I thoroughly enjoy many comics.  In addition to my daily ration in the local newspaper, I also follow a few more on the internet.  While most of the comics I read on the internet are new each day, there are two which are no longer produced but are rerun daily on the internet.  One is Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed, which gave birth to the character Opus, and subsequently led to the comic strip of the same name.

The second comic strip is Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, again long gone.  The strip follows the adventures of sneaky little Calvin and his sidekick Hobbes, who is a stuffed animal in others eyes but a real live tiger when alone with Calvin.  It was a recent strip that first made me laugh then gave me pause.

In it, Calvin is shoved over in the playground by his nemesis, Moe.  In the final panel, Calvin is lying on the ground, battered.  His final words are, "People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children."  Naturally, my first reaction was to laugh.  Then it hit me.  I sometimes wax nostalgic in this blog about my early youth.  And as Calvin (aka Bill Watterson) so wisely noted, I tend to forget or gloss over those times and events in my early childhood that weren't so pleasant.  I guess unless we carry those bad memories over into our adult lives, we all tend to forget then ever occured.

I suspect there are very few of us who weren't bullied by someone older and bigger.  I'm sure we all met some adult that struck us wrong; someone who, for whatever reason, we simply didn't like.  Even in childhood we experienced disappointments and setbacks.  But for most of us the good days and the good times outweighed those childhood dark times.  If we are fortunate, those dark times didn't scar us for life.  But nevertheless, childhood was not and is not all fun and games.

I hope Calvin forgives me, but I do get nostalgic about childhood at times because, all in all, I can see as an adult that those were some of the best days in my life.  Hopefully the grown up Calvin would agree with me.