The Thumb-Sucker
Darkness surrounds us
As the nighttime moves in
And we feel overwhelmed
And burdened by sin
But comfort can come
From a place we’ve all been
Just open your mouth
And shove your thumb in
Our childhoods were happy
And made us all grin
And simple we were
With our little thumbs in
So as we’re all worried
And all feeling dumb
We can make it all better
By sucking our thumb
(Silly poems and blue cartoons are a specialty of mine. I’m no Ogden Nash, but I make it all rhyme.)
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I wrote the other day about the fact that my writing is music in my head. Now, I realize there are probably a number of things wrong with my head, and Lord knows, it may truly need a good cleaning… er, well, not a brainwashing if that’s what you had in mind. No, what I need is to clarify the meaning of what I said, to restate in a less metaphorical and obscure way.
I have this insane notion that I am a good writer. Believe me, I am aware of the fact that every Indie author with a self-published novel has the same crazy fantasy right now. I imagine that my humor is like Mark Twain’s, my characterizations like Charles Dickens (Boz), my themes and insights like William Shakespeare (the Bard), and my creativity akin to that of Walt Disney (Diz).
I plan to write about it in a novel that used to be called The Little Boy Crooner, and now labors on under the title Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns. Don’t be fooled by the fact that I call this idea-thing a novel. It is not complete. There is no flesh on the bare bones. If it were one of the walking dead, it would not even qualify as a zombie. It is an animated skeleton. It is a notion about how words and ideas become and are transmitted by musical means.
The main character is a young boy named Francois Martin, the singing clown-boy in the Paffooney above. He is orphaned by a terrible car wreck in France, then sent to the only living relatives he has, who happen to live in Norwall, Iowa. Yes, that same goofy little farm town where I grew up and far too many of my novels are set. The Norwall Martins own the town tavern, where the bachelor head of the family, Victor (also known as the Vicar), is trying to make a go of it by putting in his bar a new-fangled bar-thing called karaoke.
As you’ve probably guessed, Francois, though he is awkward and unable to communicate in English, is a natural at singing karaoke. He puts on the clown paint and sings for his supper, and brings people into the bar from all across the State, and eventually the whole Midwest.
The clown images come through his connections to the Dreamlands… the same fantasy world of dreams alluded to in the novels of H.P. Lovecraft. Three clowns, Mr. Disney (Diz), Mr. Dickens (Boz), and Mr. Shakespeare (the Bard) help the boy and his American cousin Billy travel back and forth to the Dreamlands and learn to understand each other in ways that family members should. I should warn you, the new title reveals the fact that all dreams are not happy dreams and all endings are not happy endings. But we shall try… Diz, Boz, the Bard, and I.
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In 1969, the summer after I had to travel to a new school in another town, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. I stayed up and awake that entire summer night, as did my whole family, watching everything the TV was able to show. I vowed to myself that summer that I, too, would one day walk on another world. My fantasy was, as I’m sure most thirteen-year-old boys in the entire world agreed, was to be the first Earth man to set foot on Mars.
I set out to get myself into the Air-Force Academy in Colorado Springs. We visited there during one of our yearly family tent-camping car trips. It was an elegant, pristine dream. But life has a way of putting needle holes in the balloons that make up the loftiest of dreams. I developed bursitis and eventually arthritis by the time I was eighteen. My eyes were always too myopic to ever become an astronaut. Then Challenger blew up. Reagan, who didn’t believe in the U.S. Government as a way to accomplish important things, or at least, didn’t believe in spending money for such things when that money didn’t go into the pockets of his rich friends, changed young boy’s dreams. Our trajectory towards Mars was slowed.
So, do you let dreams die? Never me. No, not I. I would still travel there. But I could not take my physical body. I would have to go by the ship of imagination. I would have to rely on the fantastic inner eye.
Some of my junior high English students and I took up role-playing games. We graduated from Dungeons and Dragons into the space fantasy game called Traveller. We fought space wars, built space colonies, absorbed Doctor Who, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Last Starfighter. All things were possible. With a role of the dice, you could save the universe. And so my novel Aeroquest was born.
Catch a Falling Star and all the stories I have percolating now continue that plan, that goal, that young boy’s dream of placing his feet on another world. Today’s Paffooney is a symptom of that illness, not an absolute definition of it. Young Buster Crabbe, if you can’t tell, is the human boy in the picture.
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Hear the Music (a love poem)
The singer sings his song,
And wants the world to sing along,
Though the world has gone all wrong,
And the darkness stays too long.
The singer warms and croons,
Under bright romantic moons,
And carries hopeful tunes,
To the listening dolts and loons.
Can a song bring truth to light?
Can it help us win the fight?
Does it ease the world’s plight?
And set the wrongs aright?
Yes a song can save the world,
Though the truth must be unfurled,
And the listeners’ ears are twirled.
So the hurts will all be pearled.
Okay, okay… goofy poetry, I know. That’s the way I am. I have a goopy-sappy-goofy faith in the power of words. I call the chapters of my fiction Cantos because I believe them to be musical compositions and pieces of poetry. Ooh, what a goof that I am! But I really do believe that the words of a song, the stories in a book, or the beat of a poem can save lives, change worlds, and make all things better. Why would I believe that? Because words and ideas have power. And as I feel my mortality creeping nearer and nearer, I am feeling more and more power in my words. I almost have to burst into song like some sappy musical… like Camelot, like My Fair Lady, like Man of LaMancha. Like the stupid boy in the Paffooney, I have to sing. I have my impossible dreams.
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Here is an old pencil drawing from 1980. It shows MT as an observer of all that country cornpone stuff that makes up his humor and written genius. It also shows the loyal dog that would dearly love to get his teeth into that piece of chicken.
In both the books Snow Babies and The Bicycle-Wheel Genius I used the characters of the Magnificent Murphy Clan to weave actual people from my past into my stories. The Murphys; Mary and Warren, Warren’s father Sean “Cudgel” Murphy, Mary’s and Warren’s kids, Danny, Dilsey, Mike, Little Sean, Daisy, Sarah, Thomas “Pumpkin” Murphy, and Baby Jane all live together in a small, four- bedroom house dubbed “Murphy Mansion”.
Here is a look at a Paffooney of the irrepressible Mary Murphy with daughter Dilsey, and Little Sean on her shoulders.,
And here is one of my anti-hero Pirates, Mike Murphy with his little girlfriend Blueberry Bates.
Mike has the distinction of being in all three of my Norwall Novels, a very rare character indeed. And, NO, that doesn’t mean that he is me just because we have the same first name… Okay, maybe a little bit me, but that’s just the nature of writing silly novels about adventures through time and space and farm-town Iowa. I’m hoping to make you curious enough to buy one of my books. Catch a Falling Star is available as a hardback, paperback, or e-book from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and the link here to I-Universe. But I know you are far too smart for me, and I can never hook you just on the strength of my nerdy humor or my implausible Paffoonies. Here’s hoping a look at the Murphys will help.
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I submitted my 2012 novel Snow Babies to a novel writing contest. I learn more about the results November 30th. I have a lot riding on this contest, but the book will get published if I have to print it by hand.
(This old picture paffooney won a blue ribbon at the Wright County Fair in 1979.)
I am repeatedly told by people willing to tell me all the many things I am doing totally wrong in social media marketing that I should be creating fresh new content every day for blogs and Facebook. Ooftah! I don’t work hard enough as a teacher and a writer already? I have to imitate George Takei and master the internet just to make headway as a writer? It makes me wonder why I am actually doing what I am doing.
So why am I doing what I am doing?
First of all, I am an artist. I have always been one no matter what else was going on in my life. Arthritis limits my drawing time. Teacher work-time limits it more. Still, I like to blog and I like to post Paffoonies. Now, I know perfectly well you are saying, “What the heck is a Paffooney?” I also know you are probably using stronger language than “heck”. A Paffooney is a piece of full-color art that I have created matched with a silly little essay. It takes a lot of work unless I do like today and re-post old pictures with new flubbergraphy. (What’s flubbergraphy, you say? Oh, don’t start!)
Secondly, I do have important things to say. I have a somewhat rough road as a parent, the thing that led me to write Catch a Falling Star, a YA Sci-fi novel about an intelligent alien invader race that eat their own young. You can tell it’s a comedy just by that, right? Just because my kids always do the opposite of what they should do and never listen to my hard-won wisdom, it doesn’t mean I’m thinking about cooking and eating them. That would require a whole lot of ketchup, right?
My contest-submission novel, Snow Babies, is about loneliness and loss, about dealing with mental disorders like being bi-polar, and how you help people who are lost in the metaphorical snow. It is a hilarious comedy about freezing to death and suicidal thoughts. Dang, I have such humorous themes, huh?
Now, when I have the chance to write my newest novel, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, it will be about lonely old men befriending young boys, murder, government agents, and time-travel. It also has a parallel subplot about a little boy who thinks he is a girl. Cross-gender angst and goofy stuff like that. I am making comedy out of suffering, fantasy out of science, and hoo-hah out of oh, no!
So, now I have made the complete mistake of telling you all my goofy plans as a writer. Unrealistic and impossible fictionary goals from a foo-bah who really believes that stories can change the world and ideas can save humanity from itself. If you have an ounce of sense, you will forget every last word of mine you have ever read and swear to delete me from the internet at every possible opportunity. But I am counting on you not having any sense.
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The nightmare is always about standing in front of class naked. I had that nightmare as a kid. I have it still as a teacher. Why do I so fear having everyone see what I most don’t want them to see about me, and all of them really don’t want to see… especially if they have any ghost of an idea what that might actually look like in real life? I would make an extremely poor nudist. People would go blind. Honestly.
And yet, I find myself writing about naked people far more often than is comfortable. Why? What’s the matter with me that the topic keeps coming up in my silly little fiction stories? Why was it a part of my boyhood fixations that just won’t go away? I am not a pornography writer, er, I mean erotic fiction writer, like some of the indie novelists I have met online. I don’t actually even read that crap. And yet, I seem to find the word “penis” used somewhere in every work of fiction that I have so far completed. That doesn’t seem natural, does it? Most of the instances in my fiction are not about adult people having sex. They are instead about kid-people being caught au natural and deeply embarrassed. They are about unwanted and unexpected revelations of what we most want to conceal about ourselves. “No, Miss, I don’t have one of those. And I never go to the bathroom, either.”
So why do I keep pulling the metaphorical privacy curtain away? Because naked is funny. Revealing the awkwardness and bare foolishness of our inner selves is what comedy is really all about.
Mark Twain once said, “Clothes make the man… naked people have little or no influence in society.” This is a very wise saying that is probably entirely true, and is only mentioned here so that I can quote Mark Twain and pretend that, for a moment at least, I have grown suddenly and comically profound. But I do think that clothes are the person we construct on the outside of ourselves to influence others and convince them of the lie that we are actually in control of anything at all in our goofy lives. Under the clothes is more nearly the truth. We do not choose what we look like. Our birthday suit leaves no room to make any kind of impression other than, “what a silly-looking blob of naked pink fat that one is!” And this is why I will at some point in a story strip my characters naked and reveal things about them that they would really rather hide.
Of course, you may have realized about the previous purple-faced paragraph that I am speaking at least partly metaphorically when I say I “strip my characters naked and reveal things about them that they would really rather hide.” It is the person inside that you are trying to reveal, not necessarily the naked person. It is probably inappropriate to dwell too much on nakedness when you write primarily for younger readers, even if you have pretensions of writing Mark-Twain-like literary quality kids’ lit the way I allegedly do. Can you write a book like the Diaries of Adam and Eve in this day and age? Probably not. After all, it has naked people in it!
This topic comes up because of my first completed novel (not yet published) called Superchicken. In that story, the main character, a seventh grader pictured in this week’s paffooney, is asked to be a guest on a camping trip by a pretty young girl who owes him a big favor. But when she tells him it’s a naturist camp, he thinks that means they study nature and do back-to-nature stuff like making a fire with sticks. Needless to say, he is surprised to learn that her very liberal parents are allowing her to invite him to a campground full of naked people. Naked is funny. But the book will invariably get me into trouble and called a pervert repeatedly. But should I avoid trying to publish it because of that? I think… heck, I could make a lot of money with that kind of controversy.
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I have the privilege of being a public school teacher. Or maybe I should use the word “cursed”. It is no easy thing to be a teacher in the modern world. Regressive State governments like Texas mandate that teachers do more with less. We have to have bigger classes. We have to show higher gains on State tests. We have to do more for special populations based on race, disability, language-learner status, and socio-economic status. Of course, we give money to private schools to be “fair” to all, so a majority of the well-funded and advantaged students are removed from the public school system, even though studies show that their presence in classes benefits everyone. When the majority of students are low-income in a single classroom, even the gifted minority perform less well. When higher-income students are at least fifty per-cent of the class, then even the low-income and learning disabled make higher gains than the minority gifted in the first example class. So, there’s my triple-downer bummer for this post. You might think that I would agree with Republicans in this State that the lower classes are not worth investing in. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is, my fondest memories from thirty-one years as a public school teacher come from the downtrodden masses, the poor, the oddballs, the disadvantaged, and even the truly weird.
Okay, so here’s the funny and heart-warming part. I have a Hispanic English Language Learner right now who looks at the beard I have grown and calls me, “my friend Jesus”. I have to constantly remind him that, “If I were the son of God, my son, then I would be using lightning bolts for discipline a little more often.” He grins at me and answers, “Yes, my Jesus.” He’s a sneaky sort, more dedicated to games and messages on his i-phone than learning. He is more into working with the girls in small groups so that he can come out appearing much smarter without putting out very much actual work.
I remember one particularly challenged boy who didn’t talk in class at all. He could make sounds, however. Constantly during classes with this student in them, there would be numerous “meows” and birdcalls. Grunts and groans and whistles would fill the air. Most of the noises came from him. The ones that didn’t, came from those who imitated him. It reached a point that I was having to teach a classroom full of Harpo Marxes . When asked about it, he claimed he had a sore throat all the time and just couldn’t talk. Many of his teachers thought he was merely sabotaging class so he wouldn’t have to do any work. But just like when you put a harp in front of Harpo, this boy had hidden talents, and just was not being engaged on his own level. He was really quite bright if you could learn to communicate with him in Harpo Marxian.
I had another student who read all the existing Harry Potter books forward and backwards, and inside out. He even looked like the actor who played Harry in the movies, glasses and all. He was treated like a radioactive being by his classmates, and although he was charming and funny and had a natural talent for manga-style drawings of people, nobody seemed to treat him like a friend. (The paffooney picture I drew for this post was inspired by him.) He was a jovial loner. I was able to tap into his natural abilities for the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contests we participated in during the early 2000’s. I helped him find nerd friends who also knew all the words to the Spongebob Squarepants theme.
I have a Chinese girl in class who shared the Spongebob boy’s fascination with manga-style art. She’s a different bird all together. She gets my jokes and thinks I am funny. But she never laughs. She never even cracks a smile. She is so careful and complete in every assignment that it is very nearly painful to watch. Grades are serious matters to her. If her grade drops from 100 to 98, she wants to audit the teacher’s grade book to find out why. She does everything in class in beautifully crafted Chinese writing, and then translates it all word-for-word into English.
I owe my teaching career to kids like these. When I started my career in 1981 for $11,000 per year, I was employed by a school that had total disciplinary meltdown the year before. I had to deal with hostility, impossible behavior-modification tasks, fire crackers in the classroom, student fights, bullying, and a language/cultural gap wider than the Grand Canyon. That first year, I was planning to resign at the end of the year and try to figure out what else I could do with my life when a small Hispanic boy with a Scottish family name came up beside me on the playground one March day and said, “Mr. Beyer, I hope you know you are my favorite teacher. You are the reason I liked school this year.”
I didn’t let him see that there were tears in my eyes. I told him something about him being my favorite student. And I gave up thoughts about giving up. I lived the next thirty years of my career for him.
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Catch a Falling Star 