I grew up on a steady diet of Calvin & Hobbes. 

The still-famous cartoon strip by Bill Watterson was a fixture in our local newspaper during the entirety of my teenage existence, one of the sole reasons I read the paper that I delivered door to door, clipping out my favourite strips and then later buying the collections in multiple formats of increasingly crisply bound volumes. You could say it was formative for me, and that would be an understatement by a mile.

The Kid graduated from high school this week and tho they were not allowed to decorate or bedazzle their gowns, they were given free passes to flare up their mortarboard caps.  She spent a whole evening in the basement and emerged later that night proudly showing off a collage affixed to the top of her cap: it was a collection of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, arranged and glued to her lid, spattered artfully with colour and sparkles, and ready for a quick stroll across the diploma stage.

This was not a surprise to anyone who knows her.

To lay claim to some kind of parenting methodology that led us to this moment, my daughter walking across her graduation threshold literally wearing a comic strip that went out of print more than a decade before she was  born, that would be foolish of me. I mean it’s simple, really. She likes Calvin & Hobbes because (a) it’s a great and timeless cartoon, (b) I had numerous copies in the house, and (c) I read them to her frequently until she could read them on her own and then she read them frequently.

Then, too, don’t forget that I even drew my own comic strip for a few years and you would not be the least bit surprised to read that one of my major influences for that effort was Calvin & Hobbes.

That influence, it swirled through the rooms of our house for decades.

Now, maybe it is that I may have internalized some of the lessons of a comic strips character who I adored because, truth be told, I was nothing like him growing up. Calvin was defiant of authority in a way that I could never muster. Calvin was wise and deep and whip smart with a purpose that I merely aspired towards. Calvin brought everything to a life lived with existential abandon that defied everything I understood about the metaphorical box in which I was raised and out of which I feared to step out. Deep down I knew that I was not Calvin, but that not just maybe, certainly, there was something aspirational in that defiant little character and his life of epic adventure and freedom.

As we were driving home from the ceremony, I racing to get her back to the house so she could dress for prom, she was holding her cap in her hand and she turns to me and says something like “You know why I put this on my cap, don’t you? I’m basically Calvin, you know that right, Dad? You raised me to turn into Calvin.”

And what does that even mean? Are you a mischievous troublemaker? Are you a socially misaligned youth? Or are you a creative soul unbound by rules? A philosophical genius wise beyond her years? A dramatic soul unleashed by existential undercurrents? Or maybe a bit of everything all rolled into one?

Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me because while I was not Calvin, then too I could pretend to be that guy, act the part, read the strips and embody the spirit of this quirky kid, not so much unlike a neurotic rule-following father-figure guy in not but a mask and striped shirt.  But whatever I made of myself, there could be a chance—a risk—an epic possibility that I influenced something else. Did I actually parent my own Calvin into being?

Formative, indeed. Formative squared.