“Dad?” asked the Princess, “I heard a funny word in school today. What does Fuddy-Duddy mean?”
“Oh, that’s a good word,” I said. “It means an old fogey… a stick-in-the-mud.”
“A what?”
“A fussy old guy who likes to have everything his way. Like, if you accuse your father of being one… which you often do… he’s a fuddy-duddy daddy.”
“Ooh! I get it!” said Henry, chiming in. “And if your father is evil, then he’s a fuddy-duddy baddie daddy!”
“Yes,” I said, “and if it makes him sad to be evil, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie daddy!”
“If you are not sure he’s really your father,” said the Princess adding a one-up, “he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe daddy!”
“Yeah!” said Henry. “And if you suspect he may have fallen into a time machine and been turned back into an infant, he’s a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby daddy!”
“Now that he’s a baby again he will surely want to watch his favorite TV show again,” I said with a tear of nostalgia in my eye, “he’ll be a fuddy-duddy saddie baddie maybe baby Howdy Doody daddy!”
“What’s Howdy Doody, Daddy?” asked the Princess.
“No,” said Henry, “now you’ve spoiled it. It just ain’t funny any more.”
“Yes it is! He’s become a funny bunny fuddy-duddy hoo-dad doo-dad saddie baddie maybe rabies hoo-dah doo-dah…”
“Just stop,” said Henry. “You always carry things too far.”
“Right you are!” I said. “See this grin? It means I win!”
“Kaw-Liga” KAW-LIGA, was a wooden Indian standing by the door He fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
He always wore his Sunday feathers and held a tomahawk The maiden wore her beads and braids and hoped someday he’d talk KAW-LIGA – A, too stubborn to ever show a sign Because his heart was made of knotty pine.
[Chorus:] Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he never got a kiss Poor ol’ KAW-LIGA, he don’t know what he missed Is it any wonder that his face is red KAW-LIGA, that poor ol’ wooden head.
KAW-LIGA, was a lonely Indian never went nowhere His heart was set on the Indian maiden with the coal black hair KAW-LIGA – A, just stood there and never let it show So she could never answer “YES” or “NO”.
Then one day a wealthy customer bought the Indian maid And took her, oh, so far away, but ol’ KAW-LIGA stayed KAW-LIGA – A, just stands there as lonely as can be And wishes he was still an old pine tree.
The quirky movie I reviewed, Moonrise Kingdom, reconnected me with a song I loved as a child. It was on an old 45 record that belonged to my mother’s best friend from high school. When the Retleffs sold their farm and tore down their house and barn, they had a huge estate sale. My mother bought the old record player and all the collected records that Aunt Jenny still had. They were the same ones my mother and her friend Edna had listened to over and over. There were two records of singles about Indian love. Running Bear was about an Indian boy who fell in love with little White Dove. They lived on opposite sides of a river. Overcome with love, they both jump into the river, swim to the middle, lock lips, and both drown. Together forever. That song, it turns out, was written by the Big Bopper, and given to Johnny Preston to sing, and released the year after the Big Bopper died in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Richie Valens.
Kaw-liga, by Hank Williams, was a wooden Indian sitting in front of a cigar store. His love story is even worse. As you can see from the lyrics above, he never even gets the girl. Dang, Indian love must be heck!
But I have come to realize that these aren’t merely racist songs from a bygone era. They hold within them a plea for something essential. They are a reminder that we need love to be alive.
When I was young and deeply depressed… though also insufferably creative and unable to control the powers of my danged big brain, I knew that I wanted love. There was one girl who went to school with me, lovely Alicia Stewart (I am not brave enough to use her real name), that filled my dreams. We were classmates, and alphabetical seating charts routinely put us near each other. She had a hypnotic sparkle in her eyes whenever she laughed at my jokes. She was so sweet to me… sweet to everyone… that she probably caused my diabetes. I longed to carry her books or hold her hand. I cherished every time she spoke to me, and collected the memories like stamps in a stamp album. But like the stupid cigar store Indian, I never spoke up for myself. I never told her how I felt. I was endlessly like Charlie Brown with the Little Red-Haired Girl. Sometimes you have to screw up your courage and leap into the river, even if it means your undoing. Because love is worth it. Love is necessary. And it comes to everybody in one way or another over time. I look at pictures of her grandchildren posted on Facebook now, and wonder what might have been, if only… if only I had jumped in that stupid river. I did find love. And I probably would’ve drowned had I done it back then. Life has a way of working things out eventually. But there has to be some reason that in the 50’s, when I was born, they just kept singing about Indian love.
I respond to dreaming in ways that make sense in my stupid head, though the responses probably seem crazy to others.
The picture above was painted in oils in the early 1990’s before I met my wife. It was in response to a Bambi dream that seemed to be about my family as a family of deer. This was not about my family from childhood. It was, at the time, about my family in the future. Somehow I got it right. Two boys and a girl. Together for 30 years next month.
This picture is called, “The Boy Who Saw the Colors”,
Some pictures are dream images that can only be interpreted metaphorically. This one is about me being creative and artistical… or autistical as the case may be. It is also about being a synesthete with pronounced synesthesia.
This dream was a dream about being a Native American during a thunderstorm. It is called “the Magic-Man’s Daughter” because the Dakota Sioux tribe held the belief that dreams about lightning reveal you as a Shaman or Magic Man. Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka is the Lakotah word for “the Great Mystery”. That was a dream that sent me to the library to look things up.
I have dreams with clowns in them that are not nightmares. Here the clown known as Mr. Disney is encouraging me to sing sad songs.
I wrote an entire novel about that whopper of a dream.
This dream had me trapped in a tomb with a Mummy who wouldn’t stay in his nice warm sarcophagus.
It is not uncommon to dream about death and mortality. More than once I have dreamed about my own death. None of them have yet proved prophetic, but you never know.
I dreamed about my eldest son 14 years before he was born.
I think dreams can be prophetic because they are not bound by our perceptions of time in the physical universe. You can look ahead in a dream to that which has not yet happened. You can also look backward into the past beyond the boundary of your own birth. I often think some of my most vivid dreams are about peering into past lives and a very different me.
I know I sound crazy when I talk about my dreams. But they are a significant source for my artwork and creative endeavors. And dreams have a logic that doesn’t work by the rules of the world we know. Rather, it is a world of wonder.
There are many ways to fly. Airplanes, bird wings, hot air balloons, bubble-gum-blowing goldfish… well, maybe I am really talking about flying by imagination. The more my six incurable diseases and old age limit my movement, my ability to get out of bed and do things, the more I rely on reading, writing, and the movie in my head to go places I want to be.
Sometimes the wings I use to fly come from other writers. I get the flight feathers I need not only from books, but also from YouTube videos, movies, and television shows.
This magic carpet ride in video form is by the thoughtful creative thinker Will Schoder. In it he carefully explains how Mister Rogers used the persuasion techniques of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos to talk to elephants and convinced a congressman intent on cutting the budget to actually give Public Television more money for educational programming. This is a video full of warmth and grace and lovingly crafted magic flight feathers that anybody can use to soar across new skies and blue skies and higher skies than before. I hope you will watch it more than once like I did, to see how beautifully the central explanation spreads its wings and gives us ideas that can keep us aloft in the realm of ideas.
It is important to stay in the air of fresh ideas and new thinking. The magic carpet ride that takes you there is the product of vivid imagination, cogent thinking, and the accurate connection of idea to better idea. So instead of falling from the sunlit sky into the darkness that so easily consumes us on the ground, keep imagining, keep dreaming, and keep flying. You won’t regret having learned to fly.
I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave. I danced that jig too when I was younger. At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams. I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years. And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason. I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.
You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967. That is when it happened. It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture. He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain. And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen. For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs. I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings. The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.
When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die. At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering. This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.
If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards. I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim. I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack. I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others. The terrible secret is a secret no longer. He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.
I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post. Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post. You may be wondering why I even bother to post it. Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself? You tell me. This is a terrible thing that happened to me. I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before. I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him. I can finally forgive him. I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it. And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me. Is there something you need to overcome? It can be overcome. So dance with me… and rejoice.
I would like to say going in that there are good reasons why young people can become obsessed with death and suffering and the color black and the dance towards the grave. I danced that jig too when I was younger. At age 22 my experience with sexual assault came back to me in dreams. I thought they were only dream images, but as I continued to think about it and be tormented by it, I began to clearly recall the terrible things he did to me that I had been repressing for twelve years. And I deal with traumatic experience with art for some crazy reason. I took a week in 1981 to get all the horrid feelings out on paper.
You will notice the tombstone lists the date of death as being before my eleventh birthday in 1967. That is when it happened. It was not actually a sexual experience… it was torture. He took my pants off and did things to my private parts to cause me intense pain. And he even said to me that it was my own fault, that somehow I had told him that I wanted this horrible thing to happen. For several years after I intentionally used the furnace in my home to make burn scars on my lower back and the back of my legs. I believe now that I was hurting myself in order to extinguish sexual thoughts and feelings. The worst thing he did to me was make me feel guilty about what happened.
When you go back to the art of the middle ages, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and other European artists both young and old, you see artists grappling with mortality, the fact that all people, including me, will die. At times it can seem to the immature mind that death is the only possible escape from suffering. This artwork comes from a time when I was contemplating exactly that.
If you are looking at this closely, you will see that I signed my name to it backwards. I signed my art as Leah Cim Reyeb, or simply Leah Cim. I put these four panels into my big black portfolio and never showed them to anybody until after my abuser passed away from a heart attack. I don’t believe in Hell and I don’t believe in ghosts, so now, I finally feel safe about sharing this artwork with others. The terrible secret is a secret no longer. He can no longer reach out and hurt me any further.
I apologize for not being funny… even remotely funny… in this post. Funny is probably not the appropriate thing for this post. You may be wondering why I even bother to post it. Isn’t this a private matter, best kept to myself? You tell me. This is a terrible thing that happened to me. I am now honest about it in a way I could never be before. I can explain it without worrying about any retribution by or against him. I can finally forgive him. I can overcome what happened and be the stronger for it. And if you have read this far without being so revolted by it that you stopped reading and stopped following my blog, maybe you need to do the dance with me. Is there something you need to overcome? It can be overcome. So dance with me… and rejoice.
I know that you are probably immediately listing all the reasons that my title is totally wacky monkey-thinking in your head. And if you want to lay into me in the comments, you are more than welcome. But the reality is that teachers have to develop the mindset that all kids can learn and all people have value… no matter what. That can be hard to accept when you factor in how corrupted, warped, and badly-taught so many people have turned out to be. It honestly seems, sometimes, that when faced with the facts of how people act… being violent, or greedy, self-centered, thoughtless, un-caring, and willfully stupid… that they really don’t even have value to others if you kill them, let them rot, and try to use them as fertilizer. The plants you fertilize with that stuff will come up deformed.
But the Doctor I have pictured here, the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton always seemed to find Earth people delightful. Alien people too, for that matter, unless they were soulless mobile hate receptacles in robotic trash cans like the Daleks, or mindless machines powered by stolen human brains like the Cybermen. There is, indeed, music in every soul, even if some of it is a little bit discordant and awkward. And people are not born evil. The classic study done on Brazilian street kids showed that even with no resources to share and living empty, hopeless lives, the children helped one another, comforted one another, and refused to exploit one another. As a teacher you get to know every type that there is. And there are stupid kids (deprived of essential resources necessary to learning), and evil kids (lashing out at others for the pain inflicted upon them), and needy kids (who can never get enough of anything you might offer and always demand more, MORE, MORE!) Sometimes they drive you insane and make you want to resign and leave the country to go count penguins in Antarctica. But the Doctor is right. No matter what has been done to them, if you get to know them, and treat them as individual people rather than as problems… they are delightful!
So let me show you a few old drawings of people.
Cute people like Andrew here.
Or possibly stupid and goofy people who never get things right.
Or long-dead people who made their contributions long ago, and sacrificed everything to make our lives different… if not better.
Or young people who live and learn and hopefully love…
And try really hard at whatever they do… whether they have talent or not.
And hope and dream and play and laugh…
And sometimes hate… (but hopefully not too much)…
And can probably tell that I really like to draw people…
Because God made them all for a reason…
even if we will never find out what that reason is.
My life always seems to come down to snow. It is a theme that runs through my little teacher-life, my little story-teller-life. Did you know that I was born during a blizzard? Mason City, Iowa was snowed in during the November blizzard of 1956 when I was born, on this date in the wee hours of the early morning. Some of my most vivid memories happened in the snow.
There was that night when I was eleven and snow was falling heavily as choir practice at the Methodist Church came to an end. The walk home was more difficult than I had anticipated when I started out. The entire front of me was plastered with snow as I leaned into the wind and trudged like some kind of plodding living snowman. I got as far as the Library on Main Street when Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Kellogg called me into the library to thaw out. They called Mom and Dad to come the three blocks from home and pick me up. But Alicia Stewart was there. The most beautiful girl in all of Rowan, as far as my young heart was concerned. She sat in the row across from me at school. I am fairly certain that my Math grades were so poor mainly from the time I wasted watching her sharpen her pencils and turning the pages in her textbook. I had my Russian snow hat on that night and the ear flaps were pulled down. I had the little bill on the front of the cap pulled down to shield my eyes, and it was caked and dripping with snow as I entered the library.
I pounded off some of the caked snow and said, “Gee, I think it might be snowing outside.”
Everyone laughed.
Alicia pulled up the bill of my cap and looked me right in the eye. “Michael, you are so funny,” she said. That smile she gave me that snowy night warmed my heart, and drove the cold out of even my frozen toes. I still keep the memory of that smile in my heart to this very day, in a drawer where nobody can find it, and I haven’t really ever told anybody about it until here and now.
And snow keeps coming back to find me, even now that I live in Texas where snow is much more of a rare thing. On February 14th, 2003 in Dallas we woke up to another heavy snow flurry.
The people I love most in the world were enthralled. My wife squealed like a little girl. She is from the Philippines and she told me she had never really seen the snow falling before that day. My three kids were awake and romping in the snow almost from first light. The gently falling snow was beautiful, though it was a bit damp and clumpy, falling like goose feathers from a pillow fight, and easily forming into snowballs. We built snow men in front of Tatang and Inang’s house (Filipino for grandpa and grandma). Dorin, Henry, and Cousin Sally were throwing snowballs and random handfuls of snow at me and each other for most of the morning. The Princess, barely walking and talking at that stage of her young life, ate snow and played in it until her bare hands were red and hurting. She threw a crying fit when we had to force her into the house to warm up her hands. Even pain couldn’t make her want to leave the snow behind. I never loved snow that much until I got to see it through their eyes.
I truly believe that one day in the near future the snow will come for me again. I will probably not be living in a place where snow is frequent, so it may not even be real snow. But it will come for me to take me away the same as it brought me to this life. Not real snow, but that obscuring snow that falls as your field of vision fills up with whiteness and purity and fades away. Being in poor health for several years now, I know that sort of snow all too well. I know it will be coming again. The magic of life comes and goes in the clear, cold beauty of snow. And all the warm tangles and troubles of life will be smoothed out under a blanket of pure, white, and cleansing snow.
It has taken me some time to put ideas together to tackle this terrible thing. Jon Stewart did a segment at the beginning of his show that was not funny. It was somber, thoughtful, and full of real outrage that cast lightning bolts at the heart of the dragon. And I admire Stewart for what he is… someone who truly cares about things, and fights the good fight using the best weapon he has. Humor. Mark Twain said that against it, nothing could stand. But some things are so terrible that not even a joke can put it right. Why? Because there are places in this human world where ideas are like a festering sore, spreading at an alarming rate, and daily becoming more and more poisonous. Texas is like that. It is a Red State. That means it is a hotbed of conservative ideas and nurtures Republican values… like being distrustful and fearful of them… And who are they? They are not us. They have a different religion. They have a different skin color. They are not opposed to raising taxes on the rich, even if they are rich themselves. They are not capitalists… Or not freedom-loving… Theythink it can be left up to women to decide what to do with their own bodies. They don’t see abortion as murder. They don’t think teaching evolution in schools is evil. We must fear them… and, yes, even hate them.
As a school teacher, I learned early on that if you only look for the bad in other people, then that is what you will be left with, a world in which there are only bad people. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a world like that. I learned to look at the world as being full of imperfect people who all have good in them, lots of good. I grew up in Iowa where the people were so white in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that when the winter snow fell heavy enough, we all had the super power of invisibility. I remember only one black face from my childhood that wasn’t on television. There was a little girl from Chicago who came to stay with a volunteer family so she could get out of the inner city for a while. The adults warned us that she might be prone to stealing things, so don’t do anything to tempt her. And we didn’t. And she didn’t. And damn it, I don’t know whether we did a good job of not tempting her, or that warning was just an empty prejudice. She was just like us. She laughed at things. She loved kittens. She played our games. She was just like us… but she had a better tan.
I started teaching in South Texas. I quickly learned how to deal with Hispanic kids who were mostly poor and mostly Spanish-speaking. I learned that they didn’t laugh at the same things as I did. When they called me Batman for a while, it wasn’t a compliment. I learned to laugh at the things they found funny and learned to joke the way they joked. I played their games. I learned to love pit-bulls and other dogs the way they loved dogs. I was just like them… but they couldn’t hide in the snow as easily as me.
I learned to teach black kids like they complain about on Fox News, the ones they throw to the ground and sit on at pool parties in McKinney, Texas, when I moved to the Dallas area and the town of Carrollton. I quickly learned why some teachers are so stressed out by them. They are louder than the white kids. Their nerves can be more raw and their tempers hotter than the other kids. Not all of them… just about 51 %. But you have to look close enough to see that… they laugh at most of the same things as us. Some of the brightest, widest smiles I have ever seen are on the faces of black kids when you laugh at their jokes. They play the same games as I do. They love puppies just like I do. They sometimes even have more faith in God than I do. Some of my favorite students of all time had very dark faces. I still think of them often… and i will never stop loving them… all of them. And when something happens like it happened in South Carolina… Forgive me, I have to cry again for a bit.
And how do we solve the problem of places where love is so badly needed, but is not present in large doses? How do we overcome this passion some people have to exclude illegal immigrants, and the need some people feel to move their children out of schools where there are too many of the wrong colored faces? I do not know the answer.
But you do not create love by passing laws and building walls. You have to spend time with them. You have to laugh at the same jokes. You have to play the same games. You have to love puppies and kittens. Don’t you?
This postable Paffooney is really not so wonderfully postable. It got a little bit moisture damaged in the garage where I found it improperly stored. It is an oil painting from before I had a family of my own back in the 1980’s. It is called Madonna of the Golden Door. The girl is my sister, the younger of my two sisters. The boy is one of my favorite students from the 1980’s, one I fed and helped raise in addition to being his teacher for two years.
This painting inspired the following silly free verse poem;
Catch a Falling Star 
Flying the Magic Flying Carpet
There are many ways to fly. Airplanes, bird wings, hot air balloons, bubble-gum-blowing goldfish… well, maybe I am really talking about flying by imagination. The more my six incurable diseases and old age limit my movement, my ability to get out of bed and do things, the more I rely on reading, writing, and the movie in my head to go places I want to be.
Sometimes the wings I use to fly come from other writers. I get the flight feathers I need not only from books, but also from YouTube videos, movies, and television shows.
This magic carpet ride in video form is by the thoughtful creative thinker Will Schoder. In it he carefully explains how Mister Rogers used the persuasion techniques of Logos, Ethos, and Pathos to talk to elephants and convinced a congressman intent on cutting the budget to actually give Public Television more money for educational programming. This is a video full of warmth and grace and lovingly crafted magic flight feathers that anybody can use to soar across new skies and blue skies and higher skies than before. I hope you will watch it more than once like I did, to see how beautifully the central explanation spreads its wings and gives us ideas that can keep us aloft in the realm of ideas.
It is important to stay in the air of fresh ideas and new thinking. The magic carpet ride that takes you there is the product of vivid imagination, cogent thinking, and the accurate connection of idea to better idea. So instead of falling from the sunlit sky into the darkness that so easily consumes us on the ground, keep imagining, keep dreaming, and keep flying. You won’t regret having learned to fly.
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Filed under battling depression, commentary, dreaming, humor, imagination, insight, inspiration, metaphor, Paffooney, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as flying, imagination, love, nature, poetry