This is the 587th consecutive day of Mickey posting at least one post on this danged old Catch a Falling Star thingy. That is not a record or even a milestone. I have reached this point at least twice before.
A year ago in September, I lost my mother to heart and kidney problems that conspired to defeat her doctors and bring an end to her consecutive run of 87 years of being alive. I kept writing and posting all during that time because it helped in many ways. In two consecutive years, I lost both of my parents, my Dad in 2020 and my Mom in 2021. I had a lot of memories to process as well as an inheritance and all the stages of grief. The time I spent writing resulted in two books, Laughing Blue and Mickey’s Rememberries, that contained all of it… I mean most of it… err, maybe just some important parts of it. And I had them both published before my mother died, though she never got to read either one.
I am beginning to be noticed as a writer. It is painfully slow, only a dollar or two at a time, but real. People are actually reading my books without being paid to do it. And a few of them even like the stories. I now have 21 books written. I have #22 written, but not yet published. I also have #23, a novella, only two chapters from finished. And I have started both #24 and #25 already. And the potential is there… but it is also a good thing that I don’t depend on writing for income.
I have managed in 65 years to create some evidence that I can do art in a couple of different forms with intelligence and humor (though I’m sure there are some readers who would strongly dispute that I have either quality in any amount at all.) It is enough. I may not be the superstar I once dreamed of being. But I have learned that I wouldn’t want to be that anyway. Being an ordinary unrecognized genius is good enough to justify a life.
My wife constantly tells me I am wrong… about everything. And I probably am. So that is not right. And if you think that’s my wife in the picture, you would be wrong. She’s much larger than that in real life.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.
Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.
The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.
It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.
I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.
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Filed under artwork, cartoons, classical music, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, Hidden Kingdom, magic, metaphor, music, Paffooney
Tagged as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart