Excelsior

My middle brother Peter is having his birthday today so I am dedicating today’s blog to him.

Both Peter and Erik were superhero comic book fans and most of their favorites were created by Stan Lee who passed away a couple of days ago at the age of 95. As I recall it they first got hold of “Thor” and “Fantastic Four” in 1967 when we had moved to Winnipeg. When we were living in Burlington we had very few comics but there may have been a few Superman comics in between the Danish Donald Duck (Anders And) comics and my Archie and Millie the Model comics. Then Peter came home one day with “Spiderman” and that was it, my brothers were totally hooked on Stan Lee’s creations.

I will admit that I did read a few of the early Thor, Fantastic Four and Spiderman comics even though I was 14 and “really, above it all”. In fact I really enjoyed the Fantastic Four because I liked the Invisible Woman, Sue Storm-Richards and the inter-relationship story. Peter and Erik read those comics for years (and I suspect they still read them). Certainly they seem to know everything about the characters and can critique storylines and what the different characters have done. They also read X-Men, Iron Man and several other comics which I never looked at. In fact recently I was amazed to learn that they had indeed been reading X-Men from the very beginning!

Of course I had heard of Stan Lee over the years but never made it my business to know anything about him so Peter enlightened me the other day about his various achievements. One thing he didn’t talk about but which I think is the greatest achievement of all; he stayed married to the same woman for 69 years, until her death last year. That is pretty amazing for anyone, much less a celebrity.

For today’s birthday boy I would like to salute him for HIS personal achievements which shall not be mentioned here but we will toast him on his next visit! He and his wife Ronda have been one of  my greatest supporters through my illness and our movie nights are always filled with fun and laughter! Let’s hope the weather is kind enough to let us have many more over these winter months. And I’m thinking a superhero movie should be on the menu.

Excelsior!