The Funnies

While many memories are visual, often as vivid as the day they were engrained upon our experience, some memories return to us from the most subtle stimuli, such as the smell of newly cut grass or the taste of cranberry sauce or the feel of a straw mat on bare feet or the sound of an orbital sander. Other memories return based on a sense of time. For me, Sundays were that time.

Ever since I can remember, Sundays were a time set apart from the rest of the week. Even after our church had burned down and we no longer attended services, Sundays were a time to absorb the quiet space around us, to reflect and regenerate. The Saturday tasks (and Hampton races) were done, the new week not yet started. Sundays were peaceful, and during the summers, perfect for long walks in the cool, deciduous forests of southern Maryland.

But Sundays also had a hierarchy, a rhythm to depend upon, a structure that allowed the creative and nightmare-laden mind of a young child an anchor. Once we no longer had to dress in our Sunday best and endure the endless and pointless sermons while failing to repress our fidgets, Sundays achieved a blessing of its own.

Part of that hierarchy was the Sunday comics, or funnies as we called them. This huge, nearly bursting Sunday paper would come into the house—funny, I have no memory of how it arrived; it just did—and my father had first dibs on the paper. Mom had the second dibs, and being the youngest, I often failed to snabble the funnies before my older brother. So by the time I inherited the funnies, they had been bent, folded backwards, and in the process of being snapped into obedient upright pages, often torn in places.

I did not have the patience to sit empty-handed while the family read the funnies, so I would often retreat to the living room and play piano softly, sneaking a glance into the family room from time to time to gauge the progress of the funnies.

For whatever reason, there came the day I stayed in the family room, quietly doing something—I forget what. The Sunday paper had come in, and I was sitting on the straw mat carpet, my back against the hassock upon which my father rested his feet. I could hear the rustle of his picking up the tome of pages, flipping through the sections. I know I sighed, at least silently. It was going to be a loooooooonnnng time before I would get to read the comics.

There was a bit more noise, the creak of my Dad's chair, a faint movement of the hassock, more rustle of paper, and then to my wondering and absolutely stunned eyes, the funnies came into my view, placed into my hands by my father. I gingerly took the funnies, but twisted and looked over my shoulder at my father, only to realize he had given them to me even before he had read them! He smiled, then settled back to his own reading.

What a special thing! First rights, not only before my brother and mother, but even before him. I read every word of the comics that day, even those strips I didn't care for.

I don't think I had done anything special to earn this privilege, but there was no mistaking it: privilege it was. I don't remember ever having that privilege again, though it might well have been that the funnies didn't retain that focus in my life as I grew older. However, I did learn that special things were special, not because they were demanded, harangued over, pouted over, screamed for, or expected "just because I'm alive."

Privileges were to be found in that gray area between our expectations and our hopes.