Topical Guide 107
Mark Dorset
School
His eyes were wide, but he wasn’t really looking at me, he was looking far beyond me, at his future.
“We’re going to die on this bus,” he said, “I’m never going to see my mother again.”
“What?” I said. “What?” I looked around the bus again. There really were no other kids left. I looked under the seat, along the floor. There were plenty of drawings left behind, but I didn’t see any little feet dangling down from the seats.
“You’re probably right,” said Matthew. “The rest of them are all at home right now,” he said. “They’re sitting on their mothers’ laps.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, “probably.”
“But we’re not going to get home,” said Matthew. Mort’s eyes were bulging. His mouth hung open in stupefied horror. …
Mort and I burst into tears at the same time. A voice boomed from the front of the bus, “Hey kids! What are you doing here? Did you miss your stop?”Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”
Hmmm. I wonder if a traumatic kindergarten school bus experience might underlie Calvin’s attitude toward school and the school bus:
Perhaps even his attitude toward life itself:
All of the above, and many, many more, can be found at GoComics and in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.
Art: Paint-by-Numbers
By the way: For more of Peter’s experiences with the paint-by-numbers technique, see “Making Murky Bay,” in Issue 6 of The Babbington Review (pdf document or online version).
[more to come on Tuesday, October 12, 2021]
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.