It's a Friday night, more than thirty-five years ago, and I'm sitting on the green cracked vinyl sofa in our basement, anxiously waiting for a beam of light to shine through the windows and onto the wall above our old TV. My twelve-year-old body is exhausted from five straight days of learning, chasing young love, and hours upon hours of swim team practice, but I don't dare fall asleep. Tonight is the night I've waited for all week.

It seems like forever, then at last! The headlights of Dad's car herald his arrival home.

 My mom and sister have gone to bed, and finally I hear my father's heavy footsteps coming down the basement stairs. We share our tired smiles as he takes up his position on the maroon shag carpeting and our midnight 'Creature Feature' begins. It's here in this room, with Godzilla on the tube, that the two most influential characters in my life lie spread out before me. The first is my superhero as well as the most brilliant man I will ever know. He's gotten comfortable after a long day, whittled down to his boxer shorts, a rumpled dress shirt, and loosened tie. With a cigarette in one hand, a pen in the other, he's drawing the second character: a short, little bald guy with a big nose—Ziggy.

It doesn't matter that the movie completely sucks or that my dad and I are so physically beat we'll never see the end of the show. No, those things don't matter. What does is that this is our time, and we both know how much it means to each other without ever having to say so.

I fight the urge to sleep while the great man in his underwear works long into the night, drawing beneath the television's projection of one classic character as he continues to create another. Ultima