The Cedarville Review 2018

PROSE 51 unending displays of grace, but that would be much too long. I think it may be wiser to simply tell the story of how I lacked those traits, and how I finally found them in an unexpected place—between the covers of my first copy of Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes, written and illustrated by Bill Watterson, is about the many adventures of a rambunctious boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. The comics are all fueled by Calvin’s imagination. To him Hobbes is a full-grown tiger that he talks to and plays with every single day. Now I’m going to be open and honest here. It was years before I realized that Hobbes was actually a stuffed tiger and not real like Calvin thought he was. I’ll never forget making that realization and running downstairs to my dad and yelling frustratingly, “Wait! Is Hobbes not real?” He laughed and said, “Yeah you didn’t know that? He’s just a stuffed tiger.” Those were such profound words to me. “He’s just a stuffed tiger.” To me he wasn’t though, and he wasn’t to Calvin either. I decided that though I knew he wasn’t real, I would imagine he was a full-grown tiger who sometimes acted as if he was a stuffed animal. Every new book of comics I got was like a completely new adventure to me. I can still see Calvin as the renowned Spaceman Spiff, flying through space with me sitting next to him as his co-pilot. I can see Hobbes and him playing Calvinball as I came running out of the house to join them. But maybe most of all I could so clearly feel myself laying in the grass with them as they discussed the meaning of life and other philosophical questions. Everyone may have told Calvin that Hobbes couldn’t talk to him, couldn’t go on walks with him, couldn’t understand his intellectual mind, because “he was just a stuffed tiger.” Calvin never saw it that way though. Hobbes was his partner in crime, the one he told all his secrets to, the one he tested all of his jokes on because he knew Hobbes would always laugh. Who had a right to say Hobbes couldn’t do those things?