We have a large portrait of me when I was six years old. The picture used to hang on the wall of our family room alongside the pictures of five of my siblings. The first four of those portraits were made the year I turned six. Our oldest sister was married and not living in our home at the time. Our youngest two brothers were not yet a part of our family. That year we took a trip to Washington, DC, traveling in our parents’ Beech 18 airplane. We made the trip in a single day with a fuel stop in Indianapolis. On the return trip, we stopped overnight in Chicago. It was a grand adventure. The portraits were done at our uncle’s studio in Maryland. He took studio photographs of each of us and our aunt hand colored the prints that hung on the wall in our family home. Later, our two youngest brothers had their portraits done when our Aunt visited Montana and theirs joined the set that our mother kept on her wall as long as she owned the house. After mother died, we were unsure what to do with the pictures, and they ended up going to our individual homes. We don’t have the portrait hung in our home, but we take it out of storage from time to time to show to our grandchildren, who are a bit puzzled to see what I looked like when I was a kid. It’s hard to imagine someone as old as their grandfather being a six-year-old with missing front teeth.

The portrait sparks memories of that wonderful trip for me. I loved flying with our father, and I used to sit on the wing spar right behind the pilot and copilot seats whenever I could when we traveled in that airplane. I got to sit in the copilot seat on several trips, but on the big trips, our mother sat there. She was a pilot and she assisted with navigation, radio work, and other chores as well as flying the plane by hand or monitoring the simple two axis autopilot with which the plane was equipped. I remember sitting there behind them looking out of the windshield as our plane broke out of the clouds on the instrument approach to Meigs Field in Chicago, We had been flying in the clouds over Lake Michigan and everything beside and behind us was dark when the bright lights of the city appeared right in front of the plane as we descended.

We took other big trips as a family. A couple of years later we flew in that same airplane to San Francisco with a stop in Salt Lake City on the way down. When I was ten we flew non stop to Seattle, landing at the Boeing Field and seeing where the 707 jetliners were made.

When we took big trips as a family, our mother would make up a packet for each child. The packet would be a large manilla envelope closed with a metal tab at the top. We weren’t allowed to open our packet until we had taken off and reached our cruise altitude (usually only 9,000 or 10,000 feet in that airplane in those days). Inside the envelope there would be a package of gum, a roll of life savers, a puzzle book, a pencil and a small plastic pencil sharpener, a small package of six or eight crayons, a few pages of typing paper, and two or three comic books. I loved comic books. We didn’t get them very often. In those days there weren’t any comic books at the library. The only way to get one was to buy one and they usually cost between 15 and 25 cents each. When I had cash, which wasn’t often because I spent my allowance pretty quickly, I would be tempted by comic books, and I might have bought one or two, but usually the lure of candy got the best of me. Three Hershey bars seemed like a lot more wealth than a single comic book until the chocolate was consumed.

I never got into collecting comic books, and I didn’t read them very often. The comics I remember most are ones designed for early readers like Scrooge McDuck or Richie Rich. By the time I might have been interested in Superman or Spiderman comics, I had moved on to reading other things and never really got into those story lines.

Our three-year-old grandson, however, has Team Spidey action figures, and a toy spider car and a spider tower among his toys. the problem that it presented for me is that I even’t watched any of the Spidey videos and I don’t know any of the storylines other than the general sense that these are kids who have super powers who solve crimes. I don’t know if kids drive cars in the videos. I know a little bit about the original Spiderman stories. Peter Parker was a sickly kid before he was bitten by a radioactive spider and got superhuman strength as well as the ability to stick to walls. Our grandson doesn’t know that story line, just that the characters in the videos have adventures. He has no problem realizing that these are not real characters and that they exist only in fictional stories.

I am not entertained by all of these videos populated by cartoon characters and wouldn’t pay attention to them, except that I enjoy listening to and talking with children. And I have learned quite a bit from children. I learned from a ten-year-old that insects can’t get as big as people. Their breathing systems are inefficient and limit their size. Even though they have strong exoskeletons and are strong for their size, their size is limited because they can’t breathe air efficiently. There was a time, millions of years ago, before the dinosaurs, when insects were larger, some as big as the a dog, but that was when there was more oxygen in the atmosphere than there is now.

It never ceases to amaze me how children can carry solid scientific facts in their minds even though they are surrounded by fictional characters and imaginary story lines. Maybe I’d be less amazed if I had read more comic books as a child. However, I doubt it. As it is, I need to have lots of conversations with children just to get my facts straight.