Billy Coffey's Blog, page 4

Things wiped clean

image courtesy of photobucket.com
This weekend brought the first real snow of the year, which makes things feel a little more new than some old crystal ball dropping.

There’s nothing like a fresh coat of white to give you the sense of things wiped clean. God’s way, I suppose, of saying Okay, let’s have a do-over.

My little corner of the world is generally a quiet place.

You get the normal neighborhood sounds of a place set against forest and mountain—kids playing and mommas hollering, dogs that never seem to stop barking, juncos and cardinals singing in the pines and the occasional scream when some poor woman goes out the front door to find a deer standing in her yard. There is a soft heartbeat to country life. It comes steady and sure and you come to stake your existence on it. By those things you know the world is all right and things are mostly as they should be.

But it all goes different once the snow flies.

Get four or five inches on the ground and all that noise stops, even the dogs, leaving everything so quiet and still you can hear your own breaths and feel your own blood moving. As a boy I wanted to be outside as soon as the first flake fell, wanted to tear up every bit of whitened ground. As a man I’m outside just as early, but wanting to keep all that white right where it is for as long as I can. I want to soak in that silence. I want the quiet to move in me.

If I have a single wish for you at the start of this year, it’s just that—for you to get a little quiet inside.

I’ve been gone from this little website for a while—fine, a long while—trying to get a novel finished (and it is, for the most part. Look for Steal Away Home sometime next Christmas and Some Small Magic early this March, which you can pre-order on the cheap right now at Amazon). But in all honesty it wasn’t the book-writing alone that kept me away. Things got a little crazy around election time. Things are still a little crazy, really. It got to the point I couldn’t go anywhere online without having to hear people yell and scream at each other, and it came to the point I needed away from it all for a bit. I have two teenage kids in the house. Yelling and screaming, I hear plenty. Didn’t need any more.

So I sort of checked out from everything for a while. No news, no commentary, and the only books I read were written by people long gone from the world. And you know what I found? Quiet. It was like a January snow, only coming down inside me.

You could say I’m a little worried about the state of things.

I’m not talking about politics or the economy or the social ills that plague us now and forever. I’m talking about us. At some point along the way we’ve forgotten how to talk to treat one another, going from “I’m right and you’re wrong” (which is fine) to “I’m right and you’re an idiot” (which isn’t so much) to “I’m right and you’re evil” (which is . . . well, I don’t know what that is, but it’s bad). We don’t think of one another as souls anymore, but a mass of opinions.

More than anything else right now, it’s quiet we need.

Time to catch our breaths, feel our own hearts beating. Soak in a little bit of silence. There’s time enough to air our grievances. The time to remember we’re all in this together? That might be slipping away.

As for me, there’s till snow on the ground and a path through the woods. I believe I’ll take it and go listening for a bit.

I’ll see you when I’m done.

The grace cup

image courtesy of google images
Before I tell you what is sitting at the corner of the big wooden desk in Room 304 of the local elementary school, I want to talk about rules.

Yes, I know: rules stink. Ask anybody. Ask me. Much of what drives us—the little devil at our shoulder that most times shouts a little louder than the angel sitting at the other—has rule breaking at its core. Rules are made to be broken. Color outside the lines. Right?

I don’t know anyone who likes rules. Then again, I don’t know anyone who thinks the world would be a better place without them.

In Room 304, this rule reigns supreme: you must have a pencil. No excuses. The pencil is mandatory. In an age when computers and tablets and smartphones rule, the world inside Room 304 is much more tangible. More basic. Work is done with paper and pencil. Every subject, every day. And as these bits of wood and graphite are both plentiful and exceedingly cheap, this seems like a rule easily enough followed.

You would be wrong.

These young elementary school kids, they don’t care about pencils.

Pencils don’t even enter into their minds. And so class must be interrupted each day as thirty children scramble to beg and borrow and steal something to write with in order that they may learn all about nouns and fractions and Chief Powhatan. And the teacher must punish the most egregious of offenders by sending them to a lonely back table for a punishment known as Think Time, which includes the filling out their name, crime, and reason for committing said crime on a single sheet of paper.

They never forget their Nike shoes. Or their Pokemons. And don’t even think they’d come to school without their iPhones. But a pencil? Please.

Kids these days, right? Sometimes all you can do is pray.

The worst of these offenders is a little girl who sits in the back of the second row. Quiet kid. Average student, though barely. She struggles. Doesn’t seem to study for her tests, and you can forget about any homework assignments. Jesus will come back before she remembers to bring a pencil to class.

It all got to be too much three days ago. Math class, and would you know it—no pencil again. To the back table she goes to fill out her Think Time report (she’s an expert at this, trust me).

She fills in her name, first and last.

Under “Reason”: I forgot my pensil.

Under “Why”:  I got up lat. I had to get my bruther up. I had to get my sistr up. Mommie at wurk. Daddie don’t life with us. I had to get the dog up. The dog puked. My bruther cryed. My sistr spiled her milk. I cleened it up. I cleened my sistr. My dog puked agin. We went on the bus layte. I forgot my pensil.

Kids these days, right? Sometimes all you can do is pray.

I don’t think I need to tell you what went through the teacher’s mind when that confession was turned in. Teachers know. They hear the stories of students too poor to eat and with mommas hooked on meth and daddies gone to jail, fist-sized bruises blamed on rickety steps and half-shut doors. Teachers know, friend. They know and it breaks their hearts. I know this as fact, because I’m married to one.

That is why you will now find at the corner of the big wooden desk in Room 304 a ceramic container daily stocked with dozens of freshly sharpened No. 2 pencils, and a note taped to the front that reads “Grace Cup.” Because we all need rules, but sometimes those rules must be forgiven.

Today you will walk out your door into a world teeming with people carrying worries and wounds you will never see. A great many of those people will be so kind of heart that they set aside their troubles long enough to nod or smile or say hello. A few will even help you in some way large or small.

But there will be some as well who won’t follow the rules of Please and Thank you and Have a good day. They will be grumpy and mean. They will do horrible things. They will make you mourn the state of things.

That’s why my advice to you is carry a Grace Cup of your own. Dip into it frequently and as needed. For others, and for yourself, too. Because it is a hard business, this thing called living. Sometimes the dog pukes.

And that is a thing worth remembering.

Forgotten America

The wedding is held inside a small Mennonite church shielded by mountains so thick and lush that it feels as though the sun is a mere passing stranger.

Two things come to mind as I gather up my family. One is that hunting season isn’t far off, evidenced by the slight chill in the air and the gunfire off the high ridges. The other is that there is apt to be no farming going on this afternoon, at least not close by, because all the farmers are here.

One whole side of the parking lot is occupied by trucks stained with dirt and mud and manure. An old Ford is parked near the doors, its bed stuffed with apples fresh off the trees and ready to market. Men gather beneath a narrow wedge of porch. They wear jeans not long plucked from the clotheslines where they had been pinned to dry and Sunday shirts, ones with snaps rather than buttons. Talk is low and slow and centered upon the goings on of the mountains rather than the wider world, one being a place of silences and mysteries that enchant, while the other is by their judgment becoming a thing near unrecognizable with each passing day.

Children skitter. Women pass in plain dresses offering waves and hugs and pecks on the cheek.

The bride stands in a patch of grass down below the church.

Her hands hold a bouquet of wildflowers that may well have been plucked and gathered from the banks of the quiet stream beside her, where there runs water so fresh and clean that it could be bottled straight and sold to rich folk. She smiles at the camera pointed at her, and in that grin is the promise of long years ahead.

Inside the church, the groom waits at the first pew. Those who will stand with him lean and talk. All are dressed in their finest Wrangler jeans, many of which possess a light, almost white-colored ring at the back pocket where a can of snuff usually rests. Country music drifts through speakers. Bluegrass. Songs of love and loving and the difference between.

The flower girl comes down the aisle in an old wooden wagon pulled by the ring bearer, each knee-high and grinning. The bride appears. We stand. The ceremony itself is of the simple kind, as all good ones are: a brief sermon, a long prayer, an exchange of rings that ends with a kiss and a series of whoops from the back. And I feel joy here. Much joy.

Afterwards we all move to a nearby barn where the reception is held, a wide and clean space decorated with strings of lights that will adorn future Christmas trees. The air is heavy with the smells of barbequed chicken and fresh biscuits. On the opposite end, the doors are opened to a wide pasture filled with hills and cows. The new couple enters to more cheers (and more whoops from those thinking of the wedding night). Farmers talk. Children play. Women—quite a few—gather in the center of the barn. They hike their dresses and kick away their shoes, high-stepping as “Rocky Top” blares from some hidden place.

And me, friend? I sit in a small corner of this barn, gaping at all this food and music, these smiling faces, and what I think is this: these are my people, kin by blood or marriage or just plain time. Folk of the hills and hollers who live out their lives now in much the same way as was done a hundred years ago, a season and a prayer at time.

In some ways my people are enjoying a brief moment in the spotlight, courtesy of an upcoming election based in no small part upon their perceived anger.

All those talking heads are right on that point. The whole lower class in this country—and in Appalachia particularly—are ticked off indeed. They are tired of being mocked because they are poor, and they are tired of being ignored because they are the wrong color poor.

But aside from this, I find my people are not overly enthused about politics—part of that wider, unrecognizable world. I’ve heard only one mention of the election in all my time among the mountains today, this from an old man who sighed in a heavy way and said, “Don’t make a damn which one gone win, we’ll get a rich Yankee Democrat either way.”

Maybe that’s so.

I’ve no doubt that come November 9, most interest in my people’s problems will fade.

The cameras and lights that have been turned to their hardships will go out. The stories of an epidemic of suicide and drug abuse will go unwritten. A people proud and self-sustaining—the sort of folk you would pray to have close when everything goes to hell—will fade once more into the lonely places that both bless and curse them. That is a sad thing to say, but it is expected. We’ve reached a point now as a country where everything is political, the downtrodden most of all.

And yet I take some small comfort in the fact that life will go on here in the simple way it always has, connected to soil and tress and unspoiled fields tended by those who understand what it is to hurt and love and gain and lose. Even here, here especially, there is joy.

There is singing and dancing and praying. And as I sit and smile and look out on all this, I think maybe those are three words for the same thing.

Danny

Danny was the one who told me about sex. He swore it was true but refused to confess the source of his information, instead repeating all the necessary steps in order, none of which involved kissing. That’s the reason I called it a lie. Everybody but an idiot knew you got babies by kissing.

But then Danny said, “Swear to God.”

That gave me pause. You didn’t go around saying something like that willy-nilly. Swearing to God was more than a promise, a lot more and maybe the most more there was. I took a step away in case the playground broke open beneath us at that moment, spewing hellfire.

He turned, looking to make sure Mrs. Harrison wasn’t around, and raised both hands. One became a circle, thumb resting across the nails. Danny made the other look to be pointing at something—a chubby forefinger caked in eraser shavings and dirt and what may well have been a booger. He shoved that finger through the circle made by his other hand and sort of wiggled it around in there.

“Like that,” he said.

“That’s just about the grossest thing I ever heard” is what I told him, which it indeed was, and I followed that with a lengthy dissertation concerning human anatomy and body function, namely that the two parts in question were meant for a variety of things but never THAT.

“Swear to God,” Danny said.

Maybe you could say right there was when a bit of my childhood ended—that tiny corner of the third grade playground where the slide emptied out and where two discarded tractor tires had been sunk into the earth to make a crude playhouse. Because Danny swore to God, and that’s something you didn’t do unless you were absolutely certain. And because if babies came from an act that disgusting, then the entire world was upside down.

It turned out, of course, that Danny was right. And like a lot of things in life, what I started out thinking was gross actually turned out to be anything but. For me that was proof learning can come from just about anywhere. Even an elementary school playground. Especially there.

Danny proved himself a fount of further information in the years following. Most all our classmates were good for learning something from, whether it was what I should do or what I shouldn’t. When you come up in a small town you come up with all the kids there are; I walked across a high school stage near a dozen years later to be handed a diploma and looked down to the same people I’d known for as much of forever as I could reckon. You can’t help but form bonds.

And then life happens. We all scattered. Some to college and others to work, and some who all but disappeared. I still see a few of my classmates around town. Others I haven’t seen for close to thirty years now. That’s how it goes. There are some in life who come along and stay in some manner or another, and ones who make only a brief appearance across the stage of your days and then exit, never to be seen again.

I received news of Danny’s death early this week. “Work related” was all the information I could gather. I found a picture of him online. He hadn’t changed much except for the beard, trimmed tight in high school but now long, a hybrid of an Amish man and Willie Robertson.

It’s funny how you can go years without thinking of a person and still feel a little hole left in you when he passes. Like a link in the chain that holds your yesterdays to your today has been broken, leaving a part of you to twist in the wind.

The rough and tumble boy I knew Danny to be back then became a man of deep kindness in the years after our graduation. He married and settled into living. Got washed in the blood of Jesus. Life can harden some as it moves over them. For others, it softens. I am glad to know it softened him.

I’m glad, too, of all the lessons he taught me. Even that gross one.

If you’ve a mind at some point in your busy day, do me a favor? Say a little prayer for Danny’s family. I’m sure they’d appreciate it. I wouldn’t bother saying one for Danny, though. Because he’s good now.

He’s good.

A case of The Feels

image courtesy of google images
My daughter is fourteen now, and in about three weeks’ time she’ll be off to her first year of high school.

It’s a tough thing for a dad to know his children are growing up. Harder, I think, when it’s your little girl doing all the growing. You get to feeling at times that something precious is beginning to slip away, and do you all you can to staunch that flow.

Which was why this past Saturday, with her brother and momma away and only the two of us and the dog to hold down the homestead, I thought it high time to have a little father/daughter afternoon in the best way possible.

I was going to let her meet John Coffey.

If you are unaware of that fictional character from Stephen King’s The Green Mile, I won’t spoil things for you. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie, then I expect nothing more needs saying. The story is one of the few I often return to whenever I need a reminder that there is still light and goodness in this world, even in the dark places.

We sat on the sofa with the dog and a giant bowl of popcorn between us as the opening scene unfolded—an old man in a nursing home, crying over a song. From there we made our way through the first act, acquainting ourselves with the main cast and supporting characters. It was awful silent in that living room when John Coffey made his appearance on the Mile. My daughter never moved once he set about doing his quiet sort of magic.

We’d gotten to the final scene when old Mister Jangles peeks up from his cigar box when I noticed my daughter looking at me. Her cheeks were red, her mouth caught in something like a grimace. Two eyes red and crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘What’s the matter?’ I’m CRYING.”

I squeezed her knee. “That’s okay, you’re supposed to.”

“I know I’m supposed to,” she said, “but what about you? You’re not crying AT ALL.”

“I’ve seen this movie a hundred times. Read the book maybe a hundred more. After that many times through a story, all the emotion in it’s been wrung out.”

She would have nothing of it: “You HAVE to cry.”

“Why?”

“Because it gives you The Feels.”

Ah. I nodded then, understanding things better. Because of The Feels. I don’t know where that expression first arose, whether my daughter picked it up at school or she read it somewhere. Maybe she made it up on her own. Regardless, it’s been a buzzword in our house for going on quite a while. It comes whenever one of those SPCA commercials shoot up on the TV or when my daughter stumbles upon an Internet video featuring either soldiers coming home from war or a litter of puppies swarming some unsuspecting child. It came as our family strolled the neighborhood on the night of July 4, gawping at all the fireworks.

Spoken in whispers and in shouts, when things are quiet or still. Day, night, afternoon, evening. First thing in the morning:

“I got The Feels.”

Sitting with me there on the sofa, she asked, “When’s the last time you really got The Feels?”

My answer was the one she dreaded: “I don’t know.”

She grabbed the remote and turned off the television, looked at me. “You seriously don’t know.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I used to, I guess.”

And in her best Mommy voice, my daughter then said, “Well, you better go someplace quiet for a while and try to figure out why.”

So I did. I sat on the front porch and watched the sunshine and the deer and tried to figure out why it seems I don’t get The Feels much anymore.

Granted, I don’t think there is anyone who can come down with a good case of The Feels so often and with such power as a fourteen-year-old girl. Such a thing isn’t possible, especially when you are a forty-four-year-old man.

But it did bug me then, and continues to bug me now, that I can go long stretches of months and even years without being struck by awe or passion or beauty, much less all three at once. Which sounds pretty bad especially considering I spend a great swath of my days writing stories that revolve around the very things that have long gone unfelt in my life.

If pressed, I would say I’ve been this way for quite a long while now. Life can do that to you.

At a certain point you move away from the innocence that defines your childhood and allow other things to take over. You become an adult with adult troubles.

But more than that, your view of the world tends to morph into something wholly different. With age comes experience, and with experience comes the shedding of the rosy caul that so long covered them. We go from seeing the world as a place of wonder to knowing it to be a place of ruin. We begin to see people not as souls but as bodies in possession of every awful thing. We see hate and avarice and violence. Maybe we even come to a point when we feel those very things in ourselves.

Living becomes not a thing to experience, but to endure.

We spend so much of our adult lives wanting only to be children again. For me, that desire had little to do with growing back down to a boy. It was more to reclaim once again that childlike state of belief and hope. To see again that all things hold a beauty and wonder.

Somewhere along the line, I lost all of that. I’ve let a wall grow around my heart as a means of self-protection, a shelter against the storms I saw raging around me each day. It was better doing that. Because constantly seeking out the good in others was to invite only disappointment, and risking belief in the good of the world only meant subjecting myself to constant hurt. And that is love most of all, is it not? It is hurt.

According to my daughter, that’s the The Feels really is, too. Deep down at its most basic level, this constant buoyancy of her spirit is not owed to joy, but a kind of pain that stings your heart and leaves behind a tiny bruise that remains behind long after the hurt of it is gone, keeping the best parts of us soft rather than hard, pliable instead of brittle.

That hurt, it seems, is necessary. That hurt you have for others and our world says that you still care, that you are still alive, and that because of those two things, there is yet time enough to start making things better.

I think we could all use a good case of The Feels right now. Hate may be the safe way to go and anger may never put you at risk, but both of those only work in the moment. But in the after, once all the destroying has been done and all those nasty words spoken, we find that the bridges between us have been reduced to mere fragments and made near impossible to put together again. To be made stronger than they were.

We can each view this world as a place of threat and fear and so look upon it with only a measure of gloom. Or we can seek to smile and search out the light that remains even as a closed-fisted hand seems ready to strike.

That choice is a big one. It’s also like every other choice there is—one entirely up to us.

But I know this. I’ve gone far too long opting for the first. It’s high time I seek out the second.

The lost love of freedom

Battle at Yorktown lithograph courtesy of Google images.
A 2009 survey revealed that 83 percent of adults do not possess a basic understanding of the American Revolution.

More than one third did not know in what century the war took place, some placing it even after the Civil War. One in four didn’t know which country we fought, much less why.

Such revelations of our current historical ignorance frighten me, though I can’t say I’m surprised.

Who cares what a bunch of rich white slave owners did a few hundred years ago?

Well, me.

The Colonial period through and beyond the founding of our country has long been my favorite period of history, in no small part because I count myself a Virginian above most everything else. Here in the Commonwealth, the past is always present. It’s like the mud that gets left on all those mountain paths after a long rain—you can’t help but get in it and then go around tracking it everywhere.

Our valley is littered with crumbling homes said to have been hewed from the calloused hands of those who stood against King George III. The ghost of a brokenhearted bride whose betrothed was felled by an English musket ball is said to roam our nearby wood, doomed to wander the ridges in silent mourning, dressed in her wedding gown as she searches for her love. Each spring when the farmers turn their fields, all manner of artifacts are driven from hiding and back into the sun. One can find arrowheads and spearpoints, even the occasional cannonball. It is no mystery why some say Virginia is our most haunted state. The centuries are like the fields beyond my window. They are constantly being turned upward and driven from hiding.

My olden kin had already been well established here when our war for independence began. They were Irish mixed with a bit of Cherokee by then. These mountains were their home. Sadly, I know little more of them than that. I don’t know what my people were doing during the Revolution, though I can make somewhat of an educated guess based upon all I have ever known of the Coffey folk. Two possibilities come to mind—either they were fighting the Redcoats wherever and whenever they could, or they were holed up in the hollers wanting only to live their lives as they saw fit and to be left the hell alone.

Those seem the only valid choices. The Coffeys I know, the ones here, are strange creatures. I state this with no malice or offense intended, as I am one. We tend to live close to the land, are self-reliant, eager to help a neighbor in need and yet covetous of our own privacy. Most of us—the vast majority, if I am honest—possess a healthy distrust of authority in any form other than the Lord God Almighty. We will fight you if we must (and sometimes even if we must not), only to then turn and help bind your wounds once that fighting is done.

Maybe things were different back then, when our country was young.

Maybe my people then were not as they are now. But most of me doesn’t think that the case. Times change, as do things, but people change seldom. And I’ve found mountain folk change not at all.

Still, I wish I knew what choice my fathers of old made. There is nothing in me that allows for the prospect their hearts sided with the King George; that distrust of authority seems too deeply seated and must have come from somewhere. But of course a dislike of one side does not necessarily mean an allegiance to the other, even where freedom is involved.

I would imagine freedom was a thing easily enough had in the Blue Ridge back then, so far as it was removed from the world. It is easy to think we made our own way here, and without interference from any or all else fave the dry seasons that threatened our crops and the cold winters that left us hungry.

It would have been an easy thing to spend those long years between April 1775 and September 1783 holed up in our own hillbilly paradise. To fight soil and beast rather than Cornwallis and Gage.

But a quick search of Google shows quite a horde of Coffeys listed as members of the Continental Army, serving as officers and soldiers both. We did take up arms. We laid down our plows and let our fields rest in order to march off under threat of death. We stood for revolution, knowing full well that loss would brand us traitors.

Tonight I will gather my family and walk around our neighborhood, oohing and ahhing at the fireworks that explode over us. We will likely visit my parents and stand close as Dad honors his own Fourth of July tradition by emptying his .30-30 into the blue Virginia sky.

Dad, he would have fought. My father would have been on the front lines, cussing and giving old King George the finger.

Me, I’ll likely bear witness to all of that and wondering what I would have done those centuries ago. Would I have stood for what was right and true, or would I have instead sought to keep to my own peaceful corner of the world and prayed for those who stood for me?

That answer seems an important one, because that looks to me the choice each of us must still make all these years later. To stand and do our part to ensure this great country continues on strong and free, or to choose instead to tend to our own affairs and our own lives and damn the rest.

The story is told of a European who visited the newly formed United States in the years following the war. He and his American relative were roaming the capital when they spotted President Washington walking alone on the other side of the street. The European was shocked at the sight of a ruler making his way alone and unbothered. In a panic, he asked his relative where Washington’s guards were.

His relative stopped cold and slapped his own chest, saying, “Here is his guard.”

I want a country like that again.

I want a people of differences and opinions united in both a singular love of a freedom born of blood and tears and a profound sense of duty toward the protection of it.

For freedom is a rare thing in this world, and easily taken from those whose only wish is to be left alone.

From those who would rather sit and pray for others to stand.

Washing away the mess we make

I stand upon a sliver of land off the North Carolina coast that I call home for one week a year, looking at what has been written in the spot of sand at my feet.

For seven years now, this spot has been my special place. All the information I need to navigate my day can be found right here without use of a screen or wifi, without any device at all.

Here, the tanagers and mockingbirds are my alarm clock. Deer move silent along narrow trails cut among the sea oats, calling the weather by the way their noses tilt to the air. Dolphins dance for their breakfast, twirling and slapping their tails in the calmness beyond the breakers, telling me when it is time to cast a line among the waves.

Yet while solitude here is plentiful, I am reminded that I have not wholly left all things behind.

There are others here as well, a family far down along the beach, a man patrolling the dunes, who have come to this place in search of the very comfort I crave.

I tend to study these others with the same sort of fascination I give to the constellations that shine over these deep waters at night, or the cockles and welks I pick up from sandbars that rise up and then fade in the changing tides. A trip through our tiny parking lot reveals that many who have answered the ocean’s siren call have traveled quite far—Ohio, Michigan, even Idaho. We are all travelers here. As such, friendliness presents itself as a thing ably given, but only with the unspoken expectation that all parties will be allowed to return to their own families, their own lives, in short order.

Umbrellas pop up along the beach in the early morning as though the sand has broken out in a multi-hued pox, each widely spaced so as to neither intrude nor interfere: islands on an island. This partition extends even into the ocean, where one is expected not to stray from the invisible line stretched outward from one corner of your square of beach to the next. If one does, should the waves you jump over or ride atop carry you in front of where your neighbors sit reading Dean Koontz and sipping glasses of wine bought at the island’s only Food Lion, your fun must be paused until you stand and fight your way back across the current to where you belong.

I’m unsure whether this need for boundaries is expressed unconsciously or with intent—if it speaks toward a desire to allow others their own attempt at peace and renewal, or if it rather tells of a deep-seated wariness toward short-term neighbors.

But a little bit ago I took a long walk along the shore, and now I think I have that answer. Here among the piles of scallop shells and oysters and augurs, HILLARY FOR PRISON 2016 has been written into the sand. Not far down comes BERNING FOR NC. Then, TRUMP’S FIRED ’16. Each carved by a different finger or big toe, each thus far saved from the encroaching tide but not by the vandalisms of others.

I thought of two things as I stood by each of those pronouncements, and how those pronouncements had been scrawled at with such rage. One is that we can leave our problems and cares at home for a short while but not our divisions. The other is that increasingly, our divisions are becoming worse and angrier.

This in itself is nothing new; our country has always been an angry one. But our collective mood has changed these last years in such a way that it now feels more a souring that hangs between us all. Our rage and distrust has gone from a thing—the government, the economy—to a person—the hated Other who dares not believe as we believe.

It is a depressing thing, really. And to be honest, it is also the very thing I wanted to get away from for a few days. But here I am yet again, a neutral witness to a raging culture war, and it saddens me as much as I’m sure it does you. It saddens me a lot.

I’m only glad I’m out here alone with only the pipers and gulls. Should the Hillary supporter, Bernie person, and Trumpster meet, there may be violence. That’s where things have arrived at now, or at least where things are headed. And I’m willing to say that’s why even here this year, everyone mostly keeps to themselves. Because we’re all tired of it, all the fighting. Because we all just want a break from the notion that we’ve come to associate the opinions and stances of others with their entirety as people, and from the ugly truth that we have somehow gone from mere disagreement with those who think other than us, to wariness, to distrust, to blame, and now, finally, to hate.

I am a writer. That term is a broad one, though I’ve found its job description narrow enough to fit inside a single sentence: Every time you sit to work, try to tell the story of us all.

Thankfully, that story has been fairly easy to come by for most of my life. Lately, though, it’s gotten a bit harder. Diversity is the magic word now, just as the celebration of all that makes us different has in certain circles become our national religion. And while that might be right and good, I’ve found that celebrating of differences often casts aside all those things that makes us the same.

Like you, I don’t know where we’re going as a country. Like you, I’m worried about it. If the recent tragedy in Orlando speaks of a single thing, it isn’t that there are those who would focus upon the weapon a terrorist used rather than the ideology behind why he used it, or that it is far too easy for a sick man to purchase an instrument of war. To me, Orlando says that we have reached a point now where we can no longer even come together to mourn.

But I’ll leave you with this. That family I saw far down the beach made their way past me a little bit ago. Dad, mom, and two little kids. They did not avoid me as they passed, did not take the easier path toward the dunes to walk around me. The father did not look at me as though I were some potential threat, nor did his children glare at me with Stranger Danger eyes. Instead, the mother smiled and offered me a sand dollar they’d found just up the beach. The kids wanted to see my tattoo. And the dad, grinning, merely said, “How ya doin’, buddy?”

And you know what? I’m doing fine. I am.

Because I nodded and said as much to that beautiful family and then left all that scribble in the sand for the tide to wash away. I walked on as they walked on, all of us looking out toward the ocean with the breeze in our faces and the smell of salt filling our lungs, thinking much the same: in spite of the mess we are prone to make of things, ours is still a beautiful world.

Lessons learned at the Walmart

The scene: Very back corner of the local Walmart. Not the corner with the toys, which plays into much of the drama that is unfolding before me. No, I’m talking about the other back corner. Namely, the applesauce aisle.

The characters: One mother, aged mid-thirties, dressed in a faded pair of blue jeans and a Johnny Cash T-shirt that reads FOLSOM COUNTY PRISON in faded letters. Hair a frazzled blond.

Also her son, aged six by my estimation, wearing a similar pair of jeans and a look on his face that says Watch Out, I’m Gonna Blow.

And then there’s me, standing some ten feet away and playing the role of Gawker. Because this kid is about to get the snot knocked out of him.

Not that I can blame him, really. Sometimes Walmart puts me in just as much a foul mood as it has put this poor kid, who has just about had enough. He’s endured rows upon rows of boring stuff—tomato sauce and cereal and flour and canned soup, not to mention a questionable assortment of produce. Time has gone wobbly. Past and present and future have been sucked away within these four massive steel walls, creating some sort of hellish alternate dimension where Happiness cannot survive for long. He wants to go look at the toys or at least the DVDs, something besides groceries. Mom says no, not yet. She says groceries are more important than toys and DVDs. The boy knows is either a lie or further proof that this woman who gave birth to him, who carried him in her very womb and suckled him at her very breast, is some sort of alien overlord.

He tries to keep quiet, keep himself together. Tries to hang on. But it’s here in the applesauce aisle that he finally loses it, and only after waiting in agonizing silence as his mother spends a full two minutes pondering the difference between the cinnamon applesauce, the low-sugar, and the regular. He’s tired. He’s grouchy. He just wants to look at some toys for a little while.

What happens isn’t the sort of slow-building meltdown with which every parent is familiar. No, this is a full on natural disaster that goes from calm to catastrophic in less than three seconds. The boy wails. He thrashes. He stomps his feet and screams and yells “STUPID!” and “TOYS!” and other words I cannot decipher, all of which draws every eye near. There are sympathetic looks from other parents. A few nearby children offer slight nods of support.

Everybody knows what’s coming. People can go on and on about corporal punishment and the negative effects it has upon children, how it’s even a form of child abuse. But most folks consider those words as little more than academic ramblings that have no place in the real world, and the the world doesn’t get more real than the applesauce aisle at Walmart.

We’re all riveted—me, the young man a few feet away who looks as though he’s just decided he was never going to be a father, the old woman with a cart full of panty hose and microwave dinners who looks at the boy and whispers “Kids these days” in the same way another old woman no doubt had once looked at her. The only exception is the mother herself, still studying a package of low-sugar applesauce and one flavored with cinnamon.

She places both back on the shelf and looks at her son.

He crosses his arms, making a stand.

She bends down.

He steps back too late. Her arms shoot out and take hold of his shoulders the way a spider would its prey, making everyone flinch. The boy, now caught, struggles as his mother pulls him toward her. He fights and squirms and screams more before realizing none of it will do any good, at which point he plays his only remaining card—he goes boneless.

Unfortunately for him, his mother doesn’t care. She continues reeling him in until he is near her face, at which point she lifts his feet off the ground. The eighteen-year-old boy next to me turns to leave, likely remembering his own public spanking sometime past. The old woman only shakes her head (“Kids these days” she says again) and decides to keep watching.

But just as the moment we’ve all been expecting finally arrives, the mother does something that surprises us all. She doesn’t turn her son over and give him a stiff whack on the butt, doesn’t shake her finger in his face and give him a lecture about all she has to do to keep him alive. Instead, she lifts him up to her eye level, staring through those red cheeks and wet eyes and the snot running down out of his nose.

And kisses him.

That’s it, nothing more. Kisses him square on one red cheek and then lowers him back to the floor, where the boy can only stand shocked into silence as she goes back to studying the pros and cons of applesauce.

What crowd had gathered now moves off in search of other entertainment. Me? I linger. I take a minute, because I know something important has just happened here. Anger has been quelled. Rage has been stymied. Not by means of hotter anger or larger rage but by a single kiss—by a simple act of love that said I know you’re upset, but I promise it’ll be okay.

And do you know what I think? I think a lot of our problems with each other could be put away just by doing that. Not to meet screaming and yelling with louder screaming and yelling, but with a simple act of love. With a reminder that we’re all in this place where happiness can never last long, but we’re all in it together.

To gaze hard into the human soul

That was the spring of my failed attempt at college, now long back, though I still remember how the assignment came to me:

in stapled sheets, double-sided and twin columned, with printed edges that had gone slanted from the awkward way the book had been angled on the copy machine. Its pages were not many.

The story represented the epitome of Southern fiction. This according to my professor, who hailed from points north and who had never found good reason to sit on a front porch, had never chased lightning bugs through a summer field, and who, so far as I gathered, had never witnessed a haint. To my mind, all lack of such knowledge rendered this man incapable of proclaiming such a thing. And yet there I sat on the porch swing one April evening, stapled sheets in hand, having a transplanted Yankee tell me what constituted my people’s finest storytelling.

I vowed to try the first sentence alone, judging it for myself.

There I found: The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. A simple sentence on the face of it, declarative and plain, subject meeting verb meeting infinitive and preposition. Indeed, the only thing I found spectacular in those eight words was how I could not take my eyes off them. They held a power. A mystery. Who was this grandmother? Why didn’t she want to go to Florida? Why was she digging her heels in so? Those eight words captured me not merely by what they said, but what they didn’t.

That first sentence turned into the first paragraph and then the first page,

the story of the grandmother and her son Bailey, his wife, their children John Wesley, June Star, and the baby, all on their way to Florida and a chance encounter with a dangerous convict known as The Misfit. It is a hard trip made worse by the grandmother’s presence. Here is a woman who considers herself holy in a way that is not and freely passes her judgment upon any and all, bemoaning how the world has gone to hell and how hard it is to find good men these days. Her actions result in an automobile accident that leaves the family stranded on a lonely dirt road. Their rescue comes in the form of The Misfit himself, who proceeds to order his gang to take the grandmother’s family into the woods and execute them all.

And here in the last breaths of her life, the grandmother is offered the grace of understanding where her life has gone. In The Misfit she finds the ability to see others with compassion and understanding, saying even, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” before The Misfit murders her, leaving her final words as a seed planted in The Misfit’s heart to bear fruit on some day long ahead and leading to what became to me the third finest sentence in the English language. There is the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the Gospel of John, the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, and these words, uttered by The Misfit: “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

I read that story twice, the pages shaking in my hands all the while.

When I finished I turned to the back page where the professor had attached a picture of the author. Imagine my surprise when I found the writer of such violent power, such darkness and such grace, was in fact a frail-looking woman plain of face, standing with crutches in both of her arms as she gazed upon two peacocks near her feet.

That was my introduction to both Flannery O’Connor and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

I have kept both close to me ever since. I expect I always will. Through her voice I have sought to find my own, and oftentimes the courage she possessed to gaze hard into the human soul is one I seek to borrow. Her world was the South in all its glory and degradation, characters who exist in lives of hubris but who see their worlds destroyed by violence in order that they may wake from their slumber. So that they may gain a moment of grace, a spiritual light in their darkness. And in these tales of poor families and proud grandmothers and brutal criminals, we come to see ourselves as who we are and who we can be.

“The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience,” she one said. “He has to be aware of the freak in himself.” I believe that true, just as I believe there is no higher aim for any of us. How could it not?

Because it was Flannery O’Connor who showed me that day on the porch that God loves us all, but He loves the freak a little more.

Cat Gets Stuck in Lampshade and Is Electrocuted

It isn’t often that I lend this space to someone else, but then Brennan McPherson isn’t just someone else. I had the pleasure of endorsing his first novel, Cain, which is a fantastic retelling of the world’s first murder.

His publisher is doing a giveaway this week, which you can enter by clicking on this picture:

Here’s Brennan . . .

There’s a lovely little video that made its rounds in the viral community recently.

In the video, three girls are trying to do a hair-tutorial video, and their curious cat gets himself stuck in a lampshade and starts yelling like an old man who just stuck his arm in an atom smasher.

The title of the video claims the cat was electrocuted, and judging by the cat’s yells, and its one-legged, tail-spinning dance, and the lamp’s subsequent tumble to the ground (out of view of the camera), it was certainly in pain. After the girls run around screaming, the sounds calm, and one girl runs to the camera and whispers, “oh my God,” as she shuts off the camera.

The viewer is left wondering, “Was the sudden hush due to feline decapitation? In trying to get the cat un-stuck, did they pop its head off?”

A friend sent the video to my wife and said it was hilarious, so I watched it smiling at first, expecting cat-induced-hilarity. “Silly kitty, getting caught in the lampshade, hah-hah! Hee-hee, silly kitty!”

40 seconds later I felt nauseas wondering if a little creature was just murdered by an inanimate object in front of three impressionable little girls who were highly disturbed by what they saw (and what the camera didn’t).

Apparently the cat was “fine,” though the manly yells it was emitting leave me in doubt as to what that word means. Alive, maybe. What about cuts, broken kitty bones, etc.?

You may have guessed already, but I am easily disturbed, and highly compassionate toward living things.

You may think it’s funny to joke about shooting cats. I don’t. Don’t try it around me. I won’t laugh. As ridiculous as it seems, I even get a little sad when the tomatoes in my garden die because I haven’t watered them enough.

You may think it ironic that my debut novel, Cain, is about the world’s first murder. But to be fair, the book is about the terrible impact of pride and jealousy, and though it has much violence in it, it’s really anti-violence at its core.

I suppose it doesn’t help that my wife and I own two cats, and that the video reminded me of a few predicaments our one cat, Jazz, has gotten himself into. One day he got his toenail stuck in the curtains. I laughed at first, but when he began flopping around, twisting his arm grotesquely and screaming like a dying woman, it was no longer funny (okay maybe it was a little funny). I had to go surgically remove The Idiot (one of his nicknames) from his predicament.

Thinking back on it, now that I know The Idiot is fine, it was funny. But not because he got hurt. It was his reaction that was funny, and the fact that he could get so stuck he thought he was going to have to ditch his arm to escape.

Another time I called The Idiot up from the basement and he sprinted his merry way up. Only problem was he slipped and smashed head-first into the middle of the staircase. When I peeked my head around the corner and saw him sitting woozily, shaking his head and looking troubled, I admit it, I laughed. But I also felt really bad for the poor little guy, and picked him up to comfort him. Because I’ve been there.

Well…I haven’t necessarily BEEN THERE, but I’ve stubbed my toe on my fair share of couches, and stepped on a lego or two.