Time Travel and Transmogrification

Over the last few days, I have discovered time travel. I can only go back for a few minutes or hours at a time. But I am magically transported to a time when I was ten years old. When I idolized the world of a little boy and his stuffed tiger. A world where imagination was far more important than education, and anything seemed possible, from transmogrification to alien worlds. Where teachers were an unspeakable evil, girls were G.R.O.S.S., and parents just didn't get you.

The other night, my wife and I journeyed several hours to my Aunt and Uncle's house for my cousin's birthday. We had a wonderful time, as always. It's great having family that you genuinely love, and that loves you back. While there, my Uncle Bob gave me a moving box full of books. In there were books on woodworking (instructions for book cases and Adirondack chairs), a couple of novels, some cookbooks (my wife collects them), and a nearly pristine copy of Bill Watterson's “Something Under The Bed Is Drooling”.

For those of you not in the know, this book is a small sampling of one of the finest comic strips ever published. Perhaps THE finest. At its height (just prior to its cancellation in 1995), Calvin and Hobbes was published daily in over 2,400 papers. It ran for ten years, comprising 3,160 total strips. Most of these were black and white with three to four panels, but every seventh (for Sunday publication, you see) was in glorious full color.

Calvin is, of course, named after 16^th Century theologian John Calvin, while Hobbes is named after Thomas Hobbes, a 17^th century philosopher. Bill Watterson used the daily interaction between the boy and his tiger to explore a world of imagination and wonder, with the occasional social commentary. Even when the commentaries were there, however, there was never any mention of politics or religion. The underlying message seemed to be how to love one another unflinchingly.

When Calvin and Hobbes was first published in 1985, Calvin and I were the same age. Fortunately for my parents, I didn't discover the joys of this precocious child for a couple of years. But when I did, boy did I relate!

Calvin and Hobbes was instrumental in my growing up. Calvin and Hobbes came to me at a very important time in my life, when my parents sat me down and announced their divorce. Though that is not germane here, I say it only to illustrate my need to disappear into their world. Through those strips I learned to explore the limits of my imagination, dreaming that I was doing strafing runs in an F-4 Phantom, or that I was a dinosaur tearing through the museum of natural history, eating patrons of the arts like they were salted almonds.

So when I cracked open this book that I had not seen since my childhood, a feeling of longing for a younger time crept up upon me.

It left. Quickly.

It left banished amid a gale of laughter. I laughed so hard at points that tears rolled down my face. I actually couldn't read it all in one sitting. I had to get up, walk around and come back to it after I had some reasonable conversation. This conversation, of course, consisted of me relating the strip to someone else who stared at me like I was a raving lunatic.

When I was younger, I laughed at Calvin's escapades. I never understood why his parents couldn't see Hobbes. To me, Hobbes was as real as he was to Calvin. I hated Suzie Derkins and Moe with the same intensity that the main character did. Looking back now, though, the real humor for me comes in his interaction with his parents. His father is hilarious, and I plan to use several of his tricks on our own children when they're old enough.

Tricks like explaining that the film itself hasn't ever changed. That really, it was color that was invented. And old photos are really color pictures of a black and white world. Or explaining that bridges are rated for weight by driving heavier and heavier trucks across them until the bridge collapses, then it's given a rating and rebuilt.

The fact that I can look at the same strips in a new light with age is a testament to the wonder of Bill Watterson's imagination and writing. This comic is both multi-generational and timeless. I would like to say “THANK YOU” to my Uncle Bob for allowing me to travel back in time again, and express my sincere thanks to Bill Watterson, for letting me grow up with a boy and his tiger.