The recent Iowa trip has been more or less a metaphor for my life as a whole. I don’t mean to be funny but… wait just a minute! Yes I do. This is corn-shucking humor blog, after all! But the metaphor is still there. I was born in Iowa.
Dawn broke over the farm yesterday where Uncle Harry used to live with his wife, Aunt Jean, and their three kids, Karen, Bob, and Tom. Bob was in my class at school. We got into a fight once over who should be Robin Hood when we were playing with all the cousins in the old brooder house on Grandpa Aldrich’s farm, the farm where mom and dad now live. It was a fight that got so intense that we were throwing broke flower-pot shards at each other in anger. Bob’s hand got cut so badly that he had to go to Belmond and get stitches. Dang, was I in trouble after that. Bob’s version, the shard I threw hit him right in the hand, directly between his thumb and pointer finger and cut him. My version, he cut himself as he threw a pot shard at me, and it cut him leaving his hand. Everyone believed Bob, of course. I’m the nutty kid that always told the stories that gave the girls nightmares. And those stories were never true… mostly. So they couldn’t believe my version.
Mom and my sister Nancy designed and executed the painted barn quilt on the work shed that used to be the chicken house.
Bucolic farm scene to represent my Iowegian past.
But life, like days and car trips, moves on. We had to pack up the little Ford Escort that brought me home and take off once more for Texas. I was a little bit worried about the dog. She didn’t poop as much in Iowa as she normally does in Texas. Well, we figured that out on the way back. She pooped a lot of funny colors at every rest-stop dog park on the way back to Texas because of all the people food she had eaten. She got fed better in Iowa apparently. And it was stuff like stolen Doritos and other stuff that is so not-good-for-her.
But going back to Texas with two kids and a dog is a lot like me after college, moving to Texas via Trailways bus in order to become a teacher. I got a job in Cotulla, Texas, the place where LBJ taught way back when he was a young Texan and still working at being good at telling the REALLY BIG LIES. I think I mentioned this before, but all the kids in the painting above were real kids I taught in my first year teaching (except for the kid sleeping.,, nobody did anything but hop around and yell at me my first year as a teacher… including the principal). Oh, and the window is imaginary. I taught for three years in a windowless concrete box with only buzzing fluorescent lights to keep the monsters from killing and eating me… or each other. Within a decade of that first class, two of the boys had been to prison, three were already dead, and one became a star lineman for the Texas A&M football team.
And over time I got closer and closer to my goal. My skills became bigger and better as a teacher. I grew in wisdom and power. Honestly, the grass in the picture was closer to the camera than I was, so I am looming in the sky above the photographer, not tiny and smaller than the grass. So maybe I better claim the picture was taken by fairies. Yeah, that’s it. Down there in the grass. Iowegian fairies got a hold of my camera and took the picture. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. (See. I never really learned to get away with the REALLY BIG LIES. A teacher, as a storyteller, has to also be a truth-teller.)
So we returned to Texas, and that is probably where the sunset of my life will take place. I am retired from teaching now. I am blogging and telling lies instead… well, writing fiction. I should have another book published soon. And it has fairies in it. So maybe there is still time to pull off the REALLY BIG LIES.
*****
ege. It struck me that it was hauntingly beautiful… but maybe I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
Catch a Falling Star 
Evidence There is a Living God
A humorist does well to remember that you should not joke about religion. God does have a sense of humor. But it is a sense of humor backed by the ever-present threat of being struck by lightning. And among religious types, a sense of humor is about as common as a nudist wandering into the midst of a porcupine convention just as the thistle-pigs begin arguing about whether or not God is actually a porcupine.
On the question of God and whether we actually have one, or whether he’s alive or not, we often turn to philosophers for insight. Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher with a hard to spell name. People often turn to him for evidence of god and the accompanying God-thoughts.
But it is entirely possible that Nietzsche did not get the absolute last word on the matter.
Nietzsche was a bit of a poozer when it comes to questions about God. He said that God is dead because the big guy in the sky didn’t seem to be active in the world. At least, not since Bible times.
And if we are supposed to believe that God Jehovah is real because he’s written down in a magic book that so very many people believe in, then why isn’t god Thor to be believed in anymore? He’s written down in some very old books too. And isn’t the story about how Thor almost drank the ocean dry on a bet just as impressive as Jehovah parting the Red Sea for Moses?
But Nietzsche wasn’t a complete and total poozer. He did have some wonderful things to say along with the klunky and hard-to-understand God stuff he said.
It takes a big mind in a big head to think of making the stars dance just by generating chaos-waves in your big old head. That’s the kind of big idea that could become a religion of its own… if Nietzsche wasn’t already dead, of course.
But I tend to believe there really is a living God. My sister posted an old picture of some of the reasons why on Facebook today.
My thing one, thing two, and thing three (in the baby carrier with her feet up) are all the reason I need to believe in miracles. Thing one was recently promoted to Corporal in the Marines. Thing Two has applied for a job at Walmart, and thing three will be a sophomore in high school this fall. Grandma Aldrich is in the middle between thing one and my sister’s girl. The little blond one on the left is my sister’s kid too. All of them are miracles in human form. Grandma Aldrich is gone now. She died not long after this picture was taken. But her life resonates through mine, and through me to my children and nieces and nephews also. I would not be me if it wasn’t for her.
So there is proof of a living God. Everything that exists cannot be erased from existence, even when it disappears from memory. So we are all eternal. We all have touched the stars… at least, in a metaphorical sense. And our bodies, science has proved, are made of star stuff in a literal sense. So it is not too much of a stretch to believe we can make the stars dance.
And if my quasi-religious joking around has God thinking about how to apply a good thunderbolt, well, I was making fun of Nietzsche… wasn’t I?
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Tagged as autobiography, friedrich nietzsche, having faith, making fun of Nietzsche, religion