One of the fundamental truths of my life is that God has a very strange sense of humor and He has chosen me to be the brunt of the nudity jokes. Yes, me, the shyest kid in town, especially when it comes to seeing someone else naked, or (shudder!) someone seeing me naked. To say that I was a teenage prude would be an understatement. I did not even believe in thinking about people being naked. People are naked under their clothes? Aaagh!
I dreaded the start of fifth grade, because in PE class you had to change into PE clothes and take showers when it was over. Not just any kind of private, in-your-own-bathroom kind of shower, but one big tiled room full of shower heads where you had to be naked in front of other boys. Other boys like fat Tiger Bates who taught me the facts of life with only a few major distortions. Other boys like Kevin Swello who had hair in places we didn’t even want to know about, let alone see. Coming of age and facing the world of locker rooms and shower rooms and boys’ PE was one of the hardest things for me.
Well, I made it through that part of my childhood by telling God all about it and being strengthened by Him. But then, He decided never to let me forget about it. College in the 70’s was wilder than my little-town morals could take. I avoided Dorm drinking parties where party-goers sometimes played strip poker seriously with members of the opposite sex. When one of my two roommates decided to go streaking on his motorcycle, I avoided getting caught up in it in any way. Well, of course, everybody avoided that particular bit of stupidity, because it was snowing and the temperature was below zero. Ol’ Wildman Beckham nearly froze off parts of himself that he could ill afford to lose to frostbite. There were a lot of things to avoid in college.
I was always a very good artist, though, and as a raw talent I took Art classes even though I was an English Major. That led to the biggest blushing of my young life. Level 4 Drawing Class was drawing the human figure from life. I didn’t realize what that actually meant until halfway through the third week of that class. That is when the first nude model walked in to class. Dang! I was red in the face for the rest of the week. The mostly female class giggled behind their hands at me. The teacher, the illustrious department head, Dr. Louise Broffert, said things to us that just made it worse. “You know there is a difference between art and pornography,” she said, glaring at the few male members of the class. “It is mainly a matter of focus and point of view. I expect not to see any of the wrong point of view!” Oh, God! And pretty as that first model was, I was unfortunate to be sitting in a position where her innermost secrets were obvious and well-lit in front of me.
And it got worse. Students in Art 4 and above were asked to be the models! Guys as well as girls were expected to take their turns. Besides, you made ten dollars per session for posing for your classmates. Oooh! The memory still makes me shiver. As well as it should. It was a Winter Quarter class. Fortunately, my turn coincided with a bout of the flu. I was infectious on my day and couldn’t attend. Even better, I got a note from student services suggesting I better not risk further exposure to the cold. God put me through several sleepless nights of the sweats, but in the end He made a way out for me. Of course, I ended up with a C in that class. The lowest course grades I got in college were both C’s that I got from Art classes.
God was not done teasing me about it yet. I learned while studying Shakespeare and the Elizabethans that there existed in their time a sect who called themselves the Adamites. They were named for the Garden of Eden and Adam in his natural state. The idiots tried to build for themselves a Utopian society, a popular thing at the time, and they walked around their little gated communities buck naked all the time. Well, I have to say, I got a good laugh out of reading about them, without ever realizing it was my doom to meet their modern-day counterparts.
As a young teacher in South Texas, teaching English to Spanish-speaking Junior High students, I took up with a pretty Latino Lady, lovely Isabella Daniels. She was divorced from one Gringo already, and not quite willing to commit to another. Hence, we never married. She was, however, a liberated lady living in a world after the Sexual Revolution and before the dampening effects of AIDS. She was not as shy about her naked charms as I was. My parents lived near Austin, so we often went for the weekend to the Austin area. I stayed with my folks, she stayed with her sister. The thing is, her sister lived in a clothing-optional apartment complex on Manor Road in Austin. It would be my first experience visiting naturists and nudists where they lived.
The apartment complex was built a lot like an English fortress from Elizabethan times. It was a huge rectangle with a central court yard cut off from view of all the surroundings. The first time I picked Isabella up there, I was put off by the iron bars on the gate. The entry portal was completely cut off from the world at large by locks. I had to ask the bearded gate guard to let Isabella know I was there. When he had spoken with her, he came back to get me and asked me to come in. He was naked! I had only seen his head in the barred gateway window. I didn’t get the full Monty until he ushered me inside. And there was no beauty in him at all. Hair everywhere, like ol’ Kevin with a beard.
Inside I found a grassy courtyard with a swimming pool in the center. Two young girls, they must have been nine or ten, were skinny dipping in the pool and having a whee of a time. There was a pool table beside the swimming pool, under the shadowy canopy of the second story balcony. Around the pool table a number of portly men were playing pool and bickering with each other completely in the buff. As I waited, my eyes ended up fastened on two young ladies that wore t-shirts, but no pants at all. One of them noticed me looking and tugged at the front of her t-shirt as if to cover up. After that one little ineffective movement, however, they took no more notice of me, standing there all gawky and red in the face.
Isabella never let me live down the expression she saw on my face when she collected me that first time. She laughed roundly at my expense. She invited me to stay there too. I would have none of it. She had no shame about walking about in the all-together, but I was not trained to be that way.
From the times I had to visit her there I learned quite a bit about naturists.
They are not what I expected. They tend to be reasonable people in all other ways, bankers, lawyers, computer programmers, and Postal Service delivery persons. They just have this nutty habit of stripping nude and walking around like that. They don’t understand my reluctance and inhibitions any more than I understand them. But they are not bad and immoral people. The place was not a gawd-awful orgy site. It was a quiet conservative domicile where naked people lived.
Mark Twain once said in the Diary of Adam and Eve that naked people have very little influence in society. This is generally true. The naturists don’t want that influence. They just want to be left alone. They will, however, proselytize. After Isabella and I broke up, I encountered naturists again when I took up stamp collecting. I found some stamp-collectors and traders in Florida that were also practicing naturists. Besides selling stamps by mail order, they ran a naturist park near Tampa and sold naturist publications of all kinds. They wanted me to come to Florida for my Summer Vacation from school, and they promised to gradually teach me to be a naturist. They wanted me to join the ANS (American Naturist Society) and I ended up buying a number of books from them and learning about their gentle philosophy of family naturism. Nudists, I discovered, are mostly married, have families, and are quite fat, not beautiful in the least. Also, they are worldwide. There is a strong naturist movement in England where they even have a school; I think it’s like a high school, where all the students are nude. The FKK in Germany (Frei Korper Kultur) has most of the beaches on the North Sea draped with naked people. They must only play naked on the beach there, huh? The North Sea is definitely not warm enough for me!
So you can see, God has gotten a good laugh out of me and my reluctance to embrace the body He blessed me with. I am NOT a naturist now, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t take my clothes off in public. But, I know people who do. And I am not as shocked and horrified by it as I once was.
I hope you can forgive all my pictures of naked people. I am not trying to become a pornographer. Remember, Dr. Broffert says that it is all a matter of perspective.
This last picture is actually depicting a pair of Snow Babies.
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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