I was poking around on the internet the other night, which isn't really different than how I spend most of my nights, and I saw something that...really affected me. I don't know how else to say it. An image, a cartoon done in Calvin and Hobbes style ink and paint to be exact. It was a picture of Hobbes, the old stuffed tiger that so many of us probably grew up with. He was in his 'live' form, how he always looked whenever Calvin was playing with him, his young imagination giving him that certain anima. Except...it wasn't Calvin he was playing with.
It was a little girl, blonde, in a purple or blue dress, running down a path in the woods with a great big smile on her face, one hand behind her clutching at Hobbes' paw. Hobbes wasn't paying attention to where they were running, though. He was looking backward, at a man who stood at the far end of the path. You couldn't really see his face, but you could see enough to know he was smiling as he waved goodbye. His hair was still blonde, but it wasn't spikey anymore, and it almost looked like it was starting to recede into his dad's old hairline. He still wore that same style shirt, red and black, but now it had graduated to a polo style. Calvin, all grown up, watching his daughter and his childhood best friend rushing off to have their own brand-new adventures.
I think it was the expression on Hobbes' face, the look in his eyes, that really got to me. As he looked back, the make-believe tiger seemed torn between his chance for new adventures with his friend's little girl, and not wanting to lose the memories that he -- and all the rest of us, let's be honest -- worked to create with her dad. It felt like there was no middle ground, no way to go back. In that single image, three entire life stories were captured. The little girl, full of wonder and magic and possibility, what ifs and could bes and tomorrows; adult Calvin, relegated to the background, to the past, a life of imagination and adventure perhaps already passed by; and Hobbes, the epitomal observer, a symbol of "Let's go play, NOW!" to literally God only knows how many kids.
I honestly don't know why I was so...touched? Disturbed? by this, but gods help me I was. Bill Watterson ended the Calvin and Hobbes comic back in '95 (or maybe it was '91), but this...this felt like a door slamming on my childhood. For a minute, it was like I WAS Calvin, standing in the background, alone and all but forgotten or ignored as the next generation forged ahead with MY toys. Christ, it made me feel...old. Am I old? Is 26 old now? I don't think so. I don't believe so. I CAN'T believe so. But right then, and even right now, I still feel it. I just can't shake this feeling that all my adventures are behind me, too, that even though it feels like there's still so much left inside me, it's all going to go to waste.
I don't know who drew that cartoon; it might have been The Man himself. Certainly it was powerful enough to have been his. But whoever it was, if you read this (I know they probably won't, but this IS the internet, and stranger things do happen) I guess I should let you know...mission accomplished. Whatever your purpose was in drawing that comic, whether just as a lark to test your artistic prowess, or to reach out and affect someone in exactly the manner I've just described, you certainly achieved it. Well done, damn you.
Well done.
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