Comic Books, the Clutter of the Past, and Green Lantern’s Light
In brightest day and darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight…
My family lives in a 115-year-old, red-brick Victorian-style row house in Washington, DC. It’s a great place, eight blocks from the Capitol, Supreme Court, and Library of Congress; a short walk, bike ride or Metro to about anywhere in the city we’d like to go; a Senator lives next door; and just down the street is the owner of a Ben and Jerry’s franchise that covers most of the DC region (important to my daughter growing up!).
Our dog, a Bichon-Shih Tzu mix named Usnavi, has a great patio in the back where he can lounge in the sun while listening to the trickling waterfall in our pond, or bark at the squirrels as they venture down from the old Southern Magnolia tree or leap off the wooden fence.
The downside of these historic homes is a limited amount of storage space — and it’s no wonder that my wife has been after me for years to do something about the boxes I have stuffed into closets and crannies all around and under the house.
The boxes are filled with 1970s era comics; sci-fi and mystery books; old fiction about growing up (Sherwood Anderson, JD Salinger, Philip Roth, William Saroyan); old “Amazing Stories” pulp fiction inherited from my uncle, drafts of unpublished novels and unproduced screenplays from the days I had hoped to make a living; photos and slides of my family and friends that predate the digital revolution; and memorabilia from when I served as staff director for the Congressional committee that oversaw the first Obama inauguration, the largest in our nation’s history.
Now, after turning 68 and as I grapple with starting the next chapter in my life after three decades working for elected officials and a Washington trade association, I’ve begun combing through these boxes, trying to figure out what to do with them.
There’s a part of me that would love to throw them all into a big bonfire — burn, baby, burn! — and free myself of my past, so I can at least figuratively rise up like a phoenix from the ashes: a new me, reborn, reenergized and enlivened with direction, passion, and purpose.
But deeper down, I know that the contents of these boxes represent the experiences, memories, and dreams that make me who I am today. I know I can’t simply throw them into the trash — I need to find a way to make use of them, perhaps as building blocks for the reinvention I am seeking.
Battling Super Villians in a World of My Own
Back in the late 70s, when I was working in a bookstore in Hermosa Beach, California, and living in a group home in Venice, I started writing a novel. It was about a boy like me: a dreamer growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, coping with the early death of my mother, my shyness with girls, my post-Portnoy delusions and my frequent escape into a world of science fiction and fantasy.
In the novel, my hero Isaac “Hot Shot” Markverra would often mind-travel to a world he dubbed “Hot Shot Hyperspace,” where he would cruise through space at greater-than-light-year speeds, and live out the kind of fantasies I had been reading about during my daily consumption of sci-fi and comic books.
In a blink of an eye, he would flee the daily drudgery of high school classes and soon be battling super villains and winning the hearts of dream girls.
Yet all too soon, like me, he would come crashing back to earth and a world where he could barely mumble a coherent sentence with girls, was teased by friends who called him “Lamprey” for his large lips, and was often chased by a group of local thugs who called him a “Dirty Jew.”
I laugh to myself now, wondering what it would be like to age Hot Shot and make him 68, still fighting the evil space monsters! Would anybody believe that? I’ve been going to the gym regularly to try to stay in shape — but faced with some elbow bursitis and an assortment of other ills, I am hardly the model for a superhero or even a space cowboy.
Boxes Upon Boxes Calling Out for Attention
The old rough draft of that novel is stored in my closet, its yellowing pages predating the days when thousands of documents could be kept on a thumb drive or in the cloud.
I also have six big boxes of comic books slipped into individual plastic envelopes, including first and early editions of things like the Neal Adams/Denny O’Neill versions of the “Green Lantern” and “Green Arrow,” in which the superheroes coped with topical issues like drugs.
And then there is a whole array of new, at the time, superheroes created by master artist Jack Kirby.
Some are probably worth hundreds of dollars. But I can’t part with them yet — it’s hard opening up these old boxes of my life and then just casting them aside.
Dreams Die Hard
I had once hoped to share the comics with my daughter. Even though she loves the TV show “Green Arrow,” and listens to the Harry Potter audiobooks religiously, rather than diving into her father’s ancient history, she has been much more focused on her friends, homework, soccer practice, Instagram and Snapchat, her Human Rights Club activism and watching “Friends” on Netflix.
Plus, she is going to college next year, and the whole application process has been the dominant factor in her life for what seems like forever. On top of that, she’s working 20 hours a week as an intern for a non-profit organization downtown and practicing soccer three or four times a week, often until late in the evening. Not much time to share old comic books and dreams with her father.
From Swedish Death Cleaning to Marie Kondo
One of the things about getting older is the realization that unless I deal with the paraphernalia of my life — nobody else is going to do it.
I recently came across an article about Swedish death cleaning — designed to get rid of all the things your survivors are never going to want themselves. Once going down this path, I found lots of articles in “aging” publications suggesting the same.
Eliminating this junk is definitely the “in” thing to do. It’s a way to save your survivors the grief of having to throw it all out after your death.
I guess it’s timely, too, that Netflix has a show featuring new minimalist-lifestyle evangelist Marie Kondo being invited into messy, chaotic homes, where she restores harmony by getting the families to throw out all their junk — and keep only those things that bring them joy.
My wife and I have been watching the show — learning how to “bless” our house, toss our things into the middle of the room, and decide what pieces give us joy — to keep, and which get donated to charity or added to the recycling. My wife has shed all sorts of old clothes and paraphernalia. Even though I was the one who suggested watching the show, I have not done as well.
In the past, I saved everything — after all the right Beanie Babies, Barbies or Star Wars action figures could be worth a fortune. But I have also kept scores of old letters, postcards, and photographs in various closets and cubby holes.
From Haunted Amazon Temples to Beverly Hills Psychotherapists
The old writing includes a screenplay about a haunted temple in the Amazon rainforest and the draft of a mystery novel about a murdered psychologist called “Couch Canyon” after a Beverly Hills block that has more psychologists per square foot than anywhere else in the world.
I Met My Wife on the Internet
I even have a box filled with print-outs of old AOL instant message conversations I had with various prospective partners during the very early days of Internet dating in the mid-90s. It was a time when AOL was the way people connected online, modems were dial-up, and that little musical “ta-ting” announced a new instant message had just arrived.
I had printed some of them up and saved them, not to hold onto the memories, but because I had actually dreamed of using them to help in writing a novel about Internet dating.
That’s the way my Argentine-born, USC-educated wife and I met in 1997 following a brief exchange of emails. We fell in love the morning of our first in-person encounter outside a deli on the Santa Monica Promenade, after which we spent eight hours together brunching on the beach, walking along the Venice Boardwalk and shopping for music and books on the promenade.
Preoccupied with work, and then focused on raising a daughter and being a husband to my wife, I never really had the time and energy to continue writing fiction.
Instead, I went from working at Either/Or Bookstore in Hermosa Beach (title is fitting with the course of my life!) to making my way as reporter covering the police beat, the criminal courts, and City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, to serving as a press secretary and communications director for elected officials, including a U.S. Senator, to being staff director for the Obama inauguration, and finally becoming Vice President of Global Strategic Communications for a trade association here in Washington, DC.
Now, at an important turning point in my life, I’ve found myself jumping back into my writing. I just love telling stories! I love pulling old memories out of the darkness and holding them up anew in the light of day, seeing what hidden messages they bring and what guidance they have to offer. And I long to do a whole lot more of it.
In Brightest Day….
As a teen, my comic book hero was Green Lantern, and I memorized the vow he would say when powering up his ring: “In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power…Green Lantern’s light.”
It’s now more than 50 years later and I still long to own one of those rings and the lantern that gives the ringbearer its power. Yes, like Hal Jordan, I’d use it to fight evildoers. There certainly is enough of that in the world.
But, as mundane as it sounds, I would also cherish its ability to light the way for my own path forward.
I imagine myself, standing there at the crossroads outside my home, looking east toward the U.S. Capitol — with Liberty standing tall atop the brightly lit dome. I hold my hand in front of me, and the ring begins to glow as I lift off into the sky, flying high into the air over the Supreme Court and Senate office buildings, and then, as I speed up, I zoom into another dimension. Pow! My future. What it will be I still do not know. But I am getting ever more excited about the journey.
Note: This is the second in a series of posts that I am writing about seeking my next chapter after an abrupt change in my professional career at 67, and finally actually having the time to write and wonder about the joys and sorrows of my life and those around me. The first in this series can be found here.
