The Cat in the Closet
by Elizabeth Rau
My son Henry is learning how to read. He knows plenty of so-called sight words – dog, jump, funny and so on – but he doesn't have the confidence yet to tackle a lengthy chapter book on his own. Books have a lot of type and pages, and chugging through all that alone can be daunting, not to mention frustrating, to a 6-year-old who doesn't like to flub up.
Not long ago, Henry was on the playground and a friend told him a joke about Garfield, the lazy, self-indulgent, plump orange cat that has been gracing newspapers' funny pages for nearly three decades. I don't remember the joke but it made Henry laugh hard enough to ask if we had any "Garfield" at home.
By gum, we did.
My husband's uncle, Gordon Alf Lawrence Johnson, a descendant of robust seafaring men from Norway, was a big fan of the comics. On first impression, you wouldn't think so. A lifelong bachelor, Gordon was a taciturn and scholarly man, lanky and broad-shouldered like his forebears, who liked to wear his English bowler hat to dinner parties and scour the newspaper for grammatical errors, which he would underline in red ink, rip out and send to friends with notes attached: "sp?'' His birthday wish-list always included
reference books. On the rare occasions when he let his guard down his boyishness revealed itself, mostly through the twinkle in his Robin's egg blue eyes. He was really a grownup kid.
He died a year ago at the age of 83 after a long bout with pneumonia. He was as sharp as a tack to the end. In his final days, we had conversations about his favorite book (Margery Allingham's More Work for the Undertaker), his beloved Boston Red Sox, and Gloria, a retired school teacher from Ithaca, New York, who was the love of his life. I'd sit on the edge of his bed at the nursing home where he lived in the weeks before his death and read him the obituaries so he could find out if anyone he knew had, as he put it, "kicked the bucket.'' He couldn't sip water, much less eat, but still felt certain he would be going home: Get the wheelchair ready. He was a dying man who wanted desperately to live.
When I emptied out his apartment I found collections of poetry by Wallace Stevens, novels by the American writer and sometimes Providence resident Elliott Paul (two months before he died Gordon reread, Linden on the Saugus Branch, Paul's memoir of growing up in Malden, Massachusetts) and five dictionaries, including the battered but grand 1902 edition of the Funk & Wagnalls A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, which Gordon insisted was one of the best dictionaries ever published. One literary genre stood out: collections of comic strips (58 to be exact) that included a dozen musty-smelling "Peanuts'' half a century old and a stack of newer, glistening "Calvin and Hobbes," "Dilbert," "The Far Side," and "Garfield.'' I packed them away in a box and stuck them in a closet, where they remained until Henry and I fished them out one evening after our playground visit.
Garfield Eats Crow soon found its way onto Henry's lap.
In his first few minutes with the cat it became clear that Henry had finally found reading material he could master without much help from his parents. He was delighted. He'd read a strip, rush downstairs, read it aloud to his dad, run upstairs, read another, descend and then ascend. Panting, sweaty, cheeks flushed red, he breathlessly reported to me that first day that he could read six "Garfield" strips – all on his own! I taught him how to dog-ear the pages he had conquered and wrote a "C'' (for correct) in my best cursive at the top of each page.
"Garfield" soon became preferred reading at bedtime. At first, Henry chose episodes with few words. In one, Garfield falls down a chimney, landing with a "Whump!'' Sitting in a fireplace covered with soot, the cat turns to its wimpy owner, Jon Q. Arbuckle, and utters: "Needs more lard.''
"What's lard?'' Henry asked.
"It's like butter,'' I said. "Slippery stuff.''
"I get it,'' he said.
As his confidence grew Henry selected strips with more complex sentences. "I'm pretty much sick of winter,'' Garfield mutters as a blizzard engulfs him. "Enough with the snow already!'' Miraculously, the snow stops except for one stubborn flake; Garfield scowls, and the flake makes haste heavenward.
Under the sway of "Garfield,'' Henry's vocabulary improved greatly. He learned big words – "soggy shorts,'' "stomped flat,'' "venomous fangs'' – but gems came his way as well. Whack. Smack. Harrumph. Aaugh. Slurp. Rrrrrrr. Sheesh. Blat. Splat. Zip. Zap. Ahem. I was thrilled. Words Henry could read – and write – with gusto.
My husband and I have been reading to Henry and his 7-year-old brother, Peder, since they were born. I loved the lyrical writing in the early childhood classics like Time for Bed, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Goodnight Moon. Now, I can add Garfield Eats Crow to the list. The writing is not as rhythmic as I would like, but it is simple and funny, just what a child cracking his first early-reader needs.
I wish Gordon had lived long enough to see the great gifts he left Henry: his playful sense of humor and his 58 books of comics. I suppose it's fitting that Henry's middle name is his great uncle's first. At night, after a laugh with the cat and just before lights out, I tuck my son in and tip my hat to the man who loved the funnies: "Goodnight, Henry Gordon.''
Elizabeth Rau's essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Providence
Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and East Side Monthly. She worked as a newspaper
reporter for 15 years and is currently a freelance writer in Providence, where she lives with her husband and two sons.
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