My son Henry (not his real name, in fact, the name of his great great uncle) went into the hospital yesterday. Today I learned the diagnosis. He is going to be all right. The hardest part is past. My son Dorin (not his real name either) and I got back from the hospital in Denton where we visited Henry for as long as the doctors would allow. Serious, but not about to beat us. Sad, but not going to make me cry, at least… not any more… well, at least,,, not tomorrow.
We will be strong in the future. We will grow and be great.
We will not break in the strong wind. But we will bend to make it happen.
Today’s Paffooney is a tribute to a childhood hero, Aquaman. I drew the picture from a comic book inspiration source coming from DC Comics in the 1960’s. Aquaman is a B-level superhero with not nearly so many fans as the big three, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. He was, however, my second favorite after Spiderman. He was more important to me than the Avengers. And this was strange, because I only had the chance to read the sacred comic books in the old barbershop in uptown Rowan. I only remember about two different issues that I was able to read during the long wait for a haircut. (Haircuts on Saturday took forever, because all the bald and crew-cut farmers would take forever getting their hair cut. And they hardly had any hair! I think the barber cut each hair individually.)
Aquaman and Aqualad would journey together in an incredible undersea world of sea monsters, giant fish, scuba divers, villains like Black Manta, and Mera, a real hot underwater babe. Topo the octopus could play comic relief by playing musical instruments or getting drunk on old lost kegs of pirate rum. I became a part of the adventure. I’m not sure whether I imagined myself more as Aquaman himself, or Aqualad. Aqualand was dressed all in red and blue, my favorite colors. I liked his blue swim-trunks. I myself could never wear swim trunks without a fatal case of embarrassment over my knobby knees and hairy legs. I admired Aqualad’s smooth and muscled boy-legs, though not without some shame and embarrassment. Some suggest that the relationship between Aquaman and Aqualad was a homo-erotic thing just like Batman and Robin. But, hey… NO IT WASN’T! It was a hero and sidekick that mirrored the complex relationship between a father and son. My father and I could never talk at any deeper level than Aquaman talked to Aqualad. Yet my father had super-powers for solving my problems and helping me do things and make things. Yes, I think I loved Aquaman because he reminded me of my own father in his quiet competence.
And I had a Captain Action Aquaman costume, a Christmas present and wonderful treasure. I played with it so much that only the broken trident, mask, and swim fins remain. The rest was all broken and unraveled and disintegrated from being played with. The Aquaman in my Captain Action collection has replacement parts in it to make it more complete. Yes, I spent time and money putting that toy back together so that I might play with it yet again.
So why is the super-powered King of the Sea so important to me? After all, his super powers are to breath underwater and telepathically talk to fish. I think, reading back over this stupid little essay, that the most important theme is the father-son thing. I never owned a single Aquaman comic book as a kid, but I watched him on Saturday morning TV. He was one of the Superfriends. And my father had been in the Navy on Aircraft Carriers. Yes, Aquaman is my favorite because Aquaman is secretly my father.
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No, I never actually got caught naked on Main Street wearing only a teddy bear in front of the Ben Franklin Dime Store. Thank goodness for that. But believe me, today was almost as bad as that. (Really, I just made up this picture to illustrate a bad day. It didn’t actually ever happen. I know it sounds like I am protesting too much, but… oh, well. Some of my friends know the truth.)
Today started with a near fatal accident on my morning commute. I have been having trouble on the drive in the mornings, passing out at stop lights on occasion and having to be awakened by angry car horns. I am a diabetic and I did discuss it with my doctor and my mother the forty-year RN nurse. I have been eating extra protein for breakfast to keep my blood sugar high enough. Still, I had a sudden rude awakening. I was going forty miles an hour as I was awakened by the car rumbling down the median on a divided portion of the highway. I got control of the car and veered back into my lane before I reached the light pole or the up-coming intersection. Believe me, I am going to take super serious steps to prevent that looming fatal accident. If I don’t, I will either end up dead or having to work with severely soiled underwear. No way can I afford another sick day.
So, after the good news about still not being dead, I was called into the vice principal’s office.
“Did they tell you that you were going to be having a new writing class?” he said out of the blue beyond.
“No.”
“You can teach a writing class, can’t you?”
Well, of course I can. I have done it a million times before. It is just that I never had to do it suddenly in the middle of a grading period before. So what is going on here? “Um, yes, I can,” I answered with the utter stupidity of the totally blind-sided.
“Good. We will be replacing your third period class today.”
Oh, good. Thank you so much. Why am I being singled out for this kind of treatment? Well, I am eligible to retire. They want me to retire. And my department is not only made up of gray-haired old fogies like me, but is being blamed for low test scores. (Of course, no one seems to notice that the scores I am routinely blamed for are second language speakers of English who have been mainstreamed in regular English classes. Why am I to blame for failures of kids who are not directly in my classes? Oh, that’s right… ESL teachers take the blame for ESL students whether we’re allowed to teach them or not.) Okay, bring it on! No way I’m gonna let kids fail, even if they are heaping it on to drive me out.
My blood sugar went too low again before the end of the day. All three of my own personal kids are failing at least one class. I am getting older by the minute. When I stop and think about it, it would be better to be a kid again, caught naked in front of the Five and Ten. (You might want to check out my previous post “Because Naked is Funny” to find out why.) It would be, all-in-all, a much better time. (And it didn’t really happen. Well… not like the Paffooney, anyway!
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I have been social media marketing for just over a year now. 208 followers on WordPress. 602 likes on my Facebook novel page, Catch a Falling Star. What does it all mean? Well, no one is reading my books still, so it means, “Write more books!” cries a crazed Mickey who is like Sisyphus in that he doesn’t know what will happen at the top of that hill.
In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall. Why have I done such a foolish thing? Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head? In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters? Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical. I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose. It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.
Here is a secret to powerful writing. Connect ideas with metaphors. A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion. Sorry, I’m an English teacher. It’s in my genes. But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.
Let me show you a metaphor. Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life. I am getting older. I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening. I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately. So what is the point of the poem? That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me. Not my memory. The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me. That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.
Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair. Its innards are revealed and labeled. The beauty is gone. It’s kinda icky.
What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own. The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained. Let me try again;
The Boy and the Boat
The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.
“Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”
I can hear what you are thinking. “That’s too simple and ordinary. If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.” Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.
Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do. When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me. I told no one. I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two. In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall. To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened. I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer. It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching. Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again. Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?
Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning. So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one. You can make of it whatever you will;
The Grin
The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man
Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti
In the afternoon sun.
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This drawing was created when I started this blog as a way of illustrating the kind of writing I wanted to do. Not only the book I published called Catch a Falling Star, but everything else I have written and plan to write. There’s a certain surreal philosophy expressed in this picture if you look at it right (squint your eyes and tap yourself on the temple hard with a brick).
In 1976 I ordered a Mego Spiderman from the ad in my Avengers comic book. It came by mail. It was only 8 inches tall, not the 12 that would become the basis of my action figure (don’t call them dolls) collection. I love Megos. I should’ve bought more of them, but I was in college and had limited space to keep them. I ordered the Wolfman second, then the Lizard, and finally Iron Man. I was going to buy a Captain America next, but Mego stopped making these things at the end of the 70’s. That, of course, is what makes them valuable. The last time I priced them in the collector’s market, Iron Man was going for fifty dollars, and Spiderman for forty five. I have no intention of selling them. They will one day belong to my own children to play with or do with whatever destructive thing they will. Until then, they are mine to play with.
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Gingerbread men may actually have saved my life. You may not have realized this, but ginger has a significant power over inflammation. I have had numerous struggles with bronchitis, chest congestion, and in the last few years, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. I discovered by yielding to the temptation to eat gingerbread men two winters ago, that the ginger in them actually makes it easier to breathe. They also help with acid reflux, a health scourge that plagued me until I discovered that eating ginger cookies, gingerbread men, and drinking ginger tea could actually make reflux go away.
Now, snowed in on a Friday when I should be teaching kids who are already shutting down for the holidays with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads, I am dreaming of gingerbread men, having used a last-minute-before-the-ice-storm trip to Walmart to lay in a supply of gingerbread men. They are the most important survival tool for me during the weather event
In my dream, the little brown-bodied cookie-men gathered around me to stare at me with raisin eyes. They wear only gum-drop buttons, white frosting squiggles, and red cinnamon sprinkles. Some brandish peppermint-stick spears and candy-cane clubs dangerously, letting me know that I better choose every move with great care.
“Why have you come to the Land of Gingerbread as an eater?” said one.
“I can’t talk to a cookie,” I said. “I am a human being, and I am supposed to be rational.”
“What are we supposed to do with a human bean when he’s trying to be rational?” a cookie man asked another cookie man.
“Let’s take him to the Ginger King. He’ll know what to do.”
So, I was surrounded by dangerous little cookie guys and escorted into a magnificent gingerbread castle. The castle stood on the edge of a cliff next to the Bitter Butter Sea. We made our way round the candy court until we reached the peppermint throne.
“So, great and hungry eater, why have you come to this part of the Dreamlands with your big hungry mouth and prodigious stomach?” The king addressing me was an even smaller gingerbread cookie than his subjects. He did have, though, a very large gingerbread crown, jeweled with red hots and candy corn.
“I ate gingerbread men last night to help me breathe and help me sleep without acid reflux.”
I was prepared to be the victim of their anger and recriminations. It was justifiable that they would be deeply offended and incensed.
The Ginger King smiled at me. “You have our blessings and our thanks,” he said. “It is the purpose and the goal of all gingerbread people to make your life better, and to make you happy.”
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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.
Catch a Falling Star 