Planning on making a trip back to Iowa becomes daunting as I get older and un-wiser. But I have to go home nonetheless. My octogenarian parents are both now gone. They rest next to each other in the Rowan Cemetery. I am now a third owner of the farmhouse and forty acres. My two sisters and I inherited it to be the fourth generation living on the farm. I am basically planning to go back there to die there. I have six incurable diseases (diabetes, osteoarthritis, COPD, psoriasis, hypertension, and chronic allergies… geez, it is hard to remember them all). And I am a cancer survivor. Whichever way the wind is blowing at any moment may completely alter my future.
Rowan, Main Street, with the water tower in the background.
The saying from the author Thomas Wolfe, the author I alluded to in the title, is, “You can’t go home again.”
In many ways that is an inescapable wisdom. I will go back to my boyhood home of Rowan, Iowa. And it will not be the home I knew. Most of the people I knew there as a boy are long gone… to the graveyard west of town, or to Minnesota, or California, or places distant and unknown to me.
And it is not just the people. The buildings have changed. None of the businesses are the same except for the Post Office and the Library. And the Library is in a different building than it was.
Morning mists beyond the cottonwood tree near Grandpa Aldrich’s farm place.
But the memories persist. I know where I am when I am there. It is the center of the universe as I once knew it. And the only reason I can’t go home again is because I carry my home with me wherever I go. And, as fallen angels go, sometimes they simply pick themselves up and fly towards home.
I have never been an attention-seeker. In the Elysian Fields of modern society, I have never really been the honeybee. I have always been the flower. I had a reputation in high school for being the quiet nerd who ends up surprising you immensely in speech class, at the science fair, or at the art show. I was the one they all turned to when everybody in the conversation had already had their chance to strut and pontificate and say dumb things, and they were finally ready to get the solution to the problem being discussed, or the best suggestion on where to begin to find it.
When I became the teacher of the class instead of the student, I had to make major changes. I had to go from being patient, quiet, and shy to being the fearless presenter, forceful, sharp as an imparter of knowledge, and able to be easily understood, even by the kids whom you couldn’t legally call stupid, but were less than smart, and not in a pleasant Forrest Gump sort of way.
Shyness is only ever overcome by determination and practice. The standard advice given is to picture your audience naked so that you are not intimidated by them. But if your audience is seventh graders, you have to be extra careful about that. They are metaphorically naked all the time, ready at a moment’s notice to explode out of any metaphorical clothing they have learned to wear to cover the things that they wish to keep to themselves about themselves. And while you want them to open up and talk to you, you don’t want the emotional nakedness of having them sobbing in front of the entire class, or throwing things at you in the throes of a mega-tantrum over their love-life and the resulting soap operas of betrayal and revenge. And you definitely don’t want any literal nakedness in your classroom. (Please put your sweat pants back on, Keesha. Those shorts are not within the limits of the dress code.) Calling attention to yourself and what you have to say, because you are being paid to do so, is a critical, yet tricky thing to do. You want them looking at you, and actually thinking about what you are saying (preferably without imagining you naked, which they will do at any sort of unintentional slip or accidental prompting.) The ones who ignore you are a problem that has to be remedied individually and can eat up the majority of your teaching time.
I trained myself to be fairly good at commanding the attention of the room.
But now that I am retired, things have changed. I can still command attention in the room, which I proved to myself by being a successful substitute teacher last year. But I no longer have a captive audience that I can speak to five days a week in a classroom. Now my audience is whoever happens to see this blog and is intrigued enough by the title and pictures to read my words.
Now that I am retired and only speaking to the world at large through writing, I am ignored more than ever before. Being ignored is, perhaps, the only thing I do anymore. It is the new definition of Mickey. Mickey means, “He who must be ignored. Not partially, but wholly… and with malice.”
I put my blog posts on Facebook and Twitter where I know for a fact that there are people who know me and would read them and like them if they knew that they were there. But the malevolent algorithms on those social media sites guarantee that none of my dozens of cousins, old school friends, and former students will see them. Only the single ladies from Kazakhstan and members of the Butchers Union of Cleveland see my posts. Why is this? I do not know. Facebook and Twitter ignore me when I ask.
My books, though liked by everybody who has actually read and responded to them, are lost in a vast ocean of self-published books, most of which are not very good and give a black eye to self-published authors in general. I recently got another call from I-Universe/Penguin Books publishers about Catch a Falling Star, the one book I still have with them. They are concerned that my book, which is on their Editor’s Choice list, is not performing as well as their marketing people think it should. But to promote it, I would have to pay four hundred dollars towards the marketing campaign, even though they are already subsidizing it by fifty percent. They tell me they believe in my book. But apparently not enough to pay for 100% of the promotion.
I have decided to invest in a review service that will cost me about twenty dollars a month. But my confidence is not high. The last time I paid somebody to review a book, they reviewed a book with the same title as mine from a different author. That service still owes me money.
But the only reason it is a problem that I am being thoroughly ignored these days is that an author needs to be read to fulfill his purpose in life. Maybe pictures of pretty girls in this post will help. But, even if they don’t, well, I had their attention once upon a time. And since my purpose as a teacher is already fulfilled, perhaps that will be enough for one lifetime.
Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass. If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.
The problem is that the pirates from Bank of America finally came through with their offer to settle my debt. (This is a repost from 2017) Sixty percent of $T13,000 in four payments over the next four months. I have an appointment tomorrow to talk with my lawyer about bankruptcy. It is expensive in this country to become poor. And if you are poor, you have no other option. At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.
Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling. It is a simple game. In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw. The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down. Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms? That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 60-year-old moose-throwing muscles. My flabber is totally gasted by that.
So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. At least I will save money on buying clothes.
Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background
There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood. You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are. Dows is not the town where I grew up. But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them. It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.
You have no idea what this is, right?
Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives. My cousin and her second husband were there. Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there. We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!) The experience taught me a simple lesson. We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.
You don’t order Coke here.
We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives. So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.
The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.
We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us. We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe. We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead. It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.
There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.
We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us. Nothing lasts forever. Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing. A simple word for that is “farming”. Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after. But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond. And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.
I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.
Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.
My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.
When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.
This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.
Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.
When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.
This picture was intended to look like it could’ve been my son, so the face came from an old black-and-white photo of me when I was ten.This is me as a nudist child in my current home’s backyard flanked by two nude Butterfly Children.
This is my purple-mouse avatar.
Eli Tragedy, my red-clad Sorcerer character from Dungeons and Dragons days is also really me.
Me as a happy new nudist
Milt Morgan is a wizard, and also a character who is half me and half the Other Mike from my childhood.Milt Morgan as a child. Also half me.Another purple Mickey.
Yes, this is a picture of a rock. But it is no ordinary rock. Okay, that’s not precisely true. It is a gray metamorphic rock roughly square in shape with numerous flecks of white and a white strip along the top. As rocks go, it probably couldn’t be more ordinary, more rocky in its soul. But, as with all things in this life, the importance and true meaning lies in the context. This is a pocket rock. It spent a quarter of a century riding around in my pants pocket. I have held it in my hand millions of times.
The Rowan Community Center, seen in this picture I used for the cover of Magical Miss Morgan, is the last part of the old Rowan school still standing.
In 1980, my Great Grandma Hinckley died. That was also the year my folks had to move to Texas because of the transfer my Dad’s seedcorn company gave him to its cotton seed division. It was one year before I got my teaching degree. And it was the year they tore down the building where I went to school for grades 1 through 6. That summer, as I walked around the demolition site, I found the homely gray rock that was nearly as square as I was, and because I was already feeling homesick before I actually left home, I picked it up and stuck it in my pocket. It was a little square piece of home.
That rock went with me to college. It went with me to both Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida. It has been to Washington D.C. It has been in the depths of caves in Kentucky and Missouri and Texas. It has been high in the sky in my pocket in an airplane. It has been to beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the U.S. It has visited both Mexico and Canada. It his been to Las Vegas. And it even rode in the subways of New York City.
And possibly the most interesting part of this pocket rock’s career happened in Texas schools. It was with me in my pocket constantly from 1980 to 2004. I finally took it out of my pocket and placed it in an old cigar box that once belonged to my grandfather and I have kept keepsakes in since I was a kid.
And I have thought a lot about this ordinary rock that isn’t really ordinary on closer inspection. At one point or another I thought about using it as a skipping stone at both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 2004 when I was considering the pocket watch broken by it and the car key accidentally bent against it, it almost wound up in Lake Superior. I put in my cigar box and it has remained exiled there since. Will I have it buried with me, in my pocket? No, probably not. My wife plans to have me cremated. Hopefully, though, not until I am already dead. This rock has pretty much been a symbol of my soul, travelling with me, teaching with me, jingling the pocket change when I walk… And it will continue to exist when the thinking and writing parts of Mickey are gone.
But even rocks are not immortal. Sometime in the future something will happen to it. It will end up someplace unexpected or changed by grinding, melting, or chemical reaction into some other form. But no matter what happens to it ultimately, the meaning of it, the context, the places it has been and the things that it has done will still be true, still have happened to it. And, ultimately, it will still be just like me.
I made a choice, long about 1980 or so. And I have not regretted that choice. I became a teacher instead of the writer/artist I thought I wanted to be. And the more I look back on it now, if I had gone the writer route back then, I could’ve eventually become an author like Terry Brooks who wrote the Shannarabooks. I might’ve even been as good as R.A. Salvatore whose fantasy adventure stories have reached the best seller list. Back then, in the 1980’s I could’ve eventually broke into the business and been successful. Even as late as when Frank McCourt broke onto the literary scene with his memoir, Angela’s Ashes in 1996, I might’ve been able to transition from teacher to writer the way he did. But I chose to keep going with a teaching career that enthralled me.
Publishing and the literary scene is changing now. And it is no longer possible for someone like me to break into the big time. I am an author who has come aboard a sinking ship.
But I have stories to tell. They have lived inside me for more than thirty years. And I am scrambling now to get them told before my crappy old body completely betrays me and makes the chance go away. I will get them told… even if no one ever listens.
And there are some advantages to doing it the way I have done it. It is, and always has been, about the people in my life. My wife, my children, my students, my co-workers, my cousins by the dozens, my little town in Iowa… they are the people in my stories. My stories are true to life, even if they have werewolves and fairies and living gingerbread men and nudists in them. I live in a cartoon world of metaphor and surrealism, after all. I would not have had the depth of character-understanding in my stories without my experiences as a teacher. And I really don’t have to worry about the whole marketing thing any more. I am not on that treadmill. I do not have to be aware of what the market is looking for. If my writing ever turns a profit, I won’t live long enough to see it anyway. And that has never been what it is all about.
I can do anything I please with my stories. They belong to me. I do not owe the world anything. What I give you now in this blog and in my books, is given for love, not profit. I can even write a pointless blog post about Sunday blather and illustrate it with Tintin drawings by Herge. And you can’t stop me. And, hopefully… you don’t even want to.
“School’s out for summer School’s out forever School’s been blown to pieces
No more pencils No more books No more teacher’s dirty looks
Well we got no class And we got no principles And we got no innocence We can’t even think of a word that rhymes”
-Alice Cooper
Once again it is that day that every kid prays for… The last day of school.
My daughter doesn’t really get it, though. She doesn’t really understand the sentiment of the poor misguided school girl named Alice Cooper. Kids are supposed to hate school. Their teachers are supposed to be witches and warlocks who live for creating misery in the lives of their students. My daughter should know that already, since her mother and I are both teachers. (I am retired now, actually… and I do miss making kids’ lives total misery.) She is actually going to miss her middle school and all her middle school teachers.
She was up late last night using air-dried clay to make dragon sculptures to give to each of her teachers. Her art teacher was recently telling me about how wonderful she is at art and how wonderful she is as a student during a recent scholastic awards dinner. In fact, most of her teachers only have good things to say about her work in middle school. And teachers are supposed to hate kids and hate teaching, right? They are supposed to only be in teaching for the paycheck, marking time until they retire, living lives full of bitterness and revengeful interactions with children.
O, I am guessing that I am actually the problem here. I never felt the way teachers are supposed to feel about kids. In fact, I… like kids. Oh, no! The secret is out. I miss being a teacher. I miss the kind of devotion you get from the kind of students who stay up late making clay dragons for you as a goodbye gift.
While I was a teacher, we were not allowed to be Facebook friends with students. Society frowns on teachers getting too close to students. But now that I will never teach again, or be in the same room with any of them again, I have been saying yes to students’ friend requests. So, I am now going to share with you pictures of former students that they have shared with me. Of course, I won’t tell you their names. I don’t want to embarrass them by revealing that they don’t hate all of their teachers the way they should.
So, there’s photographic proof that once I actually was a teacher. And I know that it probably also proves I didn’t do a very good job of making their lives miserable and making them hate me the way I should have done. But I miss it terribly. And I would work harder at being bitter and crabby if only I could go back and do it some more.
The Toonerville Post Office and Bert Buchanan’s Toy Store.
Toonerville is not only a wonderful cartoon place created by Fontaine Fox in the 1930’s, but the name of the town that inhabited my HO Train Layout when I lived in South Texas and had the Trolley actually running nearly on time. The train layout has not been restored to working condition for over a decade now. The buildings which I mostly built from kits or bought as plaster or ceramic sculptures and repainted have been sitting on bookshelves in all that time. I still have delusions of rebuilding the train set in the garage, but it is becoming increasingly less and less likely as time goes on and my working parts continue to stiffen up and stop working. So, what will I do with Toonerville?
Wilma Wortle waits on the station platform for her train at the Toonerville Train station. I built this kit in the 1970’s, hence the accumulations of dust bunnies.
Loew’s Theater has been awaiting the start of The African Queen for more than twenty years.
Main Street Toonerville at 2:25 in the afternoon. Or is it three? The courthouse clock is often slow.
Grandma Wortle who controls all the money in the family likes to park her car near the eggplant house when she visit’s Al’s General Store.
But I may yet have found a way to put Toonerville back together through computer-assisted artsy craftsy endeavors.
A two-shot of Bill Freen’s house and Slappy Coogan’s place on the photo set to start production.
Bill Freen’s house lit up with newfangled electricical. (and I do believe that is the way Bill spells it all good and proper.)
Bill Freen’s house cut out in the paint program.
So I can make composite pictures of Toonerville with realistic photo-shopped backgrounds. Now, I know only goofy old artsy fartsy geeks like me get excited about doofy little things like this, but my flabber is completely gasted with the possibilities.
Bill Freen’s house at sunset… (but I don’t get why there’s snow on the roof when the grass is so green?)
Catch a Falling Star 
Holding Patterns
Sometimes you have to fly in big circles waiting for terrible things to pass. If you don’t wait… if you rush in unprepared… then you go down in flames.
The problem is that the pirates from Bank of America finally came through with their offer to settle my debt. (This is a repost from 2017) Sixty percent of $T13,000 in four payments over the next four months. I have an appointment tomorrow to talk with my lawyer about bankruptcy. It is expensive in this country to become poor. And if you are poor, you have no other option. At least, if I can manage three more bankruptcies by the time I’m 70, I will be qualified to run for president.
Life is definitely a lot like Moose Bowling. It is a simple game. In order to win, you only have to knock down all ten pins in one throw. The hard part is that you have to throw a moose to knock the pins down. Did you know that the average weight of an adult moose is 1800 pounds, or 820 kilograms? That’s a lot of moose meat to fling with my arthritic 60-year-old moose-throwing muscles. My flabber is totally gasted by that.
So, as I swiftly rise from prosperity to poverty, the ultimate fate of most old school teachers, it is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. At least I will save money on buying clothes.
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Filed under angry rant, autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Paffooney