Why did I search for you?
Your absence echoing your presence back to me, a single chord, sublime in its simplicity, haunting in its resonances.

Was it loneliness, then? The summer stillness of my childhood room? A world outside for the children who loved soccer and music and insects; a world closed to me by gates invisible yet solid as steel?

Or, perhaps, empathy? Your eternal stare reminded me of my father, leaving a handful of notes on the table as my parents went out to dinner. Your ability to disappear so quickly, so guilelessly, was that of my mother in a crowded room. Anybody but me, it seemed.

Was it ownership? To an intellectual boy in a dusty town, so little is his own. Something tangible. A place to write my name. "This Where's Wally book belongs to...".

Fantasy, sure. Any of my long string of child therapists would have drawn this conclusion from the top of the deck. The Cake Factory. The Odlaw Swamp. The Mighty Fruit Fight. These were places into which one could comfortably retreat, like well-worn memories from a time one had never lived, like something passed down in the songs of hope and woe sung by the balladeers who kept my ancestors' souls warm throughout those long, medieval winters.

Obsessive-compulsiveness, said one therapist - of the newer school - but my lack of interest in cataloguing the exact time on every clock in The Corridors of Time sent that theory spiralling rapidly toward the bin. She became the latest on the list of rejected specialists, quickly reduced to "the one with the Miss Piggy garbage bin" in family anecdotes.

For my own diagnosis, perhaps it was fear. Fear. For if I could not even find Wally and Wenda and Woof, how was I ever to find a future? The world would always be off-brand Lego and movies taped to VCR from the television and sitting politely on the sofa while adult guests enjoyed pâté and cheese, every so often deigning to ask me a question to which they had no interest in the mumbled answer.

Loyalty? I had long fancied myself to be noble. I had followed Wally and friends through four weighty tomes; what kind of a Sancho Panza would I be to abandon them at this juncture?

Looking back, from somewhere further down the mountain, I delude myself into the notion that my search was born of love. (The stroke of death, says Shakespeare, is as a lover's pinch, which hurts, and is desired.) The feeling came much easier to me then. A quick wit, an innovative outpouring of words and ideas, and emotion arose. Not to the surface - "never to the surface" is on my family crest - but somewhere close beneath. The bubbling cauldron, the fiery furnace, the precarious rope-bridge of human sentiment which was tamped down amongst my human companions but could dance effusively between the pages of a book.

With hindsight, I may never know why I searched. Why I still search. As the fires and floods claim our land, however, I am drawn to an undeniable truth. The worst of nature will ravage us. The worst of corporations, the worst of anger and hate, the worst of human evil - all will have their fill. But what they claim is only ever corporeal, ephemeral, at heart physical. What they must leave behind are memories and ideas. The two greatest innovations of our species.

Perhaps it was enough to know that I would carry Wally with me. Forever would I know that no matter how lost Wizard Whitebeard became (his chronic shoelessness a source of great concern to my younger self), no matter how many cunning plans Odlaw devised, how many hills and dales were scoured by Wenda and Woof, they would all end up together, on the final page, waving their farewells. I knew that some companions will never leave us. Some ideas will never be destroyed by folly. Some memories must remain.

Because the secret of this life is that we never find that which we seek. We find so much besides that the journey replaces the destination. We all must begin with a list of items to search for. But we all must learn that the real search begins when we reach the end of the list.

It is the knowing how to search that will save us.

And by Wally I was saved. ( )

¿Dónde está Wally? Encuéntralo ahora con nuevos detalles en cada página. Una nueva edición de este clásico.

Cuando creó a Wally, Martin Handford no podía imaginar que este personaje con sus gafas y su gorro se convertiríaen el fenómeno mundial que es actualmente. Cientos de miles de ejemplares vendidos confirman que todo el mundo está buscando a Wally.

At first, I couldn't understand why "Where's Waldo?" books would be banned. It's like an I Spy book, except you're looking for Waldo. As I flipped through the pages looking for things that might be inappropriate, I couldn't find anything. So, I just started to look for Waldo. It took me so long to find him and some pages I didn't succeed. And that's when I understood why it might be banned. Kids might be getting frustrated and thinking they're not smart enough because they can't find Waldo. ( )