A belated apology from Mom that raises new questions
Last week I received a newspaper clipping from my 82-year-old mother back on the homestead in Galloway Township, New Jersey, with a brief note from her also tucked into the envelope. The clip, doubtless from the oft-mentioned “The Press of Atlantic City” (which every native of southern New Jersey continues to call “The Atlantic City Press,” as discussed here previously), reads thusly:
Collector buys valuable comic from attic cleaner
Ellwood City, PA —
Holy collectibles, Batman!
A near-mint copy of Detective COmics 27, a pre-World War II comic featuring Batman’s debut, was recently found in an attic and sold to a local collector.
The comic is considered to be the second-most valuable available and can fetch up to $500,000. The only comic considered more valuable is Action Comics 1, where Superman makes his first appearance.
Collector Todd McDevitt said the Batman issue he bought is worth about $250,000, but he won’t say how much he paid for it or who sold the book to him.
(We will leave aside for the moment the ongoing aggravation of having Every Single Associated Press Story About Comic Books a) focus on the astonishing monetary value of this seemingly worthless form and b) begin with a badly punned homage to the late and ungreat Batman TV show of, hey, FORTY YEARS AGO. I guess I shouldn’t grouse; by the time AP comes up with a new lede, newspapers will be dead anyway. )
So here’s the touching little note Mom enclosed with this breathless clipping:
Lee,
I’m so sorry I donated the comic books to my group at Elwood school. I never thought they would be valuable some day. But no one was interested at the time and we were planning to move.
Mom
So, there it is. The overdue apology every comic-book-collecting man my age awaits. Do I take any satisfaction from this? No. It was one of the few mistakes Mom ever made — and perhaps the only one.
Except….
As is so often the case, tiny recollections like this sometimes send me off onto a tear. Something about this note strikes me as, well, wrong. As in so many other memories:
- Thinking off and on for about 30 years with regard to the pastor of my youth before saying to my mother out of the blue, “When did you realize Pastor Joecks was gay?” (She said straight off, “I guess we always knew.”)
- Recalling the odd boy who came to play one day when I was 5. I never saw him before or after, but I remember his awkward inability to play; by the time he finally got the hang of it, his mother came to pick him up. I met him only the once, but I remember his name: Tommy Maseitis. So a few years ago, I said, “Mom, remember the time when I was 5 and that boy Tommy Masietis came over to play only he didn’t know how? I never met him before and I never saw him again. Why did he come over? What was that about?” (To which she replied initially, “Why do you do this?” before admitting that Tommy Masietis was brought over as a form of therapy — so that he could learn to play with another boy — because he had nothing at home but sisters and the mother and their pastor (a different one from mine) were worried about him.
- The supposed “missing duck” which I and my friends and my father and his friends all shot at — and saw fall — but could never find again after it absolutely had been put into Gus Weber’s truck. The men argued over who had actually hit it while we boys stamped around and ventured guesses as well, with Gus definitively claiming it as his own. Later it was gone. It took me only a few years to figure that one out: One of the other men who was sure it was his, no doubt my father, spirited it away.
And so on. These all make for good stories sooner or later. Or at the least they reawaken me to the hidden mysteries of life human psychology. So what is it about Mom’s note?
We moved when I was nine years old. We did not have old comics around at the time, at least none that weren’t mine. Believe me, if there were hidden treasures of comic books from the 1950’s and 1960’s courtesy of my older brothers somewhere — anywhere — in our house, I would have found them. Moreover, the idea that “no one was interested” is on the face of it untrue: 36 years later here I am still writing about comic books. I did find a bare handful of treasured comics from my older brothers that I kept for years: a very nice copy of Avengers #1 — which I later sold for $365, at which point my brother Ray tried to retroactively lay claim to it (with no luck); a coverless copy of Avengers #4 (the reintroduction of Captain America); an early issue of Tales to Astonish with Giant Man and the Wasp in battle with the Human Top (can’t remember the issue number — but obviously I could pick it out of a lineup); and the only non-Marvel, an issue of the DC title Tales of the Unexpected cover-featuring Space Ranger and his bubblegum-pink alien pal Cryll. But those four were it. And believe me, I scoured that house — because I was always hearing from my brothers how many comic books they once had. And I scoured that house even though, even back then, my mother was saying, and I quote, “I gave them all to the Elwood school.” (A place I grew to hate by name.)
In my reading of advice columnists, they generally say don’t apologize for faults unfound — you just raise new issues. It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. While I appreciate that my loving 82-year-old mother is trying to erase the guilt of having disposed of those comic books all those years ago, her apology now has me wondering if she doesn’t feel guilty about something far worse.
That’s why, when reading my mother’s note, I decided that in the passage of time she had connected two separate and previously unconnected incidents: 1) giving all the comic books, which would one day be extremely valuable, to the Elwood school; and 2) moving to Galloway Township many years later when I was 9. I have to believe that. Because to take her note at face value would be to conclude that my mother secretly kept all those comics away from me for years and then gave them to the Elwood school when I was 9 and we moved! And that’s too terrible to consider.