It’s been a weird week for me on the Batman front.
I’ve been playing him as my main in Injustice 2. So I see him on the screen during my free time, and I picked up and built a cardboard standee of him that is in my office waiting to be positioned.
I shotgunned the 9 issue run of Master Race last night, which includes a hell of a strange and “man, do they have to keep ruining TDKR like this?) twist.
Then today, after presenting at Alumni Weekend (which was great), I found out Adam West had passed.
Adam West was my boy when I was young. I’ve always loved Batman, and to be honest I was more of a fan of Frank Miller’s Batman, and in my later life of Nolan’s Batman, but Adam West was my first live-action super hero. I saw him in the flesh once. In his outfit. I watched his show any chance I got. When I was too old to enjoy the campy Batman, Mayor Adam West on Family Guy left me chuckling many evenings just before bed.
Death is such a bizarre thing as you age and you start to see it happen. Over the last month or so, I found out that two long-lost relatives had passed on, then I found out (as I blogged here) that my mom’s adoptive mother (my de facto grandma) had died. We recently held one of our fur children as he passed on. Prince died this year. Adam West. David Bowie. Chris Cornell. So many have left.
I remember reading The God of Small Things in an undergraduate course. It was a good book– a little “molester-y” for my taste as a favorite story, and a little more incest-y than I would pick if I was just walking over to the shelf, but– well written. One part of it that always stuck with me as how the narrator depicted loss: there was a X person shaped hole in the universe.
The other day, driving through Hamilton, Julie and I saw some Shih Tzu puppies, and I was reminded of my old pal Stan, ironically a dog with a heart condition that I named after the de facto grandfather who wasted away after a massive stroke. Stan was, until my current crop, my favorite dog ever. He just sort of got me, and rarely did we ever have a pet that was more attached to me than to my mother, as she’s much more of a pet attracting person. He was like a lil person, always watching me and keyed to my emotions (like Boo is now, though Boo I think will always be my mother’s best pal, even if she lives upstairs with me right now).
So what I’m saying is that there’s a kaleidoscope just off the horizon of each of our lives made up of little holes in the shapes of the ones we’ve lost. It’s tragic, in a way, that there are holes in the universe like that, but if you’ve ever looked into a kaleidoscope and can remember your childish wonder, it also casts a beautiful array of lights over you.
That’s how I like to think of those we’ve lost. They aren’t gone, because the things they gave us, the memories we have, bind them to us. They’re holes in our once pristine universe, little spots where the light dances just so.
And so to Adam West, as he departs, I say my heartfelt goodbyes, and I shed my tears, but the bat-signal of light that shines through the hole he left in my universe will always lead me back to a time when heroes could triumph over all, to a time when good and evil were simple, and being noble was the order of the day.
Rest in Holy Peace, Batman!