I learned from the urologist today that I am going to have to have surgery on my prostate. It is not cancer (hopefully), but it will have to cut a new channel for emptying my bladder, a procedure eerily nicknamed “a Rotor Rooter job.”
I learned from YouTube today that an ICE agent in Minnesota murdered a woman in her car, and the government is lying about what clearly happened, according to bystanders’ videos.
Today was not the best day for Michael. And Mickey isn’t happy either.
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When I was still alive and still teaching, maximizing and managing time was an incredibly important part of the day. You had to activate learners with an attention step, a lesson focus that grabbed them. Usually that had to follow a warm-up, something you got them to do as soon as you had smiled at them at the doorway, offered to shake their hand, and then pulled them into the classroom to do some work for you. fifteen minutes at the start of the class to rev up mental engines and get the gears turning… shake out the rust and the cobwebs that accumulate the instant the final bell rang in the previous class. I timed that part of class down to the second with my pocket watch… or phone in later years. Then, once the engines started, the focus is in place, you introduce the learning objective. Never more than ten minutes… timed to the second… you give the explanation, the road map of the day ahead, the instruction. Then for the next ten to fifteen minutes you let them discover stuff. In groups, with a partner, teacher to class, student to class, or (rarely) individually, they must apply what you pointed out and figure something out. It could be complicated, but probably it was simple. All answers are welcome and accepted… because all answers will be evaluated and you learn more from wrong answers than you do from correct guesses. Evaluation comes in the five to ten minutes at the end when you evaluate. “What have I learned today?” You try your hardest to pin something new to the mental note-board hanging on the brain walls of each and every student. Depending on how much or how few minutes you are given before the final bell kills the lesson for the day, you have to put the big pink ribbon on it. That tightly-wound lesson cycle goes on all day, repeated as many times as you have classes. In that time you have to be teacher, policeman, friend, devil’s advocate, entertainer, counselor, psychotherapist, chief explainer, and sometimes God. And you time it to the second by your pocket watch.
I miss being the rabbit holding the BIG PENCIL. Now that I am retired, I am no longer on the clock… no longer subject to careful time management. My pocket watch is broken and lying in a box somewhere in my library. I live now in non-consecutive time periods of sleep and illness and writing and playing with dolls. I have entered a second childhood now. Not really a simple one because of diabetes and arthritis and COPD and psoriasis and all the other wonderful things that old age makes possible. But a childhood free of school politics and mandates from the school board and from the State. A childhood where I can once again dream and imagine and create and play. That’s what this post is if you haven’t already figured it out. I am playing with words and ideas. They are my toys. Toys like this one;
This, of course, is Tim, the turtleboy of irony, holding his magic flatiron that he uses for ironing out irony. He is flattening it out now with a cartoony Paffooney and wickedly waggled words. Ironically, I have often taught students to write just like this, making connections between words and pictures and ideas through free association and fast-writing. Have you learned anything from today’s retired-teacher post? If you did, it is ironic, because you were never meant to from the start.
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Last week, a white-out blizzard hit Iowa, my first winter back in Iowa since 1981. It was the perfect time to finish reading my best novel, Snow Babies.
I have reread this book at least seven times since finishing the final edit. The humor still makes me laugh. Some of the most poignant moments still make me cry. And I recognize my former students in some of the main characters. Not that any of those same students could recognize themselves after my total rewrite of who they actually are. The key is the inner goodness that is evident in each of the young-adult characters. I know who they are better than they themselves do. And, of course, I recognize the blizzard. I went through it long ago in the 1970s. I can still savor the complex and well-woven multi-level plot. It really is my best shot at writing a memorable story.
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And so, 2026 begins. My seventieth year. Will I get to live it? Will the Pumpkinhead Dicktater be thrown off our backs? Or will the evil Empire tighten its suffocating grip? Will I publish at least one more book? Will the sun continue to shine without withering the world?
The adventure will be in finding out the answers.
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This year has been the worst year of my life. I was hospitalized in May and came out of the hospital with a pacemaker implanted under my collarbone. I was in the Emergency Room five times this year. Two of those were probably not necessary. The other three prevented my death.
My ability to write and complete novel projects has nearly disappeared. One e-book novella was the only thing I published. I successfully moved to the farm in Iowa, separating from my wife in an attempt to live a little longer, leaving her to finish her teaching career in Texas by herself.
The year could only be worse if I die tonight, before the year ends.
But for now, I am still hopeful of more good things to come before the end. Did I live the life I was supposed to live? How could I be wrong about that? I am not. Life was good.
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The little red bird that never flies away when the winter comes… is a symbol of who I am. I lasted for 31 years as a public school teacher no matter how hard it got to be, no matter how many brick walls I ran into, and no matter how little respect the world gives me for what I have done. I persisted in a difficult relationship for thirty years because it didn’t matter if she didn’t love me. I loved her and I made a commitment. And no matter how cold the relationship has become, it will continue. I don’t fly away when the snow begins to fall.
Life is hard. Terrible people do terrible things, and they seem to always get what they want and make the huge profits. Good and lovely people who sacrifice their comfort and wealth to help others always seem to be the ones who get kicked whenever they are down. Still, people are basically good. The depths of evil some of them sink to are the exception, not the rule. The heights of behavior and accomplishment are achieved by more people than the depths of the sinkers and the vile. Some people are amazing, inspiring, and the light the majority of us live by.
This world breaks many a soul under the hammer of God, but His forge is also where heroes are created from the truest of steel. There is hardship and pain and disappointment everywhere… constantly. But when you balance it all… life is good.
This is the philosophy I have come to live by. Work hard and take your lumps and wounds with grace and determination. And when it is done, celebrate. You may call me a fool or an idiot. I cannot prove I am not. But in the end, I know what happiness truly is.
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As the snow and the wind roar around the house, I have a chance to reflect on a difficult holiday week.
On Christmas Day, a little after 11:00 pm, I had to make the choice to ask my sisters and brother-in-law to get me to the ER. My constipation had reached the point of pain and impending explosion. It was a rough ride to a Cedar Rapids hospital that I had never been to before.
That resulted in a couple of hours of having my blood vessels, innards, and personal nudity exposed to female nurses, doctors, and technicians. I had a CAT scan, blood drawn, and finally, rancid-tasting medicine that had to all be drunk, even though the vaguely orange-tasting stuff was vile enough to be hard to get down.
So, after we got back to my sister’s house, four explosive expulsions of horrid liquid corruption over four hours improved my health significantly. Four hours of sleep the next morning helped a bit, too.
We got back home in the Belmond area later on Friday, in time to get to the grocery store before the oncoming blizzard got to us. The snow would start today, on Sunday. Around 9:00 a.m., the snow began blowing, probably about three inches’ worth, with almost all of it suspended in the air on the wind.
I called my daughter in Texas and joked about freezing to death, saw that the Cardinals lost their seventh football game in a row, and finally hunkered down under blankets to survive the heavy snow.
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When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.
I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”
“No,” I said, “people would never believe it.”
“Well, it is supposed to be a joke. But you are right. No one would ever think you were actually smart enough to write down what a dog tells you.”
“Yes, it’s a good thing for me that you know how to speak in English. I could never translate and transcribe Barkinese.”
So, I began thinking of where some of my best ideas came from.
Some of my stories come directly from dreams that I had. The nightmare about being chased down a street in Rowan at midnight by a large black dog with red eyes was an actual dream I had in the 1970s. So was the nightmare of the werewolf climbing out of the TV during a late-night viewing of Lon Chaney in The Wolfman.
Those two dreams together were the start of the story that became my recently published novel, The Baby Werewolf. Both dreams visit the protagonist in the story I wrote almost as if they were his dreams and not actually mine.
Snow Babies, the best novel I have ever written, was based on two different blizzards I experienced, first as a child in the 1960’s, and then again as a high school kid in the 1970s. Each blizzard involved being snowed in for a week at someone else’s house. As a child, I was stuck at Grandpa’s farm place until the snow plows could finally do their work and open the gravel roads. As a teen, I was stuck in Great Grandma’s retirement apartment near the high school in Belmond.
That novel also is based on the next source of ideas;
I can’t think of any story I have written that isn’t based on real people I have known in one way or another. Valerie in the novel above is based on three different girls I have known or taught. One of those three is my own daughter. The four orphans on the bus in that story are all boys from my junior high classes in the 1980s.
Lucky Catbird Sandman, the hobo who wears the quilted coat of many colors, is based on the poet Walt Whitman, whom I knew well in a past life, and my own shiftless, storyteller self. Some characters are just so key to a story idea that they themselves are the reason for a book to exist.
In conclusion, the dog doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. None of these things are really where I get my ideas. But I am out of time. I will have to write about the bottle imp another day. No, really. A magical imp trapped in a bottle. You can make one of those give you ideas for novels with only a slight risk to your life and soul.
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“Hurry, Grandpa! Before the snow is all gone! We gotta make a snowman, and we will name him Fred!”
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It never flies away when winter comes.
When raptors hunt high above, it wears bright red in a white world.
It sings to rule its territory, especially in Spring
When troubles come, the red bird digs in.
And my troubles double daily.
I must be a redbird, too.
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Catch a Falling Star 