Peanuts

A Book of Ages is full of touchstones, just as our lives are. If we can't invent our own touchstones, they're provided for us by sit-coms and columnists and comic strips and stand-up comics. They fit neatly into a book like mine. I included as many of them as I could think of. Little annotations explaining our lives to us. Sometimes it's only a deadpan commentary. We didn't get Peanuts in our daily paper; it came in the evening edition, hardly fair. Luckily it's in reruns now, and it's as if my childhood is being explained to me. Though I doubt I was as percipient as Linus. Looking at the photograph of me sitting on the stoop in my snowsuit I may have been about as downbeat as Charlie Brown. Sometimes anyway.

Today's Peanuts strip is a pretty good reprise of my book's take on life. We always figure we could have done better. Charles Schulz appears 14 times in A Book of Ages, getting a dog, having his cartoons rejected by his high school yearbook, having his marriage proposal rejected by a young woman with red hair, starting a comic strip, introducing us to the idea of the football we will never be allowed to kick, explaining why Christmas is sometimes so depressing. So many of his strips were touchstones. I enjoy picturing Schulz as Grand Marshall of the Rose Bowl Parade. An unlikely apotheosis.

Peanuts

On October 2, 1950 Charles Schulz debuted his new comic strip in seven newspapers. The syndicate paid the 27 year-old cartoonist $90 a month. Peanuts. Schulz appears 13 times in A Book of Ages.

The Little Red-Haired Girl

In July 1950, Charles Schulz discovered that a petite red-haired co-worker he had proposed to had decided to marry someone else. He was 27 and just about to launch a comic strip. In the years to come this disappointment would achieve an immortality far greater than Dante's love for Beatrice, or Petrarch's for Laura. The creator of Peanuts appears 13 times in A Book of Ages, getting a dog, having his cartoons rejected by the high school yearbook, being grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade, among other adventures. Petrarch appears in the book twice and Dante four times.