charlie brown | dual personalities

March 28, 2017

“Happiness is singing together when day is through And happiness is those who sing with you”

by chuckofish

cake

What a whirlwind of a long weekend I had! Daughters #1 and #2 were in town and we had fun, fun, fun gabbing away, driving all over town, checking off things on our wedding to-do list, culminating in a lovely, lovely bridal shower hosted by my sweet friends, Carla and Becky.

As you can see, even Lottiebelle attended!

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It was a lovely day and weekend. Sigh.

And tomorrow the little guy goes home!

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“Look, Mom, no tube in my nose!”

Here’s to the little guy going home and to the daughters’ next visit in May!

*You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, “Happiness”

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January 6, 2015

Under the tree: “Big brothers know everything…Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!”*

by chuckofish

My dual personality blogged about her haul of Christmas gift books the other day, so I thought I would follow suit with a list of mine.

My big brother gave me the new biography of John Wayne by Scott Eyman and I dived right in. (Middlemarch was unceremoniously shoved to the back of the bedside table.)

I read the whole thing and enjoyed it very much. It supported my previously held view that old Duke was the greatest. I always knew he was intelligent, hard-working, kind, humble, and dreamy, but it was nice to have that opinion validated. Here is a good review of the book by Peter Bogdonavich in the New York Times.

When everyone goes home tomorrow and I am bereft, I am going to binge-watch John Wayne movies. This is what I call good therapy.

My sister gave me a new book about Raymond Chandler–another favorite of mine–The World of Raymond Chandler in His Own Words edited by Barry Day.

Chandler, as we all know, wrote not about crime or detection, as George V. Higgins once observed, but about the corruption of the human spirit. He is a man after my own heart: “Philip Marlowe and I do not despise the upper classes because they take baths and have money; we despise the upper classes because they are phony.”

As you can imagine, this book is chock-full of great quotes by the master of simile. “Soot…was down-drafted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot.” (The Big Sleep)

An old friend (and a reader of this blog) gave me

which is full of good things to remember:

And, of course, I can always count on daughter #2 to give me something intellectually stimulating. This year it was a copy of

I can’t wait to delve into this one! Emerson is one of my favorites and you know I always like to look at the spiritual side of things.

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting identical that I fled from.” (Self-Reliance)

(P.S. I received some wonderful non-book presents and I hope the people who gave me these will not feel slighted that I did not mention them today.)

What are you reading?

*Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking by Charles M. Schulz

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October 2, 2013

Good grief, Charlie Brown

by chuckofish

The comic strip Peanuts was introduced on October 2, 1950 and ran for nearly 50 years. The final original strip ran on February 14, 2000.

According to Wikipedia, Peanuts is the most popular and influential strip in the history of the comic strip, with 17,897 strips published in all. At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in almost every U.S. newspaper.

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson wrote:

“Peanuts pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty, the inner thoughts of a household pet, the serious treatment of children, the wild fantasies, the merchandising on an enormous scale — in countless ways, Schulz blazed the wide trail that most every cartoonist since has tried to follow.”

As a child, I was a great fan of Peanuts. My 5th grade friends always compared me to Lucy, but I definitely related to the misfit Charlie Brown who didn’t get invited to parties and never got Valentines, and to the spiritual, but uncertain, Linus who sucked his thumb and had a blanket. So had I. I kept a scrapbook of clippings and had many books and several stuffed Peanuts character dolls. My brother once made me a balsa wood dog house for a Snoopy figure. It was painted to look like his WWI doghouse-fighter plane.

It was probably the nicest present he ever gave me.

Although a “comic” strip, I always had the sense that it was inherently sad. Life is sad and the knowledge of that is what ultimately binds us together. Clearly Charles Monroe Schulz (November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000), even with a nickname like Sparky, understood that too.

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December 5, 2012

What’s going on here?

by chuckofish

Christmas cacti are kind of the perfect plants. You put so little effort into them, and they reward you with such extravagant gifts!

Gosh almighty, aren’t they something?

Well, I for one would not want to let their heroics go unnoticed! Bravo.

Here’s a little something I found tucked away in an upstairs closet the other day.

A Charlie Brown Christmas snow globe! How nice to discover an ‘old’ decoration which seems ‘new’ again!

I haven’t watched A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) yet this year, but it’s a good idea. I was in the fourth grade when it debuted, the first animated Peanuts special (and still the best). It is astonishing to me that Charles Schulz got away with having Linus explain the true meaning of Christmas by actually reciting Luke 2:8-14 from the King James Version of the Bible. It is a modern miracle. The success of the show was and continues to be a perfect vindication. (A total of 50% of the televisions in the United States were tuned to the first broadcast. A Charlie Brown Christmas won an Emmy and a Peabody award, and is today considered to be one of the most beloved animated holiday specials of all time.)

Out of the mouths of babes, as they say:

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'”

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

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September 25, 2012

White sheep on a blue hill

by chuckofish

Don’t you just love clouds? I can’t imagine living in a place where the sky is always blue. Driving home the other day, the sky was amazing. A storm was building, but it blew right over to Illinois and nothing happened after all. Disappointing, but awesome anyway.

“Aren’t the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton… I could just lie here all day, and watch them drift by… If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations… What do you think you see, Linus?”

“Well, those clouds up there look like the map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean… That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor… And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen… I can see the apostle Paul standing there to one side…”

“Uh huh… That’s very good.”

“.. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?”

“Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind!”

― Charles M. Schulz, The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 5: 1959-1960

Sometimes I do feel like Linus. But I feel a lot like Charlie Brown most of the time.

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November 16, 2011

Call me crazy

by chuckofish

I like to go to estate sales on Saturday morning. Last weekend my son was home so I dragged him along to an estate sale at a large house in Ladue. It was a nice house with a vintage St. Charles kitchen complete with blue metal cabinets. I didn’t find anything really, but I did get this large schefflera plant:

I was glad I had a strong young man along to tote the plant to my car! It is now getting some sun in daughter #2’s bedroom. Here is another plant I found at an estate sale last spring. It is looking much improved after a long, hot summer in our Florida room!