I saw Calvin peeing today.

Of course you know which Calvin I refer to. Calvin, aka Spaceman Spiff, Grogg the Destroyer, Tyrannosaurus the Terrible, the little six year-old with an imagination to the stars who lives in a zen state with his id, a stuffed tiger named Hobbes.

I don't remember what it was that Calvin was peeing on. Usully you see the sign on the back window of one brand of pickup truck and he's peeing on the logo of another brand. Or he's peeing on whatever the vehicle owner doesn't like. I've even seen him on his knees praying to a giant, glowing cross.

Of course if you're familiar with the strip Calvin and Hobbes you realize that Calvin himself would not have done any of those things. While Calvin himself was capable of great imaginary violence against things more powerful than he, Calvin would never stoop to peeing on them. That would be crude and ordinary, something requiring no imagination. The strength of Calvin's character came from his inventiveness, his ability to twist his teacher, Miss Wormwood, into a giant insectoid bent on world destruction, and to somehow incorporate her reality into his own imaginary world. Nor was Calvin likely to bend his knee and pray, though he might at some level. Calvin was a secular character. Calvin as a fundamentalist could not be Calvin.

No, Calvin would never stoop to peeing on something. Why do that when you can just send an army of dinosaurs to do the job, or blast it with an olfacto-bomb?

I can imagine Calvin's creator, Bill Watterson, becoming furious every time he sees one of these stickers. Watterson has many times made clear his opposition to any marketing his creation. An idealistic man, he did not want to see his strip corrupted by crass commercialism. And these stickers are the worst kind of commercialism, for the makers claim they are not the Calvin, when they so clearly are drawn to be him. Of course they are not really Calvin, but a crude debased form of him, a pure example of the very crasssness Watterson despises.

For the length of its run, every day I looked forward to opening my newspaper to see the latest misadventure of Calvin, Hobbes, his father, struggling mother and abominable snowmen. One day Watterson stopped drawing the strip, exhausted and fed up. That was over a decade ago and we haven't heard a peep from him since. Not one strip, one book, nothing whatsoever from one of the late 20th century's comic geniuses. It's as if he dropped off the earth.

Bill Watterson deserves his retirement. He gave the world far more than I ever will in my mundane life. His legacy of already completed strips is timeless and will delight generations long after he leaves this earth. Yet i wish he would not stop, and wonder if back in his brain there still are more stories there, waiting to come out, more laughter for a world so dominated by division and tragedy. Reading 'Calvin and Hobbes took me away from that world for but a moment every day, and I long to fly the spaceways of Calvin's imagination again.

When I see one of those stickers I don't see Calvin peeing upon Chevrolet. bin Laden, or any of the other target of opportunity. I think it is the owner who is peeing upon Calvin, debasing and commercializing him. Perhaps these cheap imitations may stand in the way of a few more episodes of the real Calvin, the one whose mad scientist's chortle always leads to delight.