I am planning to re-watch all eight hours of Netflix’s Stranger Things. I can’t help it. I really seriously love that show. And the reason is the kids in the series. Yes, it was set in the 80’s, a decade I long to return to, but I wasn’t a kid myself in the 80’s. That was my first decade as a teacher. The thing is… I taught each and every one of the kids in that series. I admit, they had different names and lived in different bodies, but they were the same faces, the same personalities.
And it is not so much the characters the kids inhabit in the show, though they were obviously cast as themselves. It is the real-life screwiness that Jimmy Fallon brings out with the silly string that I recognize.
Finn Wolfhard’s character, Michael, is basically me. The dreamer determined to make the fantastic become true. And when they played Dungeons and Dragons in the basement, he was the Dungeon Master. That was me. The teller of the stories, the maker of the meaning. He’s the one who creates the Demogorgon adventure that eerily comes to life. He is also the one who finds and befriends the mysterious Eleven. He is the driving force that leads them all to the inevitable conclusion of the adventure.
And while I never met anyone quite like the mysterious Eleven, Millie Bobby Brown is definitely no stranger to me. She is bubbly, outgoing, and utterly charming. She can channel Nikki Minaj. I must’ve taught at least five different versions of Millie in three different schools when I was a teacher.
She makes the weird and otherworldly character of Eleven become believable through the sheer force of a natural talent for empathy and understanding. She is a highly intelligent girl with a knack for making things work.
I have also taught about four different incarnations of the Dustin character’s actor, Gaten Matarazzo. The goofy but courageous kid with a broad sense of humor and a focus on food is a very common type of junior high kid. And while he isn’t usually a leader in the classroom, he’s the one you turn to when you need help getting the group to choose the right path.
I swear to you, I know all these kids, even though I have never met them. You see, when you are a teacher for long enough, everyone in the world comes in through your door. You have to get to know them and learn to at least like them if not love them. You do the thing for long enough, and you learn that there are a limited number of different faces and personalities that God distributes over time and circumstance to many different people. It is possible to get to know nearly all of them. And there are no Stranger Things than kids.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Real Magic in that Old Home Town
Rowan, Iowa… Not the place I was born, but the place where I got to be a stupid kid, and have the lessons of the good and god-fearing life hammered into my head hard enough to make a dent and make it stay with me for more than half a century. I got to go to grade school there. I learned to read there, especially in Miss Mennenga’s third and fourth grade class. Especially in that old copy of Treasure Island with the N.C, Wyeth illustrations in it, the one Grandma Aldrich kept in the upstairs closet in their farm house. I got to see my first naked girl there. I learned a lot of things about sex from my friends there, and none of them were true. I played 4-H softball there, and made a game-saving catch in center field… in the same game where my cousin Bob hit the game-winning home run. But those were things kids did everywhere. It didn’t make me special. There was no real magic in it.
Being a farm-kid’s kid taught me the importance of doing your chores, every day and on time. If you didn’t do them, animals could get sick, animals could die, crops could be spoiled, the chickens could get angry and petulant and peck your hands when you tried to get the eggs. Cows could get grumpy and kick the milk bucket. Cats could vow revenge if you didn’t direct a spray or two at their little faces as they lined up to watch you milk the cows. And you never knew for sure what a vengeful cat might do to you later, as cats were evil. They might jump on the keyboard during your piano recital. They might knock the turkey stuffing bowl off the top of the dryer when Mom and Grandma and several aunts were cooking Thanksgiving Dinner. And I know old black Midnight did that on purpose because he got to snatch some off the floor before it could be reached by angry aunts with brooms and dustpans. And all of it was your fault if it all led back to not doing your chores, and not doing them exactly right.
But, even though we learned responsibility and work ethic from our chores, that was not the real home-town magic either. I wasn’t technically a real farm kid. Sure, I picked up the eggs in the chicken house at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm more than once. And I did, in fact, help with milking machines and even milking cows by hand and squirting cats in the faces at Uncle Donny’s farm. I walked beans, going up and down the rows to pull and chop weeds out of the bean fields at Uncle Larry’s farm. I drove a tractor at Great Uncle Alvin’s farm. But I didn’t have to do any of those things every single day. My mother and my father both grew up on farms. But we lived in town. So, my work ethic was probably worth only a quarter of what the work ethic of any of my friends in school was truly worth. I was a bum kid by comparison. Gary G. and Kevin K, both real farm kids and older than me, explained this to me one day behind the gymnasium with specific examples and fists.
Being a farm kid helped to forge my character. But that was really all about working hard, and nothing really to do with magic.
I truly believe the real magic to be found in Rowan, Iowa, my home town, was the fact that it was boring. It was a sleepy little town, that never had any real event… well, except maybe for a couple of monster blizzards in the 60’s and 70’s, and the Bicentennial parade and tractor pull on Main Street in 1976, and a couple of costume contests in the 1960’s held in the Fire Station where I had really worked hard on the costumes, a scarecrow one year, and an ogre the next, where I almost won a prize. But nothing that changed history or made Rowan the center of everything.
And therein lies the magic. I had to look at everything closely to find the things and strategies that would take me to the great things and places where I wanted to end up. I learned to wish upon a star from Disney movies. I learned about beauty of body and soul from the girls that I grew up with, most of them related. And I invented fantastical stories with the vivid imagination I discovered lurking in my own stupid head. I embarrassed Alicia Stewart by telling everyone that I could prove she was a Martian princess, kidnapped and brought to Earth by space pirates that only I knew how to defeat. And I learned to say funny things and make people laugh… but in ways that didn’t get me sent to the principal’s office in school. Yes, it was the magic of my own imagination. And boring Iowa farm towns made more people with magic in them than just me. John Wayne was one. Johnny Carson was one also. And have you heard of Elijah Wood? Or the painter Grant Wood? Or the actress Cloris Leachman?
Yep. We were such stuff as dreams were made on in small towns in Iowa. And that is real magic.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, dreaming, farm boy, farming, foolishness, goofy thoughts, humor, magic, Paffooney
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