Category Archives: photo paffoonies

Olfactory Story Telling

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My dog Jade

While walking the dog yesterday, we struck up a conversation about writing and being a writer that proved once and for all that DOGS REALLY DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE!

She turned around on the end of her leash and looked at me with that woeful you-don’t-feed-me-enough look on her little well-fed face.  “You know, I was reading your blog today, and I think I know how to make you a well-known writer and best-selling author.”

“Oh, really?” I said.  “Since when do you know anything about being a writer or marketing fiction?”

“Well, you do remember that I wrote a couple of blog posts for you already.”

“True.  But I can’t afford to do that again.   You type with your tongue and it leaves the keyboard all sticky.  I haven’t gotten it truly clean and working properly again since that last time.  If you are asking to write another post, you can forget it.”

“Well, sorry about that.  But I do think I know how to make your writing more popular with a bigger audience.”.

“Oh?  How could you possibly know that?”

“Hey, talking dog here!  That has to count for something, doesn’t it?  Don’t you think people would be amazed to learn about things from a dog’s perspective?”

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“Nobody’s going to believe I have a talking dog.  That isn’t something within the realm of what is normal.  They are all going to think I am just a crazy old man.”

“Well, you are a crazy old man.  I can’t help that.  But what if you told stories from a dog’s perspective?  You know, things that only a dog could’ve come up with?”

“Oh, like what, for instance?”

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Why does the neighbor’s dog always smell like burritos?

“Well, you know that more than half of what a dog perceives about the world she gets through her sense of smell?”

“Okay…”

“Like that spot on the grass over there.  Boy dog.  Handsome border collie… ate three hotdogs about four days ago.  Ooh!  He smells perfect!”

“You’re talking about poop smells again, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes.  But I can also tell you about the pigeons that were in that live oak tree there yesterday.”

“Oh?  What color were they?”

“I don’t know… gray maybe?”

“Bird doo.  You are smelling old bird poop!  You want me to write about poop more?”

“Well, no… not exactly.  But if you could tell your stories through the sense of smell more…  that would be unique and different.  People would like that a lot because it’s never really been done before.”

“You do understand that I can’t use my laptop to write smells?  There are no words I could use that will automatically put smells into the reader’s nose.”

“Well, but if you could invent one…”

“According to you, it would be mostly poop smells anyway.  Who wants to sniff that?”

“It would make your blog more popular with dogs.”

“But dogs don’t read!”

“How do you know for sure?  You believed me when I said I read your blog today.”

“Well, you certainly got me there.  Now, don’t we have some important business to take care of?”

“Yes, but…  You see that squirrel over there?”

“Yes, so?”

“So one day soon, I’m gonna eat him!”

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Filed under family dog, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, photo paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor

Toys

A new doll bought to combat depression.  Part of a collection of Tinkerbell fairy dolls.

A new doll bought to combat depression. Part of a collection of Tinkerbell fairy dolls.

I have basically written an awful awful lot about my toys.  (The awful is repeated on purpose because I have been having a really awful time this week for reasons I will post about if I survive them).  And there is a reason a retired old man who seems to be rotting away into a second childhood is so obsessed with toys.  Playing is my primary goal for every day right now because darkness is closing in and, while play for children is practice for life in the future, play for an old man can be the reanimation of all the good things in life.

A Lego steam engine and a 1000-piece puzzle that my wife bought me to cheer me up.

A Lego steam engine and a 1000-piece puzzle that my wife bought me to cheer me up.

I have been a toy-maker and a toy-restorer as a part of my over-all quest to be an artist.  I even made some money with an online e-Bay store where I sold collectibles and restored toys.  I bought toys from Goodwill and re-sale stores, repaired them and cleaned them, and sold them for twice the sum I bought them for.  I also made a few porcelain dolls in a kiln I bought in the 1990’s when my mother and I became porcelain doll-makers.  I would show you some of my babies, but the real live children have managed to break all the dolls except for a couple my mother made.  (Well, toys are made to be played with, right?)  But I do still have many of the repaired and cleaned toys that I either didn’t sell or couldn’t bring myself to part with.

Toys in every corner of the house, dang it!

Toys in every corner of the house, dang it!

I have also been a model railroader since childhood, spending countless hours building tunnels and repainting rolling stock, and making buildings and scenery from kits and plaster.  I haven’t rebuilt my layout since moving north away from South Texas, but maybe I will get to that too in my retirement and second childhood.

I do still have some trolley street scenes on the tops of book cases.

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And toys serve as memory objects.  They can do magic with time and space.  I have saved many of my toys from childhood.  Toys were precious and mostly Christmas and birthday gifts.  I learned to save and salvage them because they treated me well, and… well, I owed them the same in return.  My own children were not like that.  They loved toys to pieces and even sometimes ate them, to a point where many of them were un-fixable junk.  But toys bring things back to life from the long-gone past.  Take for instance the toy in this next picture;

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No, I don’t mean the baby doll.  He grew up and joined the Marine Corps.  I mean the stuffed white tiger in the background. That was the first toy I ever bought for baby Dorin.  And it is still with us, though not as fluffy and pretty as it was in the picture.  My daughter, the Princess, inherited it and christened it “Baby Tiger”.  That is, of course, still its name to this very day.  I look at it and see all three of them… my super-destructo toy-flinging and clockwork-wrecking children.  And it is the toys that we have all played with that still link us all together even though they are almost grown.

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Filed under humor, photo paffoonies, playing with toys

This is What Happens When You Leave a Crazy Old Retired Guy Alone With a Doll Collection and a Camera

Yes, I know this is supposed to be a Saturday Art Day Post, but you can make art in many different ways. That can include pictures made with a camera while I play with dolls… er… action figures and try horrifically to be funny. There is an art to that, right? Maybe?

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Filed under action figures, artwork, cartoony Paffooney, comic book heroes, comic strips, doll collecting, humor, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, playing with toys

Conversations With the Ghost of Miss M…

DSCN5148Beneath the old cottonwood tree there once stood a one-room school house.  My mother went to school there as a girl, a short walk from home along the Iowa country road.  Misty mornings on a road between cornfields and soybean fields can often conjure up ghosts.

I took this morning walk with the dog while I was visiting my old Iowegian home, and I was writing my fictional story Magical Miss Morgan in my head, not yet having had time to sit down and write.  I was reflecting on times long past and a school long gone, though Miss Morgan’s story is really about my own teaching experience.  Miss Morgan is in many ways me.  But I am not a female teacher.  I am a goofy old man.  So, why am I writing the main character as a female?

Well, the ghosts from the old school house heard that and decided to send an answer.

Miss Mennenga was my third grade and fourth grade teacher from the Rowan school.  The building I attended her classes in has been gone for thirty years.  Miss M herself has long since passed to the other side.  So when she appeared at the corner…  Yes, I know… I have said countless times that I don’t believe in ghosts, but she had the same flower-patterned dress, the glasses, the large, magnified brown eyes that could look into your soul and see all your secrets, yet love you enough to not tell them to anyone else.  Suddenly, I knew where the character of Miss Morgan had actually come from.  I also realized why I was drawn to teaching in the first place.  Teachers teach you more than just long division, lessons about the circulatory systems of frogs, and the Battle of Gettysburg…  They shape your soul.

“You remember getting in trouble for doing jokes in class when you were supposed to be studying your spelling words?”

“Yes, Miss M, but I didn’t make any noise.. they were pantomime jokes that I stole from watching Red Skelton on TV.”

“But you pulled your heart out of your chest and made it beat in your hand.  You had to know that was going to make the boys smirk and the girls giggle.”

“I did.  But making them happy was part of the reason God put me there.”

“But not during spelling.  I was trying to teach math to fourth graders.  You interrupted.”

“You made that point.  I still remember vividly.  You let me read the story to the class out loud afterwords.  You said I needed to use my talent for entertaining to help others learn, not distract them from learning.”

“I was very proud of the way you learned that lesson.”

“I tried very hard as a teacher to never miss a teachable moment like that.  It was part of the reason that God put you there.”

“And I did love to hear you read aloud to the class.  You were always such an expressive reader, Michael.  Do you remember what book it was?”

“It was Ribsy, by Beverly Cleary.   How could I have forgotten that until now?  You made me love reading out loud so much that I always did it in my own classes, at every opportunity.”

I remembered the smile above all else as the lingering image faded from my view through the eyes of memory.  She had a warm and loving smile.  I can only hope my goofy grin didn’t scare too many kids throughout my career.

10931430_1392374101067123_2624334665191497015_n I needed a post for 1000 Voices that was about reconnecting with someone.  I could’ve used any number of real life examples from everything that has happened to me since poor health forced me to retire from teaching  I could’ve written any number of things that would not make me feel all sad and goopy about retiring and would not make me cry at my keyboard again like I am doing now… like I did all through that silly novel I wrote… even during the funny parts.  But I had to choose this.  A debt had to be paid.  I love you, Miss M… and I had to pay it forward.

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Filed under 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion, humor, photo paffoonies

Dolly Pics

I like taking pictures of my doll collection. Those pictures are then qualified for Art Day posting. So, here are random pictures of dolls, most of which are from the doll shelf in my bedroom.

Not all of my dolls are on the doll shelf.

Chilly Willy here is a carnival prize that was probably won in a basketball-toss game at Six Flags and purchased by me for five dollars in a garage sale. He is technically not a doll. He is a stuffed animal.

So, let’s get back to dolls.

More stuffed animals, as well as ponies and paper dolls to add to this immense doll collection.
Creepy Captain Action lurks behind mint=in-box Emma Watson as Belle while he looks for his lost hat. But Bo Peep and Wonder Woman are keeping an eye on him.
I had to stop here as the caveman Minion had to go and start a fight with Peter Rabbit. Leave it to a mindless Minion… “Oobah Dee?” “Sorry, boss.”

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, Disney, doll collecting, humor, Paffooney, photo paffoonies

My Mother’s Dolls

Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer

Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer

You may already know about my doll-collecting mania.  You may have already called the mental health people to come take care of the problem, and they just haven’t arrived at my door yet with the white coat that has the extra long sleeves.  But you may not know that my mother is a doll-maker and has something to do with my doll-collecting hoarding disorder.

In the early 1990’s my mother and I put our money together and bought a kiln while we were visiting my sister’s family out in California.  It wasn’t the most expensive model, but it wasn’t the cheapest, either.  We both had enough experience with ceramics that we didn’t want to buy a burning box that was merely going to blow our porcelain projects to kingdom come.  Mother had doll-making friends in Texas who taught her about firing greenware and glazing and porcelain paint and all the other arcane stuff you have to know to make expensive hand-made dolls.  Now, honestly, at the start we could’ve made some money at it selling to seriously ill doll collectors and other kooks, but we were not willing to part with our early art, and by the time we were ready to do more than just have an expensive hobby, everyone who would’ve paid money for the product was making their own.  So dreams of commercial success were supplanted by the hobbyist’s mania that made more and more charming little things to occasionally display at the county fair.

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The two dolls I have left to share on my blog from that era were both crafted by my mother.  She lovingly fired the porcelain body parts, painted the faces by hand, and created the wardrobe on her Singer sewing machine.  I made some dolls too, but never with the wondrous craft and care that made my mother’s dolls beyond compare.

Tom Sawyer was originally a boy doll who was supposed to be able to hold a model train in his hands.  My mother had the pattern for the little engineer’s uniform and hat that she would use on another doll instead.  He is named after the Tom Sawyer clothing pattern that my mother bought and sewed together to dress him in.  He has a cloth and stuffing body underneath his clothes together with porcelain head, hands, and bare feet.

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The other doll I have left to brag unctuously about is a doll named Nicole after the niece my wife and I have whom this doll bares a striking resemblance to.  She displays a beautiful little girl’s sun dress with quilted accent colors that my mother sewed from scratch with the help of a pattern she was truly fond of and used more than once.

These dolls were gifts to my wife and I, presented shortly after my mother bought out my share of the kiln when she retired and moved back to the frosty land of the Iowegians.  I haven’t kept them as thoroughly dusted and cobweb-free as they deserve because I have been a somewhat lazy and slovenly son… but I do love them almost as much as (and sometimes more depending on recent behavior) my own children.  (After all, porcelain kids rarely make a mess, overspend allowances, or hog the television too much.)

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As If It Weren’t Enough…

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THE WISDOM OF THE LITTLE FOOL

A fool can’t really sum up all of life in a sentence.

But a fool tries.

A fool can’t really say something in immortal words.

Because a fool dies.

A fool can’t really do the job of the wise.

But never-the-less, the fool applies.

But a fool can write a really dumb poem,

And let it sit to draw some flies.

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Updates in Downtown Toonerville

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Toonerville is really all about creating art with my HO model railroad toys.  So, here’s a picture of the newest arrangement of the downtown as it now sits in my bedroom/studio.

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The buildings are a combination of models I put together and plaster buildings that I bought unpainted and then painted them.

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The Ghost Busters van in front of Mike’s Farmer’s Market was recently bought for less than a dollar and added to collection.  Just in time too.  There is apparently a ghost in Mike’s clock tower.

The two Thomas the Tank Engine toys were recently added after they were recovered from a junk pile in the garage.

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Here’s a shot of the Toonerville Trolley that was the first trolley added to my HO train layout back in the early 70’s.

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So, this is a small bit of insight into the workings of a toy collector and artist with excessive amounts of hoarding disorder.  And I am sharing with you the most recent pictures I have made of the things in my collection.

 

 

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Filed under collecting, humor, photo paffoonies, Toonerville, Trains

Dows, Iowa

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Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background

There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood.  You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are.  Dows is not the town where I grew up.  But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them.  It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.

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You have no idea what this is, right?

Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives.  My cousin and her second husband were there.  Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there.  We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!)  The experience taught me a simple lesson.  We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.

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You don’t order Coke here.

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We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives.  So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.

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The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.

We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us.  We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe.  We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead.  It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.

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There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.

We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us.  Nothing lasts forever.  Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing.  A simple word for that is “farming”.  Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after.  But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond.  And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.

 

 

 

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Filed under autobiography, family, farm boy, farming, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Iowa, photo paffoonies

Spotted Trains

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I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains.  Where did that come from?  It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.

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Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.

My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid.  And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout.   I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way.  I have to explain all of that somewhere down line.  But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains.  They are a link to our past.  They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.

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When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.

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This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.

Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me.  When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.

When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces.  Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof.  This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender).  I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth.  I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks.  And I can’t help being a total train nut.  Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut.  But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.

 

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Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains