She became the latest on the list of rejected specialists, quickly reduced to "the one with the Miss Piggy garbage bin" in family anecdotes.įor my own diagnosis, perhaps it was fear. Obsessive-compulsiveness, said one therapist - of the newer school - but my lack of interest in cataloguing the exact time on every clock in The Corridors of Time sent that theory spiralling rapidly toward the bin. These were places into which one could comfortably retreat, like well-worn memories from a time one had never lived, like something passed down in the songs of hope and woe sung by the balladeers who kept my ancestors' souls warm throughout those long, medieval winters. Any of my long string of child therapists would have drawn this conclusion from the top of the deck. "This Where's Wally book belongs to.".įantasy, sure. Was it ownership? To an intellectual boy in a dusty town, so little is his own. Your ability to disappear so quickly, so guilelessly, was that of my mother in a crowded room. Or, perhaps, empathy? Your eternal stare reminded me of my father, leaving a handful of notes on the table as my parents went out to dinner. Was it loneliness, then? The summer stillness of my childhood room? A world outside for the children who loved soccer and music and insects a world closed to me by gates invisible yet solid as steel? All ages.Your absence echoing your presence back to me, a single chord, sublime in its simplicity, haunting in its resonances. The pictures are astonishing in variety, detail and humor, and the pages are filled with so many people that readers will marvel at the artist's patience. Waldo cuts through a maze of people and participates in numerous activities, but, unlike readers, seems to know where he is going. Toward the end, Waldo has lost everything but his hat, and readers are expected to find those objects, too, in this amusing game of concentration amidst a sea of distractions. He's hiking his way across the world, and sees mermaids in canals, cows escaping from train cars, a helicopter chopping down flagpoles, a mummy's baby in a museum, a capsized desert island, a hat-eating giraffe and a glove attacking a man he tells all in postcards, considerately short and friendly. It's difficult to find him in the middle of a crowd because he does not stick out head and shoulders above the teeming masses of pedestrians, beach-goers or vacationers. An oversized picture book with hoards of people milling around on each pageamidst this humanity readers must try to spot Waldo, identifiable by his clothing and hiking paraphernalia, in a game of concentration.
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