I Have A Good Memory

Every Day Is Like A Kid's Drawing, Offered To You With A Strange Mix Of Ceremoniousness And Offhand Disregard, Yours For The Keeping. Some Of The Days Are Rich And Complicated, Others Inscrutable, Others Little More Than A Stray Gray Mark On A Ragged Page. Some You Manage To Hang On To, Though Your Reasons For Doing So Are Often Hard To Fathom. But Most Of Them You Just Ball Up And Throw Away.

[my Dad] Didn't Do Much Apart From The Traditional Winning Of Bread. He Didn't Take Me To Get My Hair Cut Or My Teeth Cleaned; He Didn't Make The Appointments. He Didn't Shop For My Clothes. He Didn't Make My Breakfast, Lunch, Or Dinner. My Mom Did All Of Those Things, And Nobody Ever Told Her When She Did Them That It Made Her A Good Mother.

As For Comics, One Has Only To Turn To The Characteristic Output Of Marvel Comics, For The Period From About 1961 To About 1975, To Find Not An Expression Of Base And Cynical Impulses But Of Good, Old-fashioned Liberal Humanism Of A Kind That May Strike Us Today, God Help Us, As Quaint, But Which Nevertheless Appealed, In Story After Story, To Ideals Such As Tolerance, Technological Optimism, And Self-sacrifice For The Benefit Of Others.

When I First Decided I Wanted To Be A Writer, When I Was 10, 11 Years Old, The Books That I Loved Obviously And Openly Fit That Description: They Came With Maps And Glossaries And Timelines - Books Like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I Imagined That's What Being A Writer Was: You Invented A World, And You Did It In A Very Detailed Way, And You Told Stories That Were Set In That World.

Nothing That Had Ever Happened To Him, Not The Shooting Of Oyster, Or The Piteous Muttering Expiration Of John Wesley Shannenhouse, Or The Death Of His Father, Or Internment Of His Mother And Grandfather, Not Even The Drowning Of His Beloved Brother, Had Ever Broken His Heart Quite As Terribly As The Realization, When He Was Halfway To The Rimed Zinc Hatch Of The German Station, That He Was Hauling A Corpse Behind Him