I had been promising my daughter for a while that we would build the gingerbread train. I was looking forward to it as an art project. She was impatient to eat it. So, on December 27th, I was finally feeling well enough to do the deed.
So, we prepared the work space on the kitchen table. We laid out the items that we could use for assembly. I made my daughter promise to stop eating elements of the train before we could actually put it together.
I started decorating the Christmas trees that go into the baggage car. My daughter ate several of the sugar-ball decorations.
The baggage car was assembled first. I call it the baggage car because even though it is in the tender position for a steam train if we called it that, that would mean that the engine burned Christmas trees instead of coal. My daughter snuck a few more decorations as we argued about that.
It was encouraging that the first part came together without looking too incredibly terrible.
My daughter decorated a majority of the engine and only ate a few more of the decorations while doing it. This was no small thing given how much she loves to eat gumdrops.
It ended up looking vaguely like the picture on the box. We had a great deal of fun making it. And the last time I checked, portions of it still were uneaten… something I am confident won’t be the case for much longer.
I have lived a life of irony. As a child, I was traumatized by a sexual assault, and it left me afraid to be naked in the presence of others. It was a nightmare in junior high and high school. But even though the physical education showers at the end of every P.E. class were a nightmare dance of towels and hands strategically being flung about because of the other sweaty boys present with mocking eyes and cruel comments, I slowly conducted a personal war within myself to avoid becoming a nudist over the entire course of my teaching career. And then, when I retired, I lost that war. And I became a nudist. I am now a member of the AANR Southwest. And I have been to nudist parks more than once.
You know how practically everyone has that nightmare where they are suddenly at school, in front of the class, and completely naked? Yeah, I had that dream about being both a teacher and a student. I have to say, I eventually learned that all students and all teachers are basically mentally and emotionally naked in the classroom all the time. Students can’t control themselves enough to wear mental clothing. And teachers can’t effectively teach with such barriers in place. Of course, education could not go fully nude without a total restructuring of society and a re-training of all teachers and kids from a very early age.
I can use myself as an example of why “naked is funny.” There is a lot of humor in life that stems from our need to keep certain things secret and the inevitable moment when we fail to keep others from seeing and learning the naked truth.
The picture here is me as I imagine I would have looked naked at ten, showing you everything I was terrified of having girls see, especially the dangly bits that would wiggle and waggle as you walked about naked. I actually wrote a poem about walking about naked as a seventh grader with a wiggling wiener. I, of course, tore that poem up into pieces that I distributed to three different trash cans so nobody could tape it back together. I was aware even back then that I was destined to be one of the world’s worst poets.
I did enjoy being a naked child before I was assaulted. I liked to ride my bike naked at the Bingham Park Woods south of town. There was never anybody else there to bother me. Whether or not anyone ever saw me there, I do not know. Nobody ever said anything about knowing my secret. And after I was attacked, I was always too afraid to try it again.
But being seen naked in nature was not what worried me the most. That naked-in-school nightmare was the one that actually embarrassed me and exposed my dangly bits to girls who knew me.
In P.E. Class once when I was a sophomore in high school, we were standing in a circle on the wrestling mat while the two wrestlers were grappling each other. The girls’ P.E. Class was sitting in the bleachers supposedly listening to whatever the girls’ coach was rattling on about. Of course, we could see they were really all watching the boys wrestle. I was worried that if it got to be my turn, the boy I had to wrestle, being better than me and on the wrestling team, might wrestle my pants off as sometimes happens with certain takedowns. There were cheerleaders in the bleachers that day. Oh, Lord preserve me!
But Jerry Kornbluth and Tom Klotny had an intense match going on… and on and on and on… and the coach was watching them intently as they each countered the other so well that no points were being scored. It lasted long enough that I was in no danger of having to wrestle Nelson, the former State champ in the 110 weight class. So, I stupidly let my guard down.
Boob Eekleboy was a bully and weird-sense-of-humor aficionado. He also was lurking behind me without me being aware of it at all. He was older than me. He was bigger than me. He was weaker than me. (I beat him in a wrestling match the week before, giving him a need for revenge.) And he had an evil mind.
When he took hold of my gym shorts, he apparently got his fingers under the straps of the athletic supporter.
The time between my pants going down and my face turning red as I pulled them back up was probably only about seven seconds. But my dangly bits had been totally exposed. And somebody who might’ve been a cheerleader giggled and squealed about something. Of course, I had that secret trauma that I was suppressing that nearly destroyed me at the time.
My mental problems didn’t let me enjoy this big reveal in any way at the time. But looking back on it, I can see the humor in it. I can actually laugh at it now, gobs of time having healed most of what ailed me then. And I would learn from a third-hand source that one of the cheerleaders that saw it happen liked what she saw and told others about the liking.
So, naked can be funny. I have come to accept that long ago. And it would fuss up some of my novels because they were supposed to be humorous, and I may have planned on using the naked thing a lot.
Before now I have never talked about my childhood friend Jimmy Crafton. It took a long long time to build up enough courage. Writing this on Christmas Eve 2017 makes it easier. Yes this is a very important re-post.
It is not a terrible story. I can’t think of anybody that fits the idea of a “hero” any more than Jim. I remember him as a pale-faced little boy with a thousand Watt smile full of tiny white teeth. He was two years younger than me. He was in my sister’s class at Rowan Elementary. He was outgoing and funny. And he was a hemophiliac. He had the rare condition of having too little of the essential blood-clotting proteins in the blood that the vast majority of us get to take for granted. Every day for him was a risk of having an ordinary injury like a bruise or scrape cause him to bleed to death. He missed great gobs of school days with injuries and crippling pain and the need to go to the emergency room in Mason City for life-saving blood transfusions. We were told when I was eight that he probably wouldn’t last past his tenth birthday. The teachers all gave us strict rules for playing with him on the playground… what not to do, what to immediately report, and what not to allow him to do. I remember one time he decided to wrestle both Bobby and me at the same time. He had a deep and passionate love for the sport of wrestling, big in the high schools of Iowa. He aggressively took us both down and pinned us both with minimum effort. And you should stop laughing at how wimpy that makes me sound. Remember, I had to play the game by different rules than he did. Bob and I both had to live with the consequences if bad things were to happen.
The miracle of Jim Crafton was that he did not die in childhood due to his genetic medical difficulty. In fact, he grew up, went to college, and became a doctor all because of the gratitude he had towards the doctors and medical professionals who helped him conquer hemophilia in childhood. He got married. And he even had a son. Those were things he accomplished in life that no one believed were possible back in the 1960’s.
But now we get to the part that I can’t write without typing through tears. A hemophiliac relies on regular transfusions of blood to supply the clotting factors that he cannot live without. And there was no effective screening technique for HIV in blood supplies before 1992. Further problems arose from the blood bank practice of mixing blood donations together by blood type. That meant that even clean blood donations were likely to become tainted through mixing. Far too many of the hemophiliacs in America were given infected blood and became AIDS sufferers at a time when a diagnosis of HIV was basically a death sentence. And worse, AIDS sufferers were often isolated and treated like lepers for fear of contracting the disease from ordinary contact with them. You might remember the sad case of Ricky Ray in Florida. He and his two brothers were all hemophiliacs. They all were infected. They were expelled from school. They even had to live in hiding after loving members of their community burned their house down. We were horrible to people who were dying of AIDS.
But I can’t leave this essay on such a sad note. My friend Jimmy was a hero, a doctor, and a dad. He lived a life worth living and worth knowing about. His life was a gift to all of us lesser beings. And this is the time of year for remembering those we have loved and lost. Jim died of AIDS decades ago. But he still lives in my heart and my memory. And if you have read this little story, he lives in you now too. That is a sort of magic, isn’t it? I only wish I had more powerful magic to give.
When you walk to the front of the classroom and take up the big pencil in front of a group of young teens and twelve-year-olds, there is a strong pressure to learn how to sing and dance. That, of course, is a metaphor. I was always too arthritic and clunky in my movements to literally dance. But I looked out over a sea of bored and malevolence-filled eyes, slack and sometimes drooling mouths attached to hormone-fueled and creatively evil minds. And I was being paid to put ideas in their heads. Specifically boring and difficult ideas that none of them really wanted in their own personal heads. So I felt the need to learn to dance, to teach in ways that were engaging like good dance tunes, and entertaining in ways that made them want to take action, to metaphorically get up and dance along with me.
I wanted them to enjoy learning the way I did.
But the music of the teacher is not always compatible with the dance style of the individual learner. The secret behind that is, there is absolutely no way to prompt them to dance along with you until you learn about the music already playing in their stupid little heads. (And you can’t, of course ever use the word “stupid” out loud, no matter how funny or true the word is,) You have to get to know a kid before you can teach them anything.
The discordant melodies and bizarre tunes you encounter when you talk to them is like dancing in a minefield blindfolded. Some don’t have enough to eat at home and have to survive off of the nutrition-less food they get in the school cafeteria’s free-and-reduced lunch program. Some of them have never heard a single positive thing from the adults at home, enduring only endless criticism, insults, and sometimes fists. Some of them fall in love you. Some due to hormones. Some due to the fact that you treat them like a real human being. Some because they just stupidly assume that everyone dances to the same tunes they hear in their own personal head.
Some of them automatically hate you because they know that if you hear their own secret music in their own self-loathing heads, you will never accept it. They hate you because you are a teacher and teachers always hate them. Some of them, deep down, are as loathsome as they think they are.
But, if you find the right music, you can get any of them, even all of them, to dance. It might be hard to find. It might be a nearly impossible task to learn to play that music once you find it. But it can be done.
And if you get them to dance to your music, to dance along with you, I can’t think of anything more rewarding, anything more life-fulfilling. Have you ever tried it for yourself? If you are not a teacher, how about with your own children or the children related to you? Everybody should learn to dance this dance I am talking about in metaphors. At least once in your life. It is addictive. You will want to dance more. So the next time the music starts and you get the chance… I hope you’ll dance!
Now you finally get to sample a bit of my genius at historical analysis. I will lay on you one of the theories of history that I created, and which has had a profound effect on the whole debate over whether History is a Science, or merely a gathering of talking idiots and puppets of the governments who won the wars.
The theory is this; History is always about pirates. I know that statement probably alarms you, or makes you simply dismiss me as a loony, bald-headed goofball who just likes to talk and is meant to be ignored by you. Don’t be alarmed, and I am NOT a goofball.
History is never really written about the builders and creators who craft a society or a civilization. The occasional Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Gragg of Mars, or Googol Marou gets mentioned in a history book, but it is always the man, men, or peoples who see the civilization, want the civilization, and then either take the civilization for themselves or totally destroy the civilization who ultimately get the notice and the credit for making History happen. History is not about making something, but about taking something that is already there.
Consider how this played out in the history of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way Galaxy. It truly began with the Ancients who colonized the entire galaxy and then, for reasons unknown, totally disappeared from it, leaving only powerful and dangerous artifacts behind. They were creators and makers, so the story could never really be about them.
The story then would have to proceed to the gentle alien folk called the Sylvani. Now, they may actually be the Ancients, we have no way of knowing, but they don’t actually make History happen either. They created jump drives and interstellar travel, particle readers and material synthesizers (as well as the Skortch beams and disintegrators that can be derived from them), and anti-gravity technology. They did not colonize the stars. They had the bad sense to leave everything as they found it and live their lives in relative peace. The fools!
The amphibianoid people known as the Tellerons were the first to colonize and make an empire in the Orion Spur. These prolific frog-men of Telleri spread their form of civilization to eleven worlds. They wouldn’t have been able to do this, however, if they had never made contact with the Sylvani people while the latter were peacefully exploring the world of Telleri. The frog-men imprisoned the Sylvani explorers and forced them to yield up the all-important space travel technologies they had created. It was an act of space piracy. They basically stole all the knowledge and equipment needed to make a star empire.
Now, the Tellerons were basically fools themselves. They were ruthless explorers and conquerors but were a bit shallow in the thinking end of their gene pool. They were not adaptable and had to carefully recreate their swampy home-world environment everywhere they went. Thus, they were easily conquered themselves when they met far more adaptable races like the Galtorrians from the Delta Pavonis star system and the Earthers from the Sol system.
Words are what basically conquered the Telleron Star Empire. When they reached the Galtorrian homeworld of Galtorr Prime, they got themselves hooked on an alien cultural anomaly caused by TV broadcasts from Earth. The Galtorrians had been receiving and decoding the television signals of Earth for twenty years. A virulent black market existed there for pirated episodes of a TV show called “I Love Lucy”. Reruns of that TV show became a model for both the Galtorrians and the Tellerons who tried to conquer them.
Truth be told, the Tellerons began worshipping the character of Fred Mertz being played by an actor named William Frawley. Frawley’s frog-like mouth and toad-like wit made the fin-headed frog-men think Fred Mertz was a god. The Galtorrians had already adapted the English Language from the show because it was similar in sound patterns to Galtorr-speak. It had become the language of, not only entertainment, but of commerce and diplomacy. Now, English is a twisted and demented sort of language, capable of double meanings, puns, and irony. There are no sacred rules of grammar, word-formation, or spelling, and so the language can be shaped to suit the nefarious purposes of those sinister professionals known as “writers”. Galtorrians were able to trick Tellerons with the so-called “Word of Fred Mertz” into giving them the secrets of space travel, Skortch rays, and material synthesis.
So, space travel and the Telleron Empire fell into the hands of the Galtorrians by piracy. They stole the empire from the rival alien race. They then ruthlessly expanded their new empire. Being a pirate was the thing that created the History.
Now, a very similar process also happened on Earth. Tellerons, easily tricked by Earthers, also lost control of their stolen technology when they tried to invade Earth in about the year 1990 A.D. They tried to invade using invisibility technology acquired by showing their Sylvani slaves old episodes of Star Trek with Romulans in them. The Sylvani succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Gene Roddenberry. Of course, this backfired, because it is hard to intimidate someone you are trying to conquer with armies and weapons that cannot be seen. The Tellerons managed to lose their devices and Skortch themselves during an invasion that almost no one knew was happening. Again, the technology was pirated from them. I firmly believe that it was one of my own ancestors, a genius named Orben Wallace who reverse-engineered all the alien devices and brought the technology to Earth.
The empire of all humanoid and intelligent life forms in the Orion Spur would be taken and retaken using the stolen technologies and the stolen words of what would become known as “Galanglic,” Galactic English. So, you can see, I have brilliantly proven my theory. All History is about pirates.
William Frawley, the actor who first uttered the “Word of Fred Mertz”
One of the most important things about my blog has been that I can share my artwork. I have always been capable of a reasonably high level of drawing ability. I can also paint and create artistically original photographs. I have that artist’s eye that sees creatively. If you follow directions in this first Paffooney, you will see a wider variety of the kind of Paffoonies I post than I will post here. This will be, however, a picture post. I intend to share a bunch of my artwork here, both old and new. Take a gander. (And while you hold on to that male goose, look at some of my pictures, too.)
You have to admit that I am clearly not an artist like Van Gogh or Picasso… certainly nothing like Andrew Wyeth or Winslow Homer. I am more of an illustrator, or … worse, a cartoonist.
So, this is at least partially about sharing artwork. I am not a professional artist. I have made no money from drawing, even though my artwork has been published before. I have been given this talent by God not to be famous and wealthy, but to be a better teacher and a better storyteller.
These are my clown portraits of Dickens, Shakespeare, Disney, and Poe.
Are the works of these clowns really literature? Comic novels? History, Tragedy, and Comedy in plays? Feature-length cartoons? And (shudder) poetry?
You’re weird if you say no. So, I won’t say that. (Even though I am definitely weird.)
My best attempt to draw Red Skelton…
Comedy is most often the one critics will turn up their noses at, claiming many… if not most comic works are not serious, and therefore not literature. But we have an inborn need to laugh, smile, and cavort to the music of humor.
I laugh uproariously at many of the antics in Charles Dickens’ semi-autobiographical novel, David Copperfield.
Can you tell me that the book is not Literature? You’re weird if you can.
That’s Mark Twain in the background of this picnic portrait. I didn’t see him there when I drew this from life. I, like the family dog, was more focused on what Mark was doing to that turkey leg. He just sort of appeared in the background of this picture as it developed.
And if you believe that… well, you’re weird.
And there is something wrong with this photograph too. Although I swear… every element of this picture is from a photograph.
If the theme of this is, “Bugs like Koolaid too,” is that Literature? It isn’t advertising. Koolaid Man never paid me a dime.
These Klowntown Kops are going to throw that pie at you, dear reader.
Because we all know you’re weird. And because that’s what Literature is for.
One must end the year on a note that is either upbeat or regretful. A heartfelt, “Meh,” just won’t cut it.
So here are a few particles of wisdom from the dustbowl of Mickey’s imagination.
The world is getting brighter… also hotter. If we continue to chill on the topic of global warming, soon we will be fricasseed.
You should definitely pay attention to your teachers. They are mostly old and cranky and undervalued, and it makes them sad when they realize that no one really listens to them.
I learned this from the poet Dylan Thomas, “Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light!” He cursed death, and then he promptly went out and drank so much liquor, he died at a very young age. Thank God I have lived to be old.
You are also pretty much stuck with the face that you are born with, so you better get used to it, and it has many varied uses… especially in the comic sense.
And I would also like to re-iterate the wisdom of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery;
It is a bit of a disappointment to an artist to realize that what is essential is actually invisible to the eye… but I know it is true. Truth resides in words.
The only wisdom I truly possess is the knowledge that I am a fool.
Since I was a mere stupid boy, and before I grew up to be a mildly stupid man, I always yearned to have wisdom. And wisdom comes through experience and pain. Now, years later, I realize what true wisdom is… I’d have been better off without all that pain.
People are a lot like rabbits, except that they are not.
They can never eat too many carrots… unless they do. And then their skin can turn orange.
There is no beast as noble as a rabbit… except for practically every other beast.
Turtles are not as noble as rabbits. When you challenge them to a race, they cheat.
People really ought to be naked more. It’s true. If you can strip yourself down to only what is fundamentally nothing but you yourself… you begin to know who you really are. And it is not shame to let other people see. Oh, wait a minute! You thought I was talking about being literally naked? Oh, no! Metaphorically naked only!
One should be so opaque and obtuse that other people can see acutely right through you. It is the only thing that makes nonsense into sense.
And we need to sing and dance a little more than we do. A good song is healthy for the soul, no matter how badly you sing it. And even if you are old and arthritic like me, dancing a good jiggity-jig keeps the bones loose and the heart thumping.
Everyone needs to dance with their children. And talk to them. You can learn more from them than they can from you. They have more recently come here from the hand of God. And they know things that you have forgotten… and will need to remember before you return to Him.
I hope my anti-wisdom has not seriously screwed everybody up.
One must end the year on a note that is either upbeat or regretful. A heartfelt, “Meh,” just won’t cut it.
Catch a Falling Star 
I Hope You Dance…
When you walk to the front of the classroom and take up the big pencil in front of a group of young teens and twelve-year-olds, there is a strong pressure to learn how to sing and dance. That, of course, is a metaphor. I was always too arthritic and clunky in my movements to literally dance. But I looked out over a sea of bored and malevolence-filled eyes, slack and sometimes drooling mouths attached to hormone-fueled and creatively evil minds. And I was being paid to put ideas in their heads. Specifically boring and difficult ideas that none of them really wanted in their own personal heads. So I felt the need to learn to dance, to teach in ways that were engaging like good dance tunes, and entertaining in ways that made them want to take action, to metaphorically get up and dance along with me.
I wanted them to enjoy learning the way I did.
But the music of the teacher is not always compatible with the dance style of the individual learner. The secret behind that is, there is absolutely no way to prompt them to dance along with you until you learn about the music already playing in their stupid little heads. (And you can’t, of course ever use the word “stupid” out loud, no matter how funny or true the word is,) You have to get to know a kid before you can teach them anything.
The discordant melodies and bizarre tunes you encounter when you talk to them is like dancing in a minefield blindfolded. Some don’t have enough to eat at home and have to survive off of the nutrition-less food they get in the school cafeteria’s free-and-reduced lunch program. Some of them have never heard a single positive thing from the adults at home, enduring only endless criticism, insults, and sometimes fists. Some of them fall in love you. Some due to hormones. Some due to the fact that you treat them like a real human being. Some because they just stupidly assume that everyone dances to the same tunes they hear in their own personal head.
Some of them automatically hate you because they know that if you hear their own secret music in their own self-loathing heads, you will never accept it. They hate you because you are a teacher and teachers always hate them. Some of them, deep down, are as loathsome as they think they are.
But, if you find the right music, you can get any of them, even all of them, to dance. It might be hard to find. It might be a nearly impossible task to learn to play that music once you find it. But it can be done.
And if you get them to dance to your music, to dance along with you, I can’t think of anything more rewarding, anything more life-fulfilling. Have you ever tried it for yourself? If you are not a teacher, how about with your own children or the children related to you? Everybody should learn to dance this dance I am talking about in metaphors. At least once in your life. It is addictive. You will want to dance more. So the next time the music starts and you get the chance… I hope you’ll dance!
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