Life is full of crazy characters with silly sounding names.
Pumblechook and Magwitch, Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher, Sydney Carton. Little Nell and Dick Swiveller. Uriah Heep and Mr. Murdstone. Bill Sykes. Little Dorrit, Pip, and Tiny Tim. Bob Cratchit, Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, Peggotty, and Oliver Twist. Wilkins Micawber.
Sydney Carton quote; “I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it.” …Said to Lucy Manet before he takes the place of her beloved in the line to the guillotine.
Wilkins Micawber quotes; “I have no doubt I shall, please Heaven, begin to be more beforehand with the world, and to live in a perfectly new manner, if—in short, anything turns up.” …Said to David Copperfield to explain his current poverty and difficulties.
The world, in so many words, is a complex and difficult world to understand. But with comedy and tragedy and irony and sweet understanding, Charles Dickens always made sense of it for me.
Did you ever read a Dickens’ book? I know they are long and wordy and more than a hundred years old. But anywhere you start, I guarantee it is worth it. It will pull you in. Oliver Twist, Great Expectation, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, a Christmas Carol… You have to read at least one. Start anywhere. Like me, you may never get enough.
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 firmly believe that I would never have succeeded as a teacher and never gotten my resolve wrapped around the whole nonsense package of being a published author if I hadn’t picked up a copy of Mort, the first Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett that I ever encountered. I started reading the book as a veteran dungeon-master at D&D role-playing games and also as a novice teacher having a world of difficulty trying to swim up the waterfalls of Texas education fast enough to avoid the jagged rocks of failure at the bottom. I was drinking ice tea when I started reading it. More of that iced tea shot out my nose while reading and laughing than went down my gullet. I almost put myself in the hospital with goofy guffaws over Death’s apprentice and his comic adventures on a flat world riding through space and time on the backs of four gigantic elephants standing on the back of a gigantic-er turtle swimming through the stars. Now, I know you have no earthly idea what this paragraph even means, unless you read Terry Pratchett. And believe me, if you don’t, you have to start. If you don’t die laughing, you will have discovered what may well be the best humorist to ever put quill pen to scroll and write. And if you do die laughing, well, there are worse ways to go, believe me.
Discworld novels are fantasy-satire that make fun of Tolkien and Conan the Barbarian (written by Robert E. Howard, not the barbarian himself) and the whole world of elves and dwarves and heroes and dragons and such. You don’t even have to love fantasy to like this stuff. It skewers fantasy with spears of ridiculousness (a fourth level spell from the Dungeons of Comedic Magic for those fellow dungeon masters out there who obsessively keep track of such things). The humor bleeds over into the realms of high finance, education, theater, English and American politics, and the world as we know it (but failed to see from this angle before… a stand-on-your-head-and-balance-over-a-pit-of-man-eating-goldfish sort of angle).
Terry Pratchett’s many wonderful books helped me to love what is ugly, because ugly is funny, and if you love something funny for long enough, you understand that there is a place in the world even for goblins and trolls and ogres. Believe me, that was a critical lesson for a teacher of seventh graders to learn. I became quite fond of a number of twelve and thirteen year old goblins and trolls because I was able see through the funny parts of their inherent ugliness to the hidden beauty that lies within (yes, I know that sounds like I am still talking about yesterday’s post, but that’s because I am… I never stop blithering about that sort of blather when it comes to the value hidden inside kids).
I have made it a personal goal to read every book ever written by Terry Pratchett. And that goal is now within reach because even though he is an incredibly prolific writer, he has passed on withing the last year. He now only has one novel left that hasn’t reached bookstores. Soon I will only need to read a dozen more of his books to finish his entire catalog of published works. And I am confident I will learn more lessons about life and love and laughter by reading what is left, and re-reading some of the books in my treasured Terry Pratchett paperback collection. Talk about your dog-eared tomes of magical mirth-making lore! I know I will never be the writer he was. But I can imitate and praise him and maybe extend the wonderful work that he did in life. This word-wizard is definitely worth any amount of work to acquire and internalize. Don’t take my convoluted word for it. Try it yourself.
The Starfighter is in her cockpit, ready for the enemy.
A friendly game of tennis in the nude.
Meeting the new girlfriend at the beach.
In the forests of the future
These images were made with a combination of colored pencil drawings (mostly just the human figures,) Picsart AI Photo Editor (to add backgrounds,) and AI Mirror (to make the photo parts seamlessly blend with the hand-drawn parts.)
Dogs can’t live forever. Not even as long as a people can. And believe me, she believed with all her might that she was a people. She ate enough people food, mostly stolen, that she convinced herself she was turning into a human girl. But one people year is seven years of dog-year aging. And she was 98 by that measure. And she had doggy breast cancer, complete with a big nasty tumor.
Yesterday, in the veterinarian’s office, she laid down and went to sleep, leaving me and my daughter and my two sons and my wife behind. My fur baby passed away as I stroked her precious head for the last time ever.
She will be writing no more blog posts for me when I am not feeling well. She will no longer be thinking about running over neighborhood cats as she is driving the car. The local rats will fear her no more. And I will never be able to prove to anyone now that she was a talking dog.
We picked her up off the street as a lost puppy fourteen years ago. She apparently escaped from the local pet store and was written off on an insurance claim before the vet could even suggest that that is where she came from. A free Cardigan corgi puppy. She was a priceless part of our lives. She loved us as only a dog can, with ferocity, throwing tantrums and tearing up the trash can when we left her alone in the house.
I shall miss her until the day I die. Sleep well, Jade. You have earned your rest.
This beautiful song, an operatic aria by Puccini, is from the comic opera Gianni Schicchi. But, more important than that is what the song actually means in context.
In the opera, Gianni Schicchi is a con man intent on swindling a family out of their inheritance and knowing all along that he will be destined to go to hell when he dies. The family is gathered for the reading of the rich man’s will, which is, because this is a comic opera, lost for the time being. Their main concern is for the money, which rumor has it has all been willed to the church. But one among them is actually worthy of inheriting the money, Rinuccio the son of the rich man’s cousin. And, as luck would have it, as it always does in comedies, Rinuccio is the one who, during the manic and desperate search for the will, actually finds it. And assuming he comes out well in the will, he secures a promise from his mother that if he inherits money, he can marry Schicchi’s beautiful daughter Laurretta whom he truly loves.
But when he reads the will, he is devastated. The money all goes to a monastery. He begs Schicchi to help him convince the family that he should marry Laurretta anyway. This Gianni Schicchi tries and finds it harder than turning water into wine. So Schicchi is about to give up when Lauretta finally speaks up for herself through the song,
O Mio Babbino Caro (My Beloved Father)
At this point Schicchi is moved by the beautiful song and even more beautiful love his daughter has surprised him with. He not only agrees to help, but executes a bizarre plan, hiding the rich man’s body and pretending to be him come back to life to rewrite the will. Now the will favors Rinuccio, and over the protests of the family, he inherits the money and marries his true love, Schicchi’s daughter. The opera ends with Schicchi singing his case to the audience, telling them in song that going to hell is worth it to aid true love.
And this, then, is the truth of O Mio Babbino Caro.
Love, expressed through the surprise of hidden talent suddenly revealed, is the most persuasive argument there is.
Whether it is the love in the music suddenly discovered in the overwhelming voice of a little girl like Jackie Evancho or Amira Willighagen, or the late great Maria Callas who also sang the role, or even the singer of Puccini’s greatest work who is yet to perform it and make silly old men like me weep for beauty’s sake, the song is the most persuasive argument there is in favor of true love.
That is a thing I desperately want to capture in the novel I am writing now, Sing Sad Songs. Love expressed in music. Love that reverses loss. Love that heals all things. And Love that moves all people. The love that is masterfully sung in O Mio Babbino Caro.
That book is now published and available on Amazon.
Yes, this is a picture of a rock. But it is no ordinary rock. Okay, that’s not precisely true. It is a gray metamorphic rock roughly square in shape with numerous flecks of white and a white strip along the top. As rocks go, it probably couldn’t be more ordinary, more rocky in its soul. But, as with all things in this life, the importance and true meaning lies in the context. This is a pocket rock. It spent a quarter of a century riding around in my pants pocket. I have held it in my hand millions of times.
The Rowan Community Center, seen in this picture I used for the cover of Magical Miss Morgan, is the last part of the old Rowan school still standing.
In 1980, my Great Grandma Hinckley died. That was also the year my folks had to move to Texas because of the transfer my Dad’s seedcorn company gave him to its cotton seed division. It was one year before I got my teaching degree. And it was the year they tore down the building where I went to school for grades 1 through 6. That summer, as I walked around the demolition site, I found the homely gray rock that was nearly as square as I was, and because I was already feeling homesick before I actually left home, I picked it up and stuck it in my pocket. It was a little square piece of home.
That rock went with me to college. It went with me to both Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida. It has been to Washington D.C. It has been in the depths of caves in Kentucky and Missouri and Texas. It has been high in the sky in my pocket in an airplane. It has been to beaches on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the U.S. It has visited both Mexico and Canada. It his been to Las Vegas. And it even rode in the subways of New York City.
And possibly the most interesting part of this pocket rock’s career happened in Texas schools. It was with me in my pocket constantly from 1980 to 2004. I finally took it out of my pocket and placed it in an old cigar box that once belonged to my grandfather and I have kept keepsakes in since I was a kid.
And I have thought a lot about this ordinary rock that isn’t really ordinary on closer inspection. At one point or another I thought about using it as a skipping stone at both the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 2004 when I was considering the pocket watch broken by it and the car key accidentally bent against it, it almost wound up in Lake Superior. I put in my cigar box and it has remained exiled there since. Will I have it buried with me, in my pocket? No, probably not. My wife plans to have me cremated. Hopefully, though, not until I am already dead. This rock has pretty much been a symbol of my soul, travelling with me, teaching with me, jingling the pocket change when I walk… And it will continue to exist when the thinking and writing parts of Mickey are gone.
But even rocks are not immortal. Sometime in the future something will happen to it. It will end up someplace unexpected or changed by grinding, melting, or chemical reaction into some other form. But no matter what happens to it ultimately, the meaning of it, the context, the places it has been and the things that it has done will still be true, still have happened to it. And, ultimately, it will still be just like me.
I just finished reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, his novel from 2014. Just, WOW! I guess this post is technically a book review… but not really. I have to talk about so much more than just the book.
You can see in my initial illustration that I read this book to pieces. Literally. (And I was an English Major in college, so I LITERALLY know what literally means!)
Look at this face. Can you stop looking at the beautiful eyes? I can’t.
I discovered Mitchell as a writer when I happened onto the book and movie pair of Cloud Atlas. It enthralled me. I read the book, a complex fantasy about time and connections, about as deeply and intricately as any book that I have ever read. I fell in love. It was a love as deep and wide as my love of Dickens or my love of Twain… even my love of Terry Pratchett.
It is like the picture on the left. I can’t stop looking into it and seeing more and more. It is plotted and put together like a finely crafted jeweled timepiece.
And this new book is almost exactly like that. It is a first- person narrative in six parts with five different narrators. Holly Sykes, the central character, is the narrator of the first and last parts, in the past in the 1980’s, and in the future in 2043. The titular metaphor of the bone clocks is about the human body and how it measures time from youth to old age. And it is pictured as a clock ticking in practically all it’s forms, from a child who is snuffed out at eight years of age to horologists who have lived for a thousand years by being reincarnated with past lives intact.
Fantasy and photographic realism intertwine and filigree this book like a vast kaleidoscope of many colors, peoples, societies, and places. At one point David Mitchell even inserts himself into the narrative cleverly as the narrator of part four, Crispin Hershey, the popular English novelist struggling to stay on top of the literary world. He even indulges every writer’s fantasy and murders himself in the course of the story.
David Mitchell is the reason I have to read voraciously and write endlessly. His works seem to contain an entire universe of ideas and portraits and events and predictions and wisdoms. And he clearly shows me that his universe is not the only one that needs to be written before the world ends. Books are life, and life is in books. And when the world as we know it is indeed gone, then they will be the most important thing we ever did. Even if no one is left to read them.
And so, I read this book until it fell into pieces, its spine broken and its back cover lost. To be fair, I bought it at a used book store, and the paperback copy was obviously read by previous owners cover to cover. The pages were already dog eared with some pages having their corners turned down to show where someone left off and picked up reading before me. But that, too, is significant. I am not the only one who devoured this book and its life-sustaining stories. Know that, if you do decide to read and love this book, you are definitely not the only one. I’d lend you my copy. But… well, it’s already in pieces.
Catch a Falling Star 