Canto Thirty-Three – Aboard Golden Wing Thirteen
Shalar looked at the readout on the control panel in front of her. There was no mistaking that signature. It was the same kind of supra-magnetic photon drive used in a Golden Wing, and it was no longer operational. It also appeared to be crash-landed in the middle of a debris field, and that couldn’t be good. In addition, it also had to be the tadpoles’ ship, because Farbick and Biznap on the other missing ship were too capable to have crashed in that manner.
“Is it them?” asked Harmony Castille. The beautiful young Earth woman who was really an old lady made young and beautiful by Commander Biznap’s own de-evolution machine. She had a grim face, like someone who expected the answer could only be bad news.
“I don’t see how it could be anybody else.”
“Life signs?”
“I register bodies with no breathing and considerable signs of disease. No living bodies… but no confirmation that the dead ones are our missing tadpoles.”
Harmony seemed to stifle a sob.
“Why are you so affected by Telleron tadpoles, Harmony? I understand how much you are in love with Commander Biznap, but none of these tadpoles are his.”
“I have never in my long life had children of my own. I have always loved children vicariously through the young brats and evildoers I taught in Sunday School at the Methodist Church back in Iowa.” A tear escaped the beautiful young woman’s eye and rolled down her powdered and rouged cheek. Shalar couldn’t help but notice that even though the woman’s face was young, her eyes held a certain look of wisdom and experience, as well as pain.
“I will be very sad if I have lost young Tanith and Davalon. They are very probably children from my own eggs, even though we usually only keep track of the male parents.”
“I will miss young mistresses Brekka and Menolly, too,” said Harmony sadly. “Their immature giggles and love of dancing always seemed to brighten the room whenever I tried to teach them important life lessons from the Bible.”
“I thought the way you talked to them while teaching them meant you loathed their immature behavior.”
“Oh, I did hate most of the behavior, but I adored those girls. Underneath the death-eye frowns I gave them, I was always secretly laughing at their antics.”
“I never realized that about you before, Harmony,” Shalar said with some sympathy.
“What kind of mean old fuddy-fuss did you take me for, Shalar?” Harmony gave a small chuckle with the reply.
“The kind you were pretending to be, apparently.”
“I will miss the Morrells, too. They were a little dim sometimes, but basically good Christian people.”
“…And how about little George Jetson?”
Harmony’s eyebrows raised in disbelief of some sort. “That little heathen? He was almost as full of Satan and evil ways as one of our Earth boys from the Norwall Methodist Church! He made me wonder sometimes if he actually had a little bit of wicked Baptist in his demon blood. I never met such a child for pranks and playing with his privates when he should be listening to some good, soul-saving advice!”
Shalar was amused by that reaction. She was beginning to understand how self-contradictory Earther primates actually were. In fact, she understood that the reaction actually meant that Harmony would miss that little rapscallion more than all the rest put together. Shalar had come to see that the old church lady always claimed to hate most what she really loved and adored.
“Studpopper, can you land this wing near the wreckage down there? We need to find our missing children.”
“I will certainly do my very best, my lady.”
Harmony quickly grabbed Studpopper’s pointy green ear and twisted.
“You’d dang well better do better than that!” the young old lady cried with passion.
*****
If you are going to entertain a completely absurd notion like, “Shakespeare wasn’t really written by Shakespeare”, then you have to have some knowledge of the times and the context within which such a profoundly counter-intuitive thing could possibly be true. And it also helps to understand more precisely what the “writing of Shakespeare” actually means. Now, I know it is not particularly fair to confuse you, dear reader, right before I try to dazzle you with my complicated and over-thunk lackwit conspiracy theory, but that is, after all, what obfuscation actually means.
Catch a Falling Star 
Special Snowflakes
When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment. In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are. They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go. Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.
Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake? Believe me, it is difficult. Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands. The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper. Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty. That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created. But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.
You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen? That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals. Life changes each one in a different way.
And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather. Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are. I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch. I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football. They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.
As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things. I lost a job once to one of those. And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December. Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again. I guess I am just a “special snowflake”. But the point is, those things are real. People really are destroyed by them sometimes. And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.
But people are like snowflakes. They are all complex. They are all beautiful in some way. They are all different. No two are exactly the same.
And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them. Every snowflake has worth. Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring. If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes. And snowflakes can be fascinating. Even goofy ones like me.
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