You grow up accustomed to things as they are—inexorable forces like American democracy, your parents’ religion, and prime time television—and for years you would no more think about the presence or absence to these things than you would, say, of whatever function kidneys perform. But at some point you meet a kid whose parents don’t own a TV and it blows your mind. And that’s just the beginning. You take a good hard look at your friends’ families and visits to their homes become something like travels to foreign lands. Homes with bountiful snack foods (and I don’t mean fruit) and liberal television privileges are choice destinations, like Paris or Disneyland. Homes with no TV, no pop music, no artificial sweeteners, and a surfeit of books with no pictures are more like East Berlin in 1975. Somewhat easier to escape.

Anyway, you begin to appreciate that difference exists in the world. It exists in spades in Asia, for instance. And in your own culture you can learn to tolerate some of its manifestations (like sports fandom and New Yorkers) better than others (people who say “I’ve never really liked The Beatles” when they would if they ever really listened to them). But sometimes your own culture becomes different in tiny ways which you could have foretold if you had ever given them a second thought, and more piquant than tragic—not occasion for therapeutic grief but a passing, “oh…oh that’s too bad.”

The death of Charles Schulz is such a change.

Not that Peanuts commanded the sort of dedication on the part of the reader that fifty-two years of continual publication would imply. The Peanuts gang were like childhood acquaintances who never left home, never went to college. You’re glad enough to hear from them or run into them from time to time, but wouldn’t necessarily seek them out. If you happened to want them you knew where to find them, every day, for fifty-two years.

And like those old acquaintances you don’t talk with too often because they never seem to have anything new to say, Peanuts ran in familiar cycles. The Great Pumpkin didn’t show? Lucy pulled the football away? Charlie Brown’s team lost again? Of course. Over the years, though, the repetition became ritual in an epic of frustration; gestures of unwarranted and unrewarded faith and hope. As long as Charles Schultz was productive, there was a chance that ball would be kicked. He always said it wouldn’t, but now it can’t. And that’s different. After fifty-two years, Schulz’s brief farewell and refusal to satisfactorily conclude any of the story cycles he set into motion was a wholly predictable disappointment, but still faintly sudden and shocking.

So what is the lesson? Was Peanuts a fifty-two year disquisition on misplaced faith? Or as a faithful Christian, was Schulz proselytizing hope in a universe of kite eating trees? Is it finally a collection of trite aphorisms or recondite koans?

Constancy was always more a factor of Peanuts than change, and maybe it’s fitting Peanuts drifted towards a Nirvana of constant, permanent, absence. I could ponder that, lying on my back in the grass. Peanuts (a title Schulz hated every day for fifty-two years) outlasted my faith in the ubiquity of American democracy, my parents’ religion, and prime time television. I would still say that you’d have to go pretty dang far to reach someplace where Snoopy is unknown and bet it’s not worth the trip. Come on, he’s been in outer space. But now it’s a corpus of kitsch artifacts, though a few, for me, have a relic resonance.

Like the strip in which Charlie Brown, sitting in an overstuffed chair next to Sally in her bed, looks up from the book he has been reading and asks, “Why would anyone say goodnight to the moon?” I never understood the question, but have always been touched by its implacable answerability.

Gone, and now the world is a little bit different; Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy…How can I ever forget them…

Sharon C. McGovern--Publisher/Editor/Cobra-in-Mourning