Sometimes poetry is just pictures. Pictures have meaning too. Especially in color.
The Nature of Our Better Angels
I have friends and relatives that believe in angels. Religious people who believe in the power of prayer and the love of God. And I cannot say that I do not also believe. But I also happen to believe that angels live among us.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was, as far as I am concerned, an angel. Born in the late 1800’s, she was a practical prairie farmer’s wife. She knew how to make butter in a churn. She knew how to treat bee stings and spider bites. She knew how to cook good, wholesome food that stuck to your ribs and kept you going until the next meal rolled around. She knew how to cook on a wood-burning stove, and knew why you needed to keep corn cobs in a pile by the outhouse door. Or, in the case of rich folks, why you needed to read the Sears catalog in the little room behind the cut-out crescent moon.
She also knew how to head a family. She had seven kids and raised six of them up to adulthood. She sent a son off to World War II. She had nine grandchildren and more great grandchildren, of which I was one of the not-so-great ones, than I can even count on two hands and two feet, the toes of which I can’t always see. Great great grandchildren were even greater. Tell me you can’t believe she was a messenger from God, always knowing God’s will, and making the future happen with a steady hand, and eyes that brooked no nonsense from lie-telling boys.
Mother Mendiola was an angel too. I met her at my first school, Frank Newman Junior High in Cotulla, Texas. She was the seventh grade Life Science teacher. She had been a nun before becoming a teacher, and she was a single lady her whole life. But she was a natural mother figure to the children in her classes. She’s the one who taught me how to talk to fatherless boys, engage them in learning about things that excited them, and become a lifelong mentor to them, willing to help them with life’s problems even long after they had graduated from both junior high and high school. She was not only a mother to students, but she nurtured other teachers as well. She showed Alice and I how to talk to Hispanic kids even though we were both so white we almost glowed in the dark. She went to bat for kids who got in trouble with the principal, and even those who sometimes got into trouble with the law. She had a way of holding her hand out to kids and encouraging them to place their troubles in it. She even helped pregnant young girls with wise counsel and a loving, accepting heart, even when they were seriously in the wrong. When they talk about being an “advocate for kids” in educational conferences, they always make me picture her and her methods. I can still see her in my mind’s eye with clenched fists on her hips and saying, “I am tired of it, and it will get better NOW!” And it always got better. Because she was an angel. She had the power of the love of God behind her every action and motivation. It still makes me weep to remember she is gone now. She got her wings and flew on to other things a long time ago now.
Some people may call it a blasphemy for me to say that these people, no matter how good and critically important they were, could really be angels. But I have to say it. I have to believe it. I know this because I saw them do these things, with my own two eyes, and how could they not be messengers from God? It convinces me that I need to work at becoming an angel too.
The Quiet One
She sat there behind her desk, looking at me, the teacher…
The Quiet One, I knew her well, we had had these discussions many, many times…
Saying nothing to each other.
“So, do you want to tell me about it now?”
She shook her head… Of course, not…
The Quiet One has so much going on in her head, that she cannot talk…
Unless she trusts you… Unless you are her friend… Then she hardly ever stops talking…
She’s funny and smart and full of stories and jokes and facts and memories…
But she only has one friend… And it is not me…
She’ll never ask for help… Even though I know she needs it…
She’d sooner die than talk about what is really bothering her…
And I know what it is… And it breaks my heart that I can’t help her…
I write her a sticky note. “I love you. I will help you if you need me to.“
I push the note in front of her. She reads it.
She looks up at me. A shy smile. “I know, but it’s okay.”
I have to hold back tears. I know she will face it alone.
I know because I was once the Quiet One too.
Filed under Uncategorized
“Mickey, What’s Wrong With You?”
Yes, I am trying to answer that old question that old girlfriends used to ask me back when they were young and I was young and too stupid to answer honestly. You know, the question always asked right before they tell you, “Why don’t we just be friends and leave it at that.”
After having spent my Christmas money from Mom on an 18-inch giant gorilla action figure of Kong on Skull Island to terrorize all the dolls on the Barbie Shelf after midnight when all the dolls secretly come to life, I feel more prepared than ever before to answer that particular question.
I am not in my second childhood. I am still in my first one. Yes, I reached the ripe old age of 12 and then Peter Pan Syndrome set in bigtime. On the inside, I will always be 12 years old. I still, at 61, play games and play with toys. I never really grew up.
I am not a Brony, but I am still buying My Little Pony dolls, and can name all six of the main characters. From left to right, Fluttershy, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Apple Jack, Rainbow Dash, and Twilight Sparkle. And yes, I have watched the cartoon show and like it, but am still not a Brony, okay? There are a lot of things wrong with me, but I am not that bad! My kids, however, are embarrassed to be seen with me when I am shopping for toys at Walmart, Toys-R-Us, or Goodwill.
I still play with the HO scale model trains that I have owned and collected since the first year I was actually twelve. I would love to get them running again. The Snowflake Special and the Toonerville Trolley seen in the picture both still ran the last time I tested them four years ago. I still love to paint buildings and HO scale people to live in my little train town. I am still working on a set of townspeople that I bought back in 1994. German villagers circa 1880.
I have always been fascinated by imaginary places and the people who live in them. Especially imaginary places in the fiction of the past. Places like the castle of Minas Tirith in the realm of Gondor in Middle Earth, and like Pellucidar that David Innes and Abner Perry discovered at the Earth’s Core in their boring machine called “the Prospector”as part of the Pellucidar series created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. So, another thing wrong with me is that I live mostly in the past and entirely in the worlds of my imagination. I have very little to do with the so-called “real world”.
So, to sum up, the things wrong with Mickey are; A. He’s a goofy old child. B. He still plays with toys. C. He likes girly stuff. D. He confuses fantasy with reality. No wonder the girls used to run away screaming. And I haven’t even added the part about Mickey thinking he is a nudist now and walking around the house naked when no one else is home and forced to see the full horror of it.
But maybe you should think on it for a moment more. What if the things that are wrong with Mickey are actually good things? What if he’s found the secret to long life and happiness in spite of a world full of troubles and illnesses and blechy stuff? It could be true…
The Boy Who Dreamed in Outer Space
I saw 2001, A Space Odyssey when it first came out in theaters. I saw Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon for the very first time in the Summer of 1969. I remember seeing a Gemini spacewalk on the black-and-white TV. I even remember standing in our backyard in Iowa, looking up at the blue sky, and seeing the bright pinpoint of light passing overhead that was John Glenn orbiting the Earth in his Mercury Capsule. When I was a child, I believed in space travel. I thought there was where I was one day going to go.
I believed I needed to be physically fit, smart, adaptable, and ready to accomplish anything necessary to leave my mark in life among the stars. I played sports full throttle, I got A’s in high school, and I won a full scholarship to college. It was the Space Program, not me who slowed everything down.
Of course, I went into education and became an English teacher instead. Rather than blasting off into space, I introduced classes to Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut. I read out loud and took them to Mars with me and into the interstellar far reaches of an imagined future that was further off than I was led to believe. I was teaching the day the shuttle Challenger blew up, killing the first teacher in space as horrified students watched on classroom TV sets all across the nation.
But the twelve-year-old boy that lives in my head still has not lost the dream. I may not live to see it, but perhaps the memory of me will make it there with somebody’s child that my stories, beliefs, and passion were paid forward to by someone in my class who actually listened to me. It could happen. I am not a hopeless fool.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Rest of my Classroom Gallery
Here’s what’s left in my camera from school white boards and lessons.
There you have it, the results of 31 years of doodling on the chalkboard (which became the dry erase board). And yes, I did tell them the cartoon fairy drew all the pictures. Especially when they were in my class for the second or third year when they asked, “Who does all the pictures on the board?” And yes, I started doing this back in dinosaur days in white chalk on a green blackboard, followed by colored chalk, which later became a gray marker-board for washable marker, and finally became dry erase white board. And I really bought my own chalk and markers too. Teachers do that, you know.
The Rules for Collecting
Oh, no… My secret is out. I am a doll collector. (Wait, wasn’t I supposed to claim they are “action figures” so that I can get away with being a man who, at the age of nearly 60, still plays with dolls?”) I got started down this dark path back in 1965 when my parents bought me a G.I. Joe sailor for my ninth birthday. It was the beginning of an addiction that has dogged me even down to this very day.
There are some things that just aren’t easy to admit to, like being gay, or being a socialist, or being a werewolf. Well, I am not gay and I am not a socialist, so don’t worry about that. Those are not really terrible things to be when it comes right down to it. I have friends that are gay, friends that are socialists, and friends that are… um… well, enough about those things. I am writing about the terrible scourge of doll collecting. In order to control such a rare and debilitating disease, I had to come up with a set of rules that would keep me from becoming a penniless hobo living in a cardboard refrigerator box in an alley with thousands of Barbie dolls. So let me explain the sacred rules that have kept me at least partially sane for almost fifty years.
Rule #1; Thou shalt only collect and obsess over twelve-inch dolls and action figures. That allows for literally thousands of choices to pursue, and rules out the many size variations like the three-inch G.I. Joe’s and the three-inch Star Wars figures and all the Mego eight-inch superheroes who were everywhere in the Seventies and Eighties, but now are rare and expensive.
Rule #2; Thou shalt not collect and obsess over dolls and figures that cost more than twenty dollars. This is the poverty prevention rule that keeps an obsession from breaking the bank and wreaking havoc throughout the rest of my life. I have only broken this rule on rare occasions for hard to acquire dolls or figures, and most of those were actually presents paid for by somebody else. I can blame the exceptions mostly on people who know about my weakness and exploit it for their own personal reasons… hopefully because they just like to make me happy.
Rule #3; Thou must seeketh the lost and forlorn doll and redeem it from destruction. Whenever I can, I look for dolls at Goodwill stores and yard sales. I have bought a ton of naked and sometimes broken Action Man, Barbie, Max Steel, Ken, and G.I. Joe dolls. I then try to find or make clothes for them. My daughter went through her Barbie period in a most destructive manner. She didn’t merely discard dolls and Disney princesses, she beheaded, dismembered, disrobed, and chewed them. I have rescued and repaired many of them, but only after securing her promise that she doesn’t want to play with them or eat them any longer. I should note, though, that I no longer acquire dolls in this way, now that she is middle school aged and wouldn’t be caught dead with a doll.
Rule #4; Thou shalt not let your daughter be the the only one who has fun pulling them apart, but you will put them back together again in ways that make them into something new.
So, these are the sacred rules of collecting which shall not be violated in the pursuit of this weird religion, the bringing together of a multitude of dolls.
That is my “Enterprise Collection” above. Specifically the “Original Series Enterprise Collection”. Look more closely.
Spock is holding a Vulcan harp-thingy (whose name I won’t quote here because I don’t want to seem too much like a Trekkie… and besides, I forgot what it is called and am too lazy to look it up again… What can I say? I’m old.) Kirk is wearing a Wrath of Khan movie uniform.
This green Barbie doll is a Goodwill rescue turned into a green Orion dancing girl with paint, sequins, material from a quilting project, and a hot glue gun. 
Uhura was the hardest member of the team to track down and acquire. After Kaybee Toys went out of business, I had to turn to the internet to get hold of this beauty. I also had to pay $24.
You may also have noticed that Sulu is missing from my Original Series set. Well, I’m still working on that one. But I do owe a debt to J.J. Abrams for making a new movie version of Star Trek and inspiring a new set of twelve inch dolls.
And let me not forget Rule #5, the most important rule… Thou shalt play with the dolls you collect.
Filed under collecting, doll collecting, goofiness, humor, Paffooney
Cissy Moonskipper Meets the Nebulons
The Ship’s Log of the Dark Moon’s Dreaded Luck in the Earther Year 5239, the month of Marching, 23rd day of the month.
I have not ever wrote a ship’s log entry before, but now that Dad is marooned on a faraway star, and both Mom and my older brother Wose are dead, there ain’t nobody else to do it.
I became captain of the Dreaded Luck about a week ago when a Lupin pirate killed Wose, but got disintegrated at the same time that the bullet entered Wose’s big, stupid head. I thought then that I would be the last living being on the starship. And I am only twelve until my birthday in Joon. Fortunately, though, I found the little Lupin puppy-girl that the pirate Lupin werewolf had brought with him. She’s cute and cuddly, not at all like an evil Stardog. I renamed her Friday and adopted her for company. And she told me a bunch of stuff about her pirate pack on the nearby planet. I needed that spy-stuff information to solve my problem of not having any crew.
The ship’s computer, David, was not independently intelligent, so I got help from an AI program called Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter. He helped me train one of the giant spiders in our cargo hold. And he turned out to be a very wise and capable friend. He read and memorized the ship’s owner’s manual. So, he could help me repair the starship and anything that broke down or was running poorly. That took care of the need for an engineer to replace old Wose. He could also teach me how to use the pirate skiff and drive it to the planet so we could secretly steal a pilot from the Stardogs’ prison.
The Crocodile guy went along with me to the planet in his holographic form, transferred from my spaceship to the skiff by data transfer. Friday went along mainly to hold onto me and not be left alone on the ship with only giant spiders and cleaning bots for company. And while we were there, we found and freed a group of Nebulon prisoners. If you’ve never met one, since I don’t know for sure who you are who will read this log, Nebulons are those blue-skinned alien people with bright yellow hair and red cheeks. We Earther-types call them Space Smurfs for some long-forgotten reason. And I didn’t know before we met them how different they really were from us, though also how much alike they are.
Suki, an adult Nebulon lady who was my size but much older than me, not only helped us all escape from the Stardog pirates but promised to use her pilot skills as part of my crew in gratitude for freeing her people. I like Suki a lot. She is also now not only a crewmember but my very good friend.
Suki’s piloting skills and my gunnery skills combined to help us win a space battle against the Stardog pirates. We apparently killed the leader of the pirates in battle, but he also used a virus to kill David, our shipboard computer. Fortunately, the Crocodile Hunter could take over David’s functions and was even better at it than David had been. We left the planet of the pirates with a six-day-long jump through folded space.
But we came out of jump space next to a monstrously huge space whale.
“Oh, my God!” I swore as I was floored by the size of the moon-scaled massive creature.
“Don’t worry, Cissy,” Suki said to me. “I am Nebulonin Clan Vorannac. That space whale is one of our clan.”
And then the super-sized creature moved to swallow the Dreaded Luck whole.
*** This novella is the second book in the Cissy Moonskipper’s Travels series of stories. This is the introductory preface of that story.***
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Homely Art – Part Two – Paul Detlefsen
Back in about 1968 my Grandma Beyer was seriously scandalized by an artist named Paul Detlefsen. Detlefsen did a lot of covers for the “Ideals Magazine” that Grandma always had on her coffee tables. He scandalized her by putting a painting on the cover that showed a young boy taking his pants off, the rear view only, so he could go skinny dipping with a group of naked boys. Truthfully the picture shown above is by Detelfsen, but it is not the one that offended her. I have discovered that this painter of old-timey things like blacksmith shops and one-room school houses has painted at least four different versions of “the Old Swimmin’ Hole”. And Grandma was easily scandalized when we were kids. She was a very conservative woman who loved Ronald Reagan and his politics most severely and thought that Richard Nixon was a leftist radical. She didn’t like for people to be naked, except for bath time, and maybe not even then. She is one of the main reasons, along with this painter whom she adored, that I came to learn later in life that “naked is funny”.
http://www.freeplaypost.com/PaulDetlefsen_VintageArtPrint_A.htm
Grandma Beyer also seriously loved puzzles, and besides “Ideals” covers, Paul Detlefsen did a beaucoup of jigsaw puzzles. (Beaucoup means a lot in Texican, I tend to think in Iowegian and talk in Texican and completely forget about the need to translate for those people who don’t know those two foreign tongues) One of the puzzles we spent hours working on was “Horse and Buggy Days” that I pictured here. They were the kind of puzzle paintings where every boy was Tom Sawyer and every girl was Becky Thatcher. And there were a lot of them. Here is another;
http://www.bigredtoybox.com/cgi-bin/toynfo.pl?detlefsenindex
Grandma had this in puzzle form also. We put the puzzle together, glued it to tag board, and framed it. It has hung on the wall in a Grandparent’s house, first Grandma Beyer’s and then Grandma Aldrich’s, since the early 1970’s. My own parents now live in Grandma Aldrich’s house, and that puzzle-painting may be hanging in an upstairs bedroom to this very day. Detlefsen is not known as a great artist. He was a humble painter who painted backdrops for films for over 20 years. In the 1950’s he switched gears and started doing lithographs that were turned into calendars, jigsaw puzzles, laminated table mats, playing cards, and reproductions you could buy in the Ben Franklin Dime Store in Belmond, Iowa and hang on your back porch at home. I believe I saw his paintings in all these forms in one place or another. According to Wikipedia (I know, research, right?) “In 1969, UPI estimated that his artwork had been seen by 80 per cent of all Americans.” That is pretty dang good for a humble painter, better numbers than Pablo Picasso ever saw. Let me share a few more of his works, and see if you recognize any of these;
Filed under art criticism, art my Grandpa loved, artwork, homely art, oil painting
Catch a Falling Star 
Living in the Spider Kingdom
Life seems to be getting harder and harder. And I realize that a big part of that perception is the fact that my health is deteriorating quickly. This is a humor blog, but it has been getting more and more serious and more and more grim as the grim reaper becomes more and more a central character in my own personal story.
My perception of reality, however, is best explained by a passage in a novel that spoke to me in college. It comes from the novel, the Bildungsroman by Thomas Mann called Der Zauberberg, in English, The Magic Mountain. In the scene, Hans Castorp is possibly freezing to death, and he hallucinates a pastoral mountainside scene where children are happily playing in the sunshine. Possibly Heaven? But maybe not. As he goes into a stone building and finds a passage down into the ground, he sees wrinkled, ugly, horrible hags gathered around a child’s corpse, eating it. And this vision explains the duality at the center of the meaning of life.
For every good thing, there is an equal and opposite bad thing that balances it out. There is no understanding what perfection and goodness mean without knowing profanity and evil. Just as you can’t understand hot without cold nor light without darkness. And you don’t get to overturn the way it is. You try your hardest to stay on the heads side of the coin knowing that half the time life falls to tails.
So, what good does it do me to think about and write about things like this? Well, it makes for me a sort of philosophical gyroscope that spins and dances and helps me keep my balance in the stormy sea of daily life. I deal with hard things with humor and a sense of literary irony. I make complex metaphors that help me throw a rope around the things that hurt me.
We are living now in the Spider Kingdom. Hard times are here again. The corrupt and corpulent corporate spiders are spinning the many webs we are trapped in. As metaphorical as it is, we wouldn’t have the government we currently have and be suffering the way we are if that weren’t true.
But no bad thing nor no good thing lasts forever. The wheel goes round and round. The top of the wheel reaches the bottom just as often as the bottom returns to the top. So, it will all pass if we can only hold out long enough.
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Filed under commentary, empathy, feeling sorry for myself, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, philosophy
Tagged as 365ways, book review, grim-reaper, hemingway, horror, humor, oregon