I told you I would do it. And then I basically did.
My daughter and I got it up in the air.
The sun, the wind, and the kite all worked together to help me overcome the blues.
We got it up so high that all the kite string was played out.
But then it finally came down.
And still… I was happier.
Filed under battling depression, happiness, Uncategorized
Scherzo in C Minor for Bb Clarinet by Paul Koepke
The three of them walked all the way out to the oxbow pond on the Iowa River together, but Billy was really dragging his feet.
“Why so slow, Billy boy?” Ricky asked.
“Well, um… you know she’s gonna make us get naked out at the skinny-dipping pond, right?”
“Val? You haven’t forgotten about that by now? It’s damned cold, you know.” All three of them wore jackets as the October air turned chilly.
“I haven’t forgotten. We’ll do that eventually. Naked honesty, like in gazebo at Celephais. But not yet today.”
“I… I can’t do the naked thing, Valerie,” Billy complained.
“Yes, you can. You did it with Francois, Giselle, and I before Francoise died.”
“That dream stuff never really happened, you know. People can’t share dreams. Not really. We just remember talking about it with Francois. We just convinced ourselves we all had the same dreams.”
The three of them climbed through the barbed-wire fence around the pasture bordering the oxbow as Billy complained.
“It was real enough, no matter the actual truth of it. I remember it so vividly, it’s real now even if it wasn’t real then.”
They moved down to the flattened area of grass by the banks of the pond. They each selected a spot to sit where they could talk without making actual eye contact.
“Val, we heard about the dance. Billy, Terry, and me, we all decided we’d figure out some way to bring you out of your great sadness.”
“Yeah,” said Billy. “We know how dangerous depression is. And we don’t want you to miss another week of school.”
“Guys, what you’re doing about it here is enough. A place to talk… a place to say what’s true without any interference… That’s what I really need.”
“One thing that’s true is that I don’t want to take my clothes off while talking.”
“Shut up, Billy,” Ricky said. “When the time comes, I’ll strip you myself if I need to.”
Billy looked huffy and about to get mad, a rare thing for the skinny boy.
Valerie quickly interceded. “Nobody will make you do anything you don’t really want to do. Besides, I’ve already seen you naked, so there’s nothing to fret yourself about.”
“No, you haven’t! Celephais is not real. That was just in your dream.”
“Then how do I know your cute little thing was completely hairless back in the seventh grade?”
Billy swallowed audibly. “You’re just guessing.”
“Well, maybe so. But you don’t know for sure.”
It was quiet between the three of them for several long minutes.
“All I really need is someone to actually listen to me,” Valerie finally said. “You can both do that for me, can’t you?”
“Yeah,” they both said.
“In fact, I thought of something else that might help all three of us.” Ricky’s face was totally serious for a change.
“What’s that?” Val asked.
“Marahoochie cigarettes…” Ricky said.
“What?”
“Marijuana. You know, the goof sticks. We three can get high together. It’ll make us get more creative like John Lennon did.”
“No, you can’t!” Billy said.
“Why not?”
“It’s illegal. And your adopted dad is a cop. How will that look when Cliff has to put you in jail?”
“Ah, we don’t have to get caught. We’re smart enough to get away with it.”
“But it’s a gateway drug. We’ll end up on heroine, or maybe dead.”
“It’s not like that. Terry and I tried it. People don’t die from overdoses of marijuana. And it’s easy to control. It’s less addictive than regular cigarettes.”
“It’s my decision, isn’t it?” asked Valerie. “We’re here because of me, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But I don’t want to smoke anything.”
“We don’t have to smoke it. Terry and I can bake it into brownies.”
“Where are you gonna get it?” asked Billy. “You know any drug dealers around here?”
“Uncle Harker does.”
“Harker Dawes? Terry’s Uncle Harker?” Val was astounded.
“Yes.”
“How does Harker Dawes know a drug dealer?”
“Well… you see… Harker runs Kingman’s Grocery Store now, since he lost the hardware store. And he has trouble dealing with the usual suppliers. So, he tried this new guy. And this new guy sold him some new-fangled health foods, you see. And the Mexican carrot greens were really marijuana.”
“Harker bought actual marijuana?” Billy asked.
“He did. But, of course, he didn’t know it was marijuana. He thought they were actually Mexican carrot greens.”
“You are trying to say Harker Dawes is that dumb? Or the food supplier?”
“The supply guy was using code for selling the drug. He thought Harker knew what it really was. But you know Harker. He believes whatever he’s told, even if it is a criminal telling him.”
“But he knows it now?” asked Val.
“Well… no. Terry wanted to tell him, but he doesn’t know any sign for marijuana. And he only speaks sign language.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Um, yeah… that’s how I’m gonna hook you up with some good weed. I already tried to smoke it. But it really worked best when we got Ma Dawes to bake some brownies with it inside. We told her Mexican carrot greens make good spice for brownies. Everybody really loves her brownies now.”
Billy and Valerie both stared in amazement at Ricky’s sneakers. They knew enough about the Dawes family, the family that adopted Terry during the blizzard, to know the story was absolutely true. But they were both too stunned to laugh.
“You’ll bring some brownies here, then?” Valerie asked.
“Of course.”
Billy glared at the both of them. “You don’t expect me to break the law with you like that, do you?”
“Yes. And naked while you do it,” said Valerie.
“I could just report you both to Cliff and get you arrested.”
“But you won’t do that. You are too kind-hearted and too good of a friend,” said Valerie.
“I suppose you are right. But not naked, though.”
“Right. Not naked. For now.”
Filed under battling depression, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
This is a hard video to watch if you have experience with this topic, either your own personal struggles or the struggles of someone you care deeply about. But it speaks to me with electric power that both burns and galvanizes my personal resolve. It is, perhaps, the most beautifully and carefully done thing I have ever found on this particular subject matter.
I have myself battled suicidal thoughts in my lifetime. And even though I have won the battle in the past, I realize that the war is never over, and you fight it every day no matter how long you live.
But coping with suicidal ideation, and knowing how to find the help you need, and eventually being that help for others, is something worth knowing about. And it is critical to get it right when communicating that to others. Because some very good books and movies have touched this landmine of a topic and caused readers, especially teen readers, to actually go through with the act.
So, if I finish writing my book about depression and suicide, and then it causes the very thing I have been fighting, then I have lost the war. That must not happen.
Suicidal thoughts are one of the worst after-effects of surviving a traumatic event. And if you read the actual words in my posts instead of just looking at the pictures, you may remember that I was once a victim of a traumatic event. He not only sexually tortured me, he convinced me that I was going to die if I screamed for help. It led to a long period of traumatic amnesia, hating my naked, helpless self, and self-harm every time I had sexual urges. I was lucky. The Methodist Minister, father of my best friend at the time, taught me the real facts of life and saved me from myself. I was saved again when I reached out in a secret phone call to a friend and got him to admit to me that I was not worthless and beyond redemption… even though I never revealed to him what happened to me, or why he needed to tell me not to kill myself. And it probably even helped that the high school guidance counselor spent an awkward afternoon with me trying to understand how I could be so terrified of something I didn’t even remember and couldn’t tell him about.
My experiences from that traumatic event and tragic time in my life led me to become a school teacher before I tried to become a writer. It led me to want to help others, especially those like me who have been forced to spend time in the existential darkness.
And along the way I did help some kids overcome things that were similar to my own dark woes. But, then too, there were ones I tried to help that didn’t make it.
Ruben joined a gang in San Antonio and died in the crash of a stolen pickup truck.
J.J. got drunk and drove his truck in front of a train at a local railroad crossing.
And I wouldn’t have survived either of those things without help. Sometimes life is more fragile than we realize… or know how to cope with.
But I have also spent hours upon hours sitting with kids in emergency rooms for suicidal ideation on three different occasions. And I have visited kids in two different behavioral hospitals more times than I can keep track of. And the number of times I have actually helped someone dear to me survive a suicidal episode is a number I have no way of accurately counting up. They don’t always tell you what you have done for them after the fact. But, then again, sometimes they do.
And now my work in progress is a book about having the blues so bad… Well, the scene I wrote last night made me weep for twenty minutes. About the same amount of time I cried over this essay. If you read the whole thing, congratulations. You are very brave and a decent human being, and I am sorry for whatever bad feelings I may have caused with my words.
In case you need it, no matter for who…
Filed under autobiography, battling depression, Depression, novel writing
Beethoven – Sonata No.1 in F Minor, Op.2 No.1
Getting to school and back by bus every day was tough. Especially when you are feeling rather down and blue. Now that she was a senior in high school, she no longer had Danny Murphy to sit with on the bus. Mary Phillips and Pidney Breslow had graduated four years ago and were in college now, soon to graduate from Iowa State University. Danny had graduated from high school last year, and had told her during that summer that he and Carla Bates would be getting married in the near future. Well, maybe not as near as anticipated since they still hadn’t picked a date. But no more Danny on the bus to tell her jokes or drive her home from Belle City High in that incredibly old 1950s car he inherited from his Grampy.
She sat alone in the far back of the bus now. Every day. The bus ride to Norwall seemed endless, even though it was only ten miles as the crow flies… a really slow crow named Joe with half of his tail feathers missing. But on this day, Dilsey Murphy, Danny’s younger sister, moved to the back as soon as she got on the bus. She was wearing that old purple Carl Eller jersey, number 81 from the Minnesota Vikings of the 70s.
“Um, Valerie… do you mind if I sit with you on the way home today?”
“I may be kinda grumpy company. But sure.”
Maybe the younger girl could lighten the mood for her. But, then again… probably not.
Dilsey had straight black hair which she sometimes wore with a barrette on the right side of her bangs because her mother’s fashion sense reeked of the 1960s. Otherwise, ignoring the hair and the barrette, Dilsey was dressed like a boy. Vikings’ jersey, denim pants, and boys’ sneakers.
“Um, Val, I have a favor to ask.”
Oh, boy. Here it comes. The real reason.
“Please don’t be mad at me, but…”
“It’s all right. I promise not to bite… at least, not very hard.”
“Yeah, um… you know Mrs. Patricia Zeffer?”
“Ray’s mom. Of course, I know her.”
“Well, I normally babysit for her on Saturdays when she needs to go out. But this week I can’t…”
“Mrs. Zeffer has a kid that needs babysitting services? She has a kid that young?”
“Well, yes… it’s her grandson, actually.”
“Oh, of course. But why is little Troy living with her now?”
“Uh, well… You know that family has a bit of trouble since…”
“Since Ray disappeared six years ago.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be asking, but… I have a date on Saturday.”
“You do? But you’re only…”
“Almost sixteen, and a sophomore in high school.”
“Sure. I wasn’t trying to insult you or anything, but your mother…”
“Trusts me more than she ever did Danny.”
“Of course, she does.”
“Aren’t you going to ask who the date is with?”
She didn’t really, exactly… well, care. But…
“So, who?”
“Tim.”
“No! You have gotta be kidding me! Tim the Terror? Dim Tim? Rim-tin-Tim? The stinkilicious leader of the Norwall Pirates?”
Dilsey giggled awkwardly. “I’ll have to remember those names. They may prove very useful.”
“Why would an otherwise, very pretty girl waste her time with Tiny Terrible Tim? He’s my cousin, and one of the grossest human beans in all of Iowa. In fact… all of the Midwest.”
“You know he is a good person at heart. He’s only an icky boy on the outside. Inside he’s…”
“Only icky ninety-nine percent of the time. I do know my own cousin.”
Dilsey laughed a little more easily this time. Of course, Val wasn’t entirely sure she was joking. The brat could really get on your nerves sometimes.
“But… you don’t really think that…”
“That you shouldn’t be dating him? The girl who once told him that he was the worst, most two-faced person she ever met?”
Dilsey’s face was suddenly crestfallen. She looked like her whole positive little self was being crushed and was about to crumble into a weepy pile.
“You think it’s a mistake if I think I might be falling in love with him?”
“A boy who is a year younger than you are? One who is way less mature than you are? Way meaner too?”
Tears were forming in Dilsey’s dark eyes. Valerie had gone too far. Who was the meaner cousin now?
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of that. I have been feeling outa sorts and kinda depressed for a while now. I didn’t mean to take it out on you or Tim either. Forgive me?”
“You’ll take the babysitting job for me?”
“Of course. Little Troy Zeffer? He’s such a little cutie.”
“Do you really think it’s something a normal human being would do to like Tim and go see a movie with him? He wants to watch Mrs. Doubtfire with me.”
“With Robin Williams in it?”
“Yeah. The Murphy family wants to see it together too, so, if I go with Tim, I’ll be watching it twice, probably in the same weekend.”
Val chuckled softly. “That sounds good. You make sure you tell Tim I am taking this sitting job for you to be able to go with him, so he owes me. And if he tries to sneak-kiss you, hit him in the nose really hard.”
Dilsey laughed. Val knew she intimidated the younger girl. Dilsey had never been a cheerleader. Never been the leader of the Norwall Pirates. And never lost a boyfriend before. And Val envied her those things.
“Valerie? Do you need to be alone in this back seat every day on the bus ride home?”
“Are you offering to sit with me regularly?”
“Yes. Especially now that Tim is on the basketball team and has practice every afternoon.”
That was right. Now that Valerie had given up cheerleading, there was no longer any reason to stay in Belle City after school, and no reason to ride the late bus.
“I had thought I wanted to sit alone this year, without Danny here to entertain me. But I think sitting with his sister will be just about the perfect thing to take the place of that.”
Filed under battling depression, humor, kids, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
This holiday season has not been all blues and depression as I have probably been sounding like in this blog this week.
It is true that the still-progressing pandemic has been rather hard and grueling on me and mine. Since it began I have lost both parents, though neither caught the disease itself, and the impacts on funerals and family support of each other has been difficult. I also lost a cousin, two friends from high school, and possibly an uncle on the Beyer side that we haven’t heard from since before it all started (his surviving children and their families don’t have our contact information, and we don’t have theirs.)
But it never pays to only put the dark things on the scale, and ignore the side where happiness goes.
I have had a lot of good gingerbread to eat, and , ooh, boy! Pumpkin pie!
I got to see Spiderman, No Way Home with my kids in the theater. And I got to see the whole Hawkeye series on Disney +.
Both of those stories were epic and made my comic-book-loving heart warm and happy.
I have become a third-part owner of the family farm in Iowa, the farm where my Grandma and Grandpa Aldrich lived when I was a child and spent a considerable part of every Thanksgiving week and every Christmas week there I and my two sisters successfully bought our brother’s share, and the farm will continue to be a part of our family into the future. The older of my two sisters is now living on the place and managing the farm, though a renter actually grows things on the farm.
My mother’s final Christmas gift turned out to be an inheritance large enough to pay off property taxes and finish off my Chapter 13 bankruptcy. I was also able to replace my failing computer and old cell phone.
So, of the three Christmas ghosts, the Ghost of Christmas Future might be the most welcoming ghost of them all.
Filed under autobiography, battling depression, family, farm boy, gingerbread, humor, photo paffoonies
One of the side “benefits” of having diabetes is that it often comes with an extra helping of diabetic depression. I had the blues really bad this week. I am not the only member of my family suffering.
So, what do you do about it?
Or, rather, what does a goofy idiot like me do about it?
Especially on a windy day when the air is saturated with pollen and other lovely things that I am absolutely, toxically allergic to?
Well, for one thing, I used the word toxically in this post because it is a funny-sounding adverb that I love to use even though the spell-checker hates it, no matter how I spell or misspell it.
And I bought a kite.
Yes, it is a cheap Walmart kite that has a picture of Superman on it that looks more like Superboy after taking too much kryptonite-based cough syrup for his own super allergies.
But I used to buy or make paper diamond kites just like this one when I was a boy in Iowa to battle the blues in windy spring weather. One time I got one so high in the sky at my uncle’s east pasture that it was nothing more than a speck in the sky using two spools of string and one borrowed ball of yarn from my mother’s knitting basket. It is a way of battling blue meanies.
And I bought more chocolate-covered peanuts. The chocolate brings you up, and the peanut protein keeps you from crashing your blood sugar. I have weathered more than one Blue Meanie attack with m&m’s peanuts.
And I used the 1957 Pink and White Mercury of Imagination to bring my novel, The Baby Werewolf, home. I wrote the last chapter Monday night in the grip of dark depression, and writing something, and writing it well, makes me a little bit happier.
And I have collected a lot of naked pictures of nudists off Twitter. Who knew that you could find and communicate with such a large number of naked-in-the-sunshine nuts on social media? It is nice to find other nude-minded naturists in a place that I thought only had naked porn until I started blogging on naturist social media. Being naked in mind and body makes me happier than I ever thought it would.
And besides being bare, I also like butterflies and books and baseball and birds, (the Cardinals have started baseball season remember) and the end of winter. “I just remember of few of my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad!” Oh, and I like musical movies like The Sound of Music too.
The monsters of deep, dark depression are being defeated as we speak.
For the last five and a half years I have been averaging more than 500 words every day. A rough conservative estimate of that means 17,112,000 words. If words were cocaine, I’d be dead five times over by now.
But writing is not the same as cocaine. The addiction to it has very different effects. I divide my daily writing into at least two parts. The daily blog is itself, more often than not, 500-plus words. So, by itself it can satisfy my daily word-count. And I devote at least 500 words every day to my novel work in progress. So, that means I have produced well over 17 million words in reality. Probably closer to 34 million than to 17. That, of course, is far less than Stephen King wrote in the same period of time, but it is also far more than the average person writes.
And one thing that such an overdose of verbiage does to a writer, is to make him or her a better writer.
I have produced nine novels, between 35,000 and 50,000 words each, in the time since I retired from teaching and began writing and self-publishing in earnest. I have gotten only five-star reviews on the novels that have been read and reviewed. Granted, nobody who read and hated my books hated them passionately enough to leave a scathing review, so the 5-star average is just due to laziness on the part of the reading public. But it is marginally evidence that my storytelling is good.
Another effect I have experienced from my writing addiction is that it has made me increasingly metaphorically naked. My illustrations for this post reveal a little bit of that. It is not only that I like to write in the nude when I can, but that I have used my stories to grapple with everything that was once a deep, dark secret buried in the depths of me. Being sexually assaulted as a child was something that for many years I could never admit even to myself. Struggles with loneliness, depression, and self-hatred are also something I had kept buried until I needed them to tell stories with.
I finally worked up the courage to send a gift copy of Snow Babies to the girl I grew up with whose name I used for the main character, Valerie Clarke. Valerie loved the book and became an advocate for me with both the Belmond and Rowan libraries. I even admitted that the part about Valerie being the most beautiful girl ever born in Norwall, Iowa came from something the boys in our 5th and 6th grade classes at school all said about her. She told me she never knew we had said that back then. Ah, but that was probably an untruth too.
As addictions go, my addiction to fiction is probably a lot better thing to have than addictions to gambling, cocaine, wife-beating, or gummy bears. But it hasn’t made me any richer or healthier either. It has made me older, and possibly a little bit wiser.
It is cloudy outside. The sky is a cool, damp gray. No rain. No snow. Just dreary and gray. The world is gray today.
We have now been in a lockdown and wearing masks for an entire year. I have lost a lot of ground. Color-blindness runs in my family on my mother’s side. Great Grandma Hinckley was completely color-blind by the time she was in her 70’s.
I myself have known I had the color-blindness problem since I was in high school and the school nurse gave me a vision test that proved it.
In the dotted circle, I could see the blue-green number 29, but I could also see the red number 5. I was told that I had a slight color-blindness on the red/green scale. Believe me, I had no idea what that meant. Still don’t. I just know I have never seen colors the way other people with normal vision do.
But now, after twelve months of lockdown, I can definitely detect the fact that I have lost some more of my color vision.
Great Grandma saw the world in black and white and gray since she was 70. That, for me, is now less than six years away.
As a cartoonist I use a lot of pen and ink. I also love black-and-white movies. Being partially colorblind, you might think that I would be okay living in a film-noire world. But I am not. It is simply not enough. I have always craved color. I particularly love to create with bright primaries, red, yellow, and blue.
I will sorely miss color when it is gone.
And I have always loved cardinals. Not only because they are bright red songbirds, like the one singing outside in our yard on this gray and slightly blustery day. But because they never fly away when the winter comes. They stay even in the snow and cold. Trouble doesn’t drive them away. I shall not give up when I lose all the colors.
I remember the world being gray when I was a boy back in the 1960’s too. TV was only black-and-white… and gray at our house. I watched the funeral parade for JFK on the black-and-white… and gray TV. And around that time the three astronauts Grissom, Chaffee, and White had a similar funeral parade… also black-and-white-and-mostly-gray.
The Viet Nam conflict on the TV news with Walter Cronkite. The riots at the Democratic Convention in 1968 with the Chicago Seven going on trial. The world was very, very gray.
But then, in the Summer of ’69, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. A giant leap for mankind! And I saw that also in black-and-white-and-mostly-gray.
There was a hope of color in my life after that. And we got a color TV in the later 70s after that. And even with my partially color-blind eyes, I saw color everywhere.
And now again is a good time to anticipate color coming back into my life. I am on the waiting list for vaccination. My eldest son has a steady girlfriend living with him now. And we have a better President who actually seems to care if we live or die. Good things are over the next hill.
But still… the world is, for now… gray today.
Filed under autobiography, battling depression, coloring, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, insight, Paffooney, poetry, self pity
I write some science fiction, but I am a lot more about bringing the past to life in this day and age.
And I confess, I used to long to see Annette Funicello naked, at about the age of eleven or twelve. And she is closer to my mother’s age than she is to mine. But when I lusted after her in secret, she was always falling in love with Frankie Avalon and Kurt Russel in the movies.
The music of my life back then, in the 1960’s, was the Monkees singing, “I’m a Believer” and “Last Train to Clarksville.”
My heroes were astronauts like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins.
And yet, I wanted to grow up to be just like Red Skelton, Danny Kaye, or Jerry Lewis.
Too often I am tempted to look back on a 60’s childhood and see a golden age, as if it were the best time of my life. But wait. The pain and fear and darkness of that time was certainly no better than now. I was sexually assaulted in 1966. JFK was assassinated in 1963. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were soon to follow. Grissom, White, and Chaffee burned up in an Apollo training accident. My Grandpa Beyer died young of heart failure in the 60’s. There was enough trauma in my life to make me want to kill myself in the early 70’s.
I believe I may have learned how to tame a fox for myself. It takes patience and understanding. Thank God for the people who helped me tame my monsters and keep myself alive. The Methodist Minister who taught me the facts of life on a chalkboard and assured me that I was not evil for what had happened to me. And the boy who was my friend in P.E. class where we were both bullied, because he was willing to listen on that dark day when I was planning to kill myself and all I could say was confusing nonsense, but he listened and was willing to be my friend anyway.
The point is, I learned hard lessons in my early life that gave me the insight into how to solve problems and overcome the darkness now when our government is flirting with fascism. People I used to know and trusted now want to punish me for being a liberal and wanting to help the poor and minorities rather than go to war against them. There never seems to be enough money. Climate change threatens our very existence. And people seem to care only about themselves and generally hate others.
There are reasons to believe we can solve our current set of horrific difficulties. There are good people doing good things, even if no one seems to notice. We have done similar difficult things before. We survived a Cold War, avoided nuclear war so far. We are probably on the other side of the Covid pandemic now And life can be a good thing again if we only let it.
Catch a Falling Star 
Special Snowflakes
When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment. In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are. They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go. Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.
Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake? Believe me, it is difficult. Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands. The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper. Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty. That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created. But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.
You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen? That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals. Life changes each one in a different way.
And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather. Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are. I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch. I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football. They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.
As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things. I lost a job once to one of those. And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December. Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again. I guess I am just a “special snowflake”. But the point is, those things are real. People really are destroyed by them sometimes. And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.
But people are like snowflakes. They are all complex. They are all beautiful in some way. They are all different. No two are exactly the same.
And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them. Every snowflake has worth. Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring. If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes. And snowflakes can be fascinating. Even goofy ones like me.
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Filed under 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion, artwork, battling depression, commentary, compassion, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, self portrait, Snow Babies, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as compassion, humor, snowflakes