Thinking About Nakedness

One might wonder why I am thinking about nudity so much. And I suppose if I am going to devote a book of essays to the obsession, then I should probably explain why I am so obsessed and why I am trying to actually be a nudist. Of course, you will probably laugh about it when I get to the real reason. At least I hope it’s a matter of laughter and not pitchforks and torches.

You can probably trace the nudist thing in this blog to the publishing of my YA novel, Recipes for Gingerbread Children. In that book, there is a pair of twin sisters, Sherry and Shelly Cobble, who are nudists, come from a family that practices nudism at home, and are beloved child friends to the main character, Gretel Stein, the old woman who survived the Holocaust and had once been a nudist herself, before Auschwitz.

This was not the first book I published, nor, in my opinion, the best book I had written and published to that point. But it was the first book to become popular among a special classification of book lovers. I mean nudist and naturist writers of fiction. One of them read and loved the book, becoming an advocate for it, and inviting me to become a part of their writer’s group. That advocate has many wonderful nudist-centered stories available on Amazon under his pen name, Ted Bun. I recommend that you check out his work if you have the least bit of interest in living life without clothes on all the time.

The obsession does go all the way back to childhood, however. I was a child innocently fascinated by nature and what it felt like to be immersed in it with little or no clothing on. I lived at a time when bathing suits only covered the part of me below the belly button down to barely below the crotch. And I was fascinated on Friday nights by the nearly naked body of Tarzan Ron Ely and his boy sidekick Jai as they swung on vines through the African jungle. And I will have skinny-dipping stories to share later in the book as well. I liked to go to the Bingham Park Woods south of town and ride my bicycle naked up and down the park pathways. I loved the feeling of being naked outdoors.

That innocent love was tragically suspended by a traumatic thing that happened to me at the age of ten that I will have to talk about in this book. And it will not be any easier to read than it will be for me to write about it. But nudism and naturism have a strong enough attraction for me that it eventually helped me overcome the trauma. Nudity has been a good thing for me throughout my life, even during that period that I felt it was bad for me. And I will have to do a lot of explaining about that.

And so, in this introductory excuse-making and rationalizing essay, I finally come to the real reason I need to write this book. I decided that, when I retired from teaching, I would choose to do at least one thing that truly terrified me, but would help make my life complete. Skydiving, flying an airplane, and bungee jumping was all beyond what I had the power and monetary resources to do. So, in 2017, I agreed to write an article for the True Nudists website about trying nudism for the first time. I then arranged to make a first-time visit to Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. And I will be writing about how I carried out that evil plan in this book as well.