It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.
Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.
The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.
It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.
I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.
Besides these two novels I am already working on, I have ideas for several more that have been building in my mind and my notes for as much as 40 years……………………………..
………………………….
………………………….
And I have forgotten to add in things I have in the works that are not exclusively Home-Town novels, including whatever I can make out of the mess that is Aeroquest, and the graphic novel fairy tale, Hidden Kingdom.
So, there’s my shameless self-promotion for my growing body of fiction that no one ever reads. And, as you can plainly see, no explanation of the productive spate I have been going through is offered. I am in too much of a daze right now to figure that out.
Canto Eight – Strange Sounds from the Martin House
The Martin house on Elizabeth Avenue was a very square and
Republican sort of Victorian-style house.
It was Methodist plain and practical.
Yet, there was a very unfortunate aura of trouble hanging over it
now. It had been super respectable in
the old days as the Campbell house, but now it seemed more like the brooding
sort of place where murderers might live.
Val and Danny watched it from the safety of the hollyhock stand in the
neighbors’ yard.
“Do ya think anybody is in there?” Valerie whispered.
“Yeah. The car is out
back by the shed, and it’s too early in the day for the bar to be doing much
business. The old Vicar ain’t there. But Billy’s dad and aunt will both be there.” The Vicar was what everybody at the bar
called Victor Martin. A vicar was a
British preacher or something, and everybody told their troubles to Victor
Martin at the bar… that explained the name as far as Valerie knew. And the names sounded almost the same. Iowans weren’t really that clever about
nicknames.
“And Billy?”
“Yeah, he would be there.
I don’t know where in the house, though.
I’m not ready to go knock on the windows anywhere.”
“Knock on the windows?
Really?”
“We aren’t going to the front door and knocking, are
we? That’s what the old witch wants.”
“Do you think you could lift me up high enough to look in
the side windows on the West side?”
“Yeah, maybe. But
that would be like spying or something.”
“Well, isn’t that the kind of thing Pirates do?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
They walked over to the window on the West side of the
house. Both of them were hunched over
when they walked and extremely careful about being quiet, as if walking in that
silly manner somehow made them harder to see or hear as they trampled the lawn
in broad daylight.
“Okay,” said Danny, “You sit on my shoulders and I’ll lift
you up so you can see.” Danny got down
on all fours and Valerie put one leg on each side of his head. He wobbled like a scarecrow in the wind as he
strained to lift her up. His hands
gripped her thighs tightly, but if he had wobbled too far in one direction,
then he would’ve merely succeeded in dropping her to the ground head-first.
“Careful, there, Buckaroo.
You’re gonna drop me.”
“I got you, Val. I
will never let you fall.”
After almost falling at least two more times, Val finally got a look into the first-story sitting room. Richard Martin, in all his raggedy glory, was lying on the couch watching TV. He had on a stained and dirty-looking T-shirt, boxer shorts, and he had an open can of beer balanced on his ample stomach. He was a blonde man with a very ugly face, and he looked rather drowsy as he watched what seemed to be the Phil Donahue Show.
Suddenly there was a loud banging sound coming from
somewhere below, possibly in the basement.
“Damn that stupid brat!” Richard cried out suddenly. “He’s beating up the damn house again! Kelly!
Stop that kid from breaking stuff!”
“He’s your bratty kid. You stop him, stoopid!”
“I locked him up in the basement again to keep him outta our
hair! But maybe you gotta go down there
with your old broom and swat him around a little.”
“Well, if he’s in the basement, he can’t hurt much. Everything in the basement belongs to either
Billy or Vic.”
“You have a point. We
don’t care that much about Victor’s stuff, do we?”
“I don’t. But he’s
your son. You can do the explaining
later.”
Then they all heard a power saw grinding through wood, both the residents who were supposed to be there and the Pirates who were spying.
“Good gawd, Richard.
That little creep might be gonna cut us all up and eat us some night.”
“I know he ain’t supposed to use that saw, but it belongs to
Vic. So, we’ll let him get it away from the brat.”
The sounds of a hammer and nails came next. Valerie looked down near Danny’s feet and
noticed the grimy cellar window was open a crack.
“What’s going on?” asked Danny in a hoarse whisper.
“Billy is locked in the basement, and he is building
something to take revenge on his family.”
Valerie almost didn’t believe it herself. Billy was the kind of kid who would curl up
in a ball and mew like a kitten if you just looked at him too long at a
time. Valerie never took him for an ax
murderer before. But you never knew
about those quiet and meek ones. You
never knew what they were really thinking.
“I see you didn’t take my advice.”
Valerie fell on her head and briefly saw stars. It was possible Danny had dropped her.
“Oh, no! You made me
kill the most beautiful little girl ever born in Norwall!” Danny cried.
“Pick her up and bring her with you. Follow me.”
As Valerie shook her head to shake the cobwebs and sand out
of her ears, Danny fumbled around picking her up from the ground and soon had
her on her feet.
“Quickly now, before those two horrible harpies come out to
see about all the ruckus in their yard.
You are both trespassing.”
To Valerie’s utter horror, Danny was following the old witch
Mazie Haire, and dragging her, wobbly-legged, toward the witch’s own
Gingerbread House.
Old Missus Rubelmacher was most definitely a witch in Valerie’s estimation. Miss Rubelmacher had been teaching Science forever at Belle City. She taught it in both the Elementary and the Junior High. Valerie had the extreme bad luck to have her for the one and only fifth-grade class she taught. And single old maid teachers who taught Science were definitely witches when they made you learn the scientific names of ten butterflies and recite them by memory. Ten Lepidoptera! Who in their right minds was ever going to need to know that a Danaus Plexippus was a Monarch Butterfly? She ought to get an F on purpose just to let the old witch know how stupid that was. Homework on a holiday weekend on top of it all.
But Valerie always made A’s in Science. That wasn’t about to change.
Still, after hating the old witch all the way home on Milo’s bus, she rode on into town with Danny Murphy. Milo, the crotchety old bus driver, never seemed to mind carrying her on into town when he stopped at the end of her family’s lane… as long as she told him she was going with Danny. Milo probably thought she was Danny’s girlfriend, the way he always smirked when she told him about going into town. But that was no never-mind… She had no interest in Danny as a boy. Only as a friend. Only as the one person in the world that she could really tell secrets to because she had seen him naked and could embarrass him royally if he ever told anyone else.
“Why are you coming into town today, Val?” Danny asked. They were sharing a seat in the middle of the
bus, as they often did. Val waited until
they were both off the bus to answer.
They walked past the Post Office together.
“Well, I’m a Norwall Pirate, now. I have responsibilities. We are going to try to get Billy Martin into
the gang, right?”
“Yeah. Billy needs
some friends. He has a sorta tough
life.”
Valerie nodded.
Church ladies were always tutting their tongues about the horrible,
sinful Martin family. Victor Martin, the
head of the family, owned the bar that was once the Uptown Café in the middle
of Norwall’s Main Street. Sinful things happened there. There was drinking beer, playing pool, a lot
of bad language, drinking beer, women who couldn’t be trusted around other
peoples’ husbands, and did drinking beer come up already? In the middle of it all was a long-haired,
mostly unwashed boy who was made of spindly sticks and always looked like a
lost puppy that someone had recently kicked.
Billy was the son of Richard Martin, the extra-lazy brother of
Victor. The sister of the two Martin
brothers, Kelly Martin, was the closest thing that Billy had to a mother in the
house, though Valerie was pretty sure that she was not the boy’s real mother.
“We need to do some research about Billy,” Val said like an
expert. “We need to find out more about
him. He doesn’t talk to you much, does
he?”
“I don’t think he talks much to anybody.”
“How do we ask him to be a Pirate, then?” Valerie asked.
“You go right up to him, introduce yourself politely, and
just ask,” said a grating voice from behind Valerie. The girl immediately turned to catch the
amused glint in the glittering eyes of the dreaded Mazie Haire.
“You were listening to our conversation?” Valerie asked as a
sort of justified accusation.
“Of course I was,” said the gray-haired, gimlet-eyed
hag. Truth be told, Valerie was deathly
afraid of the old Haire woman. She was
as scary as Dracula’s coffin on Halloween.
Of course, everyone had her pegged as a real witch… a thing that Mazie Haire took no trouble to deny.
“What business is it of yours?”
The old woman bored holes in both kids’ souls with her
eyes. She was a scary and formidable
woman.
“I am an old woman who doesn’t tell lies. I have a lot of knowing. I see things, and I don’t forget. This boy you are talking about does indeed
need your help. But it’s not for the
reasons you think. You need to forget
about these stupid little kids’ games you and these other little Pirates keep
playing. You need to actually see what
you are looking at.”
Valerie was completely at a loss for what to say. She just nodded at the old crone stupidly,
like she agreed to whatever was being asked of her.
Apparently that satisfied old witch Mazie Haire. She nodded.
Smiled a tight-lipped and thoroughly scary smile, and walked away.
“What was that about?” Valerie asked Danny.
“She’s mysterious,” Danny said. “It is hard to know what she is really up
to. They say she spends most of her
waking hours in the attic room of that gingerbread house of hers and looks out
the window at us all through her little telescope. She watches people. She creeps me out.”
“Do you suppose she’s right about just going up to Billy and introducing ourselves… and say what we want?”
“Well… she has a good point about the direct approach… but
she’s a witch, you know. Do you really
want to do what a witch wants?
Especially if she’s a wicked witch.
Do you want to do what a wicked witch wants?”
Valerie grinned at her awkward, silly-sounding friend. “What a
witch wants? You sound silly when
you say that.”
I am aware that nobody who looks at my blog ever clicks on my videos. This one, however, would be very useful if you are really going to read and engage with this essay. This self-reflection came into being as a response to watching this video. The video talks about how most people can’t stand to actually sit alone in a room with only themselves. And it has an impact. I have claimed in the past to being a devotee of the Theodore Roethke maxim, “Being, not doing, is my first love.” But how does one go about becoming truly self-aware? How does one enumerate the concept of “being”? I believe I can do it, but it requires a bit of self-examination. How do I do it?
Let me count the ways…
I put myself down on paper, through drawing or writing in English and look at the way it portrays me.
I find myself in both the written characters I create and the cartoon characters I draw. In Hidden Kingdom, my graphic novel, the Mouse and young Prinz Flute are both me. I can see myself both as the reluctant romantic hero and the snarky child-thing with a dangerous little bit of wisdom.
I learn to know more about my secret heart and what I truly think about the world I live in and react to by writing about what I think and the things that happen to me, both for good and ill. This blog is all about learning about myself, just as your blog is a mirror of who you really are. Consequently, I have no secrets left.
I not only reveal myself in this blog, but I also attempt to sing about myself in much the same way that Walt Whitman did in his poetry.
I live most of my life in my own imagination. It is a silly Willy Wonka world of images, songs, music, and dreams. It can all blow away in a moment when the sun comes out. It can also keep me in a light-obscuring cloud wrapped and safe, well away from the things I fear and the things that worry me. I came to realize I was repressing the memory of being sexually assaulted when I was ten through a dream when I was nineteen, re-living the event in a dream from which I awoke with a blinding flash of realization. I came to grips with the horror that mangled my childhood and young adulthood first by facing the fact that the nightmare had been real, and then by finding ways to overcome it. I became a teacher of young people in large part as a way to protect them and prevent such a thing from ever happening again to someone else.
I use my fictional stories about the girl Valerie Clarke to examine my relationships with my own daughter and a couple of old girlfriends from my youth.
I often worry that I don’t see real people as being real people. I tend to think of them from the first meeting onward as potential book characters, walking collections of details and quirks, conflicts and motivations. But I recognize too that that way of seeing with the author’s eye is not incorrect. People really are those things. There are rules and generalizations that everyone falls under at some point. It is not so much that I see real people as book characters as it is that I realize that book characters are as real as any other purportedly “real” people.
I am myself both the subject of my cartooning and fictionarooning, and the cartoon character of myself as well.
Mickey is not a real person. He is a cartoonist persona, a mask, a fake identity, and the lie I tell myself about who I actually am.
In this essay, I have attempted to explain to you who I think I am spending time with when I am alone in a room with myself. He is not such a terrible person to spend time with, this Mickey. Or else he really is truly awful, and I am lying about me and who I think I am when I am alone with me and have no other options. But probably not. I have been getting to know me for about 562 years, only exaggerating by 500, and I am not finished yet.
“My name is Michael Beyer, and I am an amateur cartoonist.”
“Hi, Michael!” says the entire group of CA group-therapy participants.
(CA stands for Cartoonists Anonymous.)
Doofy Fuddbugg
“I have to admit, I am guilty of giving in to the urge to draw cartoons. I know how it can fill lives with slapstick pain and derisive laughter, and I give in to the urge anyway.”
“So, what did you draw that you have to be ashamed of now?” asked one mad-eyed cartoonist with a pencil lodged behind each of his large ears.
“I made a very unfortunate video to post on YouTube that was supposed to be How-to-draw Cartooning. But everything went wrong. You couldn’t see my drawings in the video. It was not adequately lit. I look like a doofus (which probably can’t be cured) in the video. And instead of thinking twice or editing it, I posted it anyway.”
“Wow!” said a rather ugly cartoonist lady, “that is really bad. You have a seriously bad case of cartoonity.”
“Cartoonity?” I responded stupidly.
“The condition of needing love for your cartoons so bad that you will risk anything to make people look at them and like them,” said the wise group therapist (who looked an awful lot like Chuck Jones, though I am fairly sure Chuck Jones is now dead).
“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of the problem,” I said. “I have been posting pages from my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and I really haven’t seen more than one comment about it. Do people actually read cartoons and comics nowadays? Or is it just me that gets ignored?”
“You have to focus on how much you love drawing and doing it just for that reason, and nothing beyond that,” said the wise therapist. “Cartooning should be done for its own sake, and nothing more than that. Craving attention and approval for it can get seriously infected and become a bad case of cartoonititis. How do you think I dealt with it when I was still alive?”
At that point, my eyes popped out of my head in disbelief and my lower jaw fell all the way to the floor. Could he really be…?
And so I must end today’s blog post since it is hard to keep typing when your eyeballs are rolling around on the floor.
My daughter the Princess often disses my cover designs for my novels. The one I created for my half-written manuscript, displayed above, is really too yellow by about 500 degrees. I wanted to write a yellow book about sea stories and island magic set in Iowa, a State about as far removed from an ocean in any direction as a State can be (Well, maybe tied with Kansas and Nebraska). But yellow is not the right color. In fact, the green accent color makes me a bit nauseous next to the yellow. So, I vowed to my critic I would try again and do better.
Take a look at these alternative designs;
Really? What a maroon!
Maybe something more woody?
Will this one attract woodpeckers, do you think? Or is that too racy an idea for a novel about a young girl growing up. Woody Woodpecker is a sex symbol, isn’t he? No? Whereever did I get a fool notion like that?
So, how about something more purple?Or is a combo of purple and wood better?
I could really use your input. If you wanted to vote, you could choose a cover name from this list to tell me about it in the comments;
Banana
Maroon
Woody
Purple
Purple and Wood
Something better, Stupid!
I promise not to get mad about any commentors who choose the last one. But I don’t promise to make any new ones either. It is, however, quite easy to make changes using computer programs. I don’t have to redraw anything. Although I could be slightly worried that the Tiki totem could be viewed as racist, even though his race is “little men made out of wood.”
Mom had breakfast ready and on the table. Eggs and bacon on stoneware plates, one for
Val and one for Daddy Kyle. She was a
great cook and loved to stuff her small family with what she made. That was probably the reason she was
watching over a second pan-full of sizzling bacon.
“Your father isn’t ready yet?” asked Mom, left eyebrow
raised.
“Oh, he had to change his pants again for some reason.”
“That man can find more excuses for dragging his feet than…”
“Mom? Is something
the matter with Daddy?”
“What do you mean?”
“Last night I thought he was crying in the machine shed.”
“Well, you know your Daddy Kyle. He loves his machinery, and that big old
combine is broken down again.”
“It shouldn’t be.
It’s only two years old.”
Mom looked at her with unreadable eyes. Was she mad?
Sad? What?
“He says he can fix it.
He says the problem is just mechanical and you know how handy he is with
tools.”
“Sure.” He did love that combine. Maybe that was what made him sad. He
loved Valerie and he was always sad when she was sick too.
Valerie gobbled eggs and bacon. It was good, but even better eaten fast so
you could enjoy those bacon burps for the next half hour.
“You eat like you’re starving. I wish I could eat like that, Val, and stay
as thin as you do.”
“Mom, I’m only eleven.
I’m not supposed to be a fatty at my age.”
“I thought you were ten, dear. Where does the time go?”
Valerie was still thinking about yesterday, the holiday Monday…
and why did so many people have to feel sad?
“Do you know what makes Ray Zeffer so sad, Mom?”
“Ray Zeffer? What
brings that up?”
“He and Danny Murphy walked me all the way home last night
from town. He’s such a gentleman. But he always seems sad.”
“Well, I would guess that losing your father the way he did,
such a short time ago… well, it might have something to do with it. I know his mother, Donna Zeffer, is sad a lot
too.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“And there was a brother that died… older brother… Bobby, I think. His family has been through a lot.”
Valerie buttered a piece of toast and then sipped her milk
from the mug that Grandpa Larry had given her years ago. The mug had a big red heart on the side of
it.
“I didn’t know about the brother. Younger or older?”
“Definitely older. More than ten years ago.”
“What was more than ten years ago?” asked Daddy Kyle as he
came in to breakfast.
“Valerie was wondering about Ray Zeffer because he and the
Murphy boy walked her home from town last night. How long ago did Bobby Zeffer die, Kyle?”
“Oh, at least sixteen years ago. But what’s this about boys walking Valerie
home last night?”
Uh-oh. Dad radar had
picked up a boy-alert… a potential boyfriend/trouble/rock salt alert.
“Danny and Ray were just being gentlemen,” said
Valerie. “They wanted to make sure I got
home safe.”
“And they didn’t have anything but your safety on their
little minds?” Kyle asked with a skeptical smirk.
“I suppose now you want to shoot Ray?” asked Valerie.
“Who said anything about shooting Ray?” asked Mom.
“Dad did. He wanted
to shoot Pidney and Danny last night, and now he wants to shoot Ray!”
“Kyle!” Mom’s
scolding stare could wither flowers that were otherwise in full bloom.
“I was just kidding around!” said Daddy in a defensive voice
that sounded a lot like a little boy who’d been caught pulling his sister’s
hair. “I wouldn’t really shoot
anybody… It’s a dad thing.”
“I’m sure it is,” said Mom.
“But let’s not joke about that anymore.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He was
thoroughly chastised, and Valerie marveled at how Mom could make him so
instantly repentant, like a Baptist preacher preaching Hellfire or something.
“The bus is here, Princess,” said Daddy Kyle while peering
out the window.
And
it really was. Valerie had to
hustle. The old yellow bus driven by
Milo Volker was waiting at the end of the Clarkes’ lane, and he wouldn’t linger
if she didn’t show up fast. Still, it
made her grin to see the look of relief on her Daddy’s face as he realized the
dangerous conversation was at an end.
Yesterday I temporarily solved my computer problem with the Russian hacker with the help of the technical support people of McAfee Anti-Virus software. My computer works again. But I have had loss of personal data, and I am not yet sure that they didn’t take control of my Google account. It seems like I can change my password safely, but having been broken into, I have to wonder if the Russians are able to read this as I type it. I know I sound like a crazy, paranoid old man. The technician thinks so too. But it is harder than ever to have faith in a system when so many bad actors seem to have more control over things than I do. I am the novelist. I should be able to control the plot and the dialogue and the happy endings in my own story. But I can type on my computer again and my machine is cured of the Russian computer flu.
One should have positive thoughts as often as possible, even if you can only find them in a warehouse of old memories, impressions, and poems.
The point I wanted to make today, now that I have my word-mulching machine back to word-mulching form, is that I have always been a solver of problems, both simple and complex. It goes with being a teacher hand in hand because being a school-type teacher-man means solving problems for the little people and teaching them to be problem solvers too.
The big problem with problem-solving, however, is that there is always one more problem to be solved… unless there are ten more. Life is a matter of problem-solving, and you cannot be happy until you learn both to solve problems, even hard ones, and be reconciled to the fact that there will always be problems you have to live with and cannot solve.
Among the ten more problems I am now faced with is the problem of not having enough money to cover all the bills as I and my children continue to do things that cost money, like getting sick, eating, living in Texas, wearing clothes, wearing extra cold-weather clothes, and getting hacked by Russians. I want desperately to get a part-time job I can do. I am thoroughly qualified to be a substitute teacher. But I can’t do that job because I am in poor health. One more bout of the flu picked up in the germ farms that are Texas public schools will end me. Besides, if my health were sound enough for the classroom, I would still be teaching. It was a job God made me for, and I love teaching.
I was earning extra money the hard way through driving for Uber, daily risking an onslaught of shady clients, thoroughly unpleasant back-seat drivers, and Texas killer grandmas driving Lincoln Town Cars through stop signs at every other corner. And then I got hit in the driver’s side door by a goof who was talking to his passenger instead of looking as he turned across traffic. He didn’t see me until he clobbered me with his car. There was no way at all I could have avoided that collision. It cost me money for a deductible even though he was totally at fault. It cost me six months of driving time. I have been able to drive for other purposes, but I have not been able to drive for Uber since the accident. My driving-for-money confidence is missing. I have looked for it everywhere. It isn’t in any of the closets in the house. I guess I will simply have to make some more and get out and drive again.
So, living a problem-solving life ain’t easy, but it is necessary. It will get figured out, through persistence if nothing else. Because we all have to. And I can already see ten more problems headed towards me down the thorny garden path that is my life.
Catch a Falling Star 
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
It is, of course, one of the most powerful, masterful, and best-known pieces of music ever written.
Mozart completed the “little serenade” in Vienna in 1787, but it wasn’t published until 1827, long after Mozart’s untimely death.
The Serenade is incorrectly translated into English as “A Little Night Music”. But this is and always has been the way I prefer to think of it. A creation of Mozart written shortly before he hopped aboard the ferryman’s boat and rode off into the eternal night. It is the artifact that proves the art of the master who even has the word “art” as a part of his name. A little music to play on after the master is gone to prove his universal connection to the great silent symphony that is everything in the universe singing silently together.
It is basically what I myself am laboring now to do. I have been dancing along the edge of the abyss of poverty, suffering, and death since I left my teaching job in 2014. I will soon be taking my own trip into night aboard the ferryman’s dreaded boat. And I feel the need to put my own art out there in novel and cartoon form before that happens.
I am not saying that I am a master on the level of a Mozart. My name is not Mickart. But I do have a “key’ in the name Mickey. And it will hopefully unlock something worthwhile for my family and all those I loved and leave behind me. And hopefully, it will provide a little night music to help soothe the next in line behind me at the ferryman’s dock.
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Tagged as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Mozart