Tim is a character created in 1974. He began not as a character in a story, but a drawing of a boy wtith no pants or underpants on, but wearing a striped t-shirt, white with wavy blue horizontal stripes that were three fourths the size of the white stripes. It was an almost-portrait of a boy named Dewey ( or possibly something that began with the letter “T” because I make it a rule to never use real names in true stories about my actual past) that I had been watching from three tables away in the library during study hall. If you are thinking like a psychologist, you are probably thinking this sounds like a homosexual thing, but I promise I am not now nor have I ever been gay. I only have sexual fantasies about brown-eyed girls. It was the willowy and vulnerable shape of him, the quiet mystery of his quiet behavior and even quieter patterns of speech. I saw something of myself in him. A nerdy something about him that connected him to the thing that happened to me at the age of ten, and at that time was hidden from me by my traumatic amnesia. He represented the part of me that had been lost when the Big Bad Wolf in the forest caught me and ate my innocence completely.
I was never a friend or acquaintance of Dewey. He was a freshman when I was watching him as a senior in high school. We did not have PE class together, so I never saw him naked. The no-pants thing was not about him when I drew him. I never showed that picture to anyone. It was private, a thing completely about me in my own mind. I didn’t know anything about Dewey as a person, and his only personality in my estimation is what I imagined into him. So, he began fictional life as only a picture. In 1995 my oldest son was born. In a few years, the empty vessel that was Tim became more of my son than he was about me. My son inherited some… or most of my abilities as a liar, storyteller, imaginer, and devious thinker. Tim Kellogg, son of an English teacher, and grandson of a wise handyman who could do a little bit of everything, became full of fifty-percent son and fifty-percent father. He was both a portrait of my son and a self portrait.
So, what’s the purpose of writing about where this character came from and who I modeled him after? As you get older and closer to death, you have to come to terms with a few hard truths. I will probably never be read widely as an author during my lifetime, and probably promptly forgotten as soon as I am gone. But, as a writer, I know in my very bones that it is in my DNA to need to tell a story. I have to make meaning in coherent sentences and paragraphs about the greater reveals of WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN AND MOSTLY… WHY? Life is not to be lived in a trance, unable to burble about anything but your own pleasure and pain. Life is tragedy… comedy… romance… and reverance. And the story has to be told… and rewritten and retold. We are not real people until we allow ourselves to believe our own lies.
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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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