Children's Stories                    

A Happy Boat                       1,521 wds

It is spring and men and women are working hard in the boatyard. Big Max, a motor cruiser of fifty feet is painted. Solace, a forty-five foot ketch, receives a new propeller, propeller shaft and brace to hold the shaft in place in front of the rudder and Wild Thing, a thirty foot racing sloop, is refitted and cleaned. Other boats, more than fifty, are prepared to get a lot of Lake Michigan water under their curves. The crowd is loud, happy and eager but no one pays attention to a small sailboat covered and dusty in a dark corner, alone.

This boat was owned by a boy ~ it was a gift from his father ~ and that winter the boy died. One day he felt bad, then he felt worse, a doctor examined him and gave him pills. The next day the boy wouldn't wake up, was taken to a hospital and died. The doctor found out later what was broken inside him.

The boy’s father thinks about his son all day. Until now he has never lost anyone or anything he couldn't replace. He doesn't know what to do with the boat. Selling it would mean selling part of his son, sailing it would mean sailing alone. The man avoids the boat yard. Under a tarp, no one speaks to the boat. She feels forgotten and stuck fast. 

The boy’s father had no time for boats. Until his son died he thought about numbers all day and examined columns of numbers and made a lot of money figuring out which columns would get smaller and which would get bigger. He bought them small and sold them big. He doesn’t think of numbers now, he thinks of his boy in a box in the ground under a stone.  

One morning amid a flood of thoughts about his son, remembering their enthusiasm for the boat and their plans to sail it every day of the summer, he knew something must be done. He drove to the boatyard and spoke to the boat. Things that don’t talk or move unless people speak for them or move them need attention or they’ll fall apart. Things, like people, may get lonely and go crazy. How can we know unless they speak? We may never be certain silent things like boats feel or have souls so it might be best to think they do.  

Fixing up the boat and sailing it gives the man a dream and his dream becomes something he can share with his lost boy.

Thoughts of his son command his mind. He thinks of no one and nothing else for so long his mind, like a sailboat in high winds, turns over on its side and stops moving. This happened because the man always had everything he wanted. When he was a boy himself everyone paid attention to him, he could go anywhere and had every friend and toy. As he grew into a man anything he wanted was easily won. All that changed when his son died. The one person the man loves most above all others is gone and nothing brings him back. The man reaches into empty air. It is painful to lose so much if you have never lost so much before. 

The man makes a plan; he will fix up the boat, sail out to the deepest part of Lake Michigan, dive over the side and swim down and down and keep swimming until he reaches the mucky bottom. There he will hold fast to a rock or sunken log or an old anchor and wait. If he waits long enough his boy will notice and pop out of the ground where he was buried in January and call him. From the lake bottom he will hear his son and come up and they will sail home together. The plan is so perfect, how can it go wrong? 

It is hard to understand how and why people go crazy. To find out you have to go crazy yourself or live long enough, be healthy in all ways and think deeply. 

The man begins to make his dream come true. Though crazy, he has energy and money and is ready to spend it on the boat. He regrets spending many days and nights with numbers instead of his boy. 

The sailboat is lonely no more! Men and women sand, paint, clean, test wood for rot and metal for rust, sand and paint more. The decks are refinished, spars sanded and varnished, hardware cleaned and refitted and new sails made. Now the hull doesn’t leak, but the man’s dream leaks. People learn of it.

First, he tells the boat, who is horrified, but what can a boat do? A boat is made to sail, not talk. She thinks of him leaping from her deck in the middle of Lake Michigan, leaving her adrift. She will sink or be flung ashore, a wreck. It is better to be lonely than a wreck. Besides, she likes the man and loved the boy and if one dies there is no reason the other must follow hard by, old sadness piled on new sorrow.

He tells no human of his plan, but people know without knowing how they know. They feel something is up with him, for a powerful dream shines from within a person and they cannot hide it.

Family and friends get the scheme out of him and he is put in a hospital. All work stops on the boat and again she is covered with a tarp and lonely.

The man’s wife, the boy’s mother, sees how bad off her husband is and wants to stop him from getting worse. Of course she loved the boy as much as her husband did and knew how eager her son was to sail and wants to rescue her husband from craziness and death. Best for all, she thinks, is to sell the boat to someone who will finish fixing it. But to sell it would mean her husband would lose a loving link with the memory of their boy.

For many days the man’s wife wonders what to do. The problem she sees as a ball rolling in air and she can stick things to it. She sticks her husband, the boat, her son now in the ground (this makes her cry so she has to stop thinking and see his smile again and hear his voice and then she cries more), all the other people she loves, the house they live in, everything she remembers how to help others and what people need. Thinking takes a long time. She tells a success story to herself, ends it as happily as possible and, now with a shining new plan, she sleeps, and the next morning sets the plan afloat. 

This is it; her son had many friends excited about sailing. He talked up sailing at school and made a crew list that could stretch from here to Manitowoc. Now his mother tells some of the boys she will help them buy the boat, fix it up and sail it. Like pirates, she says and that gets them on board. At first they don’t know how to repair a boat, but a combination of youth and age finds the way.   

In a time short enough to amaze experienced shipwrights, the vessel is seaworthy, launched and now bobs on the water at the South Shore Marina, ready for the first sunny, windy day. 

On this same, first day of fair weather the crazy man is released from the hospital. Drugs and friendly conversation have brought about the recovery of his appearance, at least, so except for a desire to pull on his ears, sometimes both at the same time, and talk about the weather and only the weather, unless he is talking about his socks and shoes, or the roundness of pencils, or the odd noise a book makes when it is not dropped, he is entirely normal. His wife with him, they stroll along the shore.

The boys who bought the boat and reconditioned her are well trained in the art of sail and nautical safety procedures. They have life preservers, a radio, lunch and a waterproof camera. As they shove off from the South Shore Marina, the man and his wife walk by. There goes a lot of boys in a sailboat named for their lost friend, whose father sees his son’s name on the transom. He watches them boost the mains’l and get under way, serious, laughing and happy. 

Without warning the man feels better than he has felt in as long as he can remember.  None of the boys are his, he knows this, but they are friends of his son. They also miss his son and wish their friend could sail with them. The man feels new and easy.  His good mood spreads out and his wife feels the change.  The boys are going out on bright tossing water. They will sail until the sun is low and the man in his happy heart goes with them. 

  And the boat is happy, too. 

end of “A Happy Boat”

Anna, Dad and Fish                     1565 wds

 Once upon an Indiana afternoon a little girl named Anna and her Dad went fishing. Anna and Dad went to the zoo, floated in a boat, read many books out loud or quietly, rode in the car and ate ice cream, but the most exciting thing they did was fishing.

When Dad put Hello Worm ( he called them all Hello Worm because as he dug 

them up he would see one and say, “Hello worm,” and put them in a can) on the hook Anna looked the other way and as soon as Hello Worm and the hook were in the water Anna said, “ Now pull in the fish, Dad.”

“Not yet, Anna, we have to wait for Mr. Fish to find Hello Worm.”

And so they waited and waited. And then they waited more in the bright sun and they looked at the orange float in the green water and the tall green trees around the lake. Gramma lived in a house near the lake.  She was in the house now, up the hill from the dock on the water where Anna and Dad fished, cooking cupcakes with Mom. As they waited for Mr. Fish to eat they could smell cupcakes.

“When Mr. Fish finds the worm and eats it,” Dad said, “the orange float will go under water. Then you can pull him in.”

“What if Mommy fish bites the worm?”

“That won’t happen, she’s at home with the kids so she won‘t get hooked.”

They waited longer and Anna said, ”Mr. Fish is asleep and not eating,” and Dad was about to tell her how fish don’t sleep and was wondering if they really do or not, 

when the orange floated plunged under water. Anna pulled in Mr. Fish and when he came out of the water Dad lifted him by the line.  Mr. Fish jumped around a lot but finally lay still, panting on the dry gray boards of the dock. He was handsome, long and green with silver stripes along his sides and he looked at them with a big eye, opening and closing his mouth. 

“Anna, this is Mr. Fish. Would you like to pet him?”

NoAnna shook her head no.

“He won’t bite, but you must wet your hand before you touch him.”

He dipped his hand in the water and petted Mr. Fish. Anna watched him and did the same. 

“How do you do?”  Anna asked. 

“Fine, and you?” replied Mr. Fish.

“Fine, thanks. Now do i get my wish?”

“Certainly, but only if you promise the throw me back after i grant it for you.”

“I promise.”

“Well then, what would you like?”

“I wish i had a . . . “                      “Wait a minute, Anna,” Dad said. It had taken him some time to get over the shock of catching a talking fish but now he was, as adults say, ‘up to speed,’ and had an 

idea. “Tell me what you want and maybe i can suggest a way to make your wish better.”

Anna told him and he said, “That is very good, but instead of just one ice creamcone, wish for an ice cream factory, then we can have ice cream all the time!”

“What’s a factory, Dad?”

“It’s a big building where ice cream and other stuff like cars and radios are made.”

So Anna wished for an ice cream factory and the fish said, “Okay, look the other way for a moment, “ and they did and he said, “There you go, you have an ice cream 

factory,” and they looked back at him.

“Where is it?”

“It’s down by the shore of the big lake. I put it there because your Gramma’s yard is too small. It used to be a steel mill, the Bethlehem works on the Little Calumet. Now it’s Anna and Dad’s ice cream factory. Please, throw me back, it’s so dry out here!”

Dad wetted his hand, removed the hook and threw Mr. Fish back in the lake. They hurried up the hill to tell Mom and Gramma where they were going. In the car it took only five minutes to arrive at the factory.

A big sign above the gate read ANNA AND DAD’S ICE CREAM FACTORY, and beyond this were the big buildings and the big lake, so big you can’t see the other shore. Anna and Dad tried to drive in and some men and women with signs stopped them.

“We’re on strike!” they shouted. “No ice cream today!”

Then a rough, mean looking man noticed Anna was frightened and said to her, “I’m sorry, but we’re on strike so we can get paid in money, not ice cream. We like ice 

cream, but it melts before we can pay our bills with it. And the ice cream from this place doesn’t taste very good. It used to be a steel mill, you know.”

  “Sounds like a good reason,” Dad said, “I wish you luck. Come on, Anna, let’s see if we can find some ice cream in town.”

They drove into town and had some very good ice cream.

Back at Gramma’s on the small lake, they walked down to the dock to fish. Anna watched this time as Dad put another Hello Worm on the hook and cast it into the 

water. They watched the orange float and waited. 

Very soon this time Mr. Fish was hooked and lifted onto the dock.

Anna petted him with a wet hand. “How do you do, Mr. Fish?” 

“Fine, thank you. Did you enjoy your ice cream factory?”

“They were on strike,” said Dad.  “ They wanted money for pay instead of ice cream that tasted like steel.”

“Sorry,” said the fish.  “Some things are hard for a fish to do well.”

“That’s okay. How about turning that place back into a steel mill and maybe Anna can have another wish.”

“I can do that. But this time wish for something i don’t have to change too much.”

“I wish i had a . . . “

“Wait a minute, Anna, tell me your wish first and maybe i can suggest a way we can make it better.”

Anna told him and he said, “That’s good, but instead of wishing for one baby horse and one baby duck and one baby rabbit, wish for the whole farm and we’ll all have a place to live, too.”

So Anna wished for a farm.

“A farm, “ the fish said, “ with crops and animals and that sort of thing?”

“Lots of ducks!”

“Ducks!  We fish don’t like them so much, but ducks you shall have! Can you look the other way for a moment? “  They did so and soon the fish told them where their farm was and said, “ You got it, throw me back! Quick!”

Dad wet his hand and threw Mr. Fish back in the lake and he and Anna ran up to Gramma’s house. Before they could get in the car Gramma came out with a letter. “This 

just arrived, from the bank, “ she said, her voice and hand trembling with more than age.

Dad read the letter and said, “The bank just foreclosed on the farm. I guess you can’t make it farming these days.” 

“What will you tell Anna?”

“I’ll tell her the truth. All we can do is go to the farm and say goodbye to the animals, they belong to someone else now.”

After they said goodbye to the goats, sheep, cows, horses, and every duck, they came back to the dock at Gramma’s lake and quickly caught Mr. Fish. 

“Economics! I never understood money,” said their finny friend. “Let me try again, i promise i’ll be very careful. “

“What would you like, Anna?”

Anna thought and thought and thought and looked puzzled. “What can i wish for?" she said, " what is there except ice cream and animals? “

“Remember what you asked us for your next birthday?”

“Yes yes yes, Mr. Fish! I want a baby brother! “

“A baby brother, that’s a sweet animal. I don’t know if i can do that.”

“You can, i’m sure of it ,” said Dad.

“Okay, he’s on the way, “  said Mr. Fish, “but will you be disappointed if i slip and send you a little sister instead?" 

"No!”

Soon Dad and Anna thanked Mr. Fish and tossed him in the water. “Come on, Anna, let’s go see if mom has your baby brother.”

At the house they found Mom and Anna asked, “Where’s my baby brother?”

“He’s right here in my tummy, Anna, but he won’t be coming out until about Christmas. You’ll have to wait.”

“Why can’t he come out and play?”

“He’s not grown up enough yet. He wants to come out and play, he’s kicking like he wants to come out. Go play with your baby dolls and practice feeding and changing them and then you’ll be ready for him.”

Anna left to play.

“I thought we were going to wait and tell her on her birthday, Dad.”

“It’s a long story. A friend needed help with a wish. Let me put this fishing gear away and i’ll tell you all about it.”

end of “Anna, Dad and Fish”

Strange and Common Thinking,

  Observations of interest to old children  

Contents ~

Where Old People Come From                                    

Who, or What, Is God?

Why The Sun Is Hot and The Moon Is Cold

Why Like People?

Faces and Places

Why People Wear Pajamas

Pain

Time

History 

    There is a basic knowledge for every human being, and until a person has acquired this basic knowledge, all other kinds of knowledge will be harmful to him.

The only science is knowing how a person should live. This knowledge is open to everyone.                                                  

                 Count Lev Tolstoy

Where Old People Come From

Old people say, “We did what you do. We were like you.”  Their voices may be weak. Their voices were once as strong and loud as our voices today.

  They lived on the same farms and in the same towns, maybe the same houses where we live. Old people came from every country in the world between the north pole and the south pole. They had fun growing up, just like us, except we were not there. The sun shined on them and the air was fresh, the trees and flowers bright or, outside my window as i write this, the sky cloudy and cold rain falling on an empty street. Old people came from where we are now. They did what we do, then became old and now we see only those who are lucky, strong and smart.

We can’t walk, drive or fly to the country where the old were not old; we can only go there by listening, reading and thinking. We have films, videos and sound recordings, but before cameras and voice recorders were invented people drew and painted what they saw and printed on paper thoughts they wanted to remember. When we visit old people these pictures and words help us understand them. We already know the weather was the same as it is now, fire burned, water made things wet and a loud boom frightened people so they rushed to a window and looked out, just like today. Sugar was sweet, people now old drank hot coffee or cocoa and ate cinnamon rolls for breakfast, glad to be up in the morning with everything to do. Also, as is true today, people loved apples.

In old films everything is black, white or gray and people walk jerkily or too fast, but this is because old cameras were not as good as modern cameras. People have always walked as we see them walking today and everything has always been in color. 

Today there are more people and machines in the world, so along with the sound of birds and bugs and things dropped on the floor, we hear helicopters, airplanes, cars and trucks, refrigerators clicking on in the middle of the night, humming fans in windows, air-conditioners, radios, tvs, boom boxes and wind chimes. 

Old people heard boat or train whistles far away or, standing on the dock or station platform, talk was cut by a shrill whistle. The whistle told them the boat or train was leaving now! Get on! Goodbye! In cities the very old heard horse’s hooves clopping on the stones of the streets and the hooves made a sound like the word “clop” over and over. Listen to horses in a parade, the sound is the same. And long before this, so long ago no one is still here who remembers it, a man walked through town making sure the streetlights remained alight ~ they were oil lamps or candles in glass boxes on posts ~ and he often called out the time. “One o’clock and all’s well,” he might shout. This man was called the Town Crier. If something dangerous happened he would cry out, call for help and ring a bell and everyone would leap out of bed and hurry outside to see.

In the sky at night most of the stars are the same as when old people were not old. Some stars have gone out, some are new, most are the same. In the daytime, old people never saw thin white lines crossing the sky. These lines are frozen water spun off the engine cowlings of high-flying airplanes, not yet invented when old people were kids.

For the very oldest there were no radios or tvs or compact discs so people gathered together to sing. They sang in church and they sang at home. Copies of music, called sheet music, were sold in stores and taken home to play on the piano. If you played the piano you might be very popular, but only if you played it well, same as today.

The biggest difference between old people now and old people then is how quick they move. Their wrinkles were gone then and they laughed louder and did foolish things. They ran out to the sidewalk shouting, “Wait, you forgot your hat!”

But it was the wrong hat!

  They still talk and laugh with people they knew and these people may be shadows now but once they were as alive as you and me. One of them might say, 

    “That’s what I remember most about Walter, he was always eager to help.”

“He was helpful. He was so very kind.”

This is not all they remember, but it is all they want to say, seeing again Walter’s smile and his bright, kind eyes, like your eyes perhaps, and they know it was not just the hat Walter wanted to return. He wanted to talk again, to see you again. He loved people and paid attention to people and wanted to be with them. Walter is not an old person now. He never became an old person. He became a sailor and went to war and his ship was blown up and he sunk inside it to the bottom of the sea. When old people speak of Walter they think of waves and waves and waves, all the way to the horizon. 

Or someone might talk of Maeve, who also never became old. She laid down to sleep one night and never woke up. Something inside her broke in the night. Speaking of Maeve, old people remember her gardens. 

“Her vegetable garden was more beautiful than some flower gardens,” they might say, “so you can imagine how beautiful her flowers were.”

“You knew when you were near Maeve’s house, the air was so sweet!”

Maeve was a very nice person to sweeten the air.

There were many like Walter and Maeve, who never grew old. We have photographs of them looking serious or smiling, not knowing as they had their pictures taken what would happen to them. Some of these people were not as nice as Walter and Maeve, some of them were very bad and we’re lucky they didn’t get old. 

The old land was wilder and there were fewer people living on it. There were more fish in the sea, more alligators in Florida, more bears in Alaska, more rhinoceroses and elephants in Africa. Because there were fewer roads and houses the animals had places to live. There were fewer cars and airplanes so people traveled in larger groups closer together in trains and boats. No one had gone into outer space, no one had been to the moon. 

Most people are not happy being old and would rather be young. Most of them are glad to be living,  but it is not as much fun as it used to be. Some believe they can no longer be fresh and energetic. They feel like a door has closed and locked them in a room that gets smaller and smaller. They can’t get tickets for the circus and want more than anything else to feel young again, like us, and this makes some of them mean or sad. Others who know they can’t be young again say, “Now, even though I’m old, I’ll do the best I can.” This is good to hear. No one likes complaints about something that can’t be fixed. If our bodies are young we can live in a garden and ride the tallest roller coaster whenever we want. 

Most of the time being old or young depends on how we think about it. Our bodies will get old and nothing can slow or change this except our thinking. 

“Where do old people come from?” someone might ask. Now you can say. “Old people come from right here, from all around us and all other places, too. Long ago they were like us and one day we will be like them.”

    Point to your friend, to your brother or sister or mother or father, point to yourself and say, “Here. This is where old people come from.”

end of “Where Old People Come From”

Who, or What, Is God?

People dress in their best clothes and go to a big building with a dome or tower on it and long seats inside. Some places have no seats and people kneel on mats on the floor. They sit or kneel and press their hands together and bow their heads. The room may be tall and wide with colorful windows and a raised floor at one end. A tall table might stand on this raised floor. The table is called an alter. Statues or pictures of people in gold, silver and purple or tiles with colorful designs on them line the walls. Those who come here are serious, they mumble, talk low, sometimes they cry, shout and shake, bowing or throwing their arms up in the air. If you ask in a whisper why they do this, why they are so moody or excited, you might be told to be silent. People are visiting the one who lives here. This is the house of God.

Who, or what, is God?

This question has started arguments. One says, “God is not alive and never has been. Show me God!”

“Look at the sky, the sun, the rivers and mountains, who made all these? Who made us human beings?” 

“Nobody!” says the first, “It all happened slowly after a big explosion. Soil and water mixed just right by accident, it got hit by lightning and everything grew. Nobody planted this garden.”

“Who caused the big explosion?”

“I don’t know, but someday we’ll find out."

“How long do i have to wait?”                                  

   Now instead of falling silent and being respectful they continue until one says, “Prove it or shut up!” and the other says,

“I’m right and you are wrong!”  

I think they are still arguing. 

God yes or no is a very old question. It is one of the oldest questions ever asked. History is a bunch of stories about what has happened to people since we started thinking and talking. From the start we have been worrying, arguing or fighting over God. Who, or what, is God? 

Please notice the first letter, G, is capitalized. We do this because God and questions about God are so important. It is how we show respect. Respect means we say, “What you think and feel is important and i will not harm it.” 

To some people God is more important than anyone or anything, more important than our families and countries, animals, including fish, and trees. Mom, Dad, sisters and brothers, houses, cars, tv, your new bike; none are as important as God. They might be right. They say God created all of everything; the earth, the stars and what’s in between, so even if we are unsure of who or what God is or if God is a man or a woman, we respect people who believe in God.  

Most of the time God is male, like Dad, rather than female, like Mother Earth. Yes, some believe the planet we all live on is God. A female god is called a Goddess. Mother Earth is very popular and is sometimes called Gaia. 

Long ago people believed in many Gods and Goddesses, every city and town had one or two. There was a God of the wind, a God of the oceans, a God of all that is under the ground. Long ago people believed the God who lives under ground was married to the daughter of the Goddess who made plants grow in the spring. The God and his mother –in-law made a deal; the daughter would live for half the year underground if he, the God of the underground,  let her come up above the ground for the other half of the year. The daughter returns, so her mom makes the weather warm up, winter ends and plants grow. In the autumn the daughter returns to her husband below our feet, trees get cold, drop their leaves and winter soon follows. 

Now we know spring, summer, autumn, and winter, are hot or cold because the earth circling the sun tips toward or away from the sun for half the year. The people of long ago didn’t know the earth spins around the sun so they decided every winter the daughter of a Goddess went below the grass, roads, buildings and mountains. 

Of all the very old Gods my favorite was Zeus. He threw thunderbolts. If a mean man kicked a dog or smacked and robbed a kid and Zeus saw him that creep would receive a thunderbolt right upside the head. Kabam! That mean man would not be able to hear out of his ear again, nor would he need a haircut on that side of his head, in fact, he would no longer have that side of his head. That’s okay.

Lightning is caused by storms, not Zeus. Now we know. If you want to be struck by lightning you have to go to a hill in a storm and hold up something like a metal broomstick. 

Zeus was mostly good, but he traveled a lot and liked young women and had to hide these women from his wife, Hera, by turning them into cows or swans. Hera was a Goddess always trying to catch Zeus with one of his sweeties, so their home life was probably unhappy. Gods and Goddesses never die so they must be lonely now still living on a mountain in Greece as they did in the old days, but people pay no attention to them now. 

Today, three main Gods get most prayers. In parts of Asia people pray not to a God but to something within themselves that will make it possible, when they die, to become part of an unending happiness called Nirvana. In Asia the statues in the buildings where God lives are of people who have earned Nirvana. 

Believing in God and doing good, some say, are the same thing. 

These three Gods and Nirvana have everything to do with a big question, “What happens after we die?” The question is as old and important as “Who, or what, Is God?” No one knows the answer to What happens after we die. Four things might happen. 

Darkness happens. Death is sleep without dreams forever. 

We meet God and we’ve been good so we live in Nirvana or Heaven happy forever.

We’ve been bad when we meet God who punishes us for awhile or forever. If the punishment is only for awhile it ends and we live in Nirvana or Heaven forever. 

If we’ve been good and go to Nirvana we float on a river of bliss forever, if we were bad the part of us that lives forever, called a soul, slides into another person, animal, bug, fish or anything that lives and we start a new life over. If we are good enough in this new life we won’t have to start all over again at the end of it. 

Now that we know what might happen after we die, but we still don’t know who God is.  

When your parents put you to bed at night they say don’t worry there is no monster under the bed. 

You say, “There is!”

They ask, “Have you ever seen this monster?”

“No, but it is there, i know it!”

They chuckle and say, “Don’t worry about that monster. I’ll sleep light and when that stinker comes out to eat you i’ll grab that monster and punch it and rip it and tear it up and throw it out the window. Then i’ll lock the window. Good night.”

Do you know who protects your mom and dad from monsters? 

God. 

Some monsters are different than the ones under your bed. Loneliness and fear are monsters and some adults are eaten by a monster called hatred. 

People are mean, God is never mean. Only God will love you and think you are important and protect you no matter who hates and hurts you. 

Every day all over the world, but mostly on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, people go into big buildings where they pray to God. If you ask where God is (very politely because you have respect), someone might say, “We can’t touch or see God, but we know God is here.”

“Is God a man or a woman?” Either way, do you think it would make any difference? 

Adults say strange things. They say there are no monsters under the bed, they say a bird called a stork brings babies to the house, not your mom coming home from the hospital. At Christmas, they say, a big round guy named Santa Claus slides down chimneys, which are thin and dirty, but he doesn’t get dirty, and does this carrying a huge bag of gifts, more than one for every good kid in the world. Even if you leave out all the bad kids who get nothing and kids who live in houses without chimneys Santa Claus delivers all the toys in one night.                                  

Adults say all this!

Adults can be silly and make God sound impossible, but don’t laugh. The question of God is serious. 

It is said that God is wise and knows everything, yet bad things happen. If half the bad things happen to bad people we won’t worry about them, but the other half of bad things happen to good people. If God makes hurricanes blow down houses, lets buildings burn with children ~ babies who can’t walk ~ trapped inside, makes airplanes crash and ships sink with people inside them and lets old people get sick and lay in bed hurting for months before they die alone, can God be good? 

God created the world, we are told, and that includes earthquakes. Being squished in a falling house is like getting a finger pinched in a door but instead of just your finger your whole body, nose to toes, is pinched flat. 

If God is bad we are in big trouble and i don’t want to talk about it. But if God is good, why do bad things happen?

I have heard three reasons.

   God is so big and powerful and we are so small and weak we can never understand God, so don’t worry about it. 

God does bad things and hurts people to teach lessons and scare us into being good.

God created the earth, sun, stars, everything we see and touch, gave it a push to start it rolling and now it goes and goes. Sometimes it hits a bump and we have an earthquake. 

To believe in God we must have faith. Faith and trust and love are alike. Love is when you cuddle with mom or dad and you know they love you so you trust them. Trusting your mom and dad means you have faith in them. You know your mom and dad will love you today, tomorrow and forever. People all over the world have faith in their parents just like they have faith in God. 

Often people who don’t believe in God think that, if they are wrong, God is good and will forgive them. That is, forgive them if they do no bad things. 

I hope you take time and be careful, talk to people, read and think about God. By thinking about God a few minutes or longer every day, the answer may come to you. God would want you to take time, think well and make a good decision. 

end of “Who, or What,  is God?”

Why the Sun Is Hot and the Moon Is Cold

T

he sciences together and differently all study particular aspects of life but they come to no conclusion about life in general.   Count Lev Tolstoy

  My parents had few answers for my questions. They didn’t tell me about a lot of things. I heard what they did tell me and thought, ‘They are hiding something.’ 

No, they were not hiding anything. It took a long time to figure out that they didn’t answer my questions because they didn’t know the answers.

When someone who is supposed to know something doesn’t know it they might feel dumb and get mad. They might think we want to trick them or make them look foolish, so they say, “Shut up, fool, your question is stupid.”

They are wrong. We are not a foolish and our question is not stupid.

One day i asked my parents, “Why is the sun hot and the moon cold?” They said my question was silly. They didn’t know the answer, and when i asked them why it was silly they said, “Go look it up.” I liked to play outside and they probably thought if i had to look something up i would decide to play outside instead. My parents didn’t want me to be interested in outer space. To practical people like them knowing about anything as far away as the sun or the moon is useless. 

At the library i read about the sun and the moon. The sun is a ball of exploding gas and the moon is a ball of dust and rocks. Yes, but how do they hang out there exploding and shining at night? Why don’t they fly apart and disappear?

The book said, “Gravity holds them together.”

What is gravity?

Gravity is “a force in the universe.” How and why it holds things in place, nobody knows. It just works, thank God. 

Wait a minute, maybe god did it. That’s an answer some people are very certain about. 

The universe is everything on the inside and the outside of our bodies, the sun, moon, our house, our bed, all our stuff and this book and the internet, all part of the universe. 

How did the universe  happen?

“Science does not yet know,” say scientists. 

“God created it,” say some people who think the question is silly. 

Our parents are not the only ones who don’t know everything.

Most scientists think an enormous explosion created everything. I thought explosions destroyed things, but this one was different. It created all the stars and planets and all these are still moving away from the center of the blast.  I suppose the sun, moon, earth and all hang together because they are all going in the same direction anyway and we live here on one dot called earth so we roll along with the rest. Maybe so, i don’t know.

We do know some things. Outer space is very cold and there is no air up there. If you opened the door all the air in your space ship and in your lungs would go FOOOOP right out and spread out and disappear. Astronauts have opened their doors and it happened just like that. There is no sound in space because air carries sound, so all sound goes out with the air. When sound happens it makes a bulge on the air and this wave or ripple fraps the drum of your ear, like plucking a guitar string or a stick hitting another stick. There is a tiny drum head of skin over the inside ends of those holes in the sides of your head and sound hits these drums. 

Here on earth, if something is hot the sun heated it up, unless it came out of a stove or a volcano. At night the earth stays warm because it is surrounded by air. Not so the moon. There is no air around the moon, so when the sun shines on it, it is very hot and the other side, the dark side, is very cold. The sun shines on half the moon all the time except when the moon passes through the shadow of the earth, when the earth is between the sun and the moon. This is called an eclipse, and is rare. The sun shines on half the earth all the time too, but unlike the moon, the earth spins, so our planet is evenly warmed and lighted. If the earth didn’t spin night would last all year for half the planet!

If you were on the dark side of the moon and went outside without a coat you would freeze so fast you would still be standing up. Even though no one on the moon has ever gone outside without a coat we know freezing would happen because people have gone without a coat in Wyoming and they froze. The dark side of the moon is colder than Wyoming. The moon is colder than the coldest place on earth and hotter than the hottest. We know this because some guys went to the moon in a spaceship and stuck a thermometer in the dirt. 

The air around the earth is called the atmosphere and we stay about the right temperature night and day because of it. Cut the word atmosphere in half ~ atmo/sphere. It comes from the Greek language. The first half of the word—atmo, means gas, air or vapor. The second half—sphere, means ball. The earth is a ball of dirt, rocks and water inside a ball of air.  

And as we are on the subject of balls i might mention that doctors tell us our bodies are made of tiny balls called cells and these cells are so small you need a big computerto count them all. These cells are stuck together and so small what we see we call hair, bones, teeth (teeth are bones, the only part of our skeleton that sticks out of our skin) blood, earwax are made of cells. Every living creature is made of cells. Bugs, birds, fish, trees, other people who don’t look or sound like us, all are made of cells. We see them with a microscope.  Microscope is another Greek word we can cut in half ~ micro, small, and scope, look with. If we scope out something micro we see it is very small. If you want to see something big, or macro, far away in the night sky, look through a telescope. 

We are all made up of these cells which are mostly round, like moons, planets and stars. 

If the moon had an atmosphere something might grow there. Living things need air. The sun has an atmosphere. As a ball of gas it is one big atmosphere, all exploding. It should fly off into many pieces but it doesn’t because gravity holds it together. Nothing can live on the sun because it would be cooked and blown up all the time. 

The sun needs dirt and the moon needs air. The earth has just the right amount of dirt and air. And water; there is no water on the sun or the moon. The word earth itself is a more pleasing way to say dirt.  

Why is the sun hot and the moon cold? No one has answered that question completely. How did it get that way? How long will it be so? We have part of the answers to these questions, but they could be answered better. A long time ago people started asking these questions and people who followed them asked them again and again, each answer getting better, rolling like a planet through space. Now we ask them all over again. Without the old answers we would not know as much as we do now. Tomorrow we may have more and better answers! 

Some people say God made the sun and moon. Did God do this with the touch of a finger? This is easy to understand. It is like saying, “I don’t know how to make a sandwich but i know how to eat one.”  Some say God made the sun and the moon because He or She loves us. Does this sound lazy?

Those who study the sun and moon can explain how they work but can’t say why. Ask them and they might laugh. “Why? It was all a big accident! A bunch of stuff in space ran into a bunch of other stuff and exploded and boom, here we are.” This is also too easy to understand.  Does it sound lazy?

  No one likes asking questions that have no answer. No one likes feeling like an unloved accident. 

The only thing that keeps getting better are the pictures. If we keep looking maybe someday we’ll know.  

There are some answers to questions, but will always be new questions. It has always happened this way. Figuring out the new questions will take time and work. Maybe someday we can answer some of these questions, so when a kid’s mom or dad tells them to “Go look it up,” that kid will be reading our answers.

End of “Why the Sun is Hot and the Moon is Cold”

Why Like People?

  On a day when you have nothing more important to think about, imagine how much you look like other people. We dress alike, talk alike, use the same names of the same places. Think of what our friends talk about and like to do at home and school. We look at a globe covered with lines and dots with names beside them – cities—and the land between cities connected by roads, all are full of people who could be friends. Or enemies. Either way, friends or enemies, they walk and talk, just like us. 

These people went SPLUNK right out of the bodies of their moms, were babies, kids, get up in the morning and go to school or work and dream of getting rich or richer. Or they dream of getting enough to eat, which for some people feels rich.

We are all ordinary. Some people may be able to do amazing things like playing the piano, shooting an arrow, jumping over a high bar, talking to elephants, but in all other ways everyone is just like us. There are so many ordinary people we will never meet or even hear about them. We know without knowing their names what they are like and what they want.

Everyone must eat, sleep and go to the bathroom. Everyone fears, loves, wants stuff and is smart or not so smart. People on TV, in photographs or films, statues and paintings of people who were famous and now dead, all felt heat, cold and hunger, were happy or sad, sweaty tired and lay down to sleep and dream. We could talk to them if we were born all those thousands of years ago, but they wouldn't understand us, the language has changed too much. The language is different, our ears and mouths are the same. If we could get to know them we would probably like them. 

Most people are friendly. Watch out for the ones who are not friendly. 

Is there a difference between an old person and a kid? Size, yes, adults are almost always bigger than kids. Asults have what is called experience. They were happy, hurt and they survived troubles or having too much fun. They tried to do something and did it, or failed to do it. Most people learn more from failure than success. This is what experience is; people like us win or lost. To win we most often lose something, like time, energy, money, even blood or an arm or a leg. Parents say something might, “Cost you an arm and a leg.” In France people say something might, “Cost you the eyes in your head.” 

We have to decide where to live and what job to do, who we marry and what our kids do. Experience is helpful in making these decisions.  

Most of the time, kids who have problems in their families grow up to be parents who make families with the same problems. Every family has problems, the difference is in how and if they are solved. Some kids are mean and we might have to fight them, if we can’t stay away from them. In a supermarket, the mall or the park you might see a man or woman pulling, dragging or shaking a kid. The parents of these kids “jerk them around.” 

Some parents have lots of money and don’t love their kids. Other parents have no money and don’t love their kids. The kids can become very mean and how much money their parents have is not why they are mean. If our parents love us, we always have a place to go. Even after they die and no matter how long we live they will always love us.

We didn’t choose to be born. No one asked us if we wanted to be born. I think most of are glad it happened. Sometimes we might want different parents. 

Where were we before our parents had sex that made us grow inside the body of our moms? Were we sleeping, flying around, did we pop like a cork out of the body of someone who died? And were we that person before we are who we are now? 

No matter how it happened, here we are, we can’t go back. We might as well be good and help people. Or maybe we should be bad and hurt people as much as we can.

Why help people? Why not be mean and nasty, rob and beat up anyone smaller and weaker and take anything we want? Lots of people do this and many succeed, why not you?

This is a tough question. Don’t feel bad if you can’t answer it. I’m old and i still have to ask the question when i meet someone i want to hurt. I have hurt people and took things that didn’t belong to me. At other times i helped someone and they didn’t thank me or they hurt me for helping them. This didn’t happen very often. 

Most of the time i felt bad hurting people. They were just like me and i wouldn’t want someone doing the same thing to me. This way of thinking doesn’t work very well when the other person is a jerk with a lot of something ~ much more than they need ~ and you have none of it and they don’t want to share. 

The answer is all in the way we think about the pain. We don’t like it; nobody does.

By now you’re probably old enough to know that a bird called a stork didn’t bring us home the night we were born. The gifts under the Christmas tree where not delivered by a big guy in a red suit saying ho ho ho. These stories show us that adults want kids to believe in stories that are untrue, that will make them happy.  

Mom and dad had sex and we grew inside our mom’s body, right below her stomach, for about nine months. Our bodies got too big for her to carry us around so we were pushed out. 

Men are different and can’t grow babies inside their bodies. Some men look like they will soon have a baby but they only ate too much. 

When i asked my parents why i was born they said, “We wanted you to be part of the family.”

Silly! I wasn’t born yet, how could they know that they wanted me to be part of the family? By then i had learned calling my parents silly would upset them. My father also told me he joined the army and fought in a war for us kids. None of us were born until after the war was over. At the time of the war he had not yet even met our mother! I knew he was ‘expressing an opinion.’ Most of the time an opinion is not the truth, it is how someone wants things to be.

It took me years to understand that my parents didn’t ~ couldn’t ~ think of me all the time. Nobody thought of me all the time, not even me. I was not the most important member of my family.  I am not the most important person in the world now, either. 

Nobody is the most important person in the world. My parents had fun and hard times and important things to do before I popped out of my mom.

Sex is fun, that is why so many people do it.  Suddenly they are parents, the baby cries and people say, “What do i do now? What do i have to do to be a father or mother?” 

People treat their kids the same way their parents treated them and so they make the same mistakes their parents made. 

My mom gave birth to me because she loves kids and wanted lots of us. She grew up on a farm in a big family and she liked a crowded house. It wasn’t me she wanted, it was a baby who, at the time i was growing below her tummy, had no name. As i grew up i wondered what it would be like back inside my mom. I could not say “I feel good,” because i had never felt bad inside my mom. Besides this, inside a mom a baby can’t see or hear, has no language and language makes it possible to think and remember. Naming something, memory loops around it so when you want it again you can pull it back into your mind. 

Later i was glad to be born when i was. The next two kids who grew inside my mom died when they were born. 

 Everyone was a baby, your parents, teachers, other adults and all the people from history. Think of them as babies, as babies who haven’t grown up. We see where they came from and if we follow our imagination we can figure out where they’re going and what will happen to them. To see them this way is like seeing a tree all the way down under the ground to the roots. This makes people easier to understand; we came from someplace and many of us are going someplace.  When we know this is true for all of us, it is easy to forgive people for making mistakes; it's easy to like them.  

end of “Why Like People?”

Faces and Places

So many people live on planet Earth and they all have names. Write 7 and then write nine zeros; that is how many people live on planet Earth and have names. We live everywhere, on mountains (tall buildings in cities are steel and stone mountains), in deserts and by the sea. People live by the sea, rivers or lakes because it is easier to go places in boats, more food is there and people come and go bringing news of the world. We crowd together because we love each other, love to talk and fight (sports are a nice way to fight, and safer) buy and sell, listen to music, make things, play, eat and drink or sit in a park and feel the sun. 

Cities are built on rivers and lakes for the same reason they are built by the sea. It is easier to find food in and near water and easier to come and go on water. Before cars and airplanes were invented most people traveled long distances by boat. If you didn’t have a boat you had to take a train, walk or ride on a horse or in a cart pulled by a horse. When trains were invented they first connected cities with cities, going around deserts, jungles and mountains. Sometimes when people tried to explore these places they walked into them and never walked out. Walking is a good way to get around, it’s very healthy, but walking is too slow and today getting from place to place quickly is valuable.

Those who live in jungles may speak a language no one outside the jungle has ever heard. Others live in mountains in South America and no one outside the valley where they live has met or talked to them. Languages may have different words for the sky, ocean, trees, love, hate, pain, brother, sister, dad and mom, but we all look at the same sky and water is wet wherever we go. 

Some places are very hard to live in. It is very cold at the top and the bottom of the earth, in these Polar Regions, and very hot around the middle of the earth, called the Equator. The Equator is an equal distance from the North Pole and the South Pole, which is where penguins live. Polar bears live at the North Pole. The earth is mostly ocean or land covered with trees, grass or sand. People live in forests and islands in the ocean. They live on the desert where it is hot in the day and cold at night. The desert is cold at night and hot in the day because there are no water and trees.

All these people living all over the world have faces, they talk and walk (unless they have no legs legs) and all of them come in one of five colors; red, yellow, black, white or tan. 

We will never meet most of these people. Even if we live a hundred years and do nothing all day but stand in one place and say hello as each person walks by we will not meet them all. This is all right, they will never meet us, either. We may never meet them, but we know them. They are just like us, mostly, and what we feel and do they feel and do and what happens to us happens to them, or it has happened. No matter where we live, for how long or how we spend our time, in the end the same thing happens to everyone. 

If we have a brother or sister who takes our best stuff, or hits, or our mom or dad yells, hits us and later says they are sorry, (some people never say “I’m sorry.”) we can be sure all over the world the same thing is happening to kids just like us. Maybe this kid was born the same day you were born. Between you and this kid everything could be the same except that you speak a different language or wear different clothes. Everything else can be the same because when people love each other it doesn’t matter which language they speak. Love is the same everywhere. The language i write and you read is not used by everyone. Many people speak and write this language, English, but it is not the only language people speak. 

There are about two hundred and fifty languages spoken by more than a million people. Some languages are spoken by billions of people. Chinese, Spanish and English are spoken by about half the people of the world.  

 We understand more than we think we do. We might read a sentence in a book and say, "I think that, too," even if we had never before thought that thought. 

No matter what color is our skin, what language we speak or where we live, we all go to the bathroom once or twice a day or more if we drink a lot of water or enjoy going there to brush our teeth and look in the mirror. We all love, eat, talk, want things. Like you and your family and friends, everyone gets sick, has accidents, is afraid of the dark (adults are afraid of the dark, but it is a different kind of dark) are calm or nervous, loud or quiet, rude or polite. In all important ways, everyone is the same.  

Someday someone might sy you should hate someone who is a different color or speaks a different language. A friend you trust or your mom or dad might say this. It is hard to understand, but some people are afraid of what is new and different.  

It is very important not be fooled. People try to trick us. Most of the time they want to trick us out of money so they won’t have to work. Sometimes among your friends and family someone will try to make us look like a fool. They make us feel stupid and this makes them feel good. Why?  I don’t know.

There are accidents, people get hurt and no one is to blame, others make mistakes because they are silly, stupid or mad. Lots of money is lost or stolen, someone gets hurt and others say this bad stuff happened because the person it happened to speaks an unusual language or has different skin color. Not true. Humans make mistakes and do cruel things because some humans are stupid and cruel. 

They are bad because they were treated bad. Being bad or good is a choice everyone makes. 

Before we decide to stay away from a new person or make them a friend their face and voice can show us who they are. After watching them and listening to them we can decide if we like them or not. 

This is how to do it. First look at the shape of a person’s face and the shapes of their eyes, ears and nose. All these are important because a person’s face can actually be read like a book. The Chinese have figured out how to do this and have written books on how to do it, and not just Chinese faces. Most of us live with other people and spend most of our time with them. Being happy depends on keeping those we love close and those we dislike far away. 

  The next thing to do is listen. As they talk listen and notice, besides their shape and style of face, if their voices are healthy. If their eyes are clear and bright, their teeth white and their hair and skin not too dry or wet they are probably healthy. Sick people can be kind and energetic, so we must determine from what they say if they are worth listening to. If they are energetic and do not look healthy they may have taken a drug that gives them zip and as soon as their body uses up the drug they will go very slow. 

Are their voices weak or strong? Does what they say make us feel good or bad? Speaking well means that their voice has what musicians call rhythm and comed to our ear all at once and confused. If a person controls their voice and speaks well it means they care about something. To find out what that something is just listen. People tell us all about themselves in everything they say or do. We get their story by paying attention. 

Let’s notice one more thing; do they listen to us? If they don’t, we might as well say nothing. All we say will slip right by them, but continue to pay attention. It doesn’t happen often, but some poor listeners (they talk too much) may say something interesting.  

If we could talk to and get to know everyone in the world we would like most of them and their stories.

Those who dislike others before we know them are unhealthy.  If no one else is around to play with, play alone or go read a book or look up at the moon and stars or close your eyes and look at the sun. Feel how warm the sun is. The sun will always be there, the sun is there for everyone. 

end of “Faces and Places”

Why People wear Pajamas

From our feet up to our heads our bodies are a mystery to explore and understand. The stinky parts are no fun but we need them. Some bodies are faster, prettier or stronger than others. These differences are small compared to how much all of us are alike. Our bodies work the same or they don't work well, meaning we are sick. Our body belongs to us and only us and is special even though it is just like everyone else’s. No one should, but many will try to tell us what to do with our bodies. It is the most important thing we will ever own, so we must take care of it.

Mom or dad or other adults say don’t poke pencils in the nose, ears or other places. It is easy to understand why. If we shove a stick in an ear it will break the ear drum, then we can’t hear.  Ears work when air comes in through holes in the middle of our flappy ears through tubes into the sides of our heads. This air carries sound, a ripple or wave on the air made by a bird singing or a big explosion or a friend’s voice. These waves or ripples touch this very thin skin stretched tight, the ear drum,. From this tight skin the wave goes by way of tiny bones to nerves, like electricity in wires, to our brains. Everything we see, hear, touch and smell is sent to the brain. The brain is in your head behind your face.

The part of our bodies making it possible to walk, talk, think and do everything is the brain. How do we know? Other people just like us in all ways lived, got sick and died. After they died a person with a knife cut them open and figured out how the body works. Now we know we could not read this without a brain. Words come into our eyes or ears and our brain tells us what they mean. Readers of Braille are blind; their alphabet is many small bumps on paper.  They touch the page and fingertips send messages to the brain. 

The brains in our heads are connected to the rest of our body by bones in our backs running from the neck just under our head to our butt. Reach behind and feel the groove in your back. Right down the middle of that groove are bones and right through the middle of those bones is a big fat nerve with smaller nerves going from it and smaller nerves growing from those smaller nerves like the limbs of a tree. The nerves get smaller and smaller until they reach fingertips, toes and the tip of our nose. And the top of the head. We know they are there because when a nerve is hit, cut or burned the nerve sends pain to the brain and we say, “Ouch.” Nerves are why we can feel hot or cold, smooth metal, rough stone or a kiss. 

To pet a dog we reach out and if our ear hears a growl the brain says, “Pull back that hand.” If the dog wants to be petted its brain sends a message back to wag the tail and the human brain says, “That dog’s tail wags, it won‘t bite,” and sends a message to the hand. Brain doctors and thinkers who think about what life means (called ‘philosophers’) have a strange job. They operate on and study what we think with. They think about what they think with. All doctors and philosophers have bodies and brains in their heads just like us. The brain is part of the body, like our arms and legs. The brain and the body work together; what happens to one happens to the other. 

Besides sticking a pencil in the ear there are three ways to put stuff into our brain and body that hurt. One is to eat too much, the next is to eat, drink or breathe in poisons and the third is to believe in something that is not true. Most doctors believe the first two are the worst and most philosophers think the last hurts the most. The pain of believing a lie lasts the longest. 

When we eat too much we get fat. The extra weight puts a strain on the heart which breaks and stops pumping blood. Blood moving through our body carries energy. If we drink poison or take too much of the wrong drug or breathe polluted air or drink polluted water we get sick and die!

What happens to food after we eat it? Mashed up by teeth, it goes down a long tube into the stomach. The better we chew food the easier it is for the body to use it. That’s why it’s good to eat slowly. Through this tube to the stomach, rings of muscles squeeze the food, mash it up more, then in the stomach it’s churned up, mixed with juices and goes deep into the squiggly tunnels under the stomach. These are called intestines. In the intestines vitamins and nutrients are attached to blood (the blood pumped by our hearts) and goes all through the body to muscles, bones and brain. Our hearts are not just for falling in love. Blood goes to the lungs and gets oxygen out of air we breathe in and carries it to fingertips, toes and the nose. And every bone and muscle. Our whole body is made from air and food. When we breathe we feed ourselves. The person we will be tomorrow is on the plate in front us now.

The part of food that doesn’t get in the blood, like a piece of gum or if we swallow a rock, settles into the bottom of the intestines so when we go to the bathroom this is what you get rid of. Flush! It happens every day to everyone and if we couldn’t do it we would die.

Smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol is like breathing polluted air or drinking polluted water.  Some people say it feels good and maybe it does, but the feeling wears off and the body is sick for much longer.  

The body is covered all over with skin even under our hair. Skin has tiny holes all over and sweat comes out of these holes to cool us on hot day. Skin is what we have to keep warm on cold days. On cold nights we keep our skin warm under blankets covered by pajamas. That’s why we wear pajamas and other clothes. These are a second skin. 

Our body and brain are healthy and feel good when we feed them fresh air, exercise and sleep. If we are not killed in an accident one day we will get sick and die. I’m sorry, it happens to everyone. Until this 

happens to you, you can stay alive for a very long time by taking care of you body and brain. 

Now let’s look closely at the opposite of all this. The opposite of good food, sleep, and the truth is war. In war the body is rarely given enough food or very good food, no one sleeps enough and it is very hard to think of anything except how to avoid being killed. While a fight goes on, bullets, bombs and missiles are flying and the bodies of soldiers, sailors and pilots are torn to pieces. This happens in real war.      

Bullets and bombs destroy bodies. How is a new body made? People fall in love, bump their bodies together in a way you’ll learn about soon, no hurry, and a baby is born. No matter how old we are now, all of us were babies. 

end of “Why People Wear Pajamas.”

Pain

   We rarely talk about important stuff, we talk about the weather. We all have the weather over us and the sun and rain falls on all everywhere. We can do nothing to change it, we can only talk about it

Death, God, hate, sex, history; all are too important to talk about with anyone who just happens to be walking by. When adults listen to kids they have to think like a kid again and this makes some of them sad. Maybe when they were kids they were hurt so thinking like a kid makes them feel pain. These adults might say, “Why do you ask so many questions? You are such a pain!” Even if our parents said this, they probably still love us. We are not pain, our question is the pain, thinking is the pain.

Learning can be a pain. Learning something new means we have to give up old knowledge. Leaving behind loveable old knowledge is a pain. 

It hurts if dad or mom left the house and didn’t come back. “I’m a pain,” say children without parents or whose parents have no time to talk to them. 

You are not pain. 

There are many things that adults fear and run away from and they were running away from them long before we walked in the room. I was called a pain. Now i’m a father so i know this; you are not pain.

Adults get confused and feel bad when they think they should be doing something and they’re not doing it. This could be working, helping others or playing music. They worry about things they did wrong, about bombs blowing them up or dying of hunger, losing their home, their family or getting in an accident, being crushed in a flaming car. They don’t want to get sick and die, yet every day brings them closer to the day this will happen. They know there is nothing they can do about it except to stop thinking of it. They fear a disease called cancer which slowly gobbles them up from the inside as they lie with pain stabbing them all through their bodies. Pain won’t go away when we grow up. Being an adult is just as hard as being a kid. Many adults are just as unhappy as their children. 

If we cut a finger blood will come out and we feel pain. It may not kill us or hurt for a long time. A cut bleeds and the blood dries and the dry lump of blood seals the cut and under the dry lump of blood new skin grows. Our body can fix itself, unlike our parent’s car, but only if the cut is small. If you fall off a bike and break an arm or leg it hurts so much we have to go to the hospital so a doctor can set the bone. This hurts, but the pain will end.

I knew a man who worked alone on the prairie in Wyoming. He was cutting sage brush with a huge mowing machine and he cut off the front of his right foot. He felt a lot of pain, he was alone. He had no car, truck or phone so with half of a foot cut off he had to walk more than a mile to a highway. He wrapped a towel abound his stump of a foot and soon the towel was red. On the highway he would have to walk all the way to town and the hospital if no one stopped to give him a ride. He knew if he didn’t keep moving he would die, all his blood would leave his body and his heart would have nothing to pump. He told himself, “I will not feel pain,” and he said it again and again and soon the pain was not so bad. The way he did this, he told me, was to see his pain floating alongside him in a balloon that stayed beside him. He would not let it come back inside him and it would not fly away. His foot pain stayed inside the balloon only as long as he kept thinking it was there and seeing it there. As long as he pushed it out of his foot it went out to the balloon. He had to think very hard to keep it in the balloon and as he lost blood and energy it was harder and harder to keep the pain out. Fortunately someone on the highway gave him a ride to a hospital.

The best president of the United States was Abraham Lincoln. He was very smart, understood people and was a very good writer. He said, “When my feet hurt i can’t think.”  President Lincoln was six feet plus four inches tall so his aching feet were about as far from his brain as they could get and the pain still stopped him from thinking. 

This is pain of the body. When mom won’t give us more ice cream, a second look at a video or we have to stay inside and study or she makes us wear goofy clothes to school we hurt, though not as much or as long as when we have a broken arm. A broken arm hurts so much everyone suddenly stops doing what they're doing until it’s fixed. Hating our clothes makes no one stop.  Someone might laugh and say, ”Go put on different clothes,” or “Don’t be silly, you look great!” No one drops everything to help. It is sad, and sadness is a pain.

Body and mind hurt differently. Body pain we fix right away. Pains of the mind can be cured only by thinking, they can last for many years or forever. This kind of pain wears us out from the inside without making our bodies bleed.

One of the most important things we can learn is how to control pain. We say a person is ‘in pain’ as if it surrounds them like a cloud, and so it does, for a person ‘in pain’ can think of nothing except how much they hurt. Doctors take care of broken bones and if a man mowing sage brush on the prairie cuts off his foot, let’s hope he brought some pain killer or knows how to think his pain into a balloon and keep it there. The kind of pain our friends and family cause is harder to put aside, even for a short time. We have to do something, if only to forget the pain for awhile so we can rest. 

We need to think about questions and answers. 

Because some questions have no answers, it can hurt to think. One question might have many answers. Thinking could be a pain. People give up asking and rest by pretending to have an answer. Scientists once believed the earth was flat. Now they know it is round like a basketball. Christopher Columbus had an idea. He said, "I think the earth is round."  Many people thought Chris was crazy. Columbus created a "theory," bet his life on it and the theory proved to be true. Today he would be locked up and given drugs to “level him out.” 

Answers are needed and there are none so we pretend that we have answers. Are we lying? No. We are creating a theory.  A theory is an idea, an opinion about something unknown that hasn’t been proven true or false. It isn’t lying, but when we make a theory we have to remember that it might not be true. Scientists made a theory about how the sun, moon and stars were created because no one they know was around to see it happen. They created a theory, now we wait to see if it’s true or

false.  

I like thinking about people and what we do and why and at the same time people do things that cause pain. People are a source of fun and pain.

As a kid, i was left alone a lot, so i had to make friends outside my family and the family moved often and i lost my friends. I got used to losing my friends and making new friends. Some new friends i found in books.  I imagined people like i wanted them to be. This didn’t work. I had to see and understand people as they are, not as i wanted them to be.

   Understanding people is what i like to do. I write because for a long time the only place i could go was into my notebook. I wrote about how much i hated my parents and brothers and sister and then wrote about how much i loved them, all on the same page. 

Loneliness is a pain. Suddenly everyone is a stranger. In my notebook nobody is a stranger and everyone does what i want them to do. But not always. On paper i can describe my pain. My notebook answers questions that cause pain. Writing puts pain in a balloon.

end of “Pain”

Time

    Today is now, tomorrow is the future. The future is everything happens after today. Today the sun will go down and we will go to bed and when we wake up tomorrow will be here, changed into today. The day you are reading this, or dad is reading it to you, will be yesterday. It keeps happening, it never stops. 

The word for all the days and years before now is the past. The word for all the days and months and years after today is the future. No one can stop it. No one can change it.

Between the past which is gone and the future which will never come because it always changes into today, is the present. If we say, “I am present,” we mean “I am here.” Present is also now, usually called ‘the present.’ Take these three, past, present and future stir them in an enormous bowl (all three will not fin in a small or even a large bowl, the bowl must be enormous) and we’ll have Time.

Only, no one has time, no one owns it or controls it, it keeps going on and on. Time carries us along. We’ve heard someone say, “Hurry up, we must be on time.” 

Musicians say, “Can you hear the beat?” The beat is time measured by music. Musicians who play togethr well are “on the beat.” in music time is the beat, like the ticking of a clock. A musical clock is called a metronome. Being late when playing music makes the song like a car with a flat tire. The other tires spin smooth, a flat tire flumps and flaps, wumps and slaps.  

Being late, not “on time” means everyone waits and how do they spend the time waiting? Talking, talking about you and thinking up a lot of bad things to say to you. Making friends wait takes time from them.

Another reason to be on time instead of late is that some theaters lock the door when the show starts. We miss the show and if we are late for a bus or train it leaves without us. Walking is fun and healthy, but slow. Being late to pick up a bicycle at the repair shop that is closed means waiting until tomorrow to ride. When it comes to riding a bike only a strange and unusual people want to do it tomorrow.

“What is happening?” is a common question. Look around, this is the present. Here and now is “ what is happening.”

Listen to what people say about the past or the future. Most of us talk about the past. We have had time to think about it. “What happened?” is a question often asked. 

Kids have less of the past and more of the future to think about. When we get old we might think of the past so much we forget the future. Old people get better at doing a lot of things, this is why they are said to “grow wise.” When some old people think about the past they wonder why kids have no interest in what happened. So much happened! To kids those years in the past are only dates, numbers on a calendar, without sunshine or smiles or storms shaking them. 

“What will happen?” is another question. Someone in danger in an exciting story might say, “What do we do now?”  They care about the future.

When we enjoy reading or listening to, or if we have fun doing anything we say, “I’m like this now.” Now is the best part of time. 

end of “Time”

History

History is yesterday (the past). When today (now) is yesterday (the past) what happens today (now) will be history. Tomorrow (the future) is history that hasn’t happened. Time passes, people and things get old, we decide what is important to remember and call it history. History starts now and will never stop. We can watch it happen.

Like it or not, people remember. We remember the most painful and exciting stories. The stories get old, the people who tell them vanish (die) and what was said might not be true. Our memory changes events so they happen the way we want them to happen. 

History is hard to forget. One morning ships of the United States Navy were anchored in Hawaii when suddenly airplanes from Japan flew in and bombed and sunk many of them. Many sailors sunk inside the boats. It is hard to forget because a war started that day. It started with explosions.

About three years alter the explosions the President of the United States suddenly died. He was president for twelve years and suddenly gone, a big surprise. We remember big surprises. History is full of big surprises.

My father went to the war and walked around a jungle full of mosquitoes and soldiers from a foreign country. He was trying to find and kill these foreign soldiers and they were trying to find and kill him. The food my father ate in the jungle was bad, his bed in a shack was a hard wooden plank or he had to dig a hole to sleep in. Airplanes from the country that sent the soldiers to kill my father dropped bombs near him. They never blew him up, of course, or he would now be small pieces scattered around on an island in the South Pacific and i would have a different father. Other men were blown up, not my father. He saw the pieces of these men lying around on the ground and thanked God, he told me, because he didn’t know of anyone else to thank. "It was God that saved me, or my rabbit's foot," he said. For good luck people carry a rabbit's foot, the stump capped with a piece of metal and a tiny chain attached. No one told me why carrying a rabbit’s foot is good luck. I think it is not good luck for the rabbit. 

When i was bad my father complained that he had suffered fighting in a war for me. He didn’t fool me. I can count. The war he fought ended nine years before i was born. I was not outside my mom yet, how could he know me nine years before i was born? Before we are born we are invisible (tiny particles spread out so much no one can see us) or we don’t exist. Or maybe we are on a planet like earth somewhere on the other side of the universe. 

But wait, there’s more; one day i asked my father what he did in the war and he said, “Son, those were the best years of my life.” This made me think my dad had "shell shock" or "battle fatigue."

My father liked being a soldier, i trusted him and at the same time wondered why he told stories that were not true. Someone might lie to steal our money or make us look foolish. He did not want to trick us. My father described being at war the way he wanted the war to be. 

Stories from history are often told the way we think they happened, not the way they did happen. This is not always a lie. Sometimes it is an opinion. An opinion is a guess, idea, theory, wish or dream that might come true, that we hope is true. We have a saying about them; “Opinions are like feet, they walk but most don’t go anywhere.”  Most opinions fizzle out. Our parents tell us not to stick a finger in our nose while a friend is looking at us. Most adults don’t stick a finger in their nose while someone is watching, but they do something just as bad, they speak without first thinking. 

We fought the war and won and the fear of the countries that attacked us ended. As it ended a new way of living and thinking began. Two bombs were dropped on two cities. These were atomic bombs, more destructive than anyone imagined possible. The two cities were completely destroyed. These bombs ended the war and many people believe that atomic bombs might destroy the world. The bombs we used to destroy our enemy became our enemy. This is a big surprise from history that is still happening. Since the war ended many people fear atomic bombs will destroy everybody alive today. 

There are few real answers. Listen closely, how do we know an opinion is a real answer? Ask the question; “would i do that?” Most people are like us, even if we don’t speak the same language or have the same skin color. We like to feel special but we are really the same. People in history acted like us and if they didn’t the stories we hear about them may be more opinion than truth.

History is what happened, not an opinion. Some are honest and remember well, others remember things the way they want them to have happened. They become the heroes and heroines of their own stories and we hear about the ‘good old days.’ Kids look ahead and say, “I’ll get a cool bike for Christmas.” They get the bike, maybe it’s not cool. The kid gets, remembers and says, “I had a wonderful bike” (wonderful is the same as cool). None of this talk means they had a cool or wonderful bike, but it was the only bike they had. You have to love it if you have nothing else, and nobody likes to hear complaining, we know this and try to make the old days sound good. 

In most of history there were no airplanes, spaceships, radios, computers and many of the countries we know today did not exist. History is the story of what mean or nice people did to each other and animals. If we pay attention to history and learn a little each day we see that people have slowly become nicer to each other. We still kill a lot of animals, and not just to eat them, and we’re mean to people unlike us, but far back in history people were very cruel. Sometimes people got their heads chopped off for insulting God, who said, “Thou 

shalt not kill.”  This happens today, but not as much as it used to.

Would we be better off forgetting history? No. In fact, we need to remember everything. We need to know all about it so we can protect ourselves. 

People do the same things over and over. We go to the same places every day, work at the same job, study at the same school, shop at the same stores, visit the same aunts, uncles, cousins, gramma and grampa, at the same time each year – Christmas, Easter, birthdays ~ times of the year we notice history. Mean people do the same things every day, too. Mean people have relatives and family, like us. They have babies and at home they snarl and snap and bite each other. They’re mean, that’s what mean people do. Their words are sharp as fangs and their kids grow up to be mean. A nice kid from a mean family is rare.

What is the story, where the fun? Adults look for what is interesting, kids look for what is fun. When we put ourselves into history we find everywhere someone is dancing and everyone has eyes to see and ears to listen and teeth to bite. They chewed up their food and swallowed it. They laughed and cried wet tears and their feet hurt. They spit in the dust and drowned in the ocean, that same blue ocean we see today,  

except now more oil is spilled in it. They went camping and fell asleep by the fire on the beach and woke from a dream thinking they saw a face they loved rising in the campfire smoke and fading into the night stars. Fifty years later you were born and the same one who slept by the fire held you in her lap. She said, “This baby has my daddy’s eyes!” and sang a song her father taught her. Did anyone notice her tears for a face and smile that faded again like smoke? Fresh tears collect in eighty year old eyes as a baby gurgles, waves and laughes. The musician who wrote the song a hundred years before her father sang it was breathing and thinking in time and tones, just like us or the musician who plays the instrument and sings it today. The instrument might have belonged to the one who wrote the song. Today the music sounds the same.  

 There are three kinds of history. The most important to most people happens right now. It is our music, our stories. The people who are making history are making it now. At any moment something might blow up and change how we live. 

The second kind of history is the longest and oldest and almost nobody pays attention to it, it’s too old and dusty. This history has little to do with us now, though we may live in the same places, even the same buildings, where it happened. Everyone connected with it is long gone and their bones are dust in stone boxes in old churches.  

They were kings and popes and bishops and few people know what they did, but we know what they looked like. In Ireland you can see stone crosses by the roads. In Rome you can visit the coliseum where the gladiators fought and in Japan the Horyu-ji Temple, close to Nara, is the oldest temple in a very old country. We know what they looked like, they looked like us.

Instead of books of paper, some people made mud pies and smoothed the top layer of mud and made marks with a pointed stick. Then they baked the pie until it was too hard to break. These pies were buried or thrown away and thousands of years later they were found. The guy who found them rushed out to his friend and shouted, “Look, I found mud pies!”

The friend said, “Whoa, wait a minute, if you call them mud pies no one will take them seriously. No one puts mud pies in a museum. What you found are clay tablets!”

“Good idea. Clay tablets sound better!”

“Yes, clay tablets sound  scientific.”

In my opinion something like that happened. 

The marks in the clay tablets were made in a language so old no one knew how to read it. No one was around who could speak this language. 

By putting themselves into history people good at puzzles found out what the marks in the clay meant. They asked, “What would i write on a clay tablet?” The marks could be names, numbers, stories or laws. Many different letters and meanings for the marks were tried out and one day the whole puzzle fit together. The marks were the names of the king and his family, the numbers of cows, sheep and camels owned by the king and others. Some were stories, one about how the king’s brother killed him so he could became the new king. Other marks were laws. The biggest old law is the same as the biggest new law today. It is; “Be good or we’ll chop off your head.”

Not much has changed since those old mud clay tablet days. This shows how even the oldest history still happens today. All the people who lived back then are gone, turned to dust. This will happen to us. Then we will also be history. 

Now is now, the most important time.  

And number three is also happening now. This third kind of history belongs to us and only to us. These are our own opinions, our own stories, the thoughts we have while waiting for a train or a plane or a ride in the dentist’s chair. This history includes our family and friends. I had a sweetheart once and we loved each other for a long time and she could have been your mom, but she was also devoted to her father. She thought her father was the greatest guy ever. I thought he was a jerk, but maybe he was a jerk because i wanted to marry his favorite daughter and take her away to Australia. Her father told her i was unworthy of her and she should send me away and she sent me away. Some called this ‘admirable devotion.’ I think she was fooling herself, to think her father could love her more than me. This is a piece of history she shared with me, but no one will ever hear any of it from her; she is gone; she fell off her horse and vanished down a hole. 

This history is our’s all alone and may not be very important to anyone else. It should be important to us. We should pay close attention to it and make sure to remember it and more than just remembering, we can make it better. Yes! We can change the history of what is to be, of the future. How to do this? I have no idea. You decide. 

It helps to write it down so we can see it from many different sides and understand it completely. Someday if we don’t remember it the way it truly happened we could make a big mistake. With other people trying to trick us we don’t want to help them. We should be sure to remember history right so when we grow up and our kids ask about what happened we can tell them the truth, not just an opinion.

End of “History”                                              

 "We are preparing our children for a holiday in the Italian lake region and sending them to the Arctic." Sigmund Freud