As often happens with doddering old doofuses, you can easily reach 500 words and have to stop for the day even though you are still not through with saying all the stupid stuff you have on your doddering old doofus mind. So that’s when you get a part two the next day.
Things have happened to me in the middle of the year following the sixtieth anniversary of the blizzard I was born during in 1956 that I still haven’t talked about during this Mickey at Sixty topic.
I am, after all, a survivor, about to pass birthday number 61, the year beyond which Robin Williams never made it. I have always said that if the old saying, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” is actually true, then I must be Superman by now. I am now in my third year of not being able to afford the medicine the doctor thinks I should be taking daily. I have had arthritis for 42 years. I have been a diabetic for 17 years. I have been a cancer survivor since 1983. By all rights, I should be long dead by now. How God ever made that mistake, I will never know. Surely it was an oversight on His part. “What? Mickey is still alive on planet Earth? How could I let that happen? Oh, well, maybe we give him one more year to see how that turns out,” God says, and all the angels agree with him because angels never think for themselves, at least, not after Lucifer, that nutty angel in the red pajamas that always carries around a pitchfork.
And what am I actually doing with my year of life that I probably wasn’t supposed to have? Constructive things like becoming a nudist and giving up on wearing clothes. (Probably not a great idea for someone whose corpus strangioso is so intolerably unsightly to normal people.) I went to the nudist park in Alvord, Texas one time. And I liked it. And I have thought about going back on another weekend, but something always seems to come up and prevent me from following through with the plan. But it has been remarkably good for my blog. Apparently having my post Becoming a Nudist appear on clothesfreelife.com refers loads of readers to my WordPress blog. Who knew that nudists were such avid readers of humor blogs by goofy Mickeys? They have helped make my blog post Why Do You Think That? Part Four one of my most popular blogs of the year.
This is also the year of my life in which I was forced to give up on the idea of restoring the swimming pool to life and having it removed, thanks to the bully-boy encouragements of the city pool inspector and the rest of the Nazis down at the City Environmental Services Office.
Dreams die hard… and expensively… by stages. It took most of the summer to get it done, but now my swimming pool is no more.
So now Mickey is a sadder-but-no-wiser Mickey with no more swimming pool.
But Mickey is still Mickey, even at sixty. He will break out the paper and colored pencils and still do the doings that old doofus Mickey will do, writing a bunch of nonsense, and coloring…
stuff, and doing some of it naked.
Mickey at Sixty
It is true that I am now only a month away from being 61. But this reflection is based on what happened to me while undergoing the year past. My fictional character, Valerie Clarke, took the selfie above of the two of us. She doesn’t have her own smartphone, after all, she’s a fictional character, so she used mine. It shows in the picture what she looked like at eleven and what I looked like at sixty years and eleven months, in other words, this morning.
So, what exactly does the picture reveal about us?
Well, for her, it is fairly obvious that she’s only an imaginary person. She was eleven in 1984, the year of the fictional snowstorm in Snow Babies. She’s a bright and vibrant young girl with hopes and dreams ahead of her. She’s also known tragedy, especially after her father’s suicide. But the fact that she’s fictional and based on more than one real person from my past does a lot to explain why this reflection is not about her.
For me, however, you get a look at a grumpy old man with a straw farmer’s hat, an author’s beard, and silvery Gandalf hair. More of my drawings are glimpsable on the wall behind me. I look like the kind of seedy old curmudgeon who yells at neighbor kids who walk on his lawn.
But I’m really not what I look like.
I am a writer. So I am full of experiences, ideas, and feelings. And I am also full of people. Valerie is only one of those. I create fictional people from the people I knew or knew about in my little Iowa town, Rowan, where I grew up. Kids that went to school with me. Their parents. Shopkeepers and business people and creepy old people that I sometimes encountered. Hot tempered people. Wise people. And stupid people who were often laughed at for good reason.
I can also draw on (and draw pictures of) all the people I knew as an educator. More than two thousand kids who passed through my classes in four different schools, some of whom I knew as well as I knew my own children, were available to pull details from to mix and match and make fictional characters from. Fellow teachers, some gifted with a natural way with students, some hopelessly lost in the wrong profession with the wrong sort of personality were also available to make characters from. Fools and idealists. Bullies and shrinking violets. Heroes that possible readers could look up to and love.
I am the kaleidoscope, the thing that you can look through to see the world and have it refracted and patterned to make it beautiful, even in its ugliness.
But all of this reflection is only that, the view in the mirror, the outward look of the man who is me. Mickey at sixty is many things, not all of them pretty, not all of them wise. But some of them are. And some even better than I think they are.
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