Oh, Good Grief

Happy Anniversary, Charlie Brown!; Various Artists from the GRP label

Charlie Brown taught me how to read. He taught me the word “sigh”. He taught me the word “touché”. He taught me the word “fussbudget” … and “psychiatrist” … and “enigma”. And the learning didn’t stop with reading.

You shouldn’t look directly at a solar eclipse. They cover the pitcher’s mound with a tarp during a rainstorm in the big leagues. Beethoven was born on December 16. Coyotes eat bunnies. They hold the annual World Wrist-Wresting Championship in Petaluma, California. Wintergreen candies make little blue sparks in the dark when you bite down on them. And little girls can punch just as hard as little boys – if not harder.

My association with Peanuts started within a few days of my birth. O. brought me a Linus pillow the first time she ever saw me. And “A Charlie Brown Christmas” aired exactly eight weeks after I arrived in this world.

When I was in high school, I wanted to take part in the annual all-school play. But each year, Mr. H. would catch me in the hall and tell me that he needed me to play the piano for the play. The plays weren’t musicals, but there were a few songs to be sung, and that would knock me out of a part in the play. The last year, however, my senior year, Mr. H. decided to do “You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown” and he cast me as Charlie Brown. All humility in tact – I was a great Charlie Brown.

I never really outgrew my love for Peanuts. I found other interests, but my eye will forever catch the passing reference to Charlie Brown, Sally, Lucy, Linus, Shroeder, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Snoopy, Woodstock, Patty, Violet, Franklin and Shermy. The storylines were always squeaky clean. Charles Schultz once commented that over the course of fifty years of strips, with a particularly prominent pooch in the mix, not one strip included a reference to a fire hydrant. The comic strip was never about that at all.

It was about childhood, and what it would be like to go through it with a psychiatrist at your side. It was about never getting to kick a football. It was about never winning a baseball game. It was about practicing the piano and playing catcher. It was about unrequited love. It was about having a crabby big sister. It was about Joe Cool and the World War I Flying Ace. It was about suppertime at five o’clock. It was about a hockey-playing grandmother. It was about a security blanket.

It was about sustaining the daily afflictions that eight-year-olds undergo all over the world - and, in the end, to live another day.

Credits: To Charles Schultz, one of my greatest heroes – ever.

This is the thirty-ninth of my final forty-five CD’s.