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So as I was gathered around the small table they had set up with about fif teen other folks, the pleasant chap behind it regaled us all with a running commentary on wine etiquette as he poured for us a taste of his vineyard’s output. As I listened to his smoothly-practiced patter, a lady in her dotage and long dispossessed of any manners she might have had started indelicately try ing to elbow me aside in order to get served more quickly. Instead of crack ing her in the head with my empty, waiting glass (held by the stem, not the bowl, so as to better see the true color of the wine unmarred by my greasy mitts) and yelling, “Wait yer turn, Granma!”, I said, “Heard this speech before, huh?”

She turned to me with what she probably hoped was a withering stare and said she wasn’t used to waiting.

Usually, when I’m out in the world, I’ll encounter something that reminds me of a situation in the comic book industry. I know Matt Fraction, editor of the comic analysis site Savant is waiting breathlessly for my “How comics are like broken stoplights” column, for example… but oddly at this juncture with the old rude matron and dulcet tones of a master winemak er vying for equal attention in my field of view, I realized simultaneously two things:

First, good things come to those who wait, and second, there really are things that make a good comic.

The first lesson I learned very early in life, standing with my dad in line at Six Flags over Texas in 1968, and, in order to pay back this woman for the old-lady elbow to the ribs she gave me, I related this story to her as we waited for a taste of Napa Valley ambrosia: We were at Six Flags on one of our regular family outings, enjoying the amusement park like any middle-class mom and dad with a boy and a girl would do; but, there comes a time when the boys want to go on a ride that the girls just don’t feel as excited about, and it was then that I learned the first lesson. I was getting particularly antsy, hopped-up on cotton candy and Dr. Pepper and who knows what else, standing under the hot Texas sun in the sum mertime, waiting in an interminable line to experience what was my favorite ride. I forget the name of it, but it was a big round room that spun very fast. The centrifugal force eventually pinned you to sides, and, just when you thought it couldn’t get any more fun, the floor dropped about two feet and you spun, suspended, in the air.

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