CSotD: The Unbearable Ubiquity of Alice
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It's the tiny doll shoes. There are more tiny doll shoes than tiny doll feet, and they breed under sofas and in register grates and the back corners of closets. Tiny doll shoes are the larval stage of pods.
At least they were when I was a kid. I, too, was a big brother.
But when I became a parent, I had little boys, so it was pieces of the Ewok Village.
If we had ever gathered up all the pieces of the Ewok Village that were scattered around the house, we could have assembled a village that wouldn't have fit in the building, because I'm sure we ended up with far, far more pieces than we started with.
Come to think of it, Petey might actually have enjoyed that, were he of classic Star Wars vintage, or, at least, he'd have enjoyed seeing the video. In his room.
Lovingly, obsessively assembled is fine.
It's "scattered" that makes him crazy: Alice's ability, and tendency, to be hic et ubique.
A major part of the greatness of Cul de Sac is the way in which the characters let their neuroses overlap each other. This is truly a family, because, within their walls, they define their own reality, even when they recognize that their center is not one the rest of the world embraces.
The great families in fiction, as well as in the real world, create their own culture.
For the Gilbreth family in "Cheaper By The Dozen" (The real one – Don't get me started), it was a purposeful invention, and the fun of that book is the exploration of how Frank Gilbreth set up their world, and the varying degrees of joyful embrace and understandable rebellion with which the kids responded.
(I was entranced by his placement of a Morse Code chart on the bathroom wall, which he augmented by leaving messages for the children to decode, so that their brains could be occupied while their bodies were doing what bodies must do. I put a college guide in the bathroom when my boys were of an age for that to be worth pondering. Now one set of my grandchildren has a shower curtain map of the world to contemplate. I met Frank Gilbreth, Jr., once and went all fanboy.)
There are less beneficent examples, of course, like "The Great Santini," a fictional tale that struck a chilling chord for at least one member of a multigenerational military family in my circle.
And I'll confess to having never warmed to Clarence Day's "Life with Father," in which the paterfamilias seemed to me more of a petty blowhard than a purposeful leader like Frank Gilbreth. But then I'm not a huge Wodehouse fan, either, so this is clearly a case where your mileage is likely to vary.
"Cul de Sac" is not a family in the tradition of strong, eccentric fathers, of course. Quite the opposite.
It's an example of how, in the absence of dominant leadership from the top, someone else will fill the void, and is in the comic strip tradition of "Little Iodine," Jimmy Hatlo's classic strip of how meek Henry Tremblechin's family was taken over by a hellion daughter.
The difference, and it is immeasurable, is Alice's innocence. Unlike Iodine, or any of the "Peck's Bad Boy" school of funny brats, she's not a tyrant but a fool in the classic sense.
She blunders through life, unburdened with the sorts of neuroses that paralyze Petey but certainly full of her own odd beliefs about tube slides and the Uh-oh Baby and suchlike.
Unlike her brother — or their father — Alice has a sort of Teflon, or perhaps a level of hyperactive lack of focus, that prevents the things she fears from weighing her down very much.
Here's the thing: When Petey grows up, he will take his extensive collection of shoebox dioramas with him to his new house, where they may go up into the attic, but where they will be carefully indexed and catalogued. Whoever marries Petey is going to have to know a lot about shoebox dioramas.
But the senior Otterloops will still be finding tiny doll shoes scattered around the house long, long after Alice has grown up, moved out and married a Cuban bandleader.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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