Chapter 3

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane….

When I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s, we didn’t have the Cartoon Channel. But we didn’t need it. Right after school, up until the Nightly News came on, we had our time on television.

So the last bell would ring and – faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive – I would race home and leap three steps at a time, sliding into place in front of our Hoffman television set for…

Major Astro!!

This was a local kiddie program out of Wichita – a big guy in a space suit, sitting before a bank of blinking monitors in “mission control,” introducing science fiction shows.

Like Superman.

That strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men – mostly smirking while bullets bounced off his chest. Since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster revealed him in 1938 in Action Comics #1, the Man of Steel has become the avatar of truth, justice, and – of course – the American Way.

And to me, being what we now call a “tween,” he was as important as Jesus Christ.

And a lot more accessible.

Of course, Superman was supernatural. That’s right there in the name. But because he came to us through science fiction, we were also given something else: a putatively rational, physics-adjacent explanation for his extraordinary powers.

We knew Superman wasn’t real. I don’t remember ever sitting down and having a solemn conversation with my parents about it. There was no “Now son, Krypton did not, in fact, explode.” It was just… understood. The same way we knew that the Lone Ranger probably didn’t sleep in his mask, and that horses don’t actually come when you whistle like that.

We knew.

And yet – every afternoon – we believed.

Not in the way you believe the stove is hot or that two plus two equals four. We believed in a different key. We stepped into it. We let it work on us.

We let it show us something.

Truth, justice, courage. The idea that power could be used for something other than getting your own way. The quiet notion – never stated outright – that maybe being strong meant holding back more than it meant cutting loose.

No one demanded that Superman be factual in order for him to be true. That would have been a mistake of category– like insisting that a song be proven before you can hum it.

But somewhere along the line – and I’m not pointing fingers, I’m just noticing – we began to lose that distinction. We started to act as though meaning had to pass a kind of inspection. As though, before a story could shape us, it had to submit its credentials. Show its work. Provide documentation.

“Did it really happen?”

And if the answer was, “Well… not exactly,” then out it went. Filed under Fiction. Dismissed. Door closed.

Which is a little odd, when you think about it. Because some of the most important things we know don’t arrive as facts.

They arrive as stories. Not just Superman. We had a whole parade of them.

There was Star Wars – with its farm boy and fallen knights and a Force that seemed to be everywhere at once, binding the galaxy together, whether you believed in it or not.

There was Star Trek – cool, rational, exploratory. A future where humanity had (mostly) gotten over itself long enough to go see what was out there.

There was Gunsmoke – where right and wrong were worked out slowly, in dusty streets, with people who didn’t always get it right but kept trying anyway.

And later – long after my sliding-into-home days – we met Harry Potter, where ordinary kids discovered that the world they thought they knew was only the surface of something much deeper… and much stranger.

Different worlds. Different rules. Different costumes.

But the same strange thing was happening in all of them. They gave us a believable “somewhere else” so that we could see this place we call reality more clearly.

They stretched things just enough – added a starship, a marshal’s badge, or a hidden platform at a train station – so that questions we might avoid in ordinary life could be held up in front of us without too much defensiveness.

What does courage look like?

What is worth fighting for?

Who am I, really, when the moment comes?

And maybe most quietly of all:

Is there something more going on here than what I can measure and prove?

We didn’t demand lab reports from these stories. They just took us somewhere closer to the truth, and we let them leave something with us.

And every now and then – if the timing was right, and we weren’t too busy being clever about it – we might even catch a glimpse of ourselves in them,

And then, once in a while, a story pulls the curtain back just a little further.

A girl stands in a farmhouse in Kansas.

Everything is still in that familiar dusty sepia – the way things have always looked, the way things are supposed to look.

Then she opens the door.

And though she hasn’t gone very far at all, she looks around and says – half in wonder, half in recognition – “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”