Summer Valentine

In the epigraph to his musical, “The Music Man,” Meredith Wilson explained the genre of what followed. His play about River City, Iowa in the doe-eyed early years of the twentieth century—the little town populated by a pompous Mayor, hen-like chattering ladies, petty grudges, stable-loitering slobs, a bushy-tailed, over-inflated confidence in its own rising greatness, and a proud, young, spinsterhood-staring librarian, Marian—his play was not a tragedy, a comedy, a romance, or a farce. It was, said Wilson, a Valentine.

A Valentine is a very different sort of genre, because it arises not primarily on the form, and not even on the content, but from the attitude of the creator. A Valentine captures love yes, but a certain kind of love, a tenderness, an affection, a feeling sweet and sad.

At the close of Labor Day weekend, I thought I’d offer one of my own favorite Valentines, courtesy of Calvin, this one not to a town, but to a season. This strip was originally published in late August, as summer was winding toward its golden conclusion, and it’s hard not to sense the twinge of nostalgia for what was fleeing.

Bugs

In the past week, the insects have returned. I’ve noticed it mostly in my bathroom, whose 50’s-pink tile seem to attract a whole menagerie of critters. First there was the spider in my shower. I didn’t intend to swamp it, but when I turned on the faucet, I found out even the residual spray from my gloriously inefficient old showerhead is strong enough to dislodge eight legs at once from a vinyl curtain.

That prompted the first of the rescue operations—plucking the spider from the draining rapids to avoid a grim reenactment of the nursery rhyme. That bit of emergency intervention was followed two evenings later by the catch-and-release of a nervous cricket (I could tell he was nervous by the skittish way he jumped) and a similar effort with a moth a few mornings after that. Each of bugs I spirited away to the bushes by my front porch.

I’ve also seen ants, tiny ones, no more than one or two at a time, darting through the grouting. I have no inclination to relocate these—my instinct is to send them to that great ant hill in the sky. But then every time I’m reach for the Kleenex of death, I remember something a friend of mine said once. He grew up in Iran and loved Persian poetry. “In Iran,” he said, “children learn an aphorism: Do not tread upon an ant when you see him, for he has life and life is sweet.”

I don’t doubt for a second that my friend crushes bugs all the time. But dang it, if I don’t feel some sort of compassion for the little pests. Life is sweet.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t want to feel this way about bugs. I remember reading Albert Schweitzer’s description of how he refrained from swatting the summertime mosquitoes that slipped through his screened door: kooky, I thought; this guy is a little too far gone. And I can build an intellectual case, an ethical case for the validity of killing lower-order pests.

And yet…there’s something about it that still, well, bugs me. It seems like such a serious thing to cause death, just because of a little aesthetic distaste. I recognize this is a flaw in my constitution, a lack of backbone—rather like insects, actually.

I’d much rather be like the friend who sent me an email the other night, who broke off in the middle of a paragraph to narrate:

a horrible weird big insect, looked like a big spider with wings, just flew at me...and I just murdered it...!!

Bravo, I say. As for me, I guess I’ll just have to wait for fall.

O Day Full of Grace

I remember snow days.

You’d catch wind of a rumor over lunch the day before. We didn’t have nearly as much internet back then, so this was third-hand from what Dane Espegard heard on his parents’ car radio that morning on the way to school. There was a forecast. High winds, an overnight chill, a chance of precipitation—two, three, maybe even four-to-five inches.

That night, you’d beg to stay up and watch the late local news all the way to the end, for as long as the tickertape list of school districts crawled across the bottom of the screen. Gretna…Waverly…Hickman…Omaha (Omaha always canceled early—it was so unfair)…then Lincoln parochial schools…Lincoln Lutheran…Lincoln Christian...

But in the end, you knew you were asking too much. The Superintendent of Lincoln Public Schools was always, always stern in these matters. He’d wait overnight to let the salting trucks and snowplows do their work, before making the call. So you went to bed, knowing that your fate would be decided at some obscure hour in the morning while you were asleep. Before you lay down, you’d press your nose to the cold window, trying to discern in the dark how heavy was the snow. Sleep took you as you lay listening to the wind blow across the siding.

Then it was six fifteen, a.m., still dark, and you could hear muffled footsteps coming down the carpeted hallway. You saw the shadow of the bedroom door swing silently open and—it being the natural instinct of children to pretend they are asleep, that they observe less than they do—you shut your eyes and tried to slow down, even out your breathing.

The footsteps came toward you, softly—as softly as they could for that hour of the morning—and your mother’s hand touched your shoulder. Softly, softly, she nudged you, called your name. You waited until the third call, the third nudge, before you rolled over and pretended to emerge from a stupor.

Then you waited. It could be good news or bad news. It was either an early wake-up call because the sidewalks would be slower and the front step needed to be shoveled, or else…

And it was! It was! It was! Oh, so true! So real! Go back to sleep, she said, they’ve canceled school!

Then came the best moment of all. Your mother left the room, and you lay there in the dark, your heart was pattering a hundred-and-sixty per minute, but all you had to do was wait another moment, and then…

Slumber, heavy slumber, warm and dark, returned to you. You nestled back into the cocoon of your blankets, and thought of the snow forts you would dig out of the drifts later that morning, the gear—the boots, the overall snowpants, the heavy winter jacket, gloves, hat, scarf that would grow damp with frozen breath crystals—the hot cocoa and marshmallows, the T.V. show you’d watch in the afternoon. All of that was to come. It was all there waiting for you, and all you had to do was go to sleep to get there, warm and so happy.

Snow days were like grace—they were grace. Completely undeserved, completely unexpected, completely wonderful.

Calvin's Dad

My parents were not great censors of literature when my sisters and I were growing up, but they drew a line at the Berenstein Bears books. There was nothing wrong with the stories themselves, they told us; the problem was Papa Bear. You may recall Papa. He was the overall-clad grizzly who represented an unfortunately typical depiction of Dad: the good-natured but clueless bumbler whose patriarchal reign is propped up by a competent wife and tolerated by children who are really the cleverest ones of all. Fathers were patronized as idiots enough by pop culture, my parents reasoned, for them to add willfully add another wink with our picture books.

I had an argument recently with a friend who criticized Calvin's parents as being too sarcastic. Her description was accurate to a point, particularly when it comes to Calvin's dad: He can be droll; sometimes openly,and sometimes over his son's head (see above).

To my mind a little dark humor is not an unhealthy response to the exasperation that comes with a kid like Calvin:But even more to the point, to criticize dad's sarcasm is to overlook one of the real delightful--and encouraging--things about his character: He's smart. He's a man with a sound enough ear and a nimble enough mind for irony. He's thoughtful, disciplined, and unbothered by the fact that he's not cool. In short, he's a real grown-up, a man who knows he's a man. He may not be perfect, but on the spectrum from Homer Simpson to Atticus Finch, he's a lot closer to the latter.

Advent

We all need a suit like that. The suit that says, "bring it." Sometimes, when I'm traveling light and far, a comfy pair of jeans and a small backpack are that suit. Sometimes its a tweed jacket and club tie for coffee--or better, sherry. Whatever it is, it's a little bit of costume, a little bit ridiculous for one's station, whether a click too high or a notch too low. It's a suit that sets our minds for magic. The wonderful thing is, that it so often comes when we're ready to see.

As a critical aside, this strip is among the 8% or so (I'm estimating) that gives us Calvin from his parents' eyes. These only work because we know Calvin so well from his own point of view, so that the change of perspective is still tethered to the familiar. It's like seeing "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," or the Lion King 1 and 1/2, which is the same thing.

Calvin and Hobbes and Aristotle

There's a wonderful scene in the C.S. Lewis biopic The Shadowlands, where Anthony Hopkins, as Lewis, explains Aristotle's ethics to a group of fresher tutorialists. Pipe pressed between his lips, Hopkins ponders the relationship between character and action: which is more important for judging the measure of a man? "Aristotle's solution," he pontificates, "was simple, and revolutionary." There was no difference. Character was action--it was habit, whose existence was only meaningful to the extent it was enacted.

Thus saith Lewis (and Hopkins). And herewith saith Waterson (and Hobbes):


One of the delights of C&H is the breezy encounters one has with some of the truly Great Questions. The off-handed manner and unexpected locale makes them all the more delicious.

Rules of the Game

Board games make infrequent appearances in C&H: Scrabble a couple of times, checkers, Monopoly, and, once, a Ouiji board. This is one of the more successful board game strips, mostly, I think, because of the timing of Hobbes's expression in the last panel. 'Tis the sport to have the tiger hoist with his own petar.

I used to think that games like Scrabble were won by the player with superior raw intelligence, or at least the superior vocabulary. I remember my sophomore year of high school, on the last day of the semester in A.P. Literature, Mr. Holocek challenged me to a game. Mr. Holocek was one of the legendary characters of East High, a kind of cowboy poet who'd been around since the 60's, and whose silver mustache had a yellow dimple where he held his cigarettes. "Now the student has become the master," my friend Andrew mocked as I approached the desk at the front of the room.

But in fact, the student had not become the master. A few moves in, I took an early lead. Somewhere in the middle of the game, though, Mr. Holocek took control with a string of 20+ point words. By the end he'd beaten me solidly, presumably, I thought, because he just knew more words.

It wasn't until several years later that I learned it wasn't true. Mr. Holocek did have a better vocabulary than mine, and he was probably smarter than me, but that wasn't why he won. He won because he'd learned tricks, methods for exploiting the rules of that particular game. For example: don't waste your time learning long words--memorize every two-letter word you can; try to stack words parallel to one another, like "zoo" on top of "own"; always try first to use double and triple point spaces, and try not to set up your opponent to use them.

Once I started abiding by these simple little rules of thumb, I found myself beating other players--even smarter players--who didn't use them, every time. A little bit of very specific knowledge trumped a lot of general intelligence. It's a lesson I've found to apply in many tasks: law school issue-spotting exams, investing (so I'm told), and--needless to say--every board game out there (I've won a dozen consecutive games of Monopoly, but that recipe will remain a secret).

So specific knowledge beats general, tricks beat brainpower, and playing smarter beats playing harder...sometimes. Because tricks still need to be used at the right time, and in the right circumstances. Reliance on a misplaced trick is the way to ruin:


A bag of tricks is only consistently useful to a wise hand selecting among them.