Memory is a weird thing.
One day you can suddenly remember the Eagles game you went to at Veteran’s Stadium. You can see your view of the field, feel the chill in the air. You can see friends and family there with you. You remember the idiot a couple rows back who, upset at something the Eagles had done, threw the remnants of a soft pretzel at the field, but hit you instead. You clearly remember the piece of pretzel had mustard on it.
Even though it never happened.
Neil Gaiman mentioned this on his blog. As a fan of both Sandman and Peanuts, I wanted to share it.
The artist is Evan Shaner. He also did a Schultz version of The Watchmen. Gotta love Snoopy as Rorschach.
If you don’t read Sandman, you may not get the first panel. And if you don’t read Sandman, shame on you. Yes, it’s a comic book, but it was a comic book full of literary, historic, mythologic, cultural allusions.
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I’m in the process of having my entire house switched over from copper piping to PVC piping. The last stage of the process is scheduled for the end of the month. Part of these pipes runs through a closet at the foot of the basement stairs. The closet has always been the game closet. It’s full of board games, dominos, card games, the electronic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and so on.
To allow the plumber access to the pipes, I have to clean out the closet, which is just as well since the basement’s flooded a couple of times since I’ve been here and the games, well, they smell.
It’s funny and strange in a nice way. Over the past month or so, I’ve reconnected with old pals…
I’ll leave tales of ficus trees in an Amsterdam attic and adventures with gaffers tape for a later post. For this one, I wanted to look back over 30 years after reconnecting with my friend Leigh. We’ve known each other since elementary school but lost touch after high school. And I’m glad that we’re back in touch. It always amazes me how people can mean so much to you at a specific time in your life and then disappear altogether from the rest of it. And it amazes me how, for some of those people, you can get get back in touch and then re-establish a new friendship based on who you are now, many decades later.
Here’s a picture of us in 1st grade.
That’s me in the plaid dress at the right end of the second row. I’ll protect Leigh by not identifying her in the picture. Mrs. Wendt was my favorite teacher in elementary school. She taught me how to write in cursive. I loved her. She and my mom stayed in touch for many years.
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I have always been a reader. The only broken bone I’ve had, I got while I was reading. I liked to read with my feet above my head or in other weird positions. I was sitting on the arm of an armchair reading something or other. I somehow pulled the chair off balance and it started to fall over.
Being an intelligent 5th grader, I reached for the back of the chair to pull it back to standing. Being a 5th grader, I hadn’t gotten to any physics classes and didn’t understand that the forward motion of my body shifted more weight to the falling momentum of the chair. The chair continued falling and trapped my forearm between the top support of the chair back and the wall. Ouch. It’s the only time I’ve had a cast.
That’s a story that shows you many things about me. Among them, I was a weird kid. The important thing is that I really love reading. To be honest, I still tend to prop my legs up on the back of the couch while reading. Continue reading
