Twelve years ago today the last Calvin and Hobbes strip ran in the Sunday comics.
Third grade was the year I finally got interested in Calvin. Before that, I preferred strips that were more colourful and visual- The Family Circus and Snoopy (which is what I called Peanuts literally for years before I realised it wasn't called Snoopy). Calvin and Hobbes was too talky and generally not bright enough to catch my attention. I figured I read books, I'd rather look at comic strips.
But at some point in 1993, one of the strips paralleled the mess I was going through in my own classroom, and I started reading voraciously to make up for lost time. Calvin's world was so similar to my own- he was a smart kid, and I thought at the time he was smarter for not bothering in school at all and giving up his energies to truly useful things.
Third grade was a bad year, and truly the beginning of the troubles I would have in school. In retrospect, Calvin and I are nothing alike, but he was my closest ally. We understood things in the same way, though he went about everything in ways I was only brave enough to contemplate.
I spent a lot of time tracing Calvin's expressions; some of the Stupendous Man strips were particularly fun. I filled pages and pages of my notebooks with Calvin.
When I turned 12, just a little more than a month after the strip ended, I decided to have Calvin and Hobbes on my birthday cake; the bakery would do just about any picture you brought in. It turned out to be the last cake I had. In a way, 12 was the end of my childhood. That's not really accurate, but everything changed after that year.
I came across a diary I kept from this time, and in it, I say that eleven is the ideal age. You're old enough to do things, but you're not old enough to have to do things. I still say there's a lot of wisdom in this statement, and I would gladly be eleven years old again, half my age now, reading Calvin and Hobbes and just being who I was back then all over again.
Thank you, Bill Watterson, for helping me put my childhood in perspective.