I was thumbing through some old stuff and ran across some Charlie Brown collections.
I identify with Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang in so many ways.
Here are just some of them:
• I may not have the yellow shirt with the black stripes or the bald head, but I am round and sometimes I feel like a block head, especially when it comes to math. Sometimes, it seems, everything I touch gets ruined. It’s certainly that way with everything mechanical I undertake. My Daddy and my brother are excellent with working with their hands and repairing and building things. I’m not. My job was always to hold the flashlight or go fetch the 9/16th’s wrench.
I wrestle with the same insecurities ol’ Chuck did and am always searching for a good and decent pathway to follow in this life. While Charlie Brown secretly admires and seeks after the “red-headed girl”, I am still looking for my “petite brown-eyed, brown-haired girl”. Maybe I am like Sally searching for my “sweet baboo.” Most of them won’t give me the time of day. The last one, in the stairwell of the stadium, shot me down flat. I asked her to go to the Huddle House for a cup of coffee. She declined, saying she “couldn’t be married to a preacher.” I don’t recall proposing to her, but, see what I mean.
• The Lucys in my life are actually a mesh of childhood memories. I was always a poor athlete, so I was always picked last for teams in grade school, even for waterboy. I also had a couple of bullies in my life who hypothetically yanked the football away right as I was about to kick it. One did it literally, and always enjoyed laughing about it.
• Snoopy, literary sage that he is, once gave me the lede graph to our news coverage for a hurricane many years ago. I looked it up in the bound editions. It is still there. The copy makes me snicker like Snoopy. It reads: “It was a dark and stormy night... that turned into a dark and stormy morning.” My old friend and editor, DeAnn Komanecky, still can’t believe I used it— or that, after editing, our publisher at the time, Robert Williams Jr. let it stay in.
• Like Linus, I sometimes hold on to things, looking for security in an item that may or may not provide it.
• I have a friend like Schroeder who can tickle the ivories like nobody’s business.
• I have three cousins who remind me of Pig Pen — and bless their hearts, they can do better.
• I also have my only best good friend on Smith Road who gives me psychiatric help. If it costs five cents, he never has charged me. If he ever does, I probably owe him a zillion dollars.
• I can cook like Snoopy. If you recall, he once prepared Thanksgiving dinner for the whole crew — popcorn and toast. Even, I can manage that.
My point is, there are people in my life who closely resemble Charlie Brown and all the Peanuts gang.
If you think about it, I suspect there are people in your life that remind you of all those folks, too. That was the genius of the late Charles M. Schultz.
I come from a long line of worriers and anxiety sometimes gets the best of me.
I have always loved this quote from Mr. Schultz. “Stop worrying about the world ending today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.”
