Today our family went through the bookshelf in our den, removing books that we no longer wanted to keep. Several of the shelves were two-deep, and there was a lot of clutter–books that either had never been read or would never be read again. The initial process was to take everything off the shelf and replace only those we wanted to keep, so there was initially a lot of disorganization: nonfiction by fiction, pop fiction by classics, etc. Our kids, Katie Rose and Pete, took the books they wanted, and somehow our daughter, Katie Rose, ended up with all the Carl Hiassen in her room in exchange for returning The Hobbit and Memoirs of a Geisha to the den. Earlier, however, she had also returned about 7-8 of my Calvin and Hobbes books, including the first two–Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under the Bed is Drooling, and therein lies my tale for today:
In June, 1988, Debbie and I had our first argument: Which comic strip was better?–Calvin and Hobbes or Bloom County. I argued for the former; Debbie, the latter. Calvin only debuted in 1985–even later in our local papers–while Bloom County had been around since 1980, so, to be fair, she wasn’t as familiar with Calvin and Hobbes, but she could not believe it could be better than Bloom County. Also at this point, we had only just met as counselors at a summer camp and were still a year away from dating.
Since she didn’t have ready access to the Bill Watterson oeuvre, I came back from a break between camp sessions with my copy of the eponymous first collection of Calvin and Hobbes strips and loaned it to her. While she was reading it, she accidentally creased the back cover. Her initial thought was to replace it with a new copy, but the second collection of strips, Something Under the Bed is Drooling, had recently been published, so she got that instead and gave it to me when she returned Calvin & Hobbes. I was already becoming smitten, but this display of integrity, responsibility, and clear thinking impressed me. (Also, she did not read the second book before giving it to me.)
While I liked Calvin and Hobbes better, I also did like Bloom County–my second favorite comic at the time. Which meant that our combined library had two copies of Berke Breathed’s first collection–one much the worse for wear after 32 years, which was culled today. Fortunately, Debbie’s copy is the one that survived.
As I alluded to earlier, it took another year for me to impress her sufficiently for us to start dating, but nine years after that first argument, we had Katie Rose. Around six years after that, Katie Rose became engrossed with Calvin and Hobbes–our collection had now grown to ten of Watterson’s books–and she, along with her brother, inflicted more damage on the covers and pages of the books than Debbie did on the first one. Nothing too bad, fortunately–mainly just wear and tear from reading and re-reading and re-reading until Harry Potter came along to obsess over.