My parents tried sending me to a children’s’ day camp or some such during the summer when I was a younger pre-teen, but it didn’t work out so well. I didn’t play or socialize well with other children, and being forced to participate in physical games and activities like “dodgeball” and “swimming” with other kids for hours every day was something akin to Hell for me. Trying to be forced to imbibe something called “Bug Juice” (I think a euphemism for Gatorade) made me cry.

This experiment was mercifully short, but my parents didn’t want me around the house for months when school was out of session, so I was instead shipped off to spend my summer days with my elderly grandmother in her subsidized senior living apartment.

Her apartment complex, Franciscan Village, was built inside a historic Franciscan Monastery, so everything was rather brown and tan and dull. Quiet, no other youngsters around, TV, nobody to bother me but an 80-something year-old woman who slept most of the day—yep, this was the life.

My grandmother—Mama Ricco, as she generally referred to herself in the third person (she began all phone calls the same way every time, whether calling someone or answering: “This is Mama Ricco…”)—spoke with a pronounced Italian accent and would frequently go off on tangents about her youthful days in Italy. It wasn’t until I was almost an adult that I found out she had, in truth, never even been to Italy or outside the United States at all and that her thick accent was entirely fabricated. She was an eccentric, hefty old lady and I loved her dearly.

Days passed leisurely with Mama Ricco, as she had a walker and wasn’t especially mobile, moving at a speed of about a quarter mile per hour. She didn’t drive and never left the apartment complex unless it was for a medical appointment or family event. Occasionally I’d escort her over to the complex’s chapel for prayer, but that happened more and more seldom as time passed.

With little other stimulation and no social trivialities to distract me, it’s during my years of summers with Mama Ricco that two of my most enduring lifelong interests developed.

The first was my initial exposure to one of Mama Ricco’s “stories”, a soap opera titled “Days of our Lives”. Mama Ricco preferred the show after DAYS (as I learned to abbreviate it, in the manner it was truncated by soap fans), “Another World”. I thought that “AW” was a little bland and boring, and never really got into it.

DAYS, however, I have no shame in admitting I watched literally thousands of hours of throughout my childhood, teenage years, college years and into adulthood. When I had to be at school during the show, I taped it on VHS tapes I set recording before leaving in the morning. I consumed soap opera books and weekly magazines to catch up on the decades of history that were before my time.

Who killed who and why, who was related to who, who had a checkered past as a drug dealer or had been possessed By the devil, who had banged their spouse’s Mom—I knew it all and was mesmerized by this no-doubt-realistic portrayal of what the world outside my own antisocial existence was really like.

I even did a presentation in high school discussing the soap opera, and it turned out to be a rare commonality I could have conversations about with other students who were fans (though I suspect not to the same obsessive extent as myself).

The other interest that developed during the era spent at Mama Ricco’s abode was a fateful one that would someday blossom into the work I’m most famous for: comic books.

The stars aligned and I was in the right place at the right time to have the perfect set of circumstances to be exposed to mainstream superhero history as it happened. The greatest decade of comic book-based cartoons was about to start (including X-Men, WildCATS, Batman: The Animated Series and more) and I was spending my days at an apartment complex a less than five minute walk from what would become one of the most beloved comic stores in existence, the then-recently-opened Carol & John’s Comic Book Shop.

I have a lot more memories of being in that comic book shop than I do most other things from growing up, but I won’t drag this entry out talking about how I eternally regret passing on the Bowen Designs Deadpool mini-bust I saw in the shop for $30 (which ultimately led to my obsession with statues and mini-busts).

I would do everything in my power to scrounge up some spare change each day so that I could spend a half hour or so raiding the back issue bins for bargain comics that would expand my knowledge in these pre-Wikipedia times. It was here at Carol & John’s that I was first exposed to and began to become well-versed in the X-Men, Spider-Man, New Mutants, Fantastic Four, New Warriors, Thor and many more comic book icons that would eventually take the mainstream world by storm.

It was a perfect scenario to grow an intense specialized interest in, as I could watch the cartoons on TV and then go buy back-stocked comics to feed my growing need to know more and more about the Marvel characters whose toys on shelves were fueling my inner fire.

Mama Ricco passed away in the summer of 2004, but I didn’t attend her funeral since I avoid the rest of my biological relatives for any reason. Even so, I think it’s apropos that I was attending my first-ever comic book convention during Mama Ricco’s funeral, as the comic book expertise developed during my tenure as her sorta-ward would go on to be a core component of my life and future.