The classic line from the visionary poet Theodore Roethke;
**** This is a look back at an essay from 2017****
But the truth is, before you can BE you must first BECOME.
I know what you are probably thinking. “What is this idiot rambling on about now?”
Well, sometimes you simply have to spout a lot of love and hoo-haw and just pretend it means something. That is the core, I think, of what philosophy is all about.
But maybe a list of what I have already become will get the idea knitting itself together. You know, a list of the things I can already just BE.
I have already become college educated. I have a BA in English and an MAT in Education (Master of the Art of Teaching). Those letters my college years bestowed upon me are only an “N” short of being an anagram for BATMAN. So I have almost become BATMAN.
I have also finished becoming a teacher. In fact, I have spent 31 years becoming a teacher. I have gotten so teacherfied over the years that I am actually now becoming a retired teacher. I haven’t learned the art of retired teacher yet. It is still gonna take a bit of practice to start getting it right. But I can get a kid to sit down and shut up with just a look. I can read the mind of a glum-faced student and know we are about to have a bad day. And I always know when to tell a really awful joke so that the students know their only hope of keeping their lunch down and retaining their sanity is to ask me to please get back to today’s lesson. So I can BE that, at least in theory. I am still BECOMING retired.
I am a living, breathing human being. I have been that now for sixty years and eight months. I have practiced it enough that I can BE that without even thinking about it. Well, not now, just most of the time I don’t have to think about it.
But I did make a huge mistake fairly recently in applying for a chance to be a blogger for an AANR-affiliated website. Yes, that’s right, the American Association for Nude Recreation. I signed on to write about being a nudist.
I am asked to write a review of the nearest naturist park, the Bluebonnet Naturist Park in Alvord, Texas. I am hoping to find a day for a day-visit that won’t find a lot of people there. Ummm. How did I get roped into BECOMING a nudist? Is it too late to back out now? Or would that be UNBECOMING?
But most of all, I have labored long and hard at BECOMING a real writer. I have two books already published. Aeroquest and Catch a Falling Star. You can find them both on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. But don’t buy Aeroquest. Those cheap burgle-binkies don’t deserve to make any more money off of me. I have another book coming out soon from Page Publishing, Magical Miss Morgan. It is a book I am really proud of, though these foofy publishers have done nothing to help it and a lot to mess it up for me.
But, I must admit, I have just finished reading Mitch Albom’s masterpiece, The Magic Strings of Frankie Pesto. It is a miraculous, engaging read that made me laugh and made me cry and made me fall in love with the story. And it is so far beyond what I can do that I must write a review on it, maybe tomorrow, and gush praises all over it. I can only dream of BEING a writer like that. It proves to me that I have a lot more BECOMING to work on. Sorry, Ted, I am just not there yet.
Imaginary Friends
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolf now. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
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