The Truth Finally Comes Out

I heard Donovan whining and discovered my bedroom door closed. When I opened it, he backed away. Deanna was sitting on the floor reading the Sunday comics that Don had handed to me at bedtime last night and I had tossed on the floor so I didn't wake up with newsprint tattooed on my face. I sat on the bed and encouraged Donovan to come close so I could snuggle him. Just then, Deanna roared.

"Gumby and the Clay Boys!" She handed me the comics. I glanced over them quizzically, then asked her what she meant.

"Right there, Mom. Gumby and the Clay Boys."

I looked again. In one of the comic strips I never read, a little boy was playing with characters from Gumby's band. A parent was sitting in an easy chair reading the paper as the little boy pedaled past on his tricycle with several characters from "Gumby" in tow. In the last frame, the parent crosses his legs and Gumby is stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

"Umh," I responded distractedly. A good many years ago, I had checked out a Gumby movie from the library. Deanna and Dane sat mesmerized and must have watched the movie 100 times in a row. I never could quite see what they saw in a cheap, poorly-shot, Grade C movie about clay figures that came alive, but when we tried another time a couple of years later to check it out from the library and discovered some other child had never returned the video, Don and I started an all-out hunt for a Gumby movie to purchase for our heart-broken Clay Boys' (Gumby's band) fanatics. I hadn't thought about Gumby in a couple of years, though I'm sure we still have the movie we searched so diligently to find. Again, I was struck by how strange the Gumby phenom was. My children watched the movie by the hour. They never tired of it and had all the goofy songs memorized. And, apparently, it wasn't only my children. Some other kid liked it so much he kept the movie and here Gumby was in the funny comics. I shook my head just thinking about it. Weird, this fascination with Gumby and the Clay Boys. Gumby was a popular toy when I was a child, but I had never seen a Gumby movie. Nor was I entranced when I watched it with my children. But no amount of reasoning changed their opinion. Gumby was "cool". He was green, made of clay, could change his shape, and was make-believe, but he was "cool". He wasn't Fonzie, the coolest character ever to grace a TV screen. Or James Dean, who was before my time. Not even Clint Eastwood or (ooh, I'm swooning even thinking about the name) Robert Redford. There was nothing even remotely cool about Gumby that I could see.

I tossed the paper on the bed to read tonight before lights out and Deanna and I started to walk out of the room.

"Hard to believe I had a crush on a clay figure," she said quietly.