Hunting High and Low

With the wife at work last Saturday, I planned a father-son outing for the day. We’d convinced ourselves that the boy was already enamored of books. He kicked and giggled when we read him Dr. Seuss’s ABC: An Amazing Alphabet Book! He cooed in bobbleheaded curiosity at the bookshelves in my writing room.

My plan, then, was to serve up a literary sandwich. One slice of high culture. One slice of low culture. And the boy jammed in the middle.

We started in geek heaven, Chicago Comics on Belmont and Clark. If John Cusak’s character in High Infidelity sold comic books instead of records and was a little bit less of an obsessive snob, this would have been his store. Comics in all flavors (superheroic, independent and imported), toys, statues, posters, DVDs, hipster books (Eggers, Letham, Sedaris) and boxes of back issues, crammed into about a thousand square feet of space. The wife calls the place my shoe store, not far off the mark.

The boy was interested for about all of ten minutes. Bright colors. Men wearing their underpants on the outside. These things catch the eye of any age. Then he stared to give that low, pre-cry moan, so I paid for my two graphic novels and we got out of there.

I’d not bought a comic book since before the boy was born. I’ve been reading comics pretty faithfully since I was 5 years old. Scanning the shelves after a four-month break, I could see why the boy wanted to leave. Instead of telling self-contained stories in a single issue, Marvel and DC (the big two comic book publishers, parents of Spider-Man and Superman) had, over the years, started cranking our four-color soap operas, making casual reading impossible. It was like starting to watch Lost halfway through season four.

And even if you were following along, it all felt kind of the same. Captain America was dead for a while, but now he was back. Flash (or at least one of them) had been dead for twenty years. Now he was back. Bruce Wayne had been sent back in time to the days of the cavemen (don’t ask), and now Dick Grayson (the first Robin) was taking over as Batman, training Bruce’s illegitimate son, Damien, to be Robin. (See. I told you not to ask.)

None of it mattered. I don’t know how he’ll do it, if Bruce Wayne will end up building a time machine out of sticks and rocks then strapping it onto the back of a pterodactyl and riding it back to the 21st century, but Bruce Wayne will end up back in present day Gotham within a year. Which is a colossal cheat.

Of course, you’re probably thinking, it doesn’t matter at all. They’re comic books! Does it matter if Bella ends up with Edward or Jacob? If Harry defeats Voldemort? If the Joads make it to California? No, you could say. It doesn’t matter, except that it does. Such is the power of stories and characters. Besides. I like what I like.

Then the boy and I headed for the library. Can you even remember the last time you were in a library? I can, but only because it was to pick up a pair of tax forms. Shows you how long ago that was. Who mails their return in anymore?

By the time we got there, he’d fallen asleep, lolled in his stroller, one leg up, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. I still went in. (Clearly, the day was as much for me as him. But doing things that were such a part of my childhood and sharing them with the boy, even if he was too young to understand, didn’t strike me as a bad way to get out of the house.)

This was probably a nice library, the one I went to. But if it was typical, I can see why libraries are in trouble.

The library was divided into two halves, split down the middle by the check-out counter, which was organized the same way as the lines at the post office, with those blue plastifrabric things all over the place. The west half was all children’s books, juvie fiction and young adult novels. A pair of computer stations, in use by a large, pale, sweaty man in a tank top. Crammed into one corner, a retail display for the last Harry Potter book. It had that lightly faded look, the way photos in barber windows get. A mother read to her two children.

The other wing was geared for the adults. Shelves were crooked and half-picked over. The “What’s New!” section, with its inappropriate exclamation point, held nothing new, really, save for a year-old Neal Stephenson novel. Some newspapers on dowel rods, looking sad and wilted, just like the newspaper industry. The fiction section was practically non-existent, as was reference, non-fiction and periodicals. Do people stop reading for pleasure when they graduate grade school? What were the kids supposed to do when they were ready to graduate to more challenging fare?

Do what Jack and I did, I guess. We went to a book store. I bought three novels. He smiled the whole time.