ELAYNE RIGGS: World Enough and Time
Everyone around my age seems to have a Twilight Zone episode that sticks with them the most. For me, it’s the Burgess Meredith-starring "Time Enough At Last," which title I always misremember as World Enough and Time. (Just my luck I’m about to become even more confused as that’s also the title of the new George Takei-starring Star Trek: New Frontiers episode debuting in two weeks.) It’s about an obsessive reader who’s delighted he finally has time to pursue his favorite hobby after improbably escaping a bomb that wipes out the rest of the populace, only to have his glasses fall off his face and break, fade to black.
It was one of those episodes for which I refused to suspend disbelief because I kept thinking of all the ways Meredith’s character could remedy his fate. What was preventing him from looking for new glasses? If the NYPL building was still standing I’ll bet some optometry places were still around. And after all, he had to go food-gathering to stay alive, he’d undoubtedly (and likely literally) bump into something. And bombs tend to fuse things into lenses anyway. All that aside, I refused to believe he totally couldn’t read without his glasses; my prescription is pretty strong and I’m to the point in life where, if I didn’t have bifocals, I’d have to remove my glasses to read. And eyesight has been known to improve without the use of glasses, by means of various exercises and–
Well anyway, my point is, I went over all these machinations in my head for years because I could see a lot of myself in that character. I love to read, always have. Got it from my mom (hi Mom!); Dad wasn’t big on reading, but she’s always taken to it, as have her sister and brother, from whom I learned to like all sorts of genre stuff from the Happy Hollisters mystery series to fantasy and science fiction to fairy tales to the very occasional non-fiction foray. Reading actively engages my mind like little else. Reading has always been the way I found out about life, about myself. Reading is dreaming using words (and pictures, if you’re talking about comics).
I’m never as happy as when I have time to catch up on my reading. This week, for instance, I’m on "enforced" vacation — meaning that, because I don’t get to use up my allotted vacation time when I want to (due to my boss requiring me to be at my post whenever he’s in the country), I wind up accumulating too many days to carry over into my next service year and must "use or lose" them before my anniversary (next Monday). As of the time I wrote this column I had no idea what I was going to do during this week other than read, read, and read some more.
And even then, there’s never time enough.
Yesterday was a very special day for lots of folks. In the baseball world a couple of home run records were set, in the political world attendees at the progressive blogosphere’s Nerd Prom (yes, they have one too) schmoozed with the Democratic presidential candidates, and we at ComicMix celebrated head honcho Mike Gold’s 57th go-round in life. All the incriminating photos my camera could muster 
White Rabbits! (Sorry, 
It’s the day before the biggest convention in an American comic fan’s year — the San Diego Comic-Con International. Just about every one of my ComicMix colleagues is heading out there. (Don’t ask me how they got hotel rooms, it’s still a mystery to me.) I’m not. My boss told me a long time ago that I can’t go on vacation when he’s in the country (yes I know, but it’s still better than being unemployed and sans health insurance), and even if I could I just don’t think I could work up the enthusiasm any more for something so expensive and exhausting. The closer I get to pushing 50, the more 50 pushes back harder.
Want to excite that baseball fan whom you’d like to drag along to the Comic-Con International in San Diego next week? Tell her or him that Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling will be there, or at least his company will.
The older I get, the more Einsteinian I become in my concept of time. It’s like I’m watching a vehicle moving at light-speed, Dopplering like crazy, when it’s all I can do sometimes to make it from point A to point B. I’m just a 20th century gal in a 21st century world.
It’s said that there are only a few established art and entertainment forms that America can truly call its own — baseball, jazz music and comic books. It’s a bit of a hubristic statement, not surprising coming from a country as relatively young yet as vast as our own. It almost sounds as if we’re trying to convince ourselves of our own cultural relevance — even more so because we realize that each of these things has its roots elsewhere. But hey, so do most of us. And just as this "nation of immigrants" has brought disparate peoples into a "melting pot" atmosphere wherein their contributions have mixed to form a melange all its own, so have jazz, comics and baseball taken previously existing elements and turned them into something new and unique.
