From the No, I Didn’t Imagine It department.  I took to reading at an early age…the stereotypical pastime of brainy, nerdy, only kids.  Mom used to shower me with kiddy reading material, even before I entered grade school.  Little Golden Books and such like.  Also kids comic books.  Many kids comic books.  Many that I wish I still had because they are probably collectors items now.  I didn’t always get the toy I wanted, but I almost always got any book I asked for, including comic books (so long as they were for kids).  I remember her reading to me when I was very small, but by the summer before I entered first grade I was already reading by myself without any help.

I had my favorites, one of which was a quirky comic about three mice who had their own clubhouse in the back yard of some human family.  I remember liking it because of all the clever things they did with random stuff they found in the human family’s back yard.  Their clubhouse was a tin can with a leaf for a door, but they always used a secret passageway into it instead.  I think its entrance was a mushroom they’d turned into a trap door, but the mushroom compartment that I still remember might have been a secret storage space for things.  Understand this is about as far into my past as I can remember much of anything so all I have of it now are disjointed fragments of memory.

I haven’t laid eyes on one of those comics since I was a tyke.  But it still crosses my mind from time to time because of something that happened one afternoon while we were visiting some other family.  I don’t remember their names was so they must not have stayed in our social circle for very long.  But they had a daughter who was a bit older then me.  I had not yet entered first grade and I think she was already in third or forth.  I remember her in particular because she did something to me that gave me my first taste of how being smart could make people want to take you down a notch or two, just because.

I was reading my comic book alone out in the front yard while the adults chattered among themselves inside.  I think mom had just bought it for me.  The girl came outside and looked at me for a while like I was a fish out of water or something.  I remember feeling uncomfortable and I think I said "Hi" or something.  She sat down beside me and looked at the comic book and then flatly stated that I was too young to read and so I must only be looking at the pictures.

Which was tantamount to calling me stupid to my face and even at that age it was a sure and certain way to get my hackles severely up.  I promptly told her I could so read and not only that I could draw too.  She smiled at me in a way that made me really uncomfortable and then pointed to the cover of the comic book.  "What does that say?" she asked.

"The Three Mouseketeers," I replied. 

She stared at me for a moment, shook her head and said "No…it’s The Three Mousies." 

You have to picture this…I’m five, going on six years old and I must have stared at her like she was an idiot.  But I remember this much of the encounter pretty well, even after all these years.  For a second I thought she was the one who couldn’t read.  So I parsed it out for her with my finger…  "No…it’s The Three Mouse-Ke-Teers".

She gave me that discomforting smile again and looked me right in the eyes and said "No…it’s The Three Mousies."  And right then I knew she knew damn well I’d read it correctly.  She kept smiling at me in a deliberately patronizing way…and it shocked and pissed me off because I knew I’d just proven to her that I could read and now she was trying to make me doubt I could.  Like she was trying to shove me back into the box she thought a five year old should be in.  Or maybe she’d had a hard time herself learning the trick and didn’t appreciate seeing a much younger kid doing it better then she had at my age.  She was trying to make me feel stupid even though she knew I wasn’t…no, because she knew I wasn’t.  I think that must have been the first time I ever saw that in someone because I can still remember how shocked I was to see it.

I got up and walked back inside with my comic book.  She followed close behind.  Maybe she thought I was about to complain to mom but I didn’t.  I just sat down within earshot of mom and her friends and continued reading my comic book.  I figured if the girl wanted to argue with me about whether or not I could read she could do it in front of the other grownups.  But she didn’t say anything more.

That memory still comes floating back after all these years, and just a few moments ago, while I was searching Google for some other comic book reference, I thought of it again and tried looking up the comic book.  It wasn’t easy because there are actually several different "Three Mouseketeers" out there now, including a Disney version.  But eventually I hit it…

Let’s hear it for the internet tubes.  More info on the title is Here.  It was an odd one, but I remember it being a favorite, along with Space Mouse and Scrooge McDuck.  God I wish I still had those old Scrooge McDuck comics.  I found a reprint a few years ago of one I enjoyed so much I still remembered really well.  It was about the time Scrooge, Donald and the three nephews went looking for the lost treasure of the Incas.  Scrooge finds the treasure but accidentally sets off a trap that washes tons of Inca gold into a river and downstream to the city.  Suddenly there is so much gold now that it’s clogging the streets of the city like mud, and even coming out of the water faucets.  So Scrooge finds the gold but in the process made gold almost totally worthless.  My first lesson in how inflation works.  Indiana Jones adventures were never as exciting to a young boy’s eyes.  And…hilarious. 

What kind of person tries to make a kid think they’re stupid?  Okay…kids are still in the process of forming themselves, and she was a kid then too, and I did some pretty crappy things to the other kids myself at times when I was that age…things I still cringe to remember.  But what kind of person did that girl grow up to be I wonder…