I am only going to be 65 years old for four more months. Then I will be 66… even if I croak off this mortal coil before my birthday. It is heck getting older. My eyes and memory and joints all work far less well then they did a decade ago, even a year ago, heck, even last week. They don’t tell you this when you’re young, but you don’t have to be dead to start decomposing. And that doesn’t mean un-writing this essay, though maybe that would be a good idea based on that last sentence.
It is inevitable that the longer we live, the more our aging bodies are going to gradually break down, work properly with more difficulty, and cause us pain and loss.
And as we age, our minds drift back to childhood and days long gone. We obsess about little things. Especially the little things we have lost.
The sense of adventure is mostly gone from our daily lives. Things have settled into a permanence, and the limits of fame, fortune, and future expectations have all been irreversibly set. All we can do to reclaim any of that is to reflect, to remember, and to tell stories about it.
I had a recent story idea that I have begun calling by the title The Haunted Toy Store. It is about a small-town store filled with antique toys that nobody ever buys. And the store owner is very creepy and quiet and does practically no business. People wonder how he makes a living. But there are definitely ghosts in the toy store. And in the long run, it is discovered that the true customers are the ghosts. And the toys are actually the people that are lured in, especially the children, that the ghosts play with. It is not a horror story. It is a comedy adventure. But, like any good story, there is conflict and a number of scary moments.
Why would I even consider telling a story like this? Well, because I am old. There are certain truths, certain experiences, and a lot of goofy observations that I still need to tell about my life, and pretend that somehow it all adds up to wisdom. I am growing old, walking around naked more than ever, forgetting where I put my glasses while I am still wearing them, grumbling to myself like a cereal killer (I did not misspell that, I mean killing boxes of high-fiber cereal,) and arguing with the dog about whether or not dogs can talk, or if I can trust her to write another blog post or not. I will probably be losing my mind soon. I keep forgetting which box I put it in last night when I wake up in the morning and need it again. So, I better slow down and try to do it all the right way.
Catch a Falling Star 
How It Should Be… According to Mickey
My bicycle was red. It was red and looked just like the ones that Captain Kangaroo had in his commercials that we watched on a black-and-white TV every day before we walked or rode our bicycle to school, across town a whole long seven blocks away. After school I could ride it out a whole mile and a half to Jack’s farm with Bobby and Richard and Mark the preacher’s kid to go skinny dipping in the cold creek in Jack’s South pasture. Jack was younger than any of us except Bobby. And it was a golden age.
Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books cost twelve cents to own, but they were forbidden. And as much as we sneaked them and passed them around until they fell apart, usually in Bobby’s hands, we never knew that Dr. Wertham had gone to Congress to make our parents believe that comic books would make us gay and violent. He was a psychiatrist who wrote a book, so even if you didn’t believe him, you had to worry about such things.
I believed in Santa Claus until 1967. And after I found out, I only despaired a tiny little bit, because I began to understand you have to grow up. And adults can lie to you, even if they don’t do it to be mean. And the world is a hard place. And the golden age ended in November of 1963 when JFK was assassinated.
In June of 1968 I rode my bicycle out to the Bingham Park woods, Once there, I took off all my clothes and put them in the bicycle basket, and then I rode up and down the walking paths through the trees with nothing between me and God but my skin. I had a serious think about how life should be. All the while I was terrified that someone might see me. I was naked and vulnerable. A mere two years before that I had been sexually assaulted and was terrified of older boys, especially when I was naked and vulnerable. But I was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and Bob Gibson. They were repeated World Series winners. And they beat the Yankees in the series in 1964. And more important than that, cardinals were the little red songbirds who never flew away when the winter came. You don’t give up in the face of hardship. You face the trouble. No matter how deep the snow may pile up.
And in 1969, the first man to walk on the moon showed that a Star Trek world was in reach of mankind. Star Trek was on every afternoon after school. I watched a lot of those episodes at Verner’s house on his family’s black-and-white TV. The Klingons were always bested or beaten because the crew of the Enterprise outsmarted them. You can solve the problems of the universe with science. I know this because of all the times Mr. Spock proved it to me not just by telling me so, but by showing me how you do it. And what you can achieve is greatly enhanced if you work together like Spock and Kirk and Bones… and sometimes Scotty always did.
So, what is the way it should be? What did Mickey decide while naked in the forest like a Dakota Sioux shaman on a spirit-quest?
JFK’s 104th birthday was on May 29th. Dr. Wertham has been dead for 40 years. Bob Gibson was 85 when he passed away in October of last year. Captain Kirk turned 90 in March of this year.
The Golden age is long gone. There is no single set of rules that can clearly establish how it should be now. But I like those ideas of how it should be that I established for myself while naked on a Schwinn Spitfire in a forest long ago.
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