Gee I wish I were Superman

John H Reif

All boys as they grow up have at some time or other a desperate need to pretend they are some sort of super-hero. My own personal hero was Superman from the old stack of Superman Comics abandoned by my older brother off to boarding school.

I devoured those comics and found a certain solace with my similarities with Clark Kent, the disguised Superman, for he had thick glasses – just as I had recently acquired with considerable resistance on my part. Furthermore Clark Kent worked for a newspaper, and I also did, delivering newspapers every afternoon.

Of course what was most intriguing was the possibility that I really could perhaps be Superman himself – not just Clark Kent, but the Real Thing with capital R and T.

I would now and then try a carefully designed scientific experiment. I would attempt to lift off the floor an enormously heavy trunk in the attic, but never did this with even a slight budging this trunk. Well, I had once again flunked my test for being Superman but perhaps I would grow into being Superman at some future date.

I also tested myself on the other attributes of Superman beyond incredible strength. These included attempts to use my X-ray eyes to try to see things that I well know even by then I should not be attempting to see.

But there was one thing, the most wonderful attribute of Superman I already knew I had achieved, and that was liberation from gravity. It was flight. When in the winters I was on the top of a high steep ski hill and then pushed off, there was that elation of joy, for on my wild and uncontrolled flight down the mountain and over a ski jump, I was liberated from the constraints of gravity and literally soaring, I was Superman, at least for a brief moment until I crashed into the snow.