construct to keep us a safe distance from the world. Each tap of the keys or stroke of the pen should in reality be a swing of the hammer. Each word should be a tiny chunk taken from our walls. Each paragraph a brick, each page a section, until finally we are left naked with nothing between us and our audience.

That’s the fear of which I speak.

That’s the only way writing works.

There are countless definitions of what good writing looks like. For me, only one counts—good writing doesn’t show how we’re all different, but how we’re all the same. And that’s impossible unless writers are willing to be vulnerable.

Vulnerable enough to commit to the page those hidden parts within themselves which they wouldn’t even whisper to their closest friends.

Your story

notebook01I recently spent a Friday afternoon with a group of high school English students. They were stuck, their teacher said. Could you help? Since the teacher happened to be a longtime friend and I didn’t have much else to do, I said yes. Absolutely.

But it was more than simply helping out a friend and having something to do. Much more. The problem her students were having was the problem isn’t the sole property of the formative years. I didn’t have anyone around back then to tell me how to fix it. It isn’t often that life affords you the chance to right some cosmic wrong. When it does, you can’t pass it up.

Their problem was a basic one, simple yet foundational.

They had nothing to write about.

To a person, they were stereotypical teenagers. Clumsy and loud, with a strange combination of fear and arrogance. The one thing that set them apart from the rest was a common love of writing, whether it was expressed or not. But a love of writing isn’t enough. You have to do something with it. You have to have material. And they had none. Zero. Nada.

Or so they thought.

I can’t say that I managed to convince all of them otherwise in the three or so hours I was there. But I did some, I think. And I did a few most assuredly. Considering the fact that it’s darn near impossible to get a teenager to change his or her mind about anything, I’d call that a victory.

But then I started thinking about the fact that thinking there isn’t anything interesting about your life isn’t just for teenagers. Not just for writers, either. We all fool ourselves into thinking there isn’t anything that separates us from everyone else. So I thought I’d give the same little pep talk to you today that I gave them a couple weeks ago. Just in case.

It’s amazing how the rules of good writing are also the rules of good living. The two go hand in hand, I think. Good writing is cutting out all the excess, whittling down what you want to say until what you need to say is left. Same with living. Whittle it down. Find the basics. Keep it simple. Makes for not just a better story, but a better life, too.

I wasn’t visiting that class to talk about the basics of a good story, though. I was there to talk about the basics of getting ideas. Not surprisingly, that just so happened to be my own rule number one to good writing. And good living.

Rule Number One: You are extraordinary.

Don’t let anyone fool you with that. Some will try, of course. Some will try very hard. They’ll say you’re good or nice or very polite or even special, but not extraordinary. And maybe you’ll even tell yourself that. Don’t. That’s a lie, and maybe the biggest. Believe it, and nothing will really happen. Don’t believe it, and everything will.

It’s not just you that’s extraordinary, either. Your life is, too. What you’re feeling, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. Your dreams and your fears, your hopes and worries. Extraordinary, and in a very special way. On the one hand, those things are unique to you. Your thoughts about them are your own, and how you approach each of them is determined by everything from your DNA to your experience and your beliefs.

But on the other hand, those dreams and fears and hopes and worries are for the most part shared by every other person who’s ever walked in this world. There is an invisible line that runs through the heart of every person, connecting you not only to your family and your friends, but to the stranger down the road. As different as we may appear to be on the outside, we’re all the same on the inside.

You are common, yes. But only in the way Da Vinci and Einstein and Twain were common. They were extraordinary in what they did with their commonness. You can be the same.

Think of this world as a house with many rooms. Some are big and wide and hold many people. Others are small and cramped and hold just a few. But all of those rooms are dark inside.

When you’re born, God gives you a light and places you in one of those rooms. It might be a big room with many people. Maybe it’s a smaller room with a few people.

It doesn’t matter what kind of room you’re in. Doesn’t matter who’s there and who isn’t.

All that matters is that you shine your light.

The tribe

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image courtesy of photobucket.com

I can’t remember the name of the tribe, which is mildly ironic given the nature of their story. And it’s quite a story.It amazes me that regardless of how smart we are and how much we can do, we still know so little about the world.

Only 2 percent of the ocean floor has been explored. Species thought long extinct still turn up every once in a while. And just last year, scientists stumbled upon a valley in New Guinea that had gone untouched by man since the dawn of time. There were plants and insects never seen before. And the animals never bothered hiding or running from the explorers. They didn’t have the experience to tell them humans were a potential threat.

But of course it’s not just plants and animals and hidden valleys that are being discovered. People are, too. And that can lead to all sorts of things.

Take, for instance, the tribe I mentioned above.

They were discovered in 1943 in one of the remotest parts of the Amazon jungle. Contact was carefully arranged. Easy at first, nothing too rash. That seems to be rule number one in those situations–don’t overwhelm the tribe.

It didn’t work. Here’s why.

The difference between these particular people and the others that pop up every few years was that their uniqueness was foundational to their belief system. They’d been so cut off from civilization for so long that they were convinced they were the only humans in the world. No one outside of their small tribe existed. And they liked that idea.

Finding out that not only were there other people in the world, there were billions of them, was too much. The trauma of learning they were not unique was so debilitating that the entire tribe almost died out. Even now, sixty-nine years later, only a few remain.

Sad, isn’t it?

I’ll admit the temptation was there for me to think of that tribe as backward and primitive for thinking such a thing. But then I realized they weren’t. When you get right down to it, their beliefs and the truth they couldn’t carry made them more human than a lot of people I know.

Because we all want to be unique.

We all want to think we’re special, needed by God and man for some purpose that will outlast us. We want to be known and remembered. We all know on a certain level that we will pass this way but once, and so we want whatever time we have in this world to matter.

That’s not a primitive notion. That’s a universal one.

I think at some point we’re all like members of that tribe. We have notions of greatness, of doing at most the impossible and at least the improbable. Of blazing a new trail for others to follow. It’s a fire that burns and propels our lives forward.

I will make a difference, we say. People will know I was here.

But then we have a moment like that tribe had, when we realize there are a lot of other people out there who are more talented and just as hungry. People who seem to catch the breaks we don’t and have the success that eludes us. And that notion that we were different and special fades as we’re pulled into the crowd of humanity and told to take our rightful place among the masses.

It’s tough, hanging on to a dream. Tough having to talk yourself into holding the course rather than turning back. Tough having to summon faith amidst all the doubt.

But I know this:

That tribe was right.

We are all unique.

We are all here for a purpose, and it’s a holy purpose. One that cannot be fulfilled by anyone else and depends upon us.

We are more than flesh and blood. More than DNA and RNA and genes and neurons. And this world is more than air and water and earth. Whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, our hearts are a battleground between the two opposing forces of light and dark.

One side claims we are extraordinary. The other claims we’re common.

It’s up to us to decide the victor.

The Second Thing God Wants To Hear

I was about six years old when my father looked at me during an episode of Wild Kingdom and said, “For the love of all that is holy and good, please shut up!”

Not that I was a talkative child. I wasn’t. And still am not. But I was in the midst of something amazing, and it had no choice but to leak out. Before, my universe in its entirety had been comprised of my home, my neighborhood, my church, and the grocery store. Everything else was fuzzy and gray and didn’t really matter. And I was happy.

But then things changed. At some point I sat in the backyard grass one night, gazed up at the stars, and began thinking about what they were and how they hung in the sky. And one day I looked at the mountains outside my front door and thought about who lived there a hundred years ago and what happened to them. And then I looked into the mirror and wondered, in my own childlike way, who I was and how I was possible. My world was creeping outward. Expanding. Suddenly, everything went from fuzzy and gray to bright and sparkling. And I was happier.

I had stumbled upon wonder. And it was expressed in my new favorite word:

Why.

As in, “Why do the clouds look like rabbits and spaghetti, but not clouds?”

Or, “Why does God live up in heaven when all of us are so far down here?”

Or, “Why do some people go to church and some people don’t?”

And on. And on.

This was at first an encouraging sign as far as my parents were concerned. I was waking up to the world and taking an interest in things, which was good. But as the days and weeks wore on and my questions not only kept coming but became more difficult to answer, they came to believe that perhaps my wakefulness and interest weren’t so good. Weren’t so good at all.

They’ve confessed as much to me, so now I understand the whys and for-whats of the day I watched Wild Kingdom with my father.

The episode was about creatures of the deep sea, and along with the requisite slugs and shrimp, they had shown several pictures of angler fish.

I had wondered aloud why there were a lot more fish in the sea than there were animals on land. And I had also wondered aloud why we had to send submarines to the bottom of the ocean instead of people in suits.

Then I asked this: “Why did God make that fish so ugly?”

“For the love of all that is holy and good, please shut up!” Dad said. Which was about the funniest thing I had ever heard. I laughed so hard that I fell off the sofa.

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Tonight I sat with my own son on our own sofa, eating crackers and watching a recorded episode of Planet Earth. After five years of living, his world is beginning to expand just as mine did. And like me, his favorite word is now “Why?”

Sigourney Weaver had just transitioned from sharks and whales to the creatures of the deep sea. Several bioluminescent fish lit the screen, tiny shrimp scurried along the sea floor, and then an angler fish crept into the scene.

My son said through his crackers, “Why did God make that fish so ugly?”

That’s when I remembered that story of Dad and me. And as I had spent the last twenty minutes answering my son’s questions with varying degrees of success, a part of me wanted to tell him the exact thing my father told me. But when I looked down and saw the grimace on his face and the tiny pile of cracker dust on his pajamas, I didn’t see my son. I saw me. And then I doubled over with laughter and fell off the sofa.

Much the same way I did thirty years ago.

My son peered down over the edge and gave me a what’s-so-funny? look.

“Atta boy,” I said, looking up to him.

Because I pray the wonder he has at this world and his place in it never wanes. It’s the sort of wonder that has cured diseases and explored our solar system and invented wondrous technology. And it’s also the sort of wonder that God bids us to have in abundance.

Number one on His top ten list of things He wants to hear is “I love you.”

Number two is “Why?”

My friend Jennifer Lee keeps a folder on her desk that’s full of questions she wants to ask God one day, things she’s struggled to answer but cannot. I think that’s a good idea. Not just to keep them, but to add to them.

Because if we want our faith strengthened, it must be tested. And if it’s truth we seek in this life, we must begin with doubt. The Christian faith is unique in that it centers itself upon a God Who revels in both the faith that lives in our hearts and the questions that live in our minds. He challenges us to ask the tough questions and seek their answers, even if some are unsearchable. He knows the great secret: the more we try to prove Him false now, the more we’ll prove Him true in the end.

God cannot be proven in a laboratory, but He can in us. We can know He’s there, that He’s paying attention, and that despite what we think or hear or see, He has something wonderful waiting for us on the horizon. And all He asks in return are three things:

That we hang on.

That we believe.

And that we wonder.

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