Remembering It

29 October 2007

“All of the loves …. are unrequited. The baseball game is always lost, the test score is always D-minus, the Great Pumpkin never comes, and the football always gets pulled away.”
- Charles Schulz

Honestly, that’s not the way that I remember it. A couple of weeks ago, The Times ran a story about the recently released biography of Charles Schulz, the man behind my childhood.

Let me explain. I grew up on the Peanuts. Every week, while my mother did the groceries, I’d head to the paperbacks and pick out a new book of cartoons to buy with my $1 allowance. Usually, they were black-and-white. From time to time, I’d have to save a couple of weeks to buy a special-edition four-color set of cartoons. I lived on these compilations. I compared my real-life friends to my paperback archetypes. I had my own security blanket. No, really, I did! I completed and hung on my bedroom wall a latchhook rug of Linus. I cursed the Red Baron, desperately hoped that PigPen would discover personal hygiene, wanted Peppermint Patty to veer away from a blunt bob with bangs, and wondered (granted, in retrospect) whether Schroeder swung with Dumbledore. I bought a Snoopy telephone (my parents still use it).

It shouldn’t come as a surprise or disappointment to any of us that Mr. Schulz was occasionally depressed, from time to time mean and withdrawn … or that he embedded some profound sadness from his personal life into a slyly written snippet adored by children. Aren’t we/don’t we all?

But in my memory those kids were happy, occasionally surprised by success, and otherwise meted out disappointment in four-frame chunks that made life livable, if nothing else for the promise of hope–the next kick, the next kiss, the next pop quiz could be theirs. I think that’s what I miss most …