In my social media feed today was this post from Lynda Barry, showing off her afterword for a new edition of her novel in comic strip form The Good Times Are Killing Me.
I’ve been an avid reader of Lynda Barry since forever because her heartfelt stories ring true in a way “grownups” never do. And since Ernie Pook’s Comeek has gone off the air so to speak I haven’t been reminded in a while at how her incredible ability to capture the structure and feeling of what kids say is indebted to her rare gift for understanding of their ideas and viewpoints.
It’s not remarkable for an 8 year old is as excited by shouting “Free Huey!” as laughing and running when someone yells “bombs away!” at a sighting of the Goodyear blimp, as in her collage. Kids literally creating mythologies and mirrors of the anxiety and fear they see on TV and hear from their parents is the core of her art. How the impossibility of separating the literal from the metaphorical is made fluid and real in her drawings and writing.
This blending of hilarity and horror is so natural for children to express at once because it’s literally their world. Can we even understand as adults what it means to speak out in support of a black revolutionary that the white establishment has imprisoned and accuses of homicide? The words themselves don’t require an adult understanding to understand, but when they’re replayed again and again on TV, can they be forgotten?
Her equation of this with a viral ad for tires that children can’t even buy is pretty amazing for a grownup to make, but not for a kid. The name brand of anything hovering over their houses is remarkable, and why wouldn’t we equate a flying thing that looks like a cartoon of a bomb with the drills you learned to be prepared for a nuclear war if you were a 60s American kid? Does it even make sense to not weight these things equally?
When I was a single-digit age, there was a strange and deafening wail one morning as my brother and I were getting ready for school. A continuous wail with a slight taper up in frequency and volume and then back down. I’d never heard anything like it, and it was louder than anything I’d ever heard. I put on my jacket and went outside and saw kids walking to school as if nothing was going on. It was coming from the west, away from the school.
It bothered me a lot, and I couldn’t ignore it, so I walked in the direction of the noise until I finally came to the mysterious “bell” I’d walked by a million times with my grandma on the way to the A&P turning around and around.
It looked like this:
But it sounded like this:
In the mid 80s, even as the threat of Russia and the need for a space arsenal dominated the news (sound familiar?) I was told when I finally found someone who could tell me what I’d seen, they were like, that? That’s no big deal. They test the air raid siren every few years.
But what if you’ve only been alive a few years?
Maybe we should spend a little more time asking kids what they understand, and finding out what they grown ups to explain, and what they don’t. It might be a bigger opportunity than we think.