Exploring Calvin & Hobbes is the selection of my book club for next month. It features an interview with series creator Bill Watterson and highlights from the ten year run of the strip. For many, it’s a chance to relive childhood memories. I was not much older than Calvin when it debuted and read it as often as I could. I think it was the one thing that made me try to read the newspaper on a regular basis in junior high and high school.

As you might guess, like Calvin, I had a favourite stuffed animal that I carried with me everywhere, even once I was no longer really the age for such things. It was a yellow teddy bear, for whom I made my mother sew a pair of red shorts and a red cape with an ‘S’ on the back so he could transform into Super-Bear and fight crime. This is not him. Instead, this is a hand-made teddy bear that my grandmother made for me at the height of the 1980s Care Bear craze. I was too old, and my scenarios with Super-Bear too entrenched to allow for a newcomer, but I’ve kept this one around in a pride of place while Super-Bear readies himself to help another crime-fighting generation.

The beans pictured here are a guilty pleasure from Calgary’s venerable coffee roasters, The Roasterie. The butterscotch notes of their Highland Grog are a delight, either on their own or lightly mixed in with darker, smoky roasts.