Apparently the seed was in the soil the demolition company used to fill the hole when the pool was removed. It grew in the corner of the flower patch where I planted zinnias, and I decided to leave it, rather than treat it as a weed like I did with the other 14 sunflower plants that grew in the plot where the pool used to be.
You don’t even notice it in the first picture because it was in the back corner of the flower patch and only green. But it began to stand out more as the yellow petals began to appear and it grew taller even than the gardener.
There is a certain metaphorical truth here that applies to being a teacher as well as it does to being the gardener in the flower garden. Sometimes in the classroom you have to nurture the student other teachers have identified as the weed in the garden. And don’t get me wrong when I say this, I pulled enough sunflowers out of the bean fields as a farm boy to know how aggressively obnoxious they are in their weediness. But sometimes the classroom weed becomes the tallest, brightest, most beautiful flower in the patch. It shows you clearly what a little patience, a little love, and accepting a lot of risk can accomplish.
I have begun to think of the sunflower as Clarissa, the valedictorian of the flower patch.
Despite what it looks like, this is NOT a bowl full of dog poop. It is actually gingerbread dough in the process of being mixed. I had already folded in the one large egg, and already stirred it almost to readiness for the kneading process.
You see, my daughter and I have been staying at home in Texas while my wife and son are off on a trip I couldn’t manage for health reasons. So, since the Princess and I have some bonding time, we decided to have a gingerbread cookie contest that we ended up putting off too long last December.
We decided to make just two cookies. I suggested unicorns, she wanted to do a dragon. So we each took half of the dough and started sculpting. We didn’t make the cookies mobile once cooked. The plan was to make them, decorate them, photograph them, and eat them.
The Dragon is the Princess’s entry and the unicorn mine in the fantasy critter cookie contest. In the previous pictures they are in raw dough form. In the next set of pictures they are cooked cookies.
The en-fattened cooked cookies didn’t look quite as fine as our original sculpted conceptions. We were hoping to improve their artistic merits by decorating them. I had frosting left over from the gingerbread house we did in December.
The chocolate frosting, though, had congealed in a strange, barely spreadable manner. To deal with this, had to warm it and melt it slightly to get it to spread. The Princess chose to forego using chocolate frosting. Like an idiot, I forged ahead with the tasty goo.
Unfortunately, the warm chocolate had a tendency to melt all the other decorative frosting.
So, I tried my best to be artsy creative and rescue the look of my unicorn cookie. I failed. I turned it into a fire-tailed ugly dog with a bleeding white stick stuck in its forehead.
The Princess was, however, much more successful.
And fortunately, both cookies were delicious when it came time to clean up our respective messes.
Yes, this is a picture of a rock. But it is no ordinary rock. Okay, that’s not precisely true. It is a gray metamorphic rock roughly square in shape with numerous flecks of white and a white strip along the top. As rocks go, it probably couldn’t be more ordinary, more rocky in its soul. But, as with all things in this life, the importance and true meaning lies in the context. This is a pocket rock. It spent a quarter of a century riding around in my pants pocket. I have held it in my hand millions of times.
The Rowan Community Center, seen in this picture I used for the cover of Magical Miss Morgan, is the last part of the old Rowan school still standing.
In 1980, my Great Grandma Hinckley died. That was also the year my folks had to move to Texas because of the transfer my Dad’s seedcorn company gave him to its cotton seed division. It was one year before I got my teaching degree. And it was the year they tore down the building where I went to school for grades 1 through 6. That summer, as I walked around the demolition site, I found the homely gray rock that was nearly as square as I was, and because I was already feeling homesick before I actually left home, I picked it up and stuck it in my pocket. It was a little square piece of home.
That rock went with me to college. It went with me to both Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida. It has been to Washington D.C. It has been in the depths of caves in Kentucky and Missouri and Texas. It has been high in the sky in my pocket in an airplane. It has been to beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the U.S. It has visited both Mexico and Canada. It his been to Las Vegas. And it even rode in the subways of New York City.
And possibly the most interesting part of this pocket rock’s career happened in Texas schools. It was with me in my pocket constantly from 1980 to 2004. I finally took it out of my pocket and placed it in an old cigar box that once belonged to my grandfather and I have kept keepsakes in since I was a kid.
And I have thought a lot about this ordinary rock that isn’t really ordinary on closer inspection. At one point or another I thought about using it as a skipping stone at both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 2004 when I was considering the pocket watch broken by it and the car key accidentally bent against it, it almost wound up in Lake Superior. I put in my cigar box and it has remained exiled there since. Will I have it buried with me, in my pocket? No, probably not. My wife plans to have me cremated. Hopefully, though, not until I am already dead. This rock has pretty much been a symbol of my soul, travelling with me, teaching with me, jingling the pocket change when I walk… And it will continue to exist when the thinking and writing parts of Mickey are gone.
But even rocks are not immortal. Sometime in the future something will happen to it. It will end up someplace unexpected or changed by grinding, melting, or chemical reaction into some other form. But no matter what happens to it ultimately, the meaning of it, the context, the places it has been and the things that it has done will still be true, still have happened to it. And, ultimately, it will still be just like me.
My flower adventure for this summer was planting Texas wildflowers and zinnias in the space where the swimming pool was last year at this time.
We had to go from a yard full of bare dirt to a better, greener space with colorful things growing in it.
And, of course, the weeds took to filling the space in the yard like maniacs on steroids. For every flower that bloomed, twenty to fifty weeds were thriving. And I, suffering from arthritis have a hard time pulling the weeds out by hand. And I will not use herbicide. We, as a people, have spread enough poison in the world as it is. It has always been my intention to grow things that consume the carbon dioxide and spew out things like oxygen and nitrogen, the things we can actually breath. I mean to help life grow, not prune it or kill it.
Even the weeds like thistles can have beautiful blossoms to share with butterflies and bees.
I have to do a better job of weeding the flower plot. Weeds can take the sunlight and nutrients away from the plants you want to thrive. One of the workers who removed the pool was a sunflower seed chewer. It is not mere coincidence that we have more than twenty sunflower plants growing as weeds in the yard.
But the point of this whole flower-petal essay is that the zinnias are blooming, bright, and loud, and beauteous, at a time when I need the color… need the beauty… to balance against the darkness.
Sundays have always been a day for rest. And yet, I have always gotten more work done on Sunday than any other day of the week. It was always in the past a day for grading papers and reading student essays. It was also a day for housework; washing dishes, mowing the lawn, painting the house, and paying bills.
And today, I have paid bills and fully intend to do more meal deliveries through Uber to raise money for paying even more bills. I have no shortage of bills.
But I also need to “Carpe Diem” a little bit and do some of the things that are most important in life. And here I intend to confess a few of those things that I consider important.
My wife has gone to California for a week to a religious convention. I took her to the airplane early yesterday morning. So I am alone with the kids for a while. I intend to take them out to eat today, maybe at Braums. Later, the movie Ready Player One is playing at the dollar movie in Plano.
You can also see by the initial picture of this piece that the flower garden has zinnias blooming, but desperately needs weeding. I don’t wish to horrify you too much, so I will not post a picture of me working on the flowers because I have resolved to do it in the nude. Seriously, have you ever heard of the oriental practice of Forest Bathing? Spending time in nature, like the time we visited the redwoods in California, really does cleanse the soul. And because we have a privacy fence in the back yard, and because wifey is gone to California where she can’t make fun of me for it, I intend to get a little bit of that feeling by practicing nudism a wee bit in the back yard. I know it sounds like the idiot pronouncements of a fool entering his second childhood, but it is really a refreshing thing to be out in the light of the sun bathing in the growing greenness and yellow sunshine. And I can get a few weeds pulled out of both the flower garden and my soul.
So I vow to get important things done today. I will seize the day. And while the things I do can’t all be called work, necessarily, they will be accomplishments. And I will have done something worthwhile.
This is probably the hailstone that cracked the glass on my bedroom window at 1:45 am early this morning. We got a devastating hailstorm in the middle of the night. Baseball-sized hail came down on parts of Carrollton, Texas and bashed in car windshields and broke windows and stripped leaves and branches from trees.
It not only woke me up, it made me instantly desperate. I do not have the $1000 dollars necessary for the insurance deductible that such a disaster would create. My economic recovery after bankruptcy would be completely derailed. No car means no extra money from Uber to help pay for doctor bills, the bankruptcy payouts, the income tax bill, and the losses we suffered from the city forcing us to remove our cracked swimming pool last summer. So I went first to watch the hail come down, fearing it would destroy my life. I noticed that it was coming down sporadically in the rain and it was only about marble-sized in our neighborhood. As soon as the ice bombs stopped banging on the roof, I went out into the early morning downpour in only bathrobe, pants, and shoes and checked on my poor little Ford Fiesta. I found the window-breaker under the bedroom window, but the tree and sporadic-ness of the stones had protected my car. No cracked windows there. No dings and divots either. My car was un-struck.
It would turn out that morning light revealed my wife’s car had been similarly defended by a different tree.
The flowers in the flower patch out where the pool used to be were just beginning to bloom before the storm. They not only survived the hail, but benefited from the much-needed rain.
So, as my daughter the Princess pointed out this morning, maybe the Greek goddess of bad luck and chaos has finally concluded that I have had enough bad luck for one lifetime… or maybe year… or month… or, goddess please, at least this week. I did also successfully ignore a phone scam about a fraud investigation involving my tax return. I did not contact Agent Paul Avery because my tax return has already been accepted and I have even made the first installment payment of the money I owe the IRS. What kind of idiot would I have to be to commit a fraud on my taxes that would make me pay over a thousand dollars extra on taxes? Besides, I had seen previous warnings of this particular scam in the news. Naughty Mr. Agent Avery has been quite the busy boy. I also know about at least four car accidents that I didn’t get into yesterday and today. One lady turned in front of me and almost hit me head on. Somehow I knew by looking at her that she was going to insanely do what she should not do in moderate traffic and I hit the break in time. Possibly not all luck is bad luck. And I am not Joe Btfsplk. At least, not today.
I am still in lazy mode, not quite making the effort for 500 words… But, in my defense, a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words. So, the picture above should count as 1,042 words because of the words in it.
Poetry is like that. Even bad poetry. This doggerel verse is capable of meaning far more things than it specifically, literally states. But I shouldn’t point that out. You should never explain a poem… or defend a poem… a poem should simply be. Even a bad poem.
And there are those who will say it is not a bad poem. It speaks to simple farmer wisdom, the kind I learned while yet a boy in Iowa 50 years ago. Did you realize that I made this meme on a photo of my own unweeded flower garden, grown in the unforgiving Texas heat?
That’s all there is to today’s post. A picture/poem… a tiny bit of wisdom… on the first hot Sunday in June.
Coyotes live in the city. You hardly ever see them, though. This one was entirely too interested in me walking my dog at around six thirty in the morning. You can see the hungry look in his eyes. It made him brave and brassy enough to walk up right behind us on the sidewalk in the park just after the sun had come up. I got a chance to look him right in the foxy-eyed stare he was giving us. He had fully planned to snatch Jade, my Cardigan corgi from behind if I hadn’t turned around in time.
Old Wiley Coyote would’ve successfully snatched her too, if I hadn’t noticed him out of the corner of my eye and turned around on him. But shouting at him only made him back off, not flee. He was a big coyote, big enough to give me a really bad day if he wanted to go through with the planned attack. Who knows? Maybe he breakfasted on old men before too.
Jade bristled at him and talked really tough, but she was scared witless. And he was obviously bold and bad enough to be confident that he didn’t need to immediately run away. He stayed there looking at us with his evil yellow wolf eyes. He stayed long enough to allow me to take a picture of him. And he didn’t leave until we chased him just a bit to show him we were not afraid (even though we really were). (The dog told me after that my face had gone ghost white.)
Being stalked by a hungry coyote early in the morning is sort of a bad omen to begin a day with, especially when so many other things have been going wrong for me. But, as always, I laugh about it and write about it and make it seem of little consequence by doing so. Still, I am not a road runner. And that coyote had murder on his mind.
2017 was not a good year for me financially. And nuclear winter could also be referred to as, “an unfortunate change in the weather”. I was sued by Bank of America because I had the audacity to try to reduce my debt with the aid of a debt reduction company. The lawyer originally assured me that I would probably get a reduced settlement bill. Instead, I lost the case and had to declare bankruptcy. The city was objecting to the swimming pool needing repair and forced us to have it removed at our own expense at the same time the BoA lawyers were eating my whole pie. And then, when so many were getting at least some tax relief from Trump’s tax cut for rich folk, I had to pay over a thousand dollars because of retroactive accounting errors.
I also got a week’s vacation in the hospital that cost lots of money because it was a an emergency room visit under heart attack conditions, but determined that I wasn’t actually having a heart attack without the added benefit of telling me what went wrong that put me in the hospital in the first place. I am now suffering numerous warning signs of heart attack or stroke without the confidence that I can go to the doctor without another hospital vacation I can’t pay for.
I deal with it by biting the bullets, paying the bills, and buying myself bargain toys. The Astronaut Barbie play set came from the Walmart post-Christmas Clearance Sale shelves. It cost me less than half of its original price.
The Captain Cassian Andor action figure with barely pose-able inaction joints cost me less than $4 at Ross Dress For Less while I was waiting for my wife to do her shopaholic thing. And Goodwill Barbie got repaired and dressed, even though I had to borrow G.I. Joe pants to keep her from being a bottomless bare semi-nudist. Toys don’t make the headaches go away, but I am a little bit less grumpy and foul-tempered when I play with them. Plastic toys tend to treat you a whole lot better than bankers or Trump or city pool inspectors do.
“Geez, Mickey,” you will say, “Why-ever would you write such a gloomy pessimist’s poem?”
“Because I prepare myself for the worst. The worst in this case is that the President of the United States says the solution to school shootings is putting guns in the hands of teachers. He wants those of us whose hands were made for using chalk on chalkboards, and hearts were made for talking to kids, learning who they are, and guiding them toward a better future, to pick up a gun and accurately take out a threat coming in with legally purchased weapons of war that can shoot more rounds faster than any weapon that the school system will be able to put in my hands. It is a terrible idea, and he is going to make it happen just because he stupidly can.”
One time at a middle school I taught at, a child did bring a gun to school. It was a handgun concealed in a back pack. He apparently meant to shoot his former girlfriend. But, as kids will, he told friends about it. They told a teacher. The principal called the police and confiscated the back pack. Not only did the target survive without being shot at, the perpetrator, after his brush with the law and time served, was able to right his boat again and sail on into adulthood, a job, a wife, and kids. He even told me later that he was grateful to have been stopped from ruining his life, even possibly ending his life. The problem was solved without a shooting because of teacher skills, being able to talk to kids, being approachable to talk to about problems and unsettling rumors, and knowing where to turn for the proper help at the proper time.
Of course, we were lucky on that one. Stopping that shooter was not 100% guaranteed. And it happened in the 90’s during the assault rifle ban. He was immature enough and excitable enough to have killed many with a more powerful weapon.
If it were up to me to become a weapon-toting defender of the innocent, I am fully aware of how little chance I have to be successful at such a thing. I am a lousy shot. If I had to face down an AR-15 with the cheap school-district pistol, I would become one more obvious target that any shooter will obviously take out in seconds. That’s the best possible outcome for the school, because my missing shot would probably hit some poor innocent bystander.
And, of course, conservative Facebook friends won’t stop insisting that teachers need to be armed. A good guy with a gun can defeat a bad guy with a gun, you know… assuming the SWAT team doesn’t shoot the good guy, mistaking him for the bad guy.
So, even though I don’t like it, I guess I have to be prepared for schools to become battlegrounds. Every day a shootout at the OK Corral. I just hope Wyatt Earp is on my side.
And it really is raining outside today. Cold, February rain… and it depresses me.
Catch a Falling Star 
Lyrical Lessons from Life
I am still in lazy mode, not quite making the effort for 500 words… But, in my defense, a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words. So, the picture above should count as 1,042 words because of the words in it.
Poetry is like that. Even bad poetry. This doggerel verse is capable of meaning far more things than it specifically, literally states. But I shouldn’t point that out. You should never explain a poem… or defend a poem… a poem should simply be. Even a bad poem.
And there are those who will say it is not a bad poem. It speaks to simple farmer wisdom, the kind I learned while yet a boy in Iowa 50 years ago. Did you realize that I made this meme on a photo of my own unweeded flower garden, grown in the unforgiving Texas heat?
That’s all there is to today’s post. A picture/poem… a tiny bit of wisdom… on the first hot Sunday in June.
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