Dan Turkel

Peanuts in 1000 Words

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a four-panel Peanuts comic ought to be worth at least four thousand. Well, I gave it my all to get about a thousand out of this one.

This piece is based on the Peanuts comic strip from June 7th, 1967. Additional inspiration from the November 19th, 1961 and November 12th, 1963 strips. Peanuts was written and drawn by Charles Schulz from 1950 to 2000.

After long enough, Mrs. Donovan’s voice just starts to sound like gibberish. I was losing my mind listening to her blabber on about Christopher Columbus and the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María. The occasional word made it from Mrs. Donovan’s cherry-red lipsticked mouth to my tired ears but the rest was just a low drone, punctuated with the tapping of a yardstick on the chalkboard or the pull-down map.

That kind of environment can wear on a man. Before I knew it, I’d lost track of my surroundings. Tunnel-vision had set in like I had heard it does in war sometimes. I heard, saw, sensed nothing but the feeling of my cheek resting heavily on my palm and the vague brightness of the sun through the window.

Sigh.

Imagine my embarrassment when Mrs. Donovan snapped at me and told me to quit day-dreaming and get back to taking down notes. It’s gotten to the point with me where embarrassment is such a frequent state that I am almost unphased by scenes like this one, but as usual I went through the motions: I looked down at my shoes as the rest of the class snickered and someone through a gum-wrapper at me.

And for another few minutes, ol’ Chris Columbus was back in my head, sailing into the unknown. And before I knew it, I suddenly understood exactly how Columbus must have felt when he first caught sight of America, this great land where we now live. Before I knew it, I had caught sight of something amazing: the sun bounced off that pretty little red-haired girl’s pretty red hair. Light traveled millions of miles from the sun, to earth and through my classroom window, onto those strawberry locks and into my eyes.

Gee, I didn’t even know her name. But she must have been the prettiest girl in the whole class, maybe even the whole school! And what manners she had! Whenever I had my head in the clouds, my thoughts a million miles away from Mrs. Donovan’s lecture and a million days into the future, thinking about that pretty little red-haired girl, she was always giving the lecture her full attention as if it were the most interesting thing in the world! I bet her parents were awfully nice too, they wouldn’t make fun of me if I came over to her house for dinner and introduced myself and stated with sincerity my desire to marry their daughter. They wouldn’t tell me that love is for sissies or that I’ve got a big dumb head.

But how could I ever get her to notice me? Every day I ate lunch alone and hoped that I’d catch a glimpse of her playing a game with the other girls—none of whom could even compare to her—and I think that sometimes she even saw me, moping all on my own, but she never came over and said “Gosh, Charlie Brown, you’re such a gentleman, I don’t know why you’re not the most popular boy in school. Would it be okay with you if I sat and ate lunch with you today? And maybe tomorrow too? And the day after that?”

I wondered what would happen if I walked over to her desk, put my arm around her and gave her a big kiss?

She would blush at first, of course, and maybe everyone would laugh, but then after class she would come up to me and say, “Hey Charlie Brown, I want you to know that I like you too” and give me a peck on the cheek and send me straight to heaven right there.

Wow!

I was practically exploding with excitement just thinking about it. I felt like I could jump up and do a backflip right there in my seat. What a life we coul have together! We’d make up our own games that only we could play at recess. We’d share our best snacks at lunchtime. We’d walk home from school together every day, not even needing to talk to fill the silence because her hand in mine would say all that needed to be said. Over time our walks home would look different. The leaves leaves would change and fall, the snow would come, then the flowers and the rain and the sun again, but the happiness we would share would be a constant in the ever-changing chaos of this world.

But…

But what if it didn’t go like that at all? What if I went over and gave her a kiss and as everyone laughed she gave me a big smack in the face?! Mrs. Donovan would ask me to leave the room and I’d probably never be able to show my face in this school—no, this town!—again! I would walk home, dejected and probably crying like a baby and say “Mom and dad, you knew this day would come. I’ve done it. I’ve humiliated myself to such a degree—embarrassed myself with such flagrant social ineptitude and inability to grasp social cues—I’ve failed so thoroughly to integrate with the boys and girls that should be my friends that, once and for all, it’s time. We have to move away. Or maybe if you could just send me away. To a relative’s house. To boarding school. To the army. I know you did your best. I understand.”

In fact, of course it would happen just like that. Nothing good had ever come of me approaching a girl like her, so I was better off just keeping my dumb mouth shut. My big dumb head grew beet red and I put my head in my hands, my eyes still on that pretty little red-headed girl but my mind no longer fixated on the life I now admitted we could never have. Getting one last glimpse of her before trying to snap back to Mrs. Donovan’s lesson, I thought to myself: I’ve gotta stop thinking about things like that.