Comics, Part 1

I don’t remember the first time I read my father’s old comics; I can only remember that I read them every single time I went to my grandmother’s house. My father was an insurance salesman and a nomad at heart. He was torn between the north and the south and a lust for life. Although he was born and raised in the south he claimed the north, where his cousins lived and his father was born, as his home (I always thought he was a yankee until I read his birth certificate). We lived in roughly three different cities within in six different states and I attended ten different schools by the time that I graduated high school and decided to stay in Georgia.

No matter where we lived at the time we always made the trip to visit my grandmothers in Alabama. The trip usually went something like us stuffing the trunk with our luggage and gifts, driving all day and straight through the night and through the next day with a minimum of stops, my parents’ chain smoking. The windows would be down and I would catch whiffs of the smoke, cool country air, the dead skunk smell of factories along the way, the dead skunk smell of dead skunks, the chirping of insects and croaking of frogs drifting in over the sound of the radio. Every now and then my mother or father would chime in on a song they liked. My sisters would usually banish me to curl up in the floorboard in back so that they could stretch out across the seats either to lounge or sleep. I didn’t mind so much I would curl up and lay my head on the hump between the floorboards and it would be warmer than anywhere else, the hum of the car and the cold air whistling in through a vented window would lull me right to sleep. To this day I cannot sleep comfortably without a fan blowing on me or some sort of movement.

When we would get to my fathers old house my grandmother would be waiting at the door. I would try and rush through the obligatory niceties of hugs and kisses and food, but my mind was on the prize. I would always rush to the basement bedroom open the night stand and pull out the brown paper sack of my father’s old comics. I would read them in peace down there until my sisters came down to claim the room and sent me up to the sofa or the creepy pristine guest bedroom with all of the portraits that unrelentingly stared at me. My family referred to me as Casper the Friendly Ghost, because I would disappear to read the comics and not be heard from unless called for. I would read and reread and draw from those comics for almost the entire time I was there unless some adventure in the fields or woods called for me. Even into my teens whenever I would visit I would still go and read those comics, the brown sack they were kept in had been worn to the consistency of thin cloth and replaced and worn and replaced several times over. It was even offered for to me to take them with me but I declined. They belonged there, they were not mine. I’m sure I wasn’t conscious of it but I’m sure my sentimentality considered them part of the whole experience of the visit.

Several years later living on my own and out of touch with my family I visited my grandmother on my own. I went to read the comics but they were not there. I searched the entire house to no avail. When I asked my grandmother she told me that my oldest sister had come with her family and they took the comics with them. I was incensed. Although they were not mine I felt as though I had been stolen from. How could anyone else appreciate the smell of those yellowed pages, the cut out ads, taped spines and all? I said nothing. I didn’t want anyone to know how much they meant to me.

Eventually years down the road I asked my sister whatever happened to the comics. She told me that they decided to try and sale them to see if they were worth anything. They weren’t, they were too far gone, she still had them and she gave me the stack. It was different. It felt different. Thumbing through the stack I found a few that didn’t belong and gave them back to her, and then I asked where the rest of them were. She told me that some had covers and pages missing so they threw them out. I bit the insides of my cheeks. I thanked her for them and took them home I placed them in sleeves and put them in a brown paper bag where they have stayed for the last six years.

I know its ridiculous and I hate to be too sentimental about anything but that’s the way it is.

Rosebud for sure.