It was a slow Sunday. I woke up at ten, squinted at the window long enough to confirm suspicions of rain, and then pulled the covers back over my head until eleven. My phone started emitting plaintive low battery chirps at eleven thirty, and try as I might, there was no going back to sleep with a pitiful gadget broadcasting its death rattle from across the room, so I threw back the covers and began my day. After dismantling the phone, breakfast was found, captured, and hauled back in to bed before the covers cooled down. Thus began my first hour of consciousness: sipping tea, munching tea-soaked cookies (then happily spooning out the mushy confection at the bottom of the cup) and slowly paging through Mike’s three volume boxed set of Calvin & Hobbes. This post is really about Calvin & Hobbes. My summers used to be loosely structured around the exploits of those two. After careful scrutiny of the Sunday color comics, afternoons were often lost to an extended round of Calvinball. Our rules weren’t quite as involved as C&H’s, but then we were managing this outside of the confines of Bill Watterson’s imagination, so some cuts had to be made. On the unlikely occasion everyone wasn’t up for a game with insanely complicated rules that changed every 40-50 seconds (or less, depending on whether Munsey was playing), Calvinball could easy be reduced to Race; a C-ball derivative that is a hundred times more dangerous and perhaps the only activity I cared to exert physical energy towards before the age of fifteen. It goes something like this: 1. Nate goes and finds his swim-coach-style stopwatch that someone game him for Christmas last year. 2. Participants (usually Nate, his up-for-absolutely-anything little sister Margaret, and the aforementioned Mr. Munsey) assemble about fifteen suicidally dangerous obstacles across the property. These obstacles may include hair-raising combinations of: string, rocks, ladders, gasoline, balls of all sorts (tennis, soccer, croquet, baseball, basketball, etc..) roofs, hula-hoops, branches from nearby trees that Matt has removed but doesn’t know what to do with, electric fencing, bicycles, tires, trees, fence posts, lye, manure, pipes, the sprinkler, more string and - on very rare occasions - the dog. 3. Margaret goes first to make sure it isn’t too dangerous. 4. We race. Bill Watterson deserves a Nobel Prize for lots of reasons, but that one in particular - creating a comic strip that inspired kids go do out and do crazy shit - I think is his most impressive achievement. I don’t know of anything else like it. Computer games are obviously out. Books aren’t collectively read the same way comics are, and my other favorite comics - The Far Side, Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Doonsbury - were often hilarious, but never moved you to leave the chair you were sitting in and go be part of the action. There's no real bang at the end of this thought, I just love Calvin & Hobbes. There will be more posts about how wonderful they both are soon enough, but so far as this one is concerned, I’m curious if anyone who has gotten this far down the post disagrees and had a similarly motivational touchstone from their childhood that I missed out on. Don’t be shy, I know at least one of you still has a D&D board lurking around back there...

Comments

Jason L.
Death rattle of a cellular phone...that's a good one!

Carla
MBL: Somehow I now only risked my neck each week while growing up, but was gambled out of my allowance, was frequently sent on quests I later got in trouble for, and made a bong out of clay at age 11. All at the hands of my older sister. I still make C&H snowmen whenever I can. And at one point I tried to live in the yard like a Gnome. I ate apples,rhubarb,chillies,and hosewater for three days. Kept trying to sleep in a tree but ended up in the canoe.

Carla
MBL: Somehow I now only risked my neck each week while growing up, but was gambled out of my allowance, was frequently sent on quests I later got in trouble for, and made a bong out of clay at age 11. All at the hands of my older sister.

MBL
Keep in mind that Margaret, the up-for-absolutely-anything little sister, has since developed a higher level of brain function, and will no longer act as guinea pig for any damned "obstacle courses." Let this be my statement to little sisters everywhere: DON'T DO IT. BIG BROTHERS NEVER HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART. ESPECIALLY ONES WHO TRIED TO LYNCH YOU AT AGE 2.

Nate
Fantastic! I think the Hippochicken on page four qualifies as the highlight of my day.

maura
http://www.amazon.com/Indispensable-Calvin-Hobbes-Bill-Watterson/dp/0836218981 Do you have this one? Look inside to the first poem! Now I'm off to finish my bat report. #1: Bats = Bugs