This is not the first Christmas I kept in my secret heart and all by myself.
It probably won’t be the last.
But it is the only one like this due to Covid 19 and the fear that I may die before the month is over.
I must accept whatever comes. And I have no regrets about how I’ve lived my life. Even the bad parts, the sad parts, the pain… are all a part of the song as a whole, and no one ever was able to take back a single note once it has been sung.
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I have claimed that I am a humorist and all my novels are comic novels, to some degree at least. But it is often pointed out to me that I write about things that make people cry. And I freely admit that I most certainly do.
But if you think about it carefully, analytically, or even emotionally, you have to admit, even a book like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has some weep-worthy moments in it. I have read the book more than once myself, and I never get past the scene where Huck looks down at the body of his young friend Buck Grangerford, killed in the Shepherdson/Grangerford feud about something nobody living even remembers, without shedding gushers and gushers of heart-busting tears.
And in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, as much as I laugh and guffaw at the antics of quiet Mr. Dick and his kite, or the much deserved downfall of villainous Uriah Heep, it is the drowning of Little Emily on the boat with David’s school friend and idol Steerforth that leaves me surrounded by puddles… nay, lakes… that I have wept.
And I think that I may justify the sad parts in so many of my weary works with the fact that I am merely providing the necessary counterpoints to my merry-making and mirth.
There has to be that necessary balance, that well-rounded-ness, to a story that makes it feel truly complete. And, of course, we know that even in a horror novel by Stephen King, you find humor used as a balance point to lighten the moments just before the monster delivers its liver-shaking, earth-tilting scare.
Snow Babies, among my published books, is a good example. It is a story that celebrates how a small Iowa town comes together to survive a deadly December blizzard. And while it tells funny stories of kooky characters battling the elements, and both surviving the blizzard and ’84 Reagan/Mondale political debates, as well as putting up Christmas trees, it is still also about death and loss of loved ones, finding and losing love, and just what sort of self-sacrifice or other accidental happening truly makes someone a hero. Or a bus driver… this book has more than one bus driver in it.
So, I think, in the end, that I have made a cogent case for the notion that in order to be a humorist, you have to manipulate many emotions, not just mirth, but sadness also. As well as fear, bitter irony, and pain. And that may well also be the underlying reason that comedy is harder to write than tragedy.
This holiday is going to be different. Different from the holiday I grew up with. Different than the celebrationless non-holiday I lived with for twenty years. And different from the new traditions we established, my kids and I, as we pulled away from my wife’s religion. The pandemic affects everything.
I was born into a family of Iowa Methodists living in North Central Iowa in a tiny farm town called Rowan.
I remember Christmas being the most magical time of year. I believed in Santa Claus. I felt like the Christmas magic that we saw in seasonal specials on TV in black and white were so real… the realest reality there could be…even if Andy Williams wasn’t the host of the program. Candy canes and Christmas trees and sitting on Santa’s lap being terrified of getting it wrong… and making him think I was asking for a talking Chatty Kathy doll even though I was a boy… FOR MY SISTER, SANTA! FOR MY SISTER… Oh, gawd, that really went wrong. And we had family gatherings where we ate pot-luck family meals with Swedish meatballs and turkey and mashed potatoes with brown gravy and casseroles of fifteen different kinds and nuts and candy…eating ourselves into a semi-stupor as we also did only three and a half weeks before at Thanksgiving.
And presents. Everybody gave presents. And Christmas Carols in Church.
But time goes on. You grow out of believing in Santa Claus. You even grow out of believing in Andy Williams. Perry Como was better. And it was getting so commercial. And Christmas shows we loved as kids seemed so simple and lame when watched again as young adults.
And then I married a Jehovah’s Witness. If you are not aware of it, Christmas originated as a pagan holiday, the Roman Saturnalia. It was a night of feasts and orgies and excess. And Jehovah’s Witnesses believe their beliefs are the only true beliefs, and celebrating Christmas is of Satan. I celebrated Christmas for the last time in 1994. I married in 1995.
For the next twenty years I did not celebrate Christmas. At least, not out loud where Brothers and Sisters in the Truth could hear. And the season became very austere and sanitized for me by the religious integrity of those around me in the faith.
But there were friends in the faith that lost their faith and left the congregation permanently. And the people around me changed. And I was beset by illnesses, mine and my family’s. And Jehovah’s Witnesses are very good at helping the sick. But, apparently only for others, not me and mine. They began turning away.
I am probably disfellowshipped now. They have turned away from me, and I am now isolated from all those who used to be friends and acquaintances. My wife is still a member of the congregation. And this is good because she desperately needs to believe. It is a good life for her and keeps her relatively well. But I know they disfellowshipped me, even though nobody told me so like they always do in such cases. My wife barely talks to me now. And this is probably because members of the congregation are supposed to shun the disfellowshipped, even if they are family.
But I bare no one ill will. That may be part of the problem. The Bible directive is to “Hate what is bad.” And blood transfusions and psychiatry are both bad things according to the Witnesses’ understanding of Bible commands.
I didn’t need any transfusions, and though I have significant stress and diabetic depression, I was never hospitalized for that. But I did kinda fake some disfellowshippable offenses so that I would be the one, and my wife would still be able to be a Witness. She needs it more than I do.
And, to be quite honest, I need to feel a little bit of Christmas now in my old age and infirmity. After all, it is a holiday all about making sacrifices in order to give gifts to others. I know that this post will make Jehovah’s Witnesses cringe. But now that they are shunning me, I guess they won’t be seeing this anyway. And I wish them a Merry Christmas in spite of it all.
I continue to get fallout from that one blistering review. Amazon reduced that particular review from two stars to one. They also reduced the stars on a review for Magical Miss Morgan because the reader, although she says she really likes the book , found some things questionable. It went from four stars to three because of that one word, which, from reading the whole review, was more about Miss Morgan’s teaching practices which included having students go barefoot in class while reading The Hobbit. So, I’m feeling persecuted.
I will survive. But in a pandemic Christmas where I am confined to my house, unable to visit family in Iowa, and still trying to recover from my father’s death a thousand miles away from here, I am a bit depressed and in need of something happening that is good for a change. I know this current problem is the fault of a bad editing decision, which made me contemplate changing the critical detail before publishing, but then deciding the tale was more intimate and subtly beautiful if it was not changed. I forget that one man’s beauty is often another man’s thought crimes.
No more dwelling on this. I have fixed the novel already. My next novel probably needs to be the one about overcoming chronic depression. The title has changed from Valerie in Darkness to The Boy Who Rose on a Golden Wing. Somebody will probably evaluate it as totally inappropriate too.
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This blog post still carries a lot of truth in its weaselly wordings.
When you make the mistake of admitting to others that you are a writer, they immediately assume you know things that are kept secret from “normal” people. For instance, they will simply assume that you can tell them where you get your ideas for writing. Well, I am fairly sure that I got the idea for this post from watching a YouTube video in which the Master, Neil Gaiman, says that every author has a joke answer for that one with enough sarcastic wit in it to punish the asker with public humiliation.
I asked the dog if she knew any jokes like that which I could use to prepare for someone asking me that question in public. She said, “You could tell them that your family dog tells you what to write every day.”
“No,” I said, “people would never believe it.”
“Well, it is supposed to be a…
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Canto 120 – Space-Walk
Junior Aero found the antique vacc suits somewhat clunky and uncomfortable compared to what the Aero Brothers had available on the Leaping Shadowcat. Not that he’d had one on more than once, briefly. But they had rigid sections in the thighs and upper arms that restricted fluid movements and joints that didn’t allow flexibility. And there was no intelligence at all ln the helmets or in the systems circuitry. It was like wearing the stupid Nebulon Danjer suits, one-piece protective organisms that Nebulons wore in space. But even though levels of stupidness were the same, the current space-wear had none of the fluid movements that the totally stupid Danjer-critters allowed.
Ged was the one taking the lead. He held the hand-rocket that moved them all through weightlessness in space. All four students were tethered behind him.
Billy Iowa was tethered directly behind Ged. Sarah was attached to his suit from behind him. Junior had fastened his tether cord to the metal loop on the lower back of her suit. And Gyro brought up the rear. After the boobie-spotting plan hatched in the little blue guy’s evil little brain, Junior felt it was right to put him as the rear end of the line. For a Nebulon, Gyro could be a real little rear end.
Stars filled the universe outside the airlock, nothing but perfect silence besides.
The alien “seed-pod ship” was lit by Gaijin’s yellow star and Junior noticed how flower-like it really seemed to be. Could it be just some sort of wandering interstellar organism? Junior really didn’t know. Still, it was no more deadly than anything else they had faced on Gaijin. Even stiller still, it was certainly no less deadly either.
Ged signaled the start of the journey across open, airless space with the first blast from the hand rocket. The line jerked each student forward in turn.
Sara turned and signaled that everything was okay. Junior gave the “OK” sign back.
As they neared the big blossom-looking appendage, the scanner pad that Ged was holding identified the structure as an airlock.
As Ged drew near enough, prehensile tentacles of some sort reached up to take hold of him.
“Ged Aero-sensei, do we run for it?” Billy asked over the comm system.
“Let’s allow it to perform its apparent function,” their master answered.
Junior then watched in horror as the tendrils latched onto Ged’s suit and pulled him inside. It looked for all the universe like the thing had eaten him.
“Ooh! I don’t know about this!” said Billy, alarmed as the thing slowly consumed him next.
“Does it hurt, Billy?” asked Gyro.
No sound, of course, came back in reply.
“Sara, can you pull them out again?” Junior pleaded.
Sara didn’t answer as the blossom-thing swallowed her next.
Then it was Junior’s turn.
“Shneejara sohk nahl, Junior-san,” saluted Gyro as the thing grabbed Junior by the feet. That meant in Nebulonin, of course, “It has been an honor adventuring with you, Junior-san.” Then, the moving, living tendrils were all over him. He could feel them pulling at his suit, twisting, turning, and then, horrifically, popping his helmet off. Slime covered his head and slid down into his suit. All he could see was a faint reddish glow through the tendrils’ translucent flesh. He sincerely hoped the slime was not digestive juices.
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, satire, science fiction
I am a liar. I can’t be any more honest than that. Of course, you probably already know that I tell my truths in stories that are fiction, but always reveal the deeper things that I am really talking about.
This last weekend I was bitterly disappointed by a Pubby review. It was disappointing because, although the reader read the whole book, he or she obviously didn’t understand the themes of it. The reader recognized that the story was well written, but instead of judging the overall message of the book, the reader seized on a detail of the plot and accused me of writing a book that depicted twelve-year-olds having sex.
The book, Sing Sad Songs, is not about that at all. In the story the girl and boy are talking about a dream they shared. They are talking about it in private. But it is not a sex dream. At that point there is no mention of sex at all. But during the discussion, they share their first kiss. The boy kisses the girl first. She then kisses him back, even more passionately, and he puts his tongue in her mouth. Shocked, she pulls away. She asks what they are doing.
He tells her they are probably making love. Then he says he knows a way to do it that can’t make you pregnant. Using their mouths. They discuss whether they want to go further. They are about to choose not to when the girl closes and locks the door. There the scene ends. There the Reader stopped enjoying the book and instead started planning a review that listed all of my crimes in the novel.
The Reader decided to be offended again when the act is discussed again between characters. There is a scene when the three narrators of the book decide whether or not they should include such personal and private stuff in the story. And the girl later turns to her older female friend, a high-school girl who already has a boyfriend she is intending to marry. They talk about sex one more time, and the older girl tells her the important thing is to be honest with the boy in question and especially with herself. This last discussion is, I think, the most important part of the whole theme. It is a theme about being honest about how you feel. The girl is getting advice from someone who is older and wiser, telling her to be more careful and to be honest with the boy about it.
The Reader feels that my truth in this book is a crime and somehow unacceptable. The Reader wrote a toxic review that not only shames my book, but questions the reading ability of a former teacher who left the previous review and dared to suggest that my book was good enough for school libraries.
I love this book. It is one of the best things I have ever written. I wrote it very carefully. I knew when I left this plot detail in the book that I was taking a risk from blue-nosed old ladies. (I don’t actually know the gender of the Reader, who reviews everything under the name Reader.) Now the risk has snapped on me. I already went back and updated the novel. All I had to do was take out the oral sex suggestion and make the particular conflict in those three chapters be about the “French Kiss” using his tongue. A few sentences rewritten and a handful of different words chosen make a big difference. But even at its worst, the book was not explicitly describing underaged sex. It was not without a moral lesson attached, and it was really not intentional pornography. I got unlucky and triggered the censorship instincts of this Reader. And Amazon did not allow me to comment on this review, not even to say I had changed the part that offended the Reader.
And what’s worse, the toxic review will not only turn away potential readers, it will affect further Pubby reviews. Pubby expects the reader to buy the book (for a verified review) and then turn it into a book review in only four days. Not all readers on Pubby are as determined to read the whole book carefully as I am… and the Reader who zapped me is. They will, for the most part, look at the existing reviews and skim through the book or not even read it. I got one review on Recipes for Gingerbread Children for an excellent cook book, even though it is listed as a YA fiction novel. (Amazon already removed that review, as apparently the reviewer didn’t actually buy the book either. I didn’t get value for value on that one.) My only hope is that actual readers will take care of business through Pubby, reading this now-sanitized book before the average of reviews totally bottom out.
Looking on the bright side, Pubby has gotten me a good rating on Amazon as a book reviewer. I have 43 citations for helpful reviews. I always include information from the book to prove I read it, specifically talk about the things I liked or didn’t like about the book without spoiling anything for future readers, and clearly either recommend or not recommend the book. I have reviewed some terrible books. But not once did I ever leave a book-killing review like this one that now makes me sad. And I can’t argue that the reviewer did not do his or her job. Just that he or she was rather unkind.
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Some of the best things that go through my stupid old head come from breakfast and dinner conversations that take place around the family table during family meals. I get ideas for topics, scenes, jokes, and notions for use in my fiction writing or in my nonfiction blog by chewing the mental fat with my kids. My daughter likes to talk about artwork, how to paint, how to compose a picture, and how to put it into the form of a picture book for children that she intends to write about mushrooms growing under the kid’s bed when the kid puts off the cleaning under the bed for too long.
This morning they made the mistake of asking me about my connections to literary nudists on Twitter. I added details about the first nudists I ever met in Austin, Texas in the 1980s. I told them about visiting an old girl friend in the Clothing-optional Apartments in Austin where she often stayed with her sister and her sister’s husband who lived there. I told them about how, being a visitor, I was given the option of being there with all my clothes on. I told them about making friends with nudists there that I stayed in contact with by mail. And this was an opportunity to talk about such things without totally mortifying them like I did the last time I talked about that particular subject at a Mexican restaurant where people we didn’t know could hear.
My number two son, the jailor for Dallas County, gets the chance to tell us his stories about being in jail (being a guard of course, not an inmate.) When his mother is not present he gets to share some of the profoundly blue-colored vocabulary he is learning from work at his new institution for the incarceration of serious criminals and mentally ill people. We get to discuss guns and gun culture, as long as we are careful to never criticize my son’s newfound conservative values, deeply held and violently defended in the manner of most conservatives.
And, of course, the dog is always there to look at the table with beg-eyes, because she can smell the meat that was cooked and usually consumed before she’s allowed to get near enough to snoop and see the tabletop. She has to settle for head scratching, tummy pats, and and smacks on the ear when she tries to jump into laps where she is not actually wanted.
Table talk is critical time for connecting with family, something that is far too rare in today’s world. And we make a conscious effort to keep it going because we are awake to its basic value.
Filed under family, family dog, humor, Paffooney
If you could choose the time and manner of your death, exactly how would you meet the closing sentences in the story of your life? I don’t mean by suicide. That notion would disqualify you from this thought experiment. But if you could suggest to the angel of death how you would like to pass from this life, how would you ask her to manage it?
I myself was born in a blizzard in middle November. As Mark Twain came in and went out with Halley’s Comet, I would prefer to leave during the falling of snow. I believe it will be caused by a health crisis, probably heart related. It might happen in a hospital, but in the dream I believe to be prophetic, the angel enters by the front door of the house and simply announces, “Michael, it is over. You must come with me.” In the dream it was in the front room of Grandma Beyer’s house. But I have noticed over time how much the dream also resembles the front room of the house we live in now. No struggle, no violence, no more pain than I experience daily now.
I know it is weird to think about my own death like this. But I find it comforting to imagine I could write the final sentences in the book of my life. I am feeling ill today, and there are some reasons why I have been thinking about dying by heart problems. Yet, the last time I had my heart checked, it wasn’t that, and the expense of that emergency hospitalization helped tip me into bankruptcy. So, if the angel comes calling now, I will not try to avoid her. And is there snow in the forecast? Who knows for sure? And now I have told her what is in my heart about this matter, so the fact that I am a Christian agnostic should have no bearing on her decision.
Filed under autobiography, religion
Catch a Falling Star 