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I barely slept last night.  I am angry at the world right now.  I spent good money to drain the pool before we left for a two-week trip to Iowa.  It is cracked and needs repairs that I can only afford to do myself because the expense is more than I paid for my car.  Even removing the pool will break my fragile little retirement budget.

Well, when I got back from Iowa, the city inspector showed up immediately to look at the progress I made with the pool.  It had standing water in it.  The danged weather dumped in almost as much as I had taken out before leaving.  So I got a ticket.  That I can pay for.  But he decided I deserved no more time to work on the cracks.  He filed a court case against me for the pool not being up to code.  If I don’t have it fixed and running in 20 days, I am out more than 8 thousand.  The city will come in and do the work with a contractor, taking the pool out, and charging me by placing a tax lean against the house.  If I can’t fix the @#$%! pool and can’t get it done ahead of the hearing, I may end up losing the house.

Sorry.  I am not feeling very funny today.  The humor will come later because humor is how I heal.  But I am mad at the world right now.

The Iowa Trip is now over.  Time to go home.  We had homemade ice cream this evening with uncles, aunts, and cousins.  The drive back to Texas awaits.

Yes, I probably won’t be using this road to get there.  This one is north of the family farm and I will be coming from the south.  But, it is time to head home again to the Land Where the Tall Corn Grows.  My parents are aging.  My sister will be visiting there too.  I need to spend some of my retirement time in the place where I was born and raised.

I am much more likely to take this road, US Highway 3, that takes us from Interstate 35 to Rowan, Iowa.  The town is over the hill in the blue distance.

Travelling is the reason for today’s short post.  We are going to try to make the long journey from Texas to Iowa in a day.  We’ve done it many times before.

So, wish me smooth sailing.  I know I am probably going by car, but it is cool to imagine taking one of the airships from our D & D game.

Already twice today my computer has interrupted my blog-post-writing with a computer brain fart instantly erasing everything I had written and was unable to save.  It reduced the essay to nothing but a title twice.  So, have already written my 500 words twice today, I settled on a simpler, shorter post.  Page Publishing sent me back the proofs of my novel Magical Miss Morgan again.  Once again they made new proof-reading errors that changed something so that I have to go to the trouble of changing it back.  It isn’t that the chimpanzees have valid improvements to show me and I am just being Grumpy Mike about changing.  They are making silly omission errors and showing me sentences that don’t make sense any more.

Page Publishing was a big mistake.  But since I have already paid them and am close to getting published, I will push forward rather than hiring a lawyer to sue them.

On Cartoon Network’s Looney Tunes show, Daffy Duck has decided he wants to be a wizard.  He even had business cards printed to be one. 

Being a wizard is almost as easy as that.  But becoming one is not what Daffy thinks it is.

wizard (n.) early 15c., “philosopher, sage,” from Middle English wys “wise” (see wise (adj.)) + -ard. Compare Lithuanian zynyste “magic,” zynys “sorcerer,” zyne “witch,” all from zinoti “to know.” The ground sense is perhaps “to know the future.” The meaning “one with magical power, one proficient in the occult sciences” did not emerge distinctly until c. 1550, the distinction between philosophy and magic being blurred in the Middle Ages. As a slang word meaning “excellent” it is recorded from 1922.  http://www.etymonline.com

The word comes from wisdom.  Being one requires wisdom.  Being one requires you to look to the future and use your hard-won experience to predict how the future will unfold, and what you can do about it to benefit yourself and others.  You know, “magic”.

But to become a wise-one, a wizard, requires hard experience.  It is possible that Daffy has acquired some over time.  He’s certainly been subjected to all sorts of slapstick cartoon injuries and insults over time.

Remember this one?  Daffy swallows dynamite, drinks gasoline, this bottle of nitroglycerin, and then throws a match down his throat.  The results are spectacular, but Daffy has to admit that he can only do the act once.

So maybe he hasn’t become a wizard yet.  To be a wizard, you have to learn from your hard experience.  You have to gain knowledge in order to work spells and do magic.

For instance, my struggles to breathe from COPD have taught me to use magic potions like ginger tea and French onion soup to open my air passages wider and make breathing easier.   When the siding on the back of the house deteriorated to the point that the city wouldn’t tolerate it any more, and I couldn’t afford to pay a contractor to fix it, I googled spells for siding repair on the internet, using articles and YouTube videos to magically fix the damage myself.  I also consulted other wizards at Lowe’s and Home Depot, where they are happy to give you advice if you buy supplies from them.

Unlike Daffy, I think I do qualify as a wizard.  I have six incurable diseases and am a cancer survivor.  I taught in a public school for 31 years.  I taught middle school children.  I lived through the years of the Kennedy assassination, landing men on the moon, the Civil Rights Movement, Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics, and 9-11.  I lived through the Cubs winning a World Series.  And all those events and hard experiences have given me more wisdom than, perhaps, any sane person would want.  Of course, I’m not sure in all my years I have ever actually met a totally sane person.

You may notice that I had to get a new magic hat.  My old black Walt Whitman hat flew out the window on Interstate 35 the other day.  This one is a fedora made of woven straw, a grandpa hat. Who knows?  I am not a grandpa yet technically, but maybe one day before I curl up my toes and go for a long dirt nap… and grandpas count as wizards too, don’t they?

I have been decidedly miserable today with sinus headaches, arthritic back attacks, little sleep, and lots of political proddings from friends who are just sure that I have everything wrong about politics.  But I did do one thing right.

Yes, that’s the ticket!  Cranberry orange muffins, baked by little old me, the Muffin Man.

Here’s what was left after breakfast of a dozen muffins fresh from the oven.  And this was just Henry, me, and the Princess eating them for breakfast.  (I wonder who got two?)

They were extremely good.  And as I write this, none are left for tomorrow’s breakfast.

Oh well, another morning, another muffin mix.  Tomorrow… double chocolate.

I was once a teacher.

This Paffooney is a picture of Nandito done in colored pencil.  I call the picture Satyrico. Explaining it is a difficult and complicated thing.  He was a complicated and difficult child.

He was in my fourth period English class in 1981, my first year as a teacher.  Fourth period was probably the hardest class I ever had to teach.  Twenty-eight kids, all of them Spanish speakers, six of them were Special Edwards with learning disabilities.  Fifty percent of the entire disciplinary case file from the previous school year were in that one eighth grade classroom.  Class in fourth period was completely shut down one September day by spitwad wars in which even the girls who were normally well-behaved were throwing wicked little wet ones at the backs of everyone else’s heads. I had to stand at the door to make sure none of the lunatics escaped and wait for them to get tired of flinging hastily chewed paper at each other.  The principal was a big help.  He called me into his office later for a tongue lashing about why I let it happen. Of course, he was not brave enough to try to stop it himself when it was happening.  So, Nando was in the worst possible class for anyone to be in.  And, looking back on it now, he needed me desperately.

There is no doubt that teachers would lump him in with the “bad kids”.  He was routinely disruptive.  He stole things whenever he could.  He was rude to everyone.  And he really couldn’t handle being around girls, except for two of them who were both his cousins, one that had the the muscles to beat him to a bloody pulp, and one who was generally sweet to everybody and looked upon him as her personal protection project.  Really, Sweet Thing actually defended him from bullies because she knew none of them could ever even say a harsh word to her.

Well, one of the best things I did my first year as a teacher was learn how to actually talk to kids in my classes.  I was careful.  I didn’t expose their secrets either in the classroom or in the teachers’ lounge.  I didn’t embarrass them in front of their peers the way other teachers did.  I learned to give them time to respond to questions and patiently waited for them to get things right on the second, third, or even fifteenth try.  It got so even the bad ones would tell me their regrets, their hopes, and their dreams.

My boy Nando started hanging out around my classroom at every opportunity.  And he found out where I lived and sought me out at home.  It was there, in private, I learned about the most terrible things in his life.  He was being sexually abused by his older cousin, a Vato Loco in that same fourth period class.  He even offered to become my lover in order to get away from what was happening.  That was a tense, dangerous situation.  I explained to him that I was not a homosexual.  We discussed it enough that he admitted he was not either.  And between implied threats of revelation and reasoned discussions with the perpetrator, we got things stopped without going to the authorities.  I was never able to tell Nando that I had once been a sexual assault victim too, but he knew that I cared about him.  He and some other boys began playing Dungeons and Dragons at my place on weekends.  He began to really blossom and become a more sociable and outgoing young man because of the story-telling games and the friendships I helped him form.

He was in my classes for two years  because he failed the 8th grade the first time.  He was the first child to treat me like a surrogate father.  He would become only the first of many.

He would not pose for a picture to be made of him.  I couldn’t even get him to hold still for a photograph.  So I had to draw this Paffooney mostly from memory.  He wanted me to promise I would never write or tell stories about him.  I told him there was no way I could ever promise that.  I did promise not to use his real name.  Actually, it probably is a promise that doesn’t really matter any more.  The last I heard of him, he had lobotomized himself with hard drugs.  If he is even still alive now, he wouldn’t be able to read this and understand it, or even remember me, let alone be embarrassed by anything I have revealed.

But I do know one thing that is true. Nando was a wonderful, valuable human being.  I was a better, more effective teacher because of what I learned from him.  And I deeply regret that his life was wasted the way it ultimately was. But to this very day, I will still go well out of my way and take risks to help wicked and wild little satyrs like he was, all dimple-faced and rude and not good with girls, because somebody needs to care.

Over time, things change.  When I was still teaching, I had to get up by five to leave by six for duty that started at seven and classes at seven-thirty.  Breakfast was an everybody-gets-their-own deal.  It was sometimes skipped all together.

But then my poor health, forty-stop-light commute, and retirement eligibility all conspired to magically change me into a muffin man.

What does that mean, you say?  Will this stupid guy now burst into the kid-friendly version of the muffin man song?

I promise not to sing.

One of my new responsibilities as the retired get-kids-to-school-and-make-breakfast-but not-in-that-order guy is to make breakfast… before taking them to school.

So, I have been learning to cook eggs… and bacon… and sausage… and hash browns.  But having been bit by the early morning baking bug (a big, shiny bacon-colored bug, by the way) I have also added muffins to the morning munch.  Apple cinnamon muffins, cranberry-orange flavored muffins, and best of all… double chocolate.  Making breakfast for the family is fun.  And I get to eat some of it too.  In fact, let me offer you some.  Although, sadly, the muffin man can only provide a picture over the internet.  Instant matter transport into a material synthesizer is still science fiction for now.

So have a double chocolate muffin.  One day soon, I will offer you one for real.

Johann Sebastian Bach may or may not have written his organ masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in 1704. All we know for sure is that the combined efforts of Johannes Ringk, who saved it in manuscript form in the 1830’s, and Felix Mendelssohn who performed it and made it a hit you could dance to during the Bach Revival in 1840 made it possible to still hear its sublime music today. Okay, maybe not dance to exactly… But without the two of them, the piece might have been lost to us in obscurity.

The Toccata part is a composition that uses fast fingerings and a sprightly beat to make happy hippie type music that is really quite trippy. The Fugue part (pronounced Fyoog, not Fuggwee which I learned to my horror in grade school music class) is a part where one part of the tune echoes another part of the tune and one part becomes the other part and then reflects it all back again. I know that’s needlessly confusing, but at least I know what I mean. That is not always a given when I am writing quickly like a Toccata.

I have posted two different versions for you to listen to in this musical metaphor nonsensical posticle… err… Popsicle… err… maybe just post. One is the kinda creepy organ version like you might find in a Hammer Films monster movie in the 1970’s. The other is the light and fluffy violin version from Disney’s Fantasia. I don’t really expect you to listen to both, but listening to one or the other would at least give you a tonal hint about what the ever-loving foolishness I am writing in this post is really all about.

You see, I find sober thoughts in this 313-year-old piece of music that I apply to the arc of my life to give it meaning in musical measure.

This is the Paffooney of this piece, a picture of my wife in her cartoon panda incarnation, along with the panda persona of my number two son. The background of this Paffooney is the actual Ringk manuscript that allowed Bach’s masterwork not to be lost for all time.

My life was always a musical composition, though I never really learned piano other than to pick out favorite tunes by ear. But the Bach Toccata and Fugue begins thusly;

The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord.

I interpret that in prose thusly;

Life was bright and full of promise when I was a child… men going to the moon, me learning to draw and paint, and being smarter than the average child to the point of being hated for my smart-asserry and tortured accordingly. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy and spiraled towards the bottom where I was diminished for a time and mired in a seventh chord of depression and despair. But that resolved into a D major chord when the realization dawned that I could teach and help others to learn the music of life.

And then the Fugue begins in earnest. I set the melody and led my students to repeat and reflect it back again. Over and over, rising like a storm and skipping like a happy child through the tulips that blossom as the showers pass. Winding and unwinding in equal measure, my life progressed to a creaky old age. But the notes of regret in the conclusion are few. The reflections of happinesses gained are legion. I have lived a life I do not regret. I may not have my music saved in the same way Johann Sebastian did, but I am proud of the whole of it. And whether by organ or by violin, it will translate to the next life, and will continue to repeat. What more can a doofus who thinks teaching and drawing and telling stories are a form of music ask for from life?