Once again I have no chapter ready for this Tuesday. I will get caught up, but this week is vacation. Vacation, not writers’ block.
502
This post is on the 502nd consecutive day in a row that I have posted at least one thing. It is a streak worth continuing.
But what’ve I really done since arriving in Iowa for my yearly visit? Well, I was haunted by the spirits of grandparents long gone as well as the more recently departed spirits of my parents. The old farmhouse and town are saturated with memories, dreams, and… worst of all, regrets.
But I did visit Ames, where I attended college for the first four years. I bought a good book there. I watched movie musicals with my sister.
Maybe it is enough. I invested my time and money in pursuing memories. And there are worse ways to invest those things.
Filed under announcement, autobiography
How to Be a Wizard
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 15th century., “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?
Filed under Uncategorized
Saturday Art Day in June
It is Saturday again, and it is time to share some more artwork. I am trying to come up with a theme. But I guess I am basically going through my gallery and picking stuff at random.
I am just guessing here, but maybe I can find pictures here of daily life at home, no matter how weird that home might be.
Maybe I don’t have a clear artistical idea of what a home life really looks like, but, after all, home is where the heart lives.
Making It Home
This is a quilt that my mother completed herself before she passed away last September. It was given to me last night, and it kept me warm during the Iowa night. A piece of art that my mother designed, pieced together and quilted with her own hands. It makes me tremble just to think about what that truly means. Will I ever be able to provide anything like that for my own children? They are not impressed with my stories and books. They don;t even laugh at my jokes. I can’t say I have provided them a home in their young lives the way my mother and father did for me. It is humbling.
Filed under autobiography
The Road to Iowa
I am now almost home again. I’m sitting in the car in a parking lot for Perkins restaurant in Ames, Iowa. With the dog while my wife and the Princess are eating a late lunch. We will be on the road again soon, but the dog is anxious to be done traveling, and I sit with her now to keep her from complaining so much while my driver and daughter eat.
Here is where a travel photo goes. And I have a good one. And the #@!!&##! Block Editor won’t let me add it no matter what I do.
Oh, well, at least something is posted to keep my streak alive.
it is, however, a mixed-up unedited mess.
I would ask the dog to do it for me, but she’s tired and cranky. And who knew that dog language had so many bad words?
Filed under Uncategorized
Fighting to Post on the Road
I am trying to write a post on the road with my phone. But apparently my fingers, or my phone, or both don’t work right.
Filed under Uncategorized
Going Home Again
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.
Filed under autobiography
Conflict is Essential
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.
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.)
Catch a Falling Star 