This oil painting is Highway 3 in North Central Iowa. The little town of Rowan is dead ahead on the South side of the road. The year is probably about 1984.
Brent Clarke is a fictional character in several of my novels. He is pictured here with the actual water tower of Rowan, used to portray the fictional water tower of Norwall, Iowa from my novels. In 1984 Brent would have been about 22 or 23 years old. The people the character is based on would have been 28 or 30 in 1984 depending on which one you think he is more like. I will not, of course, tell you who… because you could argue there is no one answer to that question. He is arguably me at some point in every story he is in.
Valerie Clarke is as close as I can come to declaring I have a main fictional character in my novels. She was 11 in 1984, the year that the book Snow Babies is set. The real girls she is based on would have been 28 in 1984 (my former classmate) and 3 years old (my former student.)
Milt Morgan is a fictional me-character, although I can argue he is almost equally based on the “Other Mike” that I grew up with. He was a year older than me and one grade ahead of me in school. In 1984 the character would have been 23. I was 28 and the Other Mike was 29. This portrait was made from a school picture of me. But somehow it also looks a lot like the Other Mike.
This is Anneliese Stein. She is a fictional character based on stories I was told. She was thirteen years old in 1945 when she died at Auschwitz. Her mother brought her back to life as a gingerbread girl in 1975 using fairy magic. Well, possibly through the magic of her mother, Gretel Stein, as a storyteller. And, according to the story that was told, she became a Storybook Fairy when her mother died and became a fairy too.
This is Bobby Niland, a fictional character from several of my novels. He is based entirely on a student from one of my classes in the 90s. The fictional Bobby was only six in 1984. The real Bobby probably seven in 1984. In the story Horatio T. Dogg, Bobby was fourteen and a half.
You can easily see that, because of living a long life with an extra-vivid imagination, not all of my real memories are of real things. There is more to it than meets the eye. This is an imaginary portrait of Valerie again, this time at the age of seventeen. It is one more imaginary thing hopelessly intertwined with all the real things I remember.
Catch a Falling Star 
On the Problem of Always Being Wrong
I was a middle-school teacher for thirty-one years. That, of course, basically means I have to be wrong about everything. Principals have told me so. Parents have told me so. And students who have heard them say so take it completely to heart because, well… Who has the most authority to declare someone else completely wrong?
Yes, I have it on good authority… I am wrong about everything, always.
.
But it is very useful to realize that I am in good company. Galileo was wrong about the sun not going around the Earth. The College of Cardinals said it was so, and the Inquisition forced him to confess he was wrong. Giordano Bruno was so wrong about Copernicus being right that the Inquisition had to burn him at the stake. One would almost think that it is a bad thing to be wrong.
But it’s not.
Science, in fact requires its greatest practitioners to find out all the ways that they are wrong. How else do you create a theory of what is probably right?
It is fundamental to the scientific method to be as right as it is possible to prove. Of course, every scientific theory yields up a lot of anomalies that somehow defy the rules of the currently understood correct theory.
Isaac Newton got thumped on the brain-top by an apple and realized that the same thing that made the apple fall to Earth was making the Moon fall to the Earth, although the Moon is falling at the same rate as it is going around the Earth, so it never finishes the falling.
Later, Albert Einstein would realize that Newton’s gravity would even bend the light of distant stars around the edges of the Sun. And so, he found where Newton, genius that he was, was wrong. And so, the Theory of Relativity was born.
Guess what. Einstein was wrong too.
So, ultimately, it is okay for me to be wrong about things. It is necessary to be wrong before you can find out what is right. So, when I say something stupid like the following…
Comedy is good for you.
You should be naked more.
Fairies are only real if you believe in them.
You must take a leap of faith and live in the world like a Navajo, in tune with the natural world and comfortable with other people living in your world too. Moment by moment in the present moment.
…and eventually, I may stumble upon what is right and true. Or get burned at the stake like Bruno. That happens too.
2 Comments
Filed under artwork, commentary, fairies, humor, Paffooney, philosophy