A Memory Evoked

Each day I get some comic strips in my email. I am a simple man who likes simple pleasures and comic strips provide these for me. I have written of my penchant for comic strips before.

Never mind that Gocomics (which provides a daily selection of strips in an email... for an annual fee) has had me upset for the last few months because it is often failing to include some strips and a few of the ones they do send are out of sequence. They are working on this, so they tell me. I still enjoy them. Perhaps it's because reading them evokes a much simpler time in my life.

You know the time I am talking about; when life was new and Mom and Dad provided all that you needed (but not, of course, all you wanted). When home was a refuge and represented safety and comfort. A time when you were still learning about this world and being amazed by it in a Good Way and not stunned and dismayed and outraged so much. My memories of listening to actors read the "funnies" (as we called them) on the radio as I looked at the pictures may even be false ones. But I suspect not as I recall the arrival of our first TV set pretty vividly.

Or maybe I have conjured these memories out of thin air, who can know for sure? Perhaps I saw a movie where the kids gathered around the big radio and listened to them being read and I just adopted it as my own; wanting it to be part of my life and taking it psychologically. Imbedding it as if it was real.

In any event, that doesn't matter now. I believe that memory and it gives me great comfort. That is all that matters. This one evoked another memory, one from my stint in the Navy.

At the end of my SONAR training, the instructors had us fill out what were referred to as "dream sheets" where we requested postings we would like to be given. The instructors pointed out that we could ask for any posting we'd like but that we would likely get "tin cans out of Long Beach" so that is what we should request. Few of us followed that advice. I know that I didn't; I requested Oceanography School.

But, sure enough, that "tin can out of Long Beach" is what all of us in that class got.