Catch a Falling Star

Yes, he’s at it again. Silly old Mickey in his birthday suit is writing metaphorically about nudity, nakedness, and naturism. The gross old coot has to do something to survive the Texas heat.

You are probably thinking, and rightly so, that since the crazy old bird was a school teacher for 31 years, and a school student for 18 years before that to become one, he’d be a bit more circumspect about his teacher-honor than to be going around promoting public nudity on his silly little blog again. And you’d be right. This society we now live in doesn’t seem like it is going to approve public nudity generally anytime soon. Most places around the USA make it illegal to go outside your house in nothing but the skin you were born in. You can be arrested for public indecency. Especially if you are ugly when you are naked.

You know it didn’t used to be that way. The ancient Greeks were wild about public nudity. It was the rule for competing in the Olympics and doing business in the agora in the downtown of every Greek metropolis. In fact, the schools that ancient-Greek Mickey would have taught in required the students to be naked for half the day at the very least as they attended school. Of course, those laws only applied to boys. Nobody really wanted to see a naked girl back then. Unless she was made of marble and depicted Aphrodite. They were wild about her naked carcass.

But Mickey learned that being a teacher in the 20th and 21st Century schools of Texas was all about being metaphorically naked.

It’s true. College speech teachers would tell you that, to overcome stage fright on the first day of class, you needed to imagine your students were naked to put yourself at ease, feeling superior because you were dressed and they were not.

But Mickey looked out at those classes of 25 to 30 students, unwashed, feral, and completely hormone-fueled, and realized they really were naked… metaphorically. Even with what passed for clothing on their sweaty little monster bodies, you could still see every naked fault, attitude, indiscretion, and sometimes beauty about them, even when packed in layers with a snowsuit on top. But it never snowed in South Texas back then anyway. They were as good as naked all the time. You could literally see which ones were evil, which were shrinking violets, which were hungry predators, and which ones were imagining the teacher naked to swing the advantage over to themselves.

And teaching entire classrooms full of naked twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds, you learned to understand what their needs really were. You could see their naked shame at not being able to read as well as the smart girls in class. You could see which ones were bullied in school and probably belittled even at home. And you learned to love them… even the bad ones… in a non-inappropriate way. Teacher love. Because they were naked. Metaphorically. At least, that’s what stupid Mickey thought.

And being metaphorically naked means many things at once. In their unarmored form, naked people are vulnerable. They are also not hiding anything under disguises or costumes that make you think they are something they are not. That leather jacket on that metaphorically naked little boy doesn’t hide the fact that he’s insecure about his male peers thinking he is only acting tough because he’s trying to hide the fact that he may be gay. Or that naked little girl in the tight blue jeans and shirt two sizes too small is afraid that she will never find love amongst the male orangutans and gorillas she is most fascinated by.

And naked angels in European art in the Middle Ages symbolized metaphorically, purity and innocence. And some of the naked angels in Mickey’s classes were also metaphorically innocent, no matter how many times they may have goofed up and lost a bit of their innocence.

And they are especially metaphorically naked when they write in their journals, something Mickey made them do at least three days out of five every week. Mickey told them he would read them when he graded them, that they only had to get the two hundred words written in each entry to get an easy 100 percent. And Mickey emphasized that he would read them and not tell anybody else about what they wrote unless they volunteered to have the best stuff read out loud. And, boy howdy! When they told Mickey what they wanted him to know about their naked little lives, it was often stuff that could embarrass Marine Corps drill sergeants, longshoremen, and undercover vice cops. Extremely naked information… metaphorically.

And so, stupid Mickey thought that, just maybe… being metaphorically naked might be good for you. Cathartic and cleansing. And freeing in a way that can only be appreciated by someone who has long been repressed and imprisoned by lingering trauma and fear like Mickey secretly knew something about. Yes, the difference between being metaphorically and literally naked was not very great at all.

And you know what that meant a stupid Mickey was going to think.

The angel of writing inspiration is angry with me. It has been too long since I buckled down to writing some WIP words every day. I used to do at least 500 words a day on the work in progress at the very least. Today, there were no words added to The, Education of Poppensparkle, He Rose on a Golden Wing, or The Haunted Toy Store. Three possible WIPs unfinished and available for daily attention. All of them are well along, but all of them have not been touched in three weeks. I haven’t written anything today but this post.

Susano, the angel of writing inspiration, doesn’t accept the fact that my health issues have been getting in the way. While it’s true I may have skin cancer once again, he points out that I have often coped with health worries in the past by losing myself in a good story.

So, what do I do? He looks like a small boy that I could maybe beat in an arm-wrestling match, but he IS an angel. He has special heavenly strength that I can’t possibly compete with. So, tomorrow… Buckle down, old Mickey, buckle down!

Today I went to the dermatologist. The doctor and her assistant were both ladies. Both young enough that they could’ve been former students. And, of course, they needed to look at and survey my bare skin… all of it. Sometimes it is good to have experience as a nudist. And they gave me a cloth to drape over me in the most personal places. Of course they had to look at all of my skin. Eczema, psoriasis, and shingles don’t respect your privacy.

I have been a writer long enough that I have no secrets left anyway. Even the fiction I write reveals more of me than I would be comfortable telling the word about just five years ago. For instance, the picture above, of me naked, is not really what I looked like. My parents never let me wear my hair that long. And by the time I was eleven, I struggled to take my clothes off even at bed and bath times… after being assaulted. And the Belmond tornado. And the death of my Grandpa Beyer, And President Kennedy being shot, and the Apollo 1 astronauts burning up in the command module capsule. All of which happened around the time I was between ages seven to ten.

But as my dermatology team was surveying the various bumps and blots and warts and whatnots all over my old carcass, they found a spot on my right temple that is definitely pre-cancerous, and may be actual cancer. In three weeks I may need a biopsy. But for today, I got freeze spray sprayed on the side of my head. Yes, they froze part of my head to kill the potential cancer cells. And that kinda hurts when they freeze a chunk of the old gourd you think with all the time.

Will I die from this? It’s possible. But we live in an age when technology has made survival more probable, especially when you already have that sweet Medicare money that the Republicans and Ted Cruz are so desperate to take away from me.

But you have to understand. I am in no hurry to be dead. But I don’t fear it either.

Mark Twain pointed out that he had been dead for billions of years before he was born and was never inconvenienced by it. Not even a little bit. And I am of the same opinion. Looking back at the time before I was born, all those past lives… being a crocodile with bad teeth… living in Patagonia with a seabird and an iguana… and that time in the Great Nebula… But I’ve already told you more of my secrets than you probably want to know. So, if you want to know the truth, the chess board is ready. And if the Grim Reaper wants to play me again, I’ve thought of a few gambits he’s probably not aware of. As long as the chicken refuses to give him hints on what moves to make.

This post was originally created in 2020 when my father was dying. It gave comfort to most of my family as the pandemic was raging and my father couldn’t even remember my mother. We had a Zoom funeral that I watched in Texas while they mourned him in Iowa. A year later, my mother passed away as well. She just couldn’t last any longer without him. It still makes me cry to hear these. But it also brings them back to life for me, if only for a moment.

My father is going into hospice care. Parkinson’s disease is winning against him. I am stuck in Texas until the results of my COVID 19 test come back. Needless to say, my heart is broken. I need magic to fix it now. Where do you find that kind of power? This is where I am looking today.

These are acapella songs. No instruments. Only voice. It comes straight from the heart. Out through the mouth and into the ever-present ether. Life may come to an end, but the sound of it continues… never-ending. Even God does not make a song unsung once it has been made real.

I have been watching these videos on my laptop, lying on my sickbed, and crying at the beauty, the truth, and the depths of sadness in my soul. It hurts to lose a parent. My father was born in 1930. In October of this year, his life-song will reach 90 years of age. It hurts now. But songs are never unsung once they finish. In this I find comfort.

I hope you will actually listen to these. I add a lot of music to my posts, and I never notice any reports of someone clicking on the videos. But these musicians; Pentatonix, Home Free, Peter Hollens, and BYU Vocal Point all have that magic… the power to both lift you up towards God and to make you weep for the bittersweet tragedy that is the experience of being alive and knowing… well, that every book has a final chapter, every song has a final note, and every life…

I don’t have to finish that thought, do I? Now is a proper time for sadness, for trepidation, for listening to music like this… and for remembering love. And I am not through crying just yet.

Since I originally posted this musical essay, my father passed away on my birthday in 2020. My mother did not last a year without him, rejoining him in September of 2021. I can’t listen to any of these songs now without weeping. But it is a good cry. It fills me up with the song of life. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? But today… today I am filled with the music of lives well-lived. He was 89. She was 87.