My Grandparents‘ house became my parents’ house, and now is the property of my two sisters and me.
It is said you can’t really go home again. And I can’t. My boyhood home is falling down and owned by someone else. But the farmplace has been in the family for 150 years. The house has changed a little. But it is mostly the same structure it always was. And the spirits of the past are plentiful now.
My great grandfather, Friend Aldrich, established the farm in the 1800s. My great grandmother, Emily Brannon Aldrich bore him three sons. Henry Aldrich and Ira Clarke Aldrich were their elder sons. My grandfather, Raymond Aldrich, was his youngest.
My grandfather and grandmother, Neva Hinckley Aldrich, lived in this old house after my Great Grandfather was gone. They had Larry, Lois (my mother,) and Donny, the youngest. Uncle Donny was a favorite of Great Uncle I. C. and his wife and inherited their farm since the old couple was childless. Uncle Larry eventually bought his own farmplace, and my mother was destined to inherit Grandpa’s farm. Thus the spirits of the whole clan still gather there. (Uncle Done is the only one I have mentioned who is still alive.)
This will be the first summer trip back home where no parent will be living there, and I am officially a part-owner of the place.
Now that it is a place of mostly memories… and ghosts of the past… I don’t know if you can really call it going home. But it will be good to get back there one more time.
The case has been made in an article by John Welford (https://owlcation.com/humanities/Did-King-Henry-VIII-Have-A-Genetic-Abnormality) that English King Henry the VIII may have suffered from a genetic disorder commonly known as “having Kell blood” which may have made having a living male heir almost impossible with his first two wives. The disorder causes frequent miscarriages in the children sired, something that happened to Henry seven times in the quest for a living male heir. If you think about it, if Henry did not have this particular physical conflict at the root of his dynasty, he might’ve fathered a male heir with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Then there would’ve been no opening for the machinations of Anne Boleyn. It follows that Elizabeth would not have been born. Then no Elizabethan Age; no sir Francis Drake, Spain might’ve landed their armada, no Church of England, possibly no William Shakespeare, and then Mickey would never have gotten castigated by scholars of English literature for daring to state in this blog that the actor who came from Stratford on Avon and misspelled his own name numerous times was not the author of Shakespeare’s plays.
History would’ve been very different. One might even say “sucky”. Especially if one is the clown who thinks Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.
Conflict and struggle is necessary to the grand procession of History. If things are too easy and conflict is not necessary, lots of what we call “invention” and “progress” will not happen. Society is not advanced by its quiet dignity and static graces. It is advanced and transformed by its revolutions, its wars, its seemingly unconquerable problems… its conflicts.
My Dick and Jane book, 1962
Similarly, a novel, a story, a piece of fiction is no earthly good if it is static and without conflict. A happy story about a puppy and the children who love him eating healthy snacks and hugging each other and taking naps is NOT A STORY. It is the plot of a sappy greeting card that never leaves the shelf in the Walmart stationary-and-office-supplies section. Dick and Jane stories had a lot of seeing in them. But they never taught me anything about reading until the alligator ate Spot, and Dick drowned while trying to pry the gator’s jaws apart and get the dog back. And Jane killed the alligator with her bare hands and teeth at the start of what would become a lifelong obsession with alligator wrestling. And yes, I know that never actually happened in a Dick and Jane book, except in the evil imagination of a bored child who was learning to be a story-teller himself in Ms. Ketchum’s 1st Grade Class in 1962.
Yes, I admit to drawing in Ms. Ketchum’s set of first-grade reading books. I was a bad kid in some ways.
But the point is, no story, even if it happens to have a “live happily ever after” at the end of it, can be only about happiness. There must be conflict to overcome.
There are no heroes in stories that have no villains whom the heroes can shoot the guns out of the hands of. Luke Skywalker wouldn’t exist without Darth Vader, even though we didn’t learn that until the second movie… or is it the fifth movie? I forget. And James Bond needs a disposable villain that he can kill at the end of the movie, preferably a stupid one who monologues about his evil plan of writing in Ms. Ketchum’s textbooks, before allowing Bond to escape from the table he is tied down to while surrounded by pencil-drawn alligators in the margins of the page.
We actually learn by failing at things, by getting hurt by the biplanes of an angry difficult life. If we could just get away with eating all the Faye Wrays we wanted and never have a conflict, never have to pay a price, how would we ever learn the life-lesson that you can’t eat Faye Wray, even if you go to the top of the Empire State Building to be alone with her. Of course, that lesson didn’t last for Kong much beyond hitting the Manhattan pavement. But life is like that. Not all stories have a happy ending. Conflicts are not always resolved in a satisfying manner. A life with no challenges is not a life worth living.
So, my title today is “Conflict is Essential“. And that is an inescapable truth. Those who boldly face each new conflict the day brings will probably end up saying bad words quite a lot, and fail at things a lot, and even get in trouble for drawing in their textbooks, but they will fare far better than those who are afraid and hang back. (I do not know for sure that this is true. I really just wanted to say “fare far” in a sentence because it is a palindrome. But I accept that such a sentence may cause far more criticism and backlash than it is worth. But that is conflict and sorta proves my point too.)
The meeting that followed the feast was limited to the Mouse King and Zam his wife, Prinz Flute and his three companions, Lord Lancelot, and the Rascal, who was forced to sit next to PoppenSparkle because he was apparently no longer welcome as Lancelot’s Squire. Schtinker, of course, wanted badly to be there, but he was taken to the bathhouse with the other Sylph children that didn’t pass the smell test before bedtime.
“I think the solution is obvious. We use Poppy’s Polymorph Spell to turn as many Gobbuluns into Fairies as it is possible to do. We bolster our army with the converts from theirs.” Prince Flute looked pleased with himself as he announced the plan to the whole table.
“Nonsense!” Lancelot sat with his arms folded in front of him and his reddish, tired eyes glaring at the map on the center of the table.
“Why is it nonsense?” Flute insisted.
“Because we are doomed here. The Stoor has his ugly army, and Lord Toxiss brought his vast army all the way from distant Sheek-a-go.”
“The Slow Ones actually pronounce that place Chicago,” Tod corrected helpfully.
“I don’t care what you call it. The point is… we are so outnumbered, they will overwhelm us, slaying everybody who is not immortal, and then swarming down to Cair Tellos to do the same to them. We have only one play here. We make a glorious last attack, kill so many of them before they overwhelm us that they can’t muster a big enough force to overwhelm Cair Tellos. We will die heroes.”
“You won’t die,” pointed out the Rascal. “You are an immortal Storybook. The rest of us will all die for your glory and you’ll walk into Cair Tellos to claim all the credit.”
“You wound me, Rascal. Did I not save your life a dozen times over in the Battle of the Arcanum?”
“You did. But you decimated the entire army doing it. We would have sold our lives better defending the castle rather than fighting them on the open fields.”
“Okay, perhaps we choose to die on the parapets of Castle Cornucopia. Maybe we can take more of them out if we make them climb our walls and pour down the hot oils as they try to climb up…”
The Mouse King cleared his throat. “Zam and I have three little mouselings to care for. And there are hundreds of Sylph and Elf children left orphaned by the war that could use new parents. We don’t want anyone to die who doesn’t have to. And don’t we know that at least a few of the Gobbuluns out there are citizens of Cornucopia that have been changed by Lord Toxiss?”
“We won’t do ourselves any good to change a few of the Gobbuluns the way the girl did today. It won’t make a sizeable enough difference, and she will just exhaust her magic getting Gobbuluns changed so other Gobbuluns can kill them. It would be futile… a wasted effort.”
“I think, Lord Lancelot, that the point where your heroics are sorely needed, is at the gate where you and your best soldiers can defend and gather the changed ones into the castle as we change them.” Flute smiled as he obviously was trying to manipulate Lancelot’s ego.
“You cannot change enough of them with one little girl casting one little spell.”
“We can do better than that!” said Glittershine. “I helped PoppenSparkle write the spell into her spell book. I already am familiar with the spell. Tod and Flute can also study it. We will have four Wizards, not one, changing bad guys into good guys.”
“If we should happen to accidentally win the war that way, what will you do with all the new Fairies? Where will they live?”
“You know good and well, Lancelot, that the Castle Cornucopia is huge. We have thousands of towers, secret rooms, mushroom gardens, Fairy houses, businesses, and entertainments in this big, old barn that haven’t had enough Fairy people to live in them since King Pallas and his army were destroyed by Darvon Redsoul, the Great Dragon.” The Mouse seemed to be getting a bit hot under the collar to Poppy.
“And as Glitter mentioned, there will be four talented Wizards helping to repopulate the place,” said Flute, grinning like a fox.
“Very well, then. It is obvious that you have to learn the hard way. I will go along with this plan if only to prove you wrong.”
“Will your plan really work?” the Rascal whispered to Poppy.
“I think so. I am not as confident as any of the rest of you, but I am just learning how to be a Wizard. But if Flute believes in the plan, then, I think I believe in it too.”
“I hope so. I thought it was a great honor to be chosen as Lord Lancelot’s Squire. But right now, I just need to see him proven wrong… even if it kills me.”
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;
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;
Every writer, especially a fiction writer, has an opinion about what his or her work really means.
I have opinions that are going to get me backlash because my friends, my birth State, and the State I now live in all have opposite opinions that are based almost entirely on fear and hate preached by the so-called conservatives in Iowa, Texas, and the farm towns I grew up in. Recent events in government are getting blamed on the more liberal of the two parties that thankfully defeated our future Führer, former President Pumpkinhead. My friends in Iowa now tell me they don’t feel safe under Grandpa Joe Biden’s administration. Apparently, the inconveniences of inflation, broken border policies, and the threats we still face from the pandemic are all Joe’s fault, because, even though the Trumpalumph set it all in motion with his incompetence in office, none of it would still be happening if the mango-flavored Twitler was put back in office… because apparently the election was stolen from him without leaving any evidence of the crime. I can’t argue with these hate-filled so-called conservatives. I am apparently a liberal groomer of school children and pedophile who wrongly calls these hate-filled screamers on the internet “possibly” racist-leaning. So, all I can do is make it clear what my actual opinion really is.
Abortion and the Supreme Court
My personal opinion is much like the opinion I expressed about trans people. I have no say in this issue. If a woman that I supposedly loved enough to make a baby with her wanted to terminate that pregnancy, I would do everything within my legal power to try and convince her not to end the fetus’s life. I would want that child to be born. But if she didn’t choose to listen to me, it is between her and her doctor. And I would have to accept the decision.
By the same measure, I don’t believe the Supreme Court Justices, especially these spotty old men, have any more right to impose their will than I have. Four of these anti-abortion rule-from-the-benchers were appointed by a President who did not win the popular vote. Alito is a Bush appointee. And Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are appointed by Mr. No-Russian-Collusion. Chief Justice Roberts is there because of the Bush who didn’t win the popular vote.
And what about the fact that by the constitution Gorsick should be named Merrick Garland? And if you accept Mitch the Turtle McConnell’s unconstitutional excuse for stealing the seat, then there should be a Biden appointee in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the court. The so-called conservative Republicans are not only hypocrites, they are criminal hippo-crats. (Oh, excuse my exaggeration. I am not entitled to call them that even though they call me a pedophile.)
At any rate, my basic opinion is that the pretenders on the new Supreme Court should not be ruling on anything in a way that takes away people’s basic right to decide personal things for themselves. I have fought through volumes of philosophy searching for the best, most moral way to live my life. And nowhere have I seen that it is acceptable for one person’s prejudices to take precedent over someone else’s right to decide for themselves.
In the wind-down of the Covid19 Pandemic we need to be more aware of our fragile health as a species than ever. Homo Sapiens is suffering now from ills of its own making. And yes, the virus itself probably has a zoological origin, the whole bats-and-pangolins-in-a-wet-market-in-China thing, and it may have been an accidental leak of virus out of a virology lab in China. But it is not a Chinese bio-weapon plot, no matter what Cucker Tarleson thinks… or says he thinks because he’s paid well to think it.
It is a matter of decades and even centuries worth of human greed and rampant profit motive. We are killing the world with industrial waste and increasing the heat world wide with the blazing fires of greed-meets-profit-motive intentions.
The furnaces of industry keep firing up when we need them to cool down and stop.
Even healthcare is monetized in this country to the point that financial predators are gorging themselves by creating economic pain in most of us.
And the political world is rabidly on board with protesting masks and social distancing in order to keep the plague raging and the sweet healthcare dollars rolling in. Not for the benefit of doctors and nurses, mind you. They are not the ones reaping the rewards. In fact, many of them are victims too.
I am stuck at home again now thinking about this again because my number two son and I are possibly under quarantine again. He had Covid once already, a year ago, and he was vaccinated in May. But now he’s sick in bed awaiting the results of another Covid test. It’s either that or a five-day bout of regular flu.
The worst of the many fears is that this is a vaccine-immune variant virus. If that’s what it is, I am probably doomed even though I am already vaccinated too. Oh, well. It’s been a good life. I hope the rest of the human race can conclude that too, as the next pandemic, or heat wave, or global extinction looms in the near future.
But take care… and be aware… because miracles have happened before.
Every writer, especially a fiction writer, has an opinion about what his or her work really means.
Of course, their readers have their own opinions of what it means. And the two different flavors of opinion, author sauce or reader ragu, rarely are the same flavor, and often work at cross purposes to spoil the whole stew. Look at how the sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird went over with readers for Harper Lee. Or how J. K. Rowling’s opinions about trans people have affected the most recent movie trilogy made from her works of fiction.
So, maybe I should clarify where I stand on certain issues before anybody threatens to make a movie from, or ban and burn any of my books.
(As if either of those things are ever going to happen.)
Trans People
In Texas now, it is generally agreed because of laws passed and pronouncements made by Fox-News-influenced Republican leaders, that trans people are 20-or-30-year-old male perverts putting on dresses and trying to get into middle school girls’ locker rooms, or worse, trying to play and win female sports with the advantages that come with testosterone and male aggressiveness.
My opinion on this issue is… you don’t get to have an opinion on this gol danged issue unless you yourself are a trans person. This is based on knowing two trans people in the entirety of my thirty-one-year teaching career. Not enough to make me qualified to open my stupid mouth about it, but more than any Texas Republican knows about it despite the large amount of foul-smelling opinion-gas they fill their speech balloons with in public.
One of these two people whose real names I will never utter was a confident and highly competent young lady whose sexual identity you could never doubt. I only knew about it because I was the teacher tasked with sitting in on her ARD meeting (a Special Education status update that she needed only because her situation qualified her as a Special Education student under the Emotionally Disturbed category.) She was at the meeting, so she knew that I knew. She would later warn me not to tell anybody, because it was no one else’s business what shape of genitals she was born with, and her hormone therapy and entire life experience made her a girl. Other teachers had leaked her secret in the past, and that was unfair to her. She was definitely a female in mind and personality. She was sweet, intelligent, witty, and capable of laughing at my classroom jokes… if they were funny. I suspect only a few if any of her classmates knew she was actually trans. She was all girl. I never told anyone. I never heard another student bad-mouth her. Although she did tell me that bad things had happened to her previously in elementary school. Nothing she was forced to endure was in any way deserved. And I am confident she is doing fine now.
The other trans student I was aware of, didn’t have it so good. I will call him a “he” because he never transitioned. But he was actually a girl. He had a penis, but it was only on the outside. His interior plumbing included a uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries. His hormones were, judging by what puberty did to his body and behavior, mostly feminine. But he didn’t have the other girl’s advantages of being from a wealthier, big-city family with relevant health services available to him. He was a member of a poor, Hispanic family that lived in a small rural Texas town. He was not treated as a trans person. He was considered a homosexual. And Hispanic culture in South Texas is not kind to homosexuals. He had serious mental problems. He tried to talk to me about his problems late one Saturday night. But the conversation ended when he tried to proposition me, and I rejected his advances. I was not a homosexual either. Months later I found him crying in the hallway and bashing his forehead against a metal doorpost. I got help from the Reading teacher to get him to the nurse. He wasn’t in class very often after that. He did not pass any of his classes that year. And he didn’t come to school at all the next year. I heard rumors that he went to Laredo and became a drug dealer and a prostitute. I also heard from one of his relatives that he had attempted suicide more than once. At this point, I feel sadly certain that he never got the help he needed and is probably now dead.
I have now told you everything I actually know about the subject of trans people. And I can safely say I had no measureable effect on either one. I still cry about one of them. I still feel a small bit of pride about the other one. As a teacher I loved both of them, but not the kind of love he asked me for on that late Saturday night when I probably should not have opened the door to him. But I am not entitled to have an opinion. It is not my business no matter how much I care.
One of my favorite characters that I have used in multiple stories, Blueberry Bates, is a trans girl. How realistic she is as a character is probably still up in the air. I have revealed what I know about trans people that she is based on. But I love her, just as I loved the two of them. I think people like that are worthy of love and whatever you have to invest in them to be of help to them. I do not think they need to be legislated against. Their lives are hard enough as it is.
My glitchy computer published this before I got to write the conclusion. But having opinions is a matter of glitchiness anyway. And if you find you need to cancel me for my terrible opinions, you don’t need my permission to do it. I doubt you would even think about asking anyway. I hope I have made what I think clear. These are my writer’s opinions. And it is obvious from this essay that this is probably not the last one I will inflict on you.
“My name is Michael Beyer, and I am an amateur cartoonist.”
“Hi, Michael!” says the entire group of CA group-therapy participants.
(CA stands for Cartoonists Anonymous.)
Doofy Fuddbugg
“I have to admit, I am guilty of giving in to the urge to draw cartoons. I know how it can fill lives with slapstick pain and derisive laughter, and I give in to the urge anyway.”
“So, what did you draw that you have to be ashamed of now?” asked one mad-eyed cartoonist with a pencil lodged behind each of his large ears.
“I made a very unfortunate video to post on YouTube that was supposed to be How-to-draw Cartooning. But everything went wrong. You couldn’t see my drawings in the video. It was not adequately lit. I look like a doofus (which probably can’t be cured) in the video. And instead of thinking twice or editing it, I posted it anyway.”
“Wow!” said a rather ugly cartoonist lady, “that is really bad. You have a seriously bad case of cartoonity.”
“Cartoonity?” I responded stupidly.
“The condition of needing love for your cartoons so bad that you will risk anything to make people look at them and like them,” said the wise group therapist (who looked an awful lot like Chuck Jones, though I am fairly sure Chuck Jones is now dead).
“Yes, I suppose that’s about the size of the problem,” I said. “I have been posting pages from my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom, and I really haven’t seen more than one comment about it. Do people actually read cartoons and comics nowadays? Or is it just me that gets ignored?”
“You have to focus on how much you love drawing and doing it just for that reason, and nothing beyond that,” said the wise therapist. “Cartooning should be done for its own sake, and nothing more than that. Craving attention and approval for it can get seriously infected and become a bad case of cartoonititis. How do you think I dealt with it when I was still alive?”
At that point, my eyes popped out of my head in disbelief and my lower jaw fell all the way to the floor. Could he really be…?
And so I must end today’s blog post since it is hard to keep typing when your eyeballs are rolling around on the floor.
This picture was intended to look like it could’ve been my son, so the face came from an old black-and-white photo of me when I was ten.This is me as a nudist child in my current home’s backyard flanked by two nude Butterfly Children.
This is my purple-mouse avatar.
Eli Tragedy, my red-clad Sorcerer character from Dungeons and Dragons days is also really me.
Me as a happy new nudist
Milt Morgan is a wizard, and also a character who is half me and half the Other Mike from my childhood.Milt Morgan as a child. Also half me.Another purple Mickey.
I think the most important thing to know about being a writer… I mean, really being an honest-to-god hard-thinking if not also hard-drinking author… is that you don’t have a choice. If you are a writer, you have to write. Words on a paper. Ideas communicated by putting squiggly little alphabet marks in some language and form that you know and can effectively express yourself in.
You write because you have to.
You have to because you love it. All of it… everything.
Life, love, laughter, learning, and longing… All of it.
You make yourself naked by putting your innermost truth out there for all to see.
Not clothed in lies or distracting details. But the innermost truth… the words that are written on your heart.
And it’s not about positive or negative. All writers have both stewing together within them. I am a pessimist by my practical, logical nature… always expecting the worst to happen. But when the plan comes together, the story gets written, the thing you love is revealed… I can also glory in it. Your truth or mine. No matter. The truth is simply the truth. And once you are weaned of mother’s milk, and your infant mind is filled with words, you need it daily to live.
And you find it in great gobs in larders and cupboards where it has been stored in writing for you to consume with gusto by reading.
Or you find it under stones you have turned, barely enough to keep you alive… and you praise God for it, for even this tiny little bit is a miracle to sustain you.
And sometimes they will ask you, “What’s it like to be a writer?”
And I will say, “I can’t really tell you. No mere words can explain it. If you already are one, you already know what it means. And if you don’t know what it means, I weep for you.”
Catch a Falling Star 