We like miniature figures and homemade illustrations in our D&D campaign. Let me show you a bit of the excessively obsessive results of this preference.
Tag Archives: photo Paffooney
Spotted Trains
I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.
Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.
My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.
When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.
This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.
Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.
When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.
Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains
The Magic of Pez
In 1927 in the mythical land of Austria, where they seem to know how to make candy… a condensed form of peppermint was created in a lozenge form and then placed into a plastic toy dispenser. The spells that were cast to make this magical item probably had nothing to do with toad warts and bat wings and eye of newt. It has more to do with Mickey Mouse, then Katzenjammer Kids, and Marvel Super Heroes. I have been caught under the spells of a PEZ fixation since childhood. I remember begging for a Bugs Bunny dispenser in Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines when I was probably six years old. My parents wisely said no hundreds of times when I was a kid. Who wanted to spend a nickel on a penny’s worth of candy? Just for a Pez dispenser. If they ever caved to my begging, even once, I don’t still have the dispenser. But now I am supposedly a responsible adult. I have money. Well, I used to have money before I spent it on collecting PEZ dispensers. I can’t even eat the the stupid candy. I have diabetes. So I feed the candy to my kids and risk giving them diabetes.
Here, my minion Stuart is showing off my Avengers collection. It took him nearly thirty minutes to line these six dispensers up so that they were all standing at once. The Hulk kept falling on him repeatedly.
I am proud of my Toy Story collection. I had to go to some lengths to find some of these (particularly Slinky Dog and Rex).
Disney Princesses were easy. Both at Walmart and Toys R Us they were all grouped together on the Disney hooks.
The Muppets were also grouped together with the Disney Pez.
Winnie the Pooh is Disney, too. I got some of these on discount at Toys R Us. I still need Piglet and Owl… and Christopher Robin. I don’t have an unbroken Minnie Mouse either. I had small children when I first started collecting these, and now I have fat children and a lot of empty Pez dispensers.
My Star Wars collection seems to be evil Pez dispensers and Yoda.
And poor Stuart is getting tired of standing up Pez dispensers, so I will end here without having shown you all of my PEZ dispensers. Besides, I have reason to keep the newest dispensers a secret from my minion.
Filed under collecting, humor, photo paffoonies
Skyscape
It is difficult to look at the sky and not feel that the power of Heaven is real. As I approach the halfway point of my sixty-eighth year, and the darkness of the future draws ever nearer, I am forced to think about what I really believe. Being smarter than the average bear has its drawbacks. I understand why most of the writers I most admire were atheists, and all of the philosophers I have read and found agreement with are decidedly atheist. Science, rationality, and reason all suggest that there is nothing beyond the physical realm. Should that matter? Faith, according to Mark Twain, is fervently believing in your heart what your mind tells you ain’t so. In fact, Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.” Even the Bible is saying you have to believe it even though you shouldn’t believe it.
So, will I go to Heaven when I die? For me, the question is meaningless. I look up at the miracle of a blue sky on a partly cloudy day and see the life-giving sun. I am alive… here and now… and nothing else is really relevant. I am a part of the great, vast universe of reality. My existence is real and cannot be unmade… even by God, if He were inclined to do such a thing. I am a small, insignificant part of reality, and I can be gone in the next instant like a puff of smoke in the wind. But I am here and I am alive and I took the Paffooney picture that I used to illustrate this post. And I face whatever comes with a smile on my face. I am alive… and life is good.
Filed under insight, inspiration, philosophy, photo paffoonies, Uncategorized
What You Should Know About Filipino Families
Not everyone pictured in this post is actually a family member by marriage, but my wife has a big family and everyone who is even remotely related to a Filipino family… or even imagines that they are… is family.
I am about as much of a white-guy WASP-type as you can find in Middle America, having grown up in Iowa and teaching for my entire career in Texas. But I know a thing or two… or three about other cultures. I taught in South Texas for 23 years with students who were over 85% Spanish-speaking. And then, in 1995, I married into the Pinoy culture of the Philippine Islands.
Me and my Filipino-American familia… circa 2003.
There are some things I have learned about this other culture that you should probably be aware of.
#1. The United States is being invaded and colonized by the Philippines. They are coming here in waves, getting jobs in education and medicine that not enough of home-grown America are willing to take up. My wife came here with a placement company as a teacher. Three of her group of Filipino teachers landed in our little Cotulla school district. When she got here, she was met by her cousin and her cousin’s family. There was a Filipina woman and her young son in the Valley that also took an interest in helping her get settled in Texas. All of these people… and all of their friends and relatives are still a part of our lives. My wife’s sister and her family lived in California where dozens of cousins also lived. They and my wife’s parents have since moved to Texas, along with two other sisters and their families. You get the idea. They are taking over.
Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.
#2. As you can see, Filipinos love to take pictures. Above is a picture from class where my niece goes to school back in Floridablanca in the Philippines. People complain about pictures of food on Facebook. My Filipino family puts the Food Network to shame. Sometimes I can’t tell if they are eating another exotic Filipino dish with rice and meat or they’ve been putting firecrackers into fish and exploding them. And the fish eyes are a delicacy. Eeuw! My sisters in Iowa won’t even let me talk about the food at Filipino gatherings. I have to be extremely careful of what I share on Facebook.
#3. To know about Filipino culture, you have to understand what Jollibee is all about. Jollibee is the Filipino MacDonald’s. Of course, it is cheaper… and better tasting. There are a few of them around the country here. California has more than Texas. They are like a giant Filipino magnet. You go there to find the Filipino community in any American city. But other people love the food too. You have to sort the Filipinos from the Hispanics and white folks that are not too proud to eat cheap and delicious.
Well, those are only about three things that you should probably know about Filipinos and Pinoy culture. I haven’t even gotten into the thing about Matrilineal social orders or the evils of Karaoke addiction… but enough is enough for one day. I have no idea how much trouble I am now in for revealing cultural secrets. It could be a long cold night in the dog house.
Filed under autobiography, family, humor, photo paffoonies
Spotted Trains
I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.
Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.
My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.
When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.
This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.
Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.
When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.
Filed under autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains
The Wizard’s Magical Tomes
For the last 25 years of my life, I have been laboring to create hand-made books filled with my magical research and spells. The two in the back are scrapbooks filled with printed images, drawings, poems, and short autobiographical compositions. I collect in them things I mean to weave into fiction, things I mean to use as models for artwork. The two in the foreground are completely cartoon stories in rough draft form. These are not books I ever mean to have published. They are filled with things I intend to use in my work at some future time. Many of these images and poems I have used already somewhere. But there are many, many more. That makes these tomes something of a treasure… at least to me.
June 3, 2024 · 1:35 am
Cloudscapes
Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!” This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution. (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)
Look at a couple of my cloudscapes. Do you see angels?
Cloudscapes (a poem)
Blue and white and filled with light…
The cloudscape burns with angels…
And wholly bought with grace unsought…
I long to fly with angels…
Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?
I see them there, they’re angels!
So, there you have it. I’m a loon. I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin. But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences. Creativity has its price. And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul. If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.
The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek ἄγγελος ángelos, The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature. (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)
I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits. I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God. So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me. I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on. Here is the pencil sketch;
This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke. In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself. But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle. She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle. I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.
The finished picture.
My Mother’s Dolls
Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer
You may already know about my doll-collecting mania. You may have already called the mental health people to come take care of the problem, and they just haven’t arrived at my door yet with the white coat that has the extra long sleeves. But you may not know that my mother is a doll-maker and has something to do with my doll-collecting hoarding disorder.
In the early 1990’s my mother and I put our money together and bought a kiln while we were visiting my sister’s family out in California. It wasn’t the most expensive model, but it wasn’t the cheapest, either. We both had enough experience with ceramics that we didn’t want to buy a burning box that was merely going to blow our porcelain projects to kingdom come. Mother had doll-making friends in Texas who taught her about firing greenware and glazing and porcelain paint and all the other arcane stuff you have to know to make expensive hand-made dolls. Now, honestly, at the start we could’ve made some money at it selling to seriously ill doll collectors and other kooks, but we were not willing to part with our early art, and by the time we were ready to do more than just have an expensive hobby, everyone who would’ve paid money for the product was making their own. So dreams of commercial success were supplanted by the hobbyist’s mania that made more and more charming little things to occasionally display at the county fair.
The two dolls I have left to share on my blog from that era were both crafted by my mother. She lovingly fired the porcelain body parts, painted the faces by hand, and created the wardrobe on her Singer sewing machine. I made some dolls too, but never with the wondrous craft and care that made my mother’s dolls beyond compare.
Tom Sawyer was originally a boy doll who was supposed to be able to hold a model train in his hands. My mother had the pattern for the little engineer’s uniform and hat that she would use on another doll instead. He is named after the Tom Sawyer clothing pattern that my mother bought and sewed together to dress him in. He has a cloth and stuffing body underneath his clothes together with porcelain head, hands, and bare feet.
The other doll I have left to brag unctuously about is a doll named Nicole after the niece my wife and I have whom this doll bares a striking resemblance to. She displays a beautiful little girl’s sun dress with quilted accent colors that my mother sewed from scratch with the help of a pattern she was truly fond of and used more than once.
These dolls were gifts to my wife and I, presented shortly after my mother bought out my share of the kiln when she retired and moved back to the frosty land of the Iowegians. I haven’t kept them as thoroughly dusted and cobweb-free as they deserve because I have been a somewhat lazy and slovenly son… but I do love them almost as much as (and sometimes more depending on recent behavior) my own children. (After all, porcelain kids rarely make a mess, overspend allowances, or hog the television too much.)
Filed under doll collecting, humor, photo paffoonies
Catch a Falling Star 
Morning Has Broken
Today is off to a miserable start. I heard on the radio that David Bowie has died. Ziggy Stardust… the Goblin King… The Man Who Fell to Earth… the Thin White Duke…is gone. And even though since high school in the 1970’s I have never been quite sure how I felt about his music, I wept. The man was a musical maker of lyrical poetry. He could make you feel really really terrible… but he always made you feel. And he made me depressed as he led me through the Labyrinth… but he also made me soar… on the wings of a barn owl. It was about facing the darkness and finding your way. Finding the way out. Singing the Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby, but not actually singing it… making peace on Earth instead. Sometimes things are just so weirdly beautiful it hurts.
I dropped my daughter off at her middle school, and then Jody Dean & the Morning Team played this on the radio.
I wept again. Darkness is my old friend… I have lived with and through depression after depression. My own… my wife’s… my children’s… And it is a miracle I have lived this long without succumbing to the Darkness. It took Robin Williams. It took Ernest Hemingway. But somehow, the Goblin King always goaded me onward, to find the answer at the end of the Labyrinth. “You… you have no power over me.” And then I am okay once again.
I captured the dawn once again this morning. Once again I failed to truly ensnare the subtle reds and pinks and purples that were actually there. But there it is, anyhow. The morning has broken. The blackbird has spoken. The morning is new.
My heart is still sore this morning. The dog didn’t help when she spilled the trash to get at the napkins with bacon grease on them. We may have a dog-skin rug as a doormat later today. But David Bowie left so many words and ideas behind to comfort me. Is he one of those “neon gods we made”? Of course he is. But as the owl flutters off in the closing credits, we can take comfort in the knowledge that no one is ever really gone. And we can always anticipate some… Serious Moonlight.
This is, of course, an old post revisited.
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Filed under commentary, music, photo paffoonies, poetry
Tagged as battling depression, bowie, David Bowie, depression, loss, love and life and laughter, music, News, photo Paffooney, rock