Billy Coffey's Blog, page 5

Release Day: There Will Be Stars

Today is release day for my newest novel, There Will be Stars.

If you’ve hung with me for the last seven books (sheesh, seven books!), chances are you’ll know the name Bobby Barnes. He popped up the first time way back in Snow Day, then again in The Devil Walks in Mattingly, then one more time in In The Heart of the Dark Wood. Kind of strange that one of the most recurring characters in all of Mattingly should be the town drunk, but then that’s me. I’ve always been drawn to characters who are broken in some way, probably because I’m a little broken, too.

Probably because we’re all a little broken.

You guys know that, right? We’re all broken people living in a broken world, and the trick is to seek out the beauty in all the cracks. That’s what life is all about. It’s certainly what it’s all about for Bobby when you get to the end of this story.

People often ask me if the shine wears off after seven books. I tell them no, it doesn’t. Between you and me, though, that’s kind of a lie. The truth is that every release day marks an event I spent a really long time trying to convince myself would happen.

Twenty years passed between the day I sat down and said I wanted to write a novel and the day my first novel was released.

And between the two . . . well, let’s just say a few of those years were dark ones that I don’t care to ever live again. So each year that a new novel comes out is a cause for celebration—it means I’ve made it this far. But while I’ll likely walk around for most of today with a goofy smile on my face, I know I haven’t quite made it where I want to be just yet. That’s why I’ll also spend much of today getting ready for what’s next.

In the meantime, please do head over to Thomas Nelson’s site for places to order a copy of There Will be Stars. Or even better, head on down to your local bookstore grab it there. And don’t you worry about Bobby Barnes. Sure, he’s not the sort of guy you’d want around. But the great thing about starting out with a ruined character is that it leaves the door open for redemption by the end. And is there a better thing in this life than that?

I don’t think so.

Trapped between worlds

For a while all the news was about the woman gone missing in the mountain wilderness two counties over.

It is rough land, beautiful for its remoteness and dangerous for the same. Hundreds have been involved in the search. Pleas have gone out from her family. Her car was found near a trail, abandoned.

Days passed. People hung onto hope, though that hope moved from one buttressed by faith to one guarded by optimism to, finally, a fragile sort of assurance.

Her remains were found last week, deep in the woods. Authorities have now said a suicide note had been found in the car.

It is a sad end to a sad story told too often. Those closest to her are now left to grieve and mourn and somehow move on. No doubt they will be haunted by questions of what sort of despair could wrench itself so deep and thoroughly into her that suicide came to be the only option, and why she felt she could not lean upon those closest for help. The pictures I’ve seen on Facebook show a bright smile and vivacious personality. They serve as a reminder to always approach others with equal measures of grace and kindness, because we may never know the battles they fight or the struggles they face.

Reading about this woman has gotten me thinking about all the others who came before her.

It may surprise you to know just how many people here have committed suicide over the years. It may surprise you more that a great many of them have chosen to take their lives not in their own homes but in the mountains that rise above our peaceful valley. They will often leave without a word or under some small pretext of an errand and drive, making their way along our streets a final time, passing friends and neighbors. They will climb the narrow backroads of the Blue Ridge and find a lonely place to walk, a spot to leave behind a world that somehow left them.

I’m not sure if anyone has ever questioned why it so often happens like that.

Ask the old timers around here, they’ll tell you folk have always gone into the mountains to die. Ask the farmers, they’ll say it’s proof man and woman aren’t so different than the animals, who themselves oftentimes sneak away to lonely places so they may breathe their last.

But I’ve always thought a deeper reason lay inside the broken hearts and exhausted souls of those who wish their living done.

To me it is as if they seek the bosom of the woods because the woods always embrace, and each step taken deeper into those ridges and hollers is a step away from their trials. And perhaps it is that they climb these mountains so they may glimpse a heaven they never imagined or never believed.

They say our mountains are filled with the spirits of those trapped between worlds, whose deaths were lonely and violent. Sometimes I believe those stories. But I pray that tired woman who passed on among the oaks and mountain streams has found a peace she somehow came to lack, just as I pray a bit of her remains behind to aid those who come after. To take their hands and gaze into their eyes and ask that they turn back.

For it is a hard world that holds us all, and broken, but there is beauty in the cracks.

Between despair and hope

image courtesy of google images
When I was a kid, Easter wasn’t even an entire day, really.

It lasted only a couple of hours on those Sunday mornings, beginning with waking up to dive into all that candy stuffed into the basket left for me on the kitchen table and ending just a few hours later, when I walked out of church. When you’re just coming up in the world, Easter seems a little overblown.

After you’ve come up, though? Well, then things get different.

You get to that age after you find out the Easter Bunny’s just a poor man’s Santa but before you start sneaking chocolate into your own kids’ baskets, and Easter maybe dims a little more. Maybe it’s the time of year that does it. It’s springtime when Easter rolls around, and everything is new and fresh and drowned in color, and what’s on your mind is more the rising temperature than a rising Lord. You take it for granted that the Miracle happened. The stone got rolled away and the angel said Look inside and inside was empty. You hear things like that too much, sometimes it doesn’t seem so special anymore.

But then something new happens, usually once you get some age and you find that you’re starting to attend more funerals than weddings. Life takes on a different look right about then. The shine starts to wear off. You start thinking less about where you’re at and more about what’s laying on ahead.

You maybe discover what Easter means for the first time in your life.

I wouldn’t say that’s where I am personally, but I’d say it’s near enough. To me, Easter is the holiest time of the year. It’s a period to be quiet and listen—days to both despair and hope. That last point is what’s been on my mind.

For a lot of the religiously minded, Easter is really just three days rather than one. It begins on Good Friday, when we pause in our otherwise busy and stressful lives to consider this person who was both God and man, dying such a horrible death, setting himself apart from God so we would never have to ourselves. It ends the following Sunday with that empty tomb full of promise—proof enough for any believer that death has lost its sting.

It’s that Saturday that I want to talk about, though—

that Saturday between the first Good Friday and that first Easter. The day between all that despair and all that new hope. Nothing much gets said about that day, and so it’s all left to some imagination and hard thinking. I think about the Marys and the disciples, all shut up inside somewhere, hiding and grieving. I think about them all trying to hold onto a faith that maybe can’t help but be slipping away, searching for any reason at all to believe, and I think about how that seems an awful lot like what most of us feel everyday.

That first Saturday? That’s our lives.

Those hours are our years, ones spent trying to hope and understand. Trying to find the reasons behind the horrible things that happen to us all. It’s a tough thing, this business of living, especially when you put a God whose ways are so far apart from our own at the center of it. We stand in the present now just as the disciples stood in it then, and the choice we have is the same as theirs. We can look back to despair, or we can look ahead and hope. It’s a daring hope, no doubt, one that seems near to impossible. And yet that is where we all must turn, and that is what we all must cling to—that stone rolled away. That empty tomb. Because we can do without a great many things in life and still call ourselves living, but we cannot go without hope.

Chasing our collective ghosts

When you’re raised in the South and announce your intention to become a writer, people look at you funny.

They’ll shake their heads maybe and grin definitely, squeeze your shoulder or the soft spot inside your elbow and bless you with a “Bud” or “Sugar” on the end. There, too, will be a hesitation, a loaded pause at after that “Lord help you, Dear” meant as a warning to be wary of the title Southern. Be a writer, they mean, and only that. Any adjective you have a mind to apply will only invite others to do the same.

Writer can become Southern writer can become only a Southern writer.

Yet even this will not explain the uncertain stares that follow an author here. To most, there is no negative connotation to being only a writer concerned with dusty roads and fading churches, the hollers and hills and those either blessed or cursed to live from Virginia west through Tennessee and down to the Gulf shores. Indeed, an argument could well be made that this region has yielded more and greater contributions to American letters than any other, likely due to a uniquely story-driven culture. We grow up with stories here, many of which have never been committed to paper but passed from one generation to the next on creaky porches and wobbling kitchen tables, along with the lessons those stories tell. Faulkner was only a Southern writer, as was O’Connor and Percy, Wolfe and Welty. To our relations north and west, such company would be sought after.

Here, there is an understanding of what it means to be known as a Southern writer. It is to contend with the ghosts.

By this I do not mean the ghosts that walk our woods and mountains, caught in some nether region between life and death. There are plenty of those, though from the tales I’ve heard they warrant more pity than fear. I mean those ghosts which truly haunt us, notions of tradition and justice and the memories of poverty and inequality and slavery, that mire the South in a history we can neither set aside nor escape. I can think of a no more reviled and revered part of our country than this, which I believe goes toward the idea that it is the South that holds many of our history’s sins and much of its graces. The past rules here. It is a place where the ground you tread was made holy by blood and tears, where people will ask of your name, your relations, and the state of your eternal soul in a single sentence, and where you are frowned upon if you dare settle far from the bones of your kin.

This is the setting for the writer of the Southern fiction.

We cast our eyes and our pens upon this landscape with truth in mind. We stare down the ghosts not with the hopes of seeing them vanish, but seeing them as they are. It is by doing so that we stand as intermediary in the breech between Here and Elsewhere, past and present. We are the literary equivalent of the person who will shout down a family member but fight a stranger who tries to do likewise.

We are known as rednecks. Bible-thumpers and NASCAR lovers, animal killers and Tea Partiers. You will find much of that in our stories. You will also find a people whose kindness will strip you of words and whose dignity in the midst of heart-wrenching poverty will convict you of your own deeds. And you will find us as well, these keepers of a present drenched in the past, shining a light into the dark places of the human heart in order to see both its narrowness and its depth.

Our stories are not only of the South. More than anything else, that is what I want you to know. A peer-reviewed study published last April in the journal PLOS ONE used Google trends to analyze the most racist region of America. Their findings suggested not Mississippi or Georgia or Virginia, but an area stretching from Kentucky to the northeast. A recent survey conducted by the Oklahoma Symposium of Racial Studies concluded that the most racist city in the United States isn’t Montgomery or Atlanta, but Portland, Oregon. Slavery and inequality doesn’t just belong south of the Mason-Dixon. Those things built New York city, too. They built Washington, D.C.

Those ghosts are everywhere.

They wander and creep and haunt. And it is the Southern writer who goes chasing after them, because every ghost should be dragged to the light.

Refusing to toe the line

It’s Super Tuesday here in Virginia, otherwise known as A Day Off to my kids and Parent/Teacher Conference Day to my wife. Me, I’m already in line down at the church at the end of our street, waiting to cast my vote. And no, I ain’t saying who that vote’s for.

I will, though, tell you what’s on my mind:
Image courtesy of Wikimedia.com

The picture to your right was taken in October 1938 in the city of Eger, in what is now the Czech Republic. Germany had just invaded. Stormtroopers were marching in. I want you to particularly notice the third woman from the left.

Hitler, of course, didn’t do all of this alone. Germany was still in shambles a decade after the first World War. The Treaty of Versailles had forced the country to admit sole responsibility for causing the entire conflict. Traditional German territory was lost. A War Guilt clause was enacted, forcing Germany to repay millions of dollars in damages. Military restrictions were enabled. I would imagine it was a hard time to call oneself German. Hard to look at yourself in the mirror and call yourself a man or a woman.

So when a failed painter came along promising a strong government, full employment, civic order, and a reclamation of national pride, people flocked. When the Nazi propaganda poured forth, they cheered. And when Hitler eliminated all opposition and declared himself dictator, they pledged their allegiance.

Even now, almost seventy years after the fall of Nazi Germany, better minds than mine struggle to understand how an entire country could be brainwashed by such evil. I won’t try to add my opinion to that discussion other than to say that I suppose the fear of Hitler held just as much sway in the minds of the German people as his fiery words. Many bought into the notion of an Aryan paradise, to be sure. But many others didn’t and simply thought the prudent thing was to keep their heads down and do as they were told.

Which brings us to this picture:
image courtesy of wikimedia.com

It was taken in 1936 during a celebration of a ship launching in Hamburg, Germany. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for three years and already abolished democracy. German factories were rearming the country after a disastrous World War I. In three years, that country would invade Poland and plunge the world into the deadliest war in human history. Over fifty million people would perish.

The man circled was named August Landmesser. I don’t know much about him other than the fact that he’d already been sentenced to two years of hard labor. His crime? Marrying a Jew. You would think getting into that much trouble would change your attitude and convince you to toe the line.

Not so. Because there was August, standing in a sea of Germans on that day in 1936, folding his arms in front of him while everyone else Hiel Hitlered.

I don’t know what became of August Landmesser. I like to think he outlived the evil that befell his land and lived to a happy old age with his wife. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. Maybe not. But regardless, August was my kind of guy.

He refused to bow down to fear. He held strong against public pressure.

I would imagine some of the men around him in that picture bought into the evil Hitler was peddling. I would imagine some didn’t but saluted anyway. Not August.

August stood strong. Not by fighting and not by protesting, but for simply folding his arms. And for that, he has my undying admiration.

Anger, it seems, is everywhere now. So far as I can tell, it is the single force driving the coming election on both sides and the reason a great many of my townspeople got up so early this morning. We are fed up. Sick of how things are. Tired of the politicians and the ruling class and that great swath of Washington, D.C. that insulates itself and has no idea what’s going on Out There. Kick the bums out. Blow it all up. Take back the country. I’m willing to bet there are a whole lot of people out there who will do as a buddy of mine said a few minutes ago—“I get in there and pull that lever, I’m gonna do it with my middle finger.”

I’ve seen some mighty things done because someone somewhere got mad enough to change something. Just as I know some of the darkest times in history were the result of a people channeling all of their fear and anger into a savior who turned out to be a devil.

Our leaders can’t save us, folks. That’s up to me, up to you.

Don’t believe me, ask August.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes, take 2

Images courtesy of photo bucket.com
Technology hates me.

Call me irrational, but this is my truth. Something was broken on the new website yesterday and I don’t even know enough to know why it wasn’t working. Fortunately, my job is to write. I leave the technology to those much smarter than me. With apologies to those of you who tried to read this post yesterday and gratitude to website administrator Kathy Richards and web master David Allen, I give you what you were unable to see yesterday…

Change, they say, is a necessary thing. A good thing. And while I have been told as much from my parents to my wife to friends and even my children, I have to admit that change is something that’s never settled well with me. I am the sort of person who enjoys a good deal of constancy. I enjoy routine, however bland it may be. My motto has always been a simple one: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But I’ve learned a little over the years (a very little, if you ask some), and part of what I’ve learned is that a portion of change here and there isn’t so bad. Is, in fact, good. And while I’ve grown quite fond of my little corner of cyberspace through the years, maybe it was time to do some sprucing up. Add some things, take a way a few more. Get that front porch shiny.

So feel free to take a look around and see what’s new. (If you click on the “Home” button it will take you to the landing page, then you can mosey around from there.)  I’ll see you back here soon with some new stories and news of my upcoming book.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

Images courtesy of photo bucket.com

Change, they say, is a necessary thing. A good thing. And while I have been told as much from my parents to my wife to friends and even my children, I have to admit that change is something that’s never settled well with me. I am the sort of person who enjoys a good deal of constancy. I enjoy routine, however bland it may be. My motto has always been a simple one: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But I’ve learned a little over the years (a very little, if you ask some), and part of what I’ve learned is that a a portion of change here and there isn’t so bad. Is, in fact, good. And while I’ve grown quite fond of my little corner of cyberspace through the years, maybe it was time to do some sprucing up. Add some things, take a way a few more. Get that front porch shiny.

So feel free to take a look around and see what’s new. (If you click on the “Home” button it will take you to the landing page, then you can mosey around from there.)  I’ll see you back here soon with some new stories and news of my upcoming book.

The endless grind of the everyday

I was seventeen when I entered the workforce in what was likely the most unglamorous job possible—a gas station attendant. The reasons why I ended up at the local BP are any and not very relevant twenty years later. This, however, is:

I wanted to make a difference.

It might seem strange to think such a thing would be possible. After all, I wasn’t spending my days healing the sick or teaching the young or shepherding a congregation. My eight hours were spent wiping windshields and asking, “Fill her up, ma’am?”

But still, I thought the gas station would be the perfect place to bring God a little closer to folks who didn’t normally get a good look at Him. The BP was a busy place. I wasn’t sure if God could call someone to pump gas, but I was sure He expected me to do the best I could with what I had.

And I did. For a while. I smiled. I was the polite gentleman. I invited people to church. Once I even prayed with someone as I checked her oil.

And you know what? It was nice. Very nice. For the first time in my life, I felt useful. I may have been making minimum wage and driving home with more dirt and grime than I ever thought possible, but I didn’t mind.

God was using me, and I was right where I wanted to be.

But then something happened.

The days grew longer and the nights shorter. The work became harder. And the people…well, somehow the people turned into customers to be herded in and out as fast as possible. My mood soured. I said as little as possible. My life went from being one of service to being one of clock-watching. I felt like a prisoner that was paroled at 4:00 every afternoon but had to report back promptly the next day.

My job became just that. A job.

How this happened still escaped me at the time, but experience has given me the answer. The newness wore off. The shine that was purpose, even calling, was covered by a gray film of the same old.

It doesn’t take a life-changing event to rob us of joy and faith. Not a death or a sickness or a job loss. No, all it takes is the endless grind of the everyday.

It’s our menial tasks and not our extraordinary ones that challenge our calling. It’s those things we do and those people we see every day that lull us into a false sense of who we are and what we God expects us to do.

Our jobs can become a highway if we let them, an endless expanse of pavement with nothing but the thump-thump of time to let us know we’re not holding still. But it doesn’t matter much that we’re simply going, does it? What matters is Who’s doing the driving.

And that’s a lesson I’ll learn and relearn for the rest of my life.

Meredith’s Christmas Wish

Insofar as Christmas Eve traditions go I have many, each born from years upon years of practice, whittled down and streamlined for maximum effect.

This year is different. And as it’s turned out, I’m not alone. For proof, I offer the hundreds of people on either side of me.

We’ve been here on Main Street for about two hours now, some standing, others sitting, our signs and American flags at the ready, waiting for news. At some point in the very near future, an off-duty policeman will steer his car into the intersection of Routes 340 and 608 just up the street where, lights flashing, he will block all traffic. Santa is here and at the ready. To my right, a crowd has gathered in front of the elementary school. Fire trucks, gleaming red and decorated with wreaths, ready their sirens.

Meredith is coming home.

She’s been gone for months, trading her quiet home for the busy hospital at the University of Virginia in order to battle her Stage IV cancer. Her one wish was to come home for Christmas. The doctors granted her two days.

Word spread.

Here we all are.

This is what small towns do. We’re constantly up in one another’s business, as separated by race and religion and politics as anyone else, have our own sorrows and our own burdens to carry, but we love each other. And the harder our times come, the deeper our love gets.

There is no other place any of us would rather be than here. Right here, where only a few weeks ago our town’s Christmas parade eased by. We celebrated then in the midst of floats and candy and fake snow pumped from the back of lifted trucks bearing American flags and names like Country Boy’s Dream. We celebrate now for deeper reasons, as evidenced by the tears in so many eyes.

Word is that Meredith has just exited the highway. Ten minutes.

There is joy here. Should there be one thing you must know, it’s that. Christmas joy, the purest kind. The sort which bubbles up from a hopeful expectation that lives inside us all, whether buried or visible for all to see. A joy that defies hardship and pain, one that bears us up under the hard things. Doesn’t matter who you are or what your story is, we’re all hope-shaped creatures. We need it, no less than air.

Far off, a siren wails. A police car ready at the intersection. Chairs shuffling. Everyone stands.

Across the street, I hear someone say: “She’s coming.”

I think about this little girl, ten years old. A baby. And I think about that other baby as well, whose birth we will celebrate a little over twelve hours from now, that miracle wrapped in a baby boy.

Hope fulfilled.

Flashing lights. A county sheriff in the lead, a silver car behind. And trailing a mass of fire trucks, honking and blowing their sirens.

People waving, cheering. The crown of a little girl’s head.

Meredith, come the calls.

Merry Christmas. We love you.

And as she passes all the questions that have preyed upon me in these last hours fall away. I no longer wonder why God would allow this sickness to befall a child or why the world must be as broken as it is. Instead I think of that babe again, lying in a manger. I think of how so much has changed since that night in Bethlehem and also how so little, that the world is so different but the people in it are not. The things we pine for now are the very ones pined for then. Peace. Purpose. Healing. Life.

Should you have a mind, do me a favor? Say a prayer for little Meredith. I know I will. She has warmed my heart this year. She has touched us all. And because of her, my community has given me a gift this Christmas that I will not soon forget. We are bombarded each day with stories of just how much humanity gets wrong, but we can get a whole lot right, too.

Merry Christmas, friends.

Joseph’s gift

image courtesy of photo bucket.com

I have always held a soft spot for the little guy, that nameless and faceless mass of everyday folk who make little noise and little splash but without whom the world would fall apart. I’ve always held a soft spot for Christmas as well. Mostly, I guess, because the one has very much to do with the other. Christmas is a little guy time of year.

It’s always about the baby, have you ever noticed that? As it should be, don’t get me wrong. It’s the baby and the angels and the shepherds, the virgin who kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. Among all the stories I have ever read or been told, the one of that first Christmas will always remain my favorite. Hope, wrapped up in a little boy.

For me, though, it isn’t only about the Christ child. Not the shepherds in the fields, those poorest of the poor who were the first recipients of the Good News. Not the heavenly hosts, ten thousand angels gathered where a single one could lay waste to an entire world. Not the magi, following a star. No. The one I most often think of this time of year is the one least mentioned, not only in the story of Christ’s birth but also in much of the Gospels.

Joseph.

Poor, neglected Joseph.

It began so well for him, this man who was a descendant of King David and Abraham. Engaged to a young girl named Mary, who, as it happened, came to be with a child not his own.

A man in Joseph’s position in that culture and at that time could have done some pretty horrible things to an unfaithful fiancee. Could have had her publicly humiliated for certain. Stoned, if that had been his inclination.

Joseph, though, had nothing of the sort in mind. Matthew says that instead, Joseph “was minded to put her away privily.”

Quietly, so as not to cause Mary further burden. It is an example of Joseph’s righteousness according to Matthew, but I’ve always thought there was more to that decision than Joseph being a righteous man—a description, by the way, that is a supreme compliment in Jewish culture. I think it was just as much that he loved Mary, loved her deeply, in spite of what had happened.

But of course like most plans, Joseph’s did not line up exactly with God’s. He was visited in a dream by an angel who said Mary’s child was indeed the Holy Spirit’s, and the child shall be named Jesus.

Let that sit for a moment. The woman you were to marry—the woman you love—has betrayed you by getting herself pregnant by someone else. You’re brokenhearted and not a little bit angry. But then an angel visits you, scaring you half to death and telling you the most amazing and inexplicable story you’ve ever heard. What do you do?

Says Matthew: “And Joseph awoke from his sleep and did as the angel of the Lord commanded him.”

I often wonder what Joseph thought and felt the night of the Child’s birth—a Child not his own.

The naming of a Jewish boy was the father’s prerogative. Joseph did not name Jesus. In the genealogy of Christ that comprises much of Matthew’s first chapter, Joseph is rendered little more than an afterthought: “Jacob was the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, by whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.”

I wonder how it would make a Jewish man of that time feel, not being known as the father of a son but the husband of a wife.

Those early years must have been a frightening time. Humbling and confusing. Maybe even lonely.

After the wise men who visited had gone, the angel came again to warn that Herod was looking for the child. He told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt. Joseph obeyed.

The angel returned after Herod died to tell Joseph to return his family (not “your wife and son,” but “the Child and His mother”) to Israel. Joseph obeyed.

The angel then returned again, telling him to settle in the regions of Galilee.

Joseph obeyed.

When Christ was twelve, Mary and Joseph took him to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Passover. Jesus remained behind to listen to an question the teachers. Mary and Joseph, no doubt being as tired and stressed as any parent, assumed the boy was somewhere in the caravan. They found him a day later. Joseph didn’t understand Jesus’s explanation.

I bet there was a lot of that.

I bet there was a mess of things that Joseph never really understood.

That is the last mention of Joseph in the Bible. It is assumed he died, but no one knows for sure. Maybe it’s fitting that a man portrayed as little more than a bit player in the greatest story ever told exits the stage in such a manner. No bows, no curtain calls. That sounds like Joseph. Play your part, then leave quietly.

I’m sure that’s not the way it all happened. I’m certain Joseph played a big part in the life of Christ. Wouldn’t be nice to have a glimpse of that, though? A single verse of Joseph the carpenter, showing the boy how to build a door or a wall.

Because in the end he spent his life in the greatest of pursuits. Joseph was a father. A step one in a heavenly sort of way, but a dad nonetheless. So here’s to him this Christmas. That unsung hero, the ultimate little guy. A man who did nothing more than what we all should do—ponder not what role we play in history’s long and winding tale, only obey, and take care of the little ones.