I am always amazed by the fact that things which are inherently silent in nature make music in your mind. Writing is like that for me. Drawing is like that. And so is photography. That is an actual musical score from Chopin in the background. My son recognized it from a book of piano pieces I bought for him because he reads music and can turn those squiggle-bugs on the fence into the right plinkety-plunks on a keyboard. But there is more music in that picture besides. The nude young girl at the keyboard softly rendered in velvety colored pencil tones is also musical in nature, for more than just the fact of fingers on a silent colored pencil keyboard. The lyrical loops of black and yellow in the wings of the tiger swallowtail butterfly also make music in my head, sprightly piano music like Chopin’s, or possibly Vivaldi’s violins.
Did you listen to the music? I don’t mean Vivaldi’s, although if you haven’t heard it, you certainly should. I mean the music in the words. The music has to be there for me for the writing to be good. That’s why I consider Ray Bradbury and Walt Whitman to be masters and Stephenie Meyer and E. L. James to be unreadable hacks. The beat and the flow of the words need to be patterned and patient and wily. Do you not hear it in that last sentence? The alliteration of the first two adjectives set off by the counterpoint of the stressed-unstressed beats of the third? How can I explain this?
Iambic pentameter is the true genius of Shakespeare’s plays. What the heck is iambic pentameter, you ask? Well, I realize you have probably never needed to teach poetry to seventh graders, a truly impossible but infinitely rewarding task. So let me tell you. Units of stress called iambs consist of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. So naturally, if iambs are put into pentameter, then there must be five of them in a line of iambic pentameter poetry. It is a simple, rhythmic way to say something profound and interesting. The classic example is the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18;
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Translating that into X’s and O’s where X=stressed and O=unstressed;
O X O X O X O X O X
It’s simple, five oxes, all in a line. Except that last one about oxes is actually O X O X X O O O O X, a less simple pattern, yet still organized on the beat. Two iambs, a dactyl and an anapest. Okay, now I am talking like a poetry geek, and I have to stop it before I hurt someone.
The whole point is, words should be musical, even when they are not the words to a song. And now I must close on the verge of starting a ten-thousand word thesis. I shall shut up now. Here endeth the lesson.
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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