Mind's Eye
by Nina B.

When 'Calvin Boys' Just
Want to Have Fun
What happens if Peter Pan kids are pressed to grow up?

From a column first run in June 95.

Many fun-loving adults never lose touch with their inner child. Some even find fame and fortune from it, like a Bill Watterson or a Robin Williams. But quite a few more, I suspect, never quite find a place to fit in and only grow up feeling like misfits.

I often wonder if my Calvin-boy is just taking his own sweet time to mature, or if he will always be a Peter Pan too.

The challenge for us is to strike a balance between the things he must learn to make his way in the world, and the things he is driven to do.

Innocent imps
Did you ever notice there's a thin line between Calvin & Hobbes and Dennis the Menace? In many ways, they are the same kid, yet where Calvin comes across as a charming imp and delightful dreamer, Dennis is depicted as an amusing annoyance.

Perhaps that's because Dennis is drawn from the outside in, through a grown-up's frustrated eyes, while Calvin is drawn from the inside out, through the eyes of a child, where the grown ups do the frustrating.

Both Calvin and Dennis can be little devils, but it's an innocent sort of impishness, the mischief of playful curiosity, not the mischief of malice.

It makes me wonder -- how much malice comes from impishness thwarted? How many delinquents and drop outs were ejected too soon from Childhood 101? How many Calvin-boys become criminals? Where can a Calvin or a Dennis fit in these days?

In this hurry-up world where toddlers are pushed to master their letters or "fall behind," there is no natural niche for the innocent imp or the late bloomer.

Hurried and harried
Colin Powell once told Barbara Walters during an interview that he was slow to blossom, an indifferent student who didn't achieve much until his late teens when he found that he could earn respect in the Army.

It was a surprising admission from a man who is so accomplished and looks so at ease. But I wonder how at ease Powell would be if raised in hurried times by harried parents.

Instead of letting our late bloomers blossom in season, we pack their lives with due dates and schedules and scold them if they don't fall in line. Even play time is organized into sports leagues and lessons, marching in time to somebody else's drummer.

Small wonder that so many kids with different rhythms grow up feeling like misfits, don't like themselves much and act out in anger.

Acting out on-line
A few of those acting out kids are finding each other on-line. They flip on their modems when parents aren't watching and drag race through cyberspace looking for other disaffected young souls. My son just lost the keys to his on-line vehicle -- the phone cord to his computer -- because I found him hanging around some of those kids in places where wannabe hackers conspire.

It was one of those times the absentmindedness of his Calvin side proved to be an asset, parentally speaking.

He forgot that when he flipped from America Online to CompuServe, he lost his private mail slot. Since CIS sorts E-mail by number not screen names like AOL, his mail showed up in my que, revealing what he'd been up to.

When told I was cutting the cord for awhile, he protested a bit. He hadn't done anything wrong, he said. He was just having fun watching. I said if he spent enough time with wannabe-punks, it couldn't help but mess with his head. Sooner or later, he'd be tempted to try their brand of fun. We'd have to find a healthier outlet for his thrill-seeking energy.

Reading those notes is what set me to thinking about how the impish lose their innocence. A few of these teens sounded quite jaded, if not also truly troubled. But most sounded like Calvin-boys looking for fun in their cyber-playground. I wonder what will happen to these kids, pressed into pseudo-adulthood, toting adult tools they don't completely comprehend.

And I worry there aren't enough places for them to plug in and turn on when they don't fit the outlets we give them.

Nina B. is the pen name of a newspaper columnist who began writing for two suburban San Francisco dailies in 1992, sharing semi-fictional stories from private lives that are "very real but not always entirely true."

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