As a child I loved a variety of highly crappy comics: Family Circus, Heathcliff, Beetle Bailey, and above all, Garfield. As all fans of this comic know, Garfield has three eye configurations: closed, half-closed, and wide open. I used to go through my slender, horizontal Garfield books, with such puny names as Garfield Makes it Big and Garfield’s Big Break (Get it? He’s fat!), and put a check mark next to the strips that featured Garfield using all three ocular expressions. Three panels, three eye patterns. Especially prized were strips that started out with closed eyes, moved to half-closed and ended in wide open. Sunday comics didn’t count, as the panels and the visual options did not match up numerically.

Over dinner last night I mentioned this habit to some friend, two of who laughed until their faces turned red, and the last looked so concerned and rather afraid that I started to questions what I had always seen as a rather harmless pastime. What about my other childhood habits, like always announcing myself before I turned on a light in a dark room and chanting a poem I made up five times in a row before I turned my light off every night before bed (it had to do with not having bad dreams). Did I have a bit of OCD, or do all children act this way? Anyway, it’s not like I still do that stuff. Now I’m content with filling in the circles on all memos, worksheets, and handouts. Capital letters are filled in with green ink, and lowercase with blue.