There was a neighborhood festival in Andersonville over the weekend.

Although we had to dance between raindrops, there are so many small shops and galleries along Clark Street that my visiting guest and I had no problems amusing ourselves Sunday.

One of our first stops was the Swedish Heritage Museum.  I had been to the gift shop there many times but never wandered around the second or third floors.  There, they have special historical displays for children depicting the lives of early Swedish immigrants to the area.

They also had a special exhibit on the tradition of Swedish comics.  I was drawn to a carefully curated cover from an old MAD magazine, depicting the back of Alfred E. Neuman’s partially shaved head.

I suspected that somewhere on the front page would be his famous motto, Vad jag oroar mig fiör?  (What, me worry?)

The idea that there was a documented history of comics in Sweden surprised me.  Who knew?

I think of Sweden as the land of the Midnight Sun, of Bjorn Borg and ABBA, of the Nobel Peace Prize,  Queen Christina, and Lutefisk, for Christ’s sake, not superheroes and ironic slackers.

The official blurb for “Outside the Lines: A History of Swedidh Comics” introduced the exhibit this way:

…Sweden has a colorful history of sequential art, cartooning, and graphic novels. Using comic historian Fredrik Strömberg’s seminal work ‘Swedish Comics History’ as a guide, the Swedish American Museum will present a sequential history of comic art development in Sweden, from early cave drawings to today’s web comic…

Some of the displays referenced Ideas, styles or characters in early US and Swedish comics which seemed to have influenced each other.  There were also examples of comics that spoke to the Immigrant experience of our Nordic friends.

Again….I had to ask myself, Who knew?

I was really tickled with the quirky new awareness.  Not that I was mentally making a short-list of who I should direct to the exhibit (although I will probably do that at some point), I was sort of delighted at yet another example of how people are more alike than different.

Most people, I believe, from anywhere in the world, want to share their experiences and often try to find something humorous even in challenging situations.

I started to think about attitudes which increase the likelihood of DISCOVERY.

I have long bemoaned the trend away from newspapers as people’s primary source of current news.  It seems that, more and more, people seek information from online sources that mostly confirm what they already know or believe.

And I’ve gotten a little irritated sometimes by how quickly people might pull out their smart phones to prove their recollection of history, whether Googling is aimed at solving a dispute over Ted Williams’ lifetime batting average or who wrote the lyrics to a pop song.  (Yes, surprisingly, it was Neil Diamond who wrote UB40’s reggae hit, Red, Red Rose.).

Sometimes, people are just testing their memory, but sometimes it’s like people want to demonstrate they know everything already.

Having this attitude makes little room for discovery.

Yes, I get puffed up when I can correctly pull out some arcane factoid in order to compose the sought Jeopardy question, but I think I’ve let go of some of the trappings of wanting to be the smartest person in the room.

Being confident about what you know but always welcoming new discoveries is no small thing.