The following is republished from my old blog on this date in 2017.
What is it about this time of year that gets me now? Is it that everyone concerned (except my brother) is gone now? I think it must be. My dad, my mom, my sister, my grandparents…all gone. Everyone I spent holidays with as a kid, except my brother (who doesn’t remember much of it), is dead.
That’s a lonely thought. But the wonders and the joy and the smells of the holiday are hardwired into my brain. It’s colorful Oz compared to the dreary black and white days of Kansas in the every day nightmare of my childhood. My mother had an ironclad custody agreement with my father. Both my brother and I would be with her for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and my father would have us for the week following. I would mark the days on my personal calendar, counting down until we would feel safe and happy again. Spending time with the people who loved me most for a glorious week, as opposed to being beaten, belittled, and berated every day. There was nothing better. I know for a fact that if I had not had those respites to look forward to, I wouldn’t have made it out alive. Even now, I weep with joy at the happy memories.
My grandma baking batch after batch of cookies. Ice cream with chocolate syrup and peanut butter as a treat every night. Endless coloring books and comics and silly putty and drawing paper and colored pencils. Sleeping on the hide-a-bed in the living room. Trips to Cadillac and Traverse City, visiting the best bookstores in northern Michigan, and knowing that I’ll be able to choose something new to take back and read in peace without being tortured for reading “those damn comic books” again. An oversized treasury comic bought for the extravagant sum of $1.00, hearing my grandpa chuckle, saying, “A dollar for a funny book? Jesus Christ, Ma,” but knowing that he didn’t care.
Riding snowmobiles for endless hours and warming up by the woodstove and drinking hot chocolate. Egg nog that I helped make from the time I was able to reach the counter while stepping on a stool, with freshly ground nutmeg. Chocolate milk with dinner; the decadence! Getting our action figures out and playing to our hearts’ content while my dad and grandparents sat around the table drinking coffee.
I remember every gift no matter how small. My dad’s tradition was to give us Lifesavers storybooks and McDonald’s gift certificates. The reason behind the gift certificates is so terrible: My mother and stepfather wouldn’t let us eat very much at McDonald’s so in order to allow Jeff and me to order what we wanted, he gave us gift certificates. It didn’t work out. They just used them to order the usual and kept them. Yes, I know, even my holiday stories have darkness to them. Welcome to my world. But don’t think for a moment that the thought wasn’t appreciated. It most certainly was. We knew we were loved, if only for a while.
As I put this last paragraph down, I’m already crying at the thought of leaving each year. And not just tears rolling down my cheeks. We’re talking the ugly cry. My grandpa would slip us each a dollar and kiss us goodbye. He wasn’t exactly an affectionate man, but there was no doubt of his love. One of his favorite things in the world were cordial cherries and I made sure he got a box of them from me every single year. I think it was his favorite gift. By the time we got to the back door of the mud room, we were begging to stay. “Don’t make us go back. Please! We’ll be good.” And my grandma would hold us close, and whisper, “I know you would. You’ll be back soon, I promise. I love you.” And she would have to leave the room before we saw her cry as well. Then my dad would hug us. I knew he didn’t want to let us go. And with hindsight, I can’t imagine the guilt he must have felt for causing this disruption not just for us, but for his own parents who didn’t get to see us except for twice a year. It was not ideal. But in my darkest hours lying in bed at night back at my mother’s house, I know we were loved for a short time every Christmas. That’s why I’ll always celebrate regardless of religion. It wasn’t about Jesus or God for me. I got beatings in the name of God.
It was about family. It was about home. It was about love. And it was about hope.
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. In case you were wondering why I haven’t been posting here this month, I have been hyperfocused on completing a novel. The goal of NaNoWriMo is just to get it out. Just write. And write I have. I have written 30,000 words in 14 days. With a goal of 2,000 words a day, I am a day ahead of schedule. With luck and determination, I will have a 60,000 word novel draft done by the end of the month.
I can then take my time to revise, edit, rewrite, and everything else necessary. But for now, I am just plain pounding the keyboard, trying to churn it all out.
What’s it about? Nothing you would ever expect from me. My wife calls it an adult contemporary novel. In fact, it will be published under a pen name. I’ll pitch it, but I can self-publish if I need to. I have extra ISBNs left over from working on Solution Squad, and I already know how IngramSpark works.
So, I’m taking a month off from my blog. I’m taking a month off from my Mego figures. And I’m going to put a big check mark on my bucket list at the end of November.
The actual milestone date was a couple of days ago, but as usual, our family circumstances dictate that we dance around actual dates when we celebrate.
Twenty-five years ago this weekend, I stepped off an airplane at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans. I was wearing a lavender long-sleeved shirt, a decision that I immediately regretted as I stepped through the exit of the plane. The air was heavy and thick, and strangely warm. I started sweating immediately, but not just because of the heat. I was going to meet the love of my life.
We met online the year before, both of us playing a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) game called Terris. We were using America On Line to disappear into a fantasy world that bore little resemblance to our own. I was playing a soceror named Antrim. She was playing a shaman named Serafina. Being of low level, we found groups of like abilities and stuck together. Serafina and Antrim were both in the Wizard’s Guild, and while my character threw massive fireballs and wrought havoc with monsters, Serafina was a healer and kept the party alive. The problem with using magic in that word was that it required a lot of rest to recover spell points, the fuel that made us go. To enhance our recovery rates, we would often find ourselves sitting around in the Glade of Spiritual Healing, outside of the main city of Devardec. And there, we would chat–sometimes in-character, and sometimes out-of-character. OOC conversations were often held in “tells,” telepathic communication that the general public wouldn’t hear. It was there that Serafina’s player, who at first didn’t even want to tell me her real first name, and I talked about what we did for a living. She was interested in making a career change, and wanted to know about teaching, which I had revealed as my profession. And that’s how our friendship began, innocuously, sitting around playing a computer game across the country from one another.
As time went on, I spent a lot of time playing Terris. I couldn’t afford to do anything else. My then-wife was doing her student teaching 90 miles away, staying with her parents. She only came home some weekends. That should have been a clue right there that something was wrong with our marriage. We went through marriage counseling, but she quit within a few sessions. It seemed that she wasn’t really motivated to try to save the relationship. I started a new job, still teaching, but somewhere else, while my then-wife did her own thing. It was on my birthday that year, that the final straw broke. My not-so-loving wife decided not to even be home on my birthday and she left early to go Christmas shopping with her mother instead, staying a few days at her parents’ house. I was devastated. I went into Terris to see if Magi was playing, and asked if I could call her. I’d never spoken to her on the phone before. It didn’t seem like it would be appropriate since I was married. But that night, I cried my heart out to her and she consoled me as best she could. It was clear to everyone, especially me, that my marriage was over.
Almost a year later, Magi and I were still good friends, but thought that maybe we could be more. We talked on the phone almost every day and saw each other through personal and professional crises. We exchanged favorite books and movies. I had a long weekend for fall break, and we decided that I should fly to her to meet her face-to-face. When I saw her smiling face looking at me in the airport greeting line, any doubt was washed away. We went to Copeland’s for dinner (I had shrimp creole for the very first time), and we held hands and talked for hours. We were just so thrilled to be in each other’s company. We talked late into the night, and the next morning (I slept on the couch; I was still technically married) I made her my favorite Big Boy Mexican Fiesta Omelet for breakfast. Honestly, I think that’s what made her love me. I make a pretty good omelet.
She took me around New Orleans, sharing with me the best of her city. I loved it. It’s still my favorite city in the world. From Cafe Du Monde to French Market to the Riverwalk, every new sight and smell made me happy. She’d had me read A Confederacy of Dunces, so naturally, I had to eat a Lucky Dog. I ate a muffaletta for the very first time. We visited art stores, including one that had animation cels, which thrilled me. She packed as much as she could into a short trip. And it was made just that much more special because she was the one showing me around. While Magi was at work one day, another friend of ours from the Terris game came over from Bourg to keep me company. We went on a ghost tour of the French Quarter, and were allowed to see the recessed apartments that hide in the middle of the store blocks, behind gated doors. And we all went to dinner afterward. I felt so happy to be surrounded by people who clearly cared about me, especially Magi.
The weekend passed too quickly. Even when Magi was at work, I hung out at her store. I just couldn’t see her enough. By the time I had to return home on Monday, I was having second thoughts about even getting back on the plane. It was like a scene from a movie. We sat in her car, in the rain, and just felt our hearts tearing apart. We were both in tears. She took a ring from her index finger and put it on my pinky. I could smell her perfume, and asked what the name of it was. Spellbound. Of course it was. I got on the plane and returned back to Indiana. I couldn’t even call it home. Because for me, from that day on, my home was wherever she was.
A week after I returned, I walked around in a daze. I went to the grocery store, which also had a perfume counter. I asked if they had Spellbound, and had them spray some on a piece of paper I had with me. I just walked around the store, trying to imagine her by my side. I went to our Borders store, and sat there with a cup of good coffee, thinking of her being at her Borders store in Metairie, where she worked, and where I spent a lot of my time while I was visiting. I knew life would never be the same.
I finally got it. After three and a half years, I caught COVID-19. Not sure where or when, but the test was positive and of that there could be no doubt. So, five days of isolation were ordered, and I could think of no better time to jump into Ted Lasso.
Several of my friends recommended this show; so many, in fact, that I found it difficult to believe the hype. But right from the get-go, this was my kind of show. An quick barrage of dad jokes and pop culture references made me feel right at home, but I was not prepared for the uplifting message behind it all. If you haven’t seen the show, Ted Lasso is an American division 2 football coach who is recruited to coach soccer in London. No, he has no experience with soccer. He doesn’t even know the rules. Why has he been hired? Well, the owner’s motive is right out of Major League. She wants the team to fail. It seems A.F.C. Richmond was her philandering ex-husband’s pride and joy, she got the team in the divorce, and her plan is to run it into the ground. That’s where the similarities end, though. There is no cynicism in this show. It’s simply not done. Every character has motives that are consistent with who they are. They react out of love, jealousy, anger, fear, and pain, and Ted Lasso is usually there to explore their motives and to persuade them to be the best version of themselves. He just brings it out in people.
I watched all three seasons over the course of a few days, and I have to tell you that after being immersed in this world, I’m going to make a few changes in myself. First, I’m going to try to be more curious and less judgmental. Second, I’m going to try to make the folks around me know how much I care about them and appreciate them. And third, I’m going to start saying, “Oi!” a lot more.
I have always loved both characters, Batman and Superman. When I was first able to walk and talk, the Batman TV show inspired me in myriad ways, starting in January 1966. Later in the same year, in the fall, the New Adventures of Superman cartoon was on CBS on Saturday mornings, and I loved that, too, especially the eight-minute Superboy sequences parked between two eight-minute Superman shorts. There have been times in my life where I have swung like a pendulum from one side to the other. As a small child, I couldn’t help but be swayed by Batmania. It was in full effect, like it was made for me. I had Batman slippers, Batman pajamas, Batman dinnerware. If Batman action figures (besides the Captain Action outift) had existed then, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without one. As it was, I had a plastic cake decoration that served the same purpose.
1966 Batman cake topper by Wilton
But as I got older and Batmania started to fade from the national consciousness, I started to learn that Superman had an older and deeper public presence. He’d had a radio show from 1940-1949, a series of animated movie shorts from 1941-1943, and a television show from 1952-1958. When the 1966 cartoon show came on, I didn’t have the first clue that it used three of the voice actors from the radio show (as did the animated shorts in the 40s) because I didn’t know there had been one!
As far as I knew, the New Adventures of Superman were the first adventures of Superman. When I found out that Superman had had a radio program, I was eating breakfast in 1976, reading the back of a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes:
By that time, I had been introduced to War of the Worlds and the Lone Ranger, but I had no inkling that there had been a radio show featuring Superman. I thought for about a second about asking for it, but I might as well have asked for the moon because I was still living with my stepfather, who had burned all of my comic books and forbade any such stuff in his house. Oh yes, I have them now, all four volumes. Of course I do. But I don’t really need them, because we live in a time of wonders. Back in the early 1990s, a company called Radio Spirits really got into cleaning up and preserving old radio broadcasts, including Superman. At first they released them on cassette, then compact disc, and among their popular releases was Superman. I was an early adopter, buying both cassettes for the car and my vintage-appearing radio/cassette player, and later, CDs, and then finally switching to USB drives, I can listen to Superman for pennies per episode. And I do. I listen to it every day on my way to and from work. I guess you could say that I’m swinging back toward the Superman side of my fandom right now. I’ve even gone to the point where I have a reproduction box of Kellogg’s Pep, which was the sponsor for the show, as well as one of the comic buttons that they advertised twice an episode.
Superman had his own sort of Batmania in the late 1970s with the December 1978 release of Superman The Movie. Double-album movie scores, trading cards, t-shirts everywhere, oversized comics celebrating the character’s past and present, movie tie-in novels, quiz books, there was no shortage of Superman.
One of my favorite products of that line of Supermania was (and is) the novel, Superman: Last Son of Krypton, by Elliot S. Maggin. Elliot was one of the prominent Superman writers of the period, and I thought he wrote a wonderful novel. Despite the fact that there were photos from Superman The Movie included in the book, the novel did not share its ice-planet vision of Krypton. It pulled strictly from the mythos of the comics, and their wonderful and sometimes absurd situations, even sometimes adding to them by suggesting that Jor-El sent a telepathic probe to seek out Earth’s greatest mind in order to have someone fitting receive baby Kal-El’s rocket as it arrived. Instead, the anonymous scientific genius, whose not-so-subtle nom-de-voyage was Calvin Eisner, arranged for the elderly Kents to be the first to find the rocket under the illusion that they were at a certain location to buy a used tractor at a good price. “Eisner” had wisely chosen not to raise the child himself, but instead chose the salt-of-the-earth Kents after meeting with Smallville’s Chief Parker and getting the lay of the land, if you will.
Maggin additionally added layers to Lex Luthor, who actually merits some sympathy due to his upbringing in this story, as well as its 1981 sequel, Miracle Monday. Both books really dig into what it was like for Clark Kent to grow up, perhaps implausibly, in the same hometown as the boy genius who would grow up to be his archenemy. A lot of time is spent in both books, especially the second, exploring what it would be like to grow up with superpowers, and even just to have superpowers. That kind of expanded storytelling appealed to me in a more adult way than comics ever could, and did what so few kinds of entertainment of the day did: It made me think. As a kid living in the country without the virtues of streaming entertainment or even cable television, I had pleny of time to think during the day, letting my mind wander into the clouds where Superman could dwell. The memory of the day I met Elliot and shook his hand, telling him what his stories meant to me, will remain with me forever.
Elliot Maggin and me. Of course I was wearing a BATMAN shirt when I met him!
The Superman movie that Elliot’s book supposedly tied into was quite different. It was a very interesting period piece, honestly. The Metropolis of 1978 was supposed to reflect the Manhattan of the time. Now, I visited Manhattan in 2004, and I thought Times Square was incredible. Shops everywhere, a three-story Toys R Us, so much fun! It was a far cry from the downtown of 1978. “Funky” would be the nice word to use. It’s been the setting of many movies that feature the filth and the grit of the area, like Midnight Cowboy, for example. And Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane seems to fit right in with her harsh and cynical no-nonsense attitude.
Right about that time, a book called Superman: Serial to Cereal was published, and went into some detail about the screen history of Superman, including the Fleischer cartoons, the movie serials starring Kirk Alyn, and the Adventures of Superman TV show, starring George Reeves. The Adventures of Superman came back to TV in my area thanks to syndication, and I rushed home to watch it every day after school. I even checked off the episodes that I saw in the checklist in the back of the book.
This was a connection that my dad had with me. This show had started when he was nine years old, and he had watched it faithfully. This, more than even comic books, is where his impression of Superman came from. I find it funny now that he thought Christopher Reeve was too scrawny to be Superman, compared to the obviously padded suit that George Reeves wore.
Yes, I still have the original book!
It was in this same book that I learned of the existence of the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons, but it would be a few years before I ever saw one. I saw the Fleischer Studios Superman cartoons at my very first comic book convention in 1984. Someone was playing a VHS tape on a tiny portable TV. Since then, I’ve bought them on VHS, DVD, and now on Blu-Ray. As I said above, the connections to the radio show were strong, as they used the voice actors for the radio program when making the cartoons. The Fleischer design of Superman is generally the visual image I use when participating in “the theater of the mind” of the radio show. The Superman of the animated shorts and the radio show is sometimes quite different from that of the comics.
There have been various homages to those incredible pieces of animation history. Some of them are direct, and some of them are more subtle. Such is the modern world where everything is available at our fingertips. I was once one of the very few who appreciated the cartoons. Now, they’re ubiquitous. It’s a great time to be a fan!
Emerging from obscurity: The 1940s Superman cartoons’ influence today
When seventh grade was finally over and summer vacation began, I couldn’t wait to play baseball. The year before, I had played Little League in Tustin with my dad as an assistant coach, and there was no question that I was one of the stars on the team. But in Mesick, that pecking order had already been established, and I was more like in interloper coming in to disrupt things. Still, I had made friends over the course of the year thanks to my size and being recruited to play basketball, and I was one of the guys now. So, naturally, I wanted to play baseball, which was a sport I was actually good at and had experience playing.
To say that we were dominant as a baseball team would be an understatement. We crushed everyone in our path. These guys had been playing together practically since birth, and their roles were were established. Everyone knew who the pitchers were, who the catcher was, and who played each position. I, who had been used to playing first base, was cast aside in favor of two left-handed players. I was relegated instead to right field. Not because I had a good arm for that long throw to third, but because fewer balls were hit there than the other two fields. I had fielded fly balls for years on the playground, but playing organized outfield was different. I did have a good arm, far better than average, and I loved to unload from the outfield. I was pretty accurate, too. I was happy as long as I was playing.
Can you picture the movie, The Sandlot? Just kids playing in blue jeans and t-shirts? That’s who we were. Kastl Well Drilling was our sponsor, and it was written in black on the front of our orange t-shirts with our numbers on the backs. The head coach our team was Jerry McNitt, the local gas man who also had a trout farm. His son, Eric, was our best pitcher and one of the lefty first basemen I mentioned. Floyd Carpenter was his assistant. Floyd was married to Vonceille, who was the lady in town who cut everyone’s hair. No, I mean it. She was the only stylist in town as far as we boys went. Unless you wanted to drive 20-25 miles to Cadillac or Traverse City, Vonceille was the only game in town. She was also Monty Geiger’s mom, and he was one of my classmates and teammates. They lived right across from the ballfield, so it was convenient!
As the summer went on, I looked forward to Little League every day. There was nothing I loved more than playing baseball, even from a young age. It was one of the few things that I did that my abusive stepfather actually approved of. I still remember the thrill of getting my first baseball glove (from a garage sale) and playing catch with myself by bouncing a hard rubber ball off of the propane tank in our back yard. The cylindrical nature of the tank provided for fly balls, ground balls, and line drives, depending on the angle at which the ball hit the tank. Eventually, I received one of the best gifts ever, a Pitch-Back.
With the Pitch-Back, I could use an actual baseball, another wonderful Christmas gift. I was always amused that my Christmas gifts were usually things that I couldn’t use for months while we waited for good weather, but my dreams were filled with visions of using them, and that sure beat nightmares any time.
One thing I had never dealt with before in baseball but encountered for the first time in Mesick, was a curveball. For those of you who don’t deal in sports very much, a curveball is thrown with an angled spin that makes the ball change course in the air. It is NOT an optical illusion. The raised seams of the baseball provide resistance against the air in the direction of the spin, while the spin accelerates on the downward side. Bernoulli’s principle is at work here. For a right-handed pitcher throwing to a right-handed batter, you literally aim the ball at their lead shoulder, and the ideal pitch will break down and to the left, across the plate for a strike. That means to the batter, for a split-second, the ball looks like it is going to hit you. You have about half a second to determine if it’s a curveball or not, and whether to swing. You determine that by picking up the spin out of the pitcher’s hand as soon as possible. As a kid who had been hit a lot, I was not one to stay still in the box and find out. I flinched almost every single time. Throwing a curve ball puts a lot of tension on the elbow, so it’s generally not something you see until 12 or 13 years old. That added a whole new element to baseball for which I was unprepared.
Still, our team dominated every area team, going undefeated for the entire summer. We beat one team in Grawn 38-0. By the end, we were all batting opposite handed so as not to run up the score even more. When victorious, our coaches would take us to the Dari-Pit for ice cream.
The Dari-Pit, a few years before I was in Little League, but it looked pretty much just like this
This, of course, was the same place my grandma used to take my brother Jeff and me for ice cream, and I knew I loved those banana boats. When it was my turn to order, I ordered the banana boat. The other players jumped on me immediately. Banana splits were for players who hit a home run. Everyone else just got a vanilla or chocolate cone. I was devastated to have committed such a faux pas with my new team. I overreacted and refused any ice cream at all, because I had been conditioned to prepare for punishment for making such a mistake. The coaches wouldn’t hear of it, though, and were great. They just told me gently to check with them next time. This, like so many other instances growing up in Mesick, was a kindness that I would never forget. It was the polar opposite of what I was used to, and how I was used to being treated. Teachers and now coaches were proving to be positive models for adult behavior which I would emuate in my own adult years.
