the bees knees part one

 Sometime early in my youth a big box of comics hit the frontroom floor of the bungalow.  I don't remember where they came from, my guess is some older cousin or whatever outgrew them.  As if anybody could ever outgrow comic books.  Maybe he got run over by a truck, who cares, because here was a great big box full of Donald Duck and Little Lulu and Superman and Batman.  I suppose if we had sealed the box then and there to keep our greasy fingers away from them why it would be worth big bucks now, but life is for the living is it not?

And sure playing baseball on the corner in the summer is living but lying on your bed all afternoon with a stack of comics is living too.  Comics, comics, comics.  There were those hard bound books for kids, but they were so staid, so morally upright, and even when they had pictures, there weren't that many and none of them had those balloons by their mouths so you could tell what the guy was saying.  Why would anybody ever read anything that was not a comic book?

And then one Christmas when I was maybe twelve years old, I discovered a book under the tree for me.  A book???  But it was about The Ant Men!!!

Pretty cool. I took it for a spin.  Not bad at all.  I had graduated to hard bound books.  I went through all the Winston Science Fiction books.

I also developed an interest in ants.  Really cool little guys, actually gals, they are all around you and they are all around the world, and they have all these different tribes that do all these clever things that you would never imagine bugs would be able to do. 

Much cleverer if you asked me, then bees who can fly and all but never seemed all that clever to me.  And then maybe ten years ago my neighbor, the German, died.