I told you about being the kind of child that liked to run around naked in places where nobody else would see. And I only got caught a couple of times.
And I also told you about how I was cured of that behavior by being sexually assaulted by a cruel sadist. If you weren’t listening in your head when you read that part, then don’t worry about backing up. You don’t have to revisit that terrible thing to appreciate how this story goes.
But just because I had been traumatized and scarred by life, it didn’t mean God would let me simply hide from the problem. I was born to be a nudist, and God’s special sense of humor laden with karma and irony wasn’t about to let me hide from that.
The first thing I had to deal with as a young man hiding from nakedness and nudity was having a job at a daycare center for children of students and staff at the University of Iowa as a work-study job while I was working on my Master’s degree. It was a janatorial job, but it also involved childcare of kids who were all no older than four, and most of them still in pampers and pull-ups. And the female work-study employee was slightly squeamish about changing diapers. So, even though I was entirely reluctant to touch the kids for phobic reasons, I learned to effectively change diapers and messed training pants. I discovered that way that two of girls, Dylan and Sierra, were actually long-haired boys. And I also learned that when we broke out the swimming pool for summer afternoons, the hippy-dippy parents prefered skinny-dipping to having to bring and keep up with swimsuits. So, I found myself supervising half a dozen to eight little nudists in the back yard of the daycare house. I learned to my great relief that I didn’t have any sort of sexual attraction at all for naked kids. It was something I had worried about because of my studies about how victims of molestation often became molesters. And naked kids you have clean even if they do poop in the potty are entirely too icky to even get a flash of that kind of evil notion. I was terrified of naked people, even myself, but I became comfortable around naked little monkeyshines. Male or female, no difference.
………………………Once I became a teacher, especially an inexperienced gringo teacher in a school of mostly Spanish-speaking middle school students, I had to learn to deal with young ladies who have an aggressive, hormone-fueled sense of humor. Especially a pair of twin girls, cheerleader types, who discovered the one topic that made me blush and double-clutch while talking.
They routinely told me stories about them going to the nude beach on South Padre Island over on the coast of Texas. They made their group of girlfriends laugh hilariously. So, suspecting they were lying just to embarrass me, I asked for more details and kept them talking, hoping to catch them in a lie. They told me about going to the beach and getting naked, using a towel to sit naked on the sand, and loving to feel the water on their naked skin. One of them, when I thought I had caught them in a lie, offered to get naked in the classroom to prove they liked being nudists. That had to be a hard no! And they started telling me about the nudist park near San Antonio, a place called Riverside in the 1980s, the time when they were actually in my English class. I later looked that place up in an SA phone book, and discovered it was real.
At one point during their Eighth-Grade year, they even invited me to go with their family to the nudist park for the weekend. I immediately turned them down. They made fun of me for being afraid of nudists, which, ironically, I was. And to this day, I don’t know for sure whether they were real nudists or just having fun at my expense with an elaborate lie. I never dared to ask their parents about it, though that would’ve been karma for them no matter what the truth was.
Now, so far in this post, I have only told you the early part of how I learned about nudism, and there is obviously more to go. So, there will be a part two, at least here in the blog if not in the book.
Catch a Falling Star 