The Island Girl

First Island Girl4When I was yet a boy in high school, I had a dream that seemed so real.  I knew that one day it would come true.  It was a dream of an island in the Pacific Ocean and an exotic island girl who was as intrigued by me as I was by her.  I began drawing pictures of it.  I don’t have the first pictures I drew any more, but here is one from college, in 1979,

As time went on, and I became a teacher, I had more dreams of who she might be and what it might mean.  I met her in real life while teaching in South Texas.  We were married and have three kids.  The next Paffooney is from 1995.

 

No matter what else it might mean, it proves to me that dreams can come true.  In fact, I believe that through dreams we can experience the future because we can dream outside of time.  Reality is a whole, and perceiving it as a straight line from the past, through the present, into the future is only one perspective of the whole thing.

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Rowan, Iowa

Here is a tap-dance made of photographs to musically and terpsichorially depict my old home town.

10475969_298109007017454_846022390001380906_o Hollyhocks photographed by Belinda Buchanan.

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Farm and Home

DSCN5036 DSCN5037 DSCN5040 DSCN5043 DSCN5044My younger son and I are visiting the family farm for a week.  It was once Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farmhouse.  Now, my retired parents live there.  It is a place that figures prominently in my fiction because most of what I know about rural farm life comes from there.  Hollyhocks and tiger lilies grow there,   Corn and soybeans grow there too.  The sky is laughing blue in sunshine. 

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The Amazing, Magical Miss Morgan

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Okay, the thing is, I was a teacher for 31 years.  I need to use that for something.  If I had any choice, I’d still be teaching, but since I can’t do that, I intend to create a story that uses my teaching experience, knowledge, and talent.  I finally came up with the right idea, and the prewriting has begun to flow.  Francis Morgan is an unmarried teacher lady with a very Mary Poppins-like quality, but the magic is all in the teaching methods.  I am pitting the hero of this little tale against the most appropriate educational villain I could think of, a principal who used to be a coach.  Issues of teacher-creativity versus wrong-headed notions of school discipline will provide the conflict and the fireworks.  And I intend to write it with a double layer of goopy purple comedy, because if she is going to be a sixth grade English teacher it either has to be a comedy or a complete horror story.  I am too much of a coward to write anything that scary.  If you are interested at all in how such a goofy little project is progressing, by all means check back in the future.

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Plans for the 4th

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So, I’m thinking that for the 4th we will spend some time hunting dragons in caverns.  Yeah… that’s it.  Dragons in cavern.

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Facebook News!

Ima mickey222I am making progress faster than ever in social media marketing.  I have reached 900 Followers on Facebook in only a month since I hit 800.  I am looking forward to more success as I continue to write and draw and try not to be totally ignored.

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Norman Rockwell

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When I was a boy in the 1960’s I looked forward to Grandma Aldrich’s Saturday Evening Post arriving at the end of her farm lane in the mailbox.  We were at Grandpa and Grandma’s farm north of town almost every day.  I often went to get the mail.  This one magazine was supremely important to me, not because I liked to read the articles, that was too much like school, but because of the wonderful pictures on the cover.  Norman Rockwell had established himself by that time as THE cover artist.  He wasn’t on every single issue, but he was on most.  And the world inside his paintings was filled with the kind of gentle humor, beautiful color, and wisdom tempered by love that I wanted to imitate.  I wanted to paint just like that… and if I couldn’t, then I would find a way to tell stories in words the same way I saw them in his oils.  I could gush more about the humble painter from New England, but I think it would serve my love of his work more just to show you what I mean;

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The Girl With the Red Bird

The Girl With the Red Bird

This is a Paffooney I have had in my portfolio for many years. Is it a miracle that it looks so much like my daughter the Princess? Yes! Most definitely. I drew this before I got married, more than twenty years ago. Yet, it looks so much like the Princess that my flabber is completely gasted.

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June 29, 2014 · 6:49 pm

Space Cowboys, the Kid Variety

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Here are two more deadly mutant kid ninjas from Aeroquest.   When the Pan Galactican Union fell to the mysterious space invaders known as the Scondians, these two mutant boys were among the flood of refugees who escaped to the Human Imperium.   Gyro son of Jor is a Nebulon.  That means he is a member of an inter-stellar race whose humanity is in question.  His skin is blue and highly radiation resistant.  On top of his Nebulon qualities, he is a Psion Trans-muter who can mentally alter molecules, sometimes even fusing simple atoms into more complex ones.  He is also very inventive.  He can change a simple computer into a mini-attack-bot, a computer into a video game machine, or a vehicle into video game machine… well, he’s a teenager, so virtually anything can become a video game machine.  He laughs easily, even at things that aren’t funny, and doesn’t mind when others call him a Space Smurf, because he doesn’t know what that means.  Billy Iowa is his best friend and fellow survivor.  If Gyro’s family hadn’t rescued Billy from Scondian captivity, he would’ve remained on Pan Galactica as a laboratory test subject.  Unlike many of the Pan Galactican Space Cowboys, he is not prejudiced against Nebulons.  In fact, as an orphan, he looks at them more as family than as an inferior race.  His Psion power is Clairvoyance, allowing him to see times and places where he is not present, even to the extent that he can accurately predict the future.  He’s a better karate and kung fu student than Gyro, but as student ninjas go, all the rest of his dojo can beat the crap out of him.  So, these two Space Cowboys, both boys, provide a lot of the comedy relief in the Aero Dojo.  They are of course, not nearly as dangerous as the girls are, but don’t insult them never-the-less.  Billy can tell you how you will die, and Gyro will make unbelievably corny jokes about it.

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Mark Twain

Mark TwainMark Twain, real name Samuel Clemens, is my hero. He lived a long and difficult life, but he lived it with grace and humor… most of the time…well, some of the time. I would very much like to be just like him… ‘cept I ain’t dead yet and have no plans on that score… but I would like to also be like him in having something important to say that can be said to somebody who isn’t even born yet, a hundred years or more from now, the way that Mark Twain spoke to me.

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June 27, 2014 · 3:35 pm