Peanuts 1960's Collection

There is exactly one place in the state of New Jersey that I love, and believe it or not it's to be found in miserable stinking Trenton. Wayfarers Erasmus and I struck dumbly upon this refuge while haphazardly in search of sustenance for body and soul, as is our idiom.

It was a winter to depress all winters. No frosty clarity or bearlike scoops of snow to twinkle the eye. Only the sucking winter murk of the Delaware river valley, laid down thin like the trail of a poisoned slug. (You know the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, with the crystalline floes of ice and heavenly shafts of light? Artistic license.) Where the trail crooks the scum is deposited, a natural debris catch upriver from nobler Philly. South Trenton between 206 and the crook forever sours under the bitter benediction of the Lower Free Bridge: TRENTON MAKES — THE WORLD TAKES. How to feel about a city whose most prominent public fixture just makes you sick to your stomach? We ventured into those neighborhoods blighted and forgotten, once factory housing, now not even worth turning into a ghetto. We were only a little hopeful, and only because Erasmus had spent less time there than I.

Hungarians and Germans had settled there once but were mostly gone. As a granitic record of their presence they left behind a runestone in the form of a restaurant called the Blue Danube. Coming in from the wet I could feel myself swell with warm oven air. We were cozied in by heavily stained woodwork, made back when trees were bigger. On the walls hung tin artifacts and oil paintings made back when the world was dimly lit and modest in color. The whole place strung up in multicolored little fuse capsule lights — the best kind. The magnificent bar like a snub-nosed tank, long enough for six stools maybe. A peaceful handful of regulars making the music of a few people quietly and comfortably gathered. The small TV set up in the corner was tuned into a network broadcast of It's a Wonderful Life. People were watching. Two squat matrons, probably sisters, served us on china with good thick forearms and the kind of stern cordiality that is so much more nourishing than false cheer. No kidding, they were watching It's a Wonderful Life.

The approaching season bares the truth of the world, the goodness and the sadness. We bundle up because our emotional armor falls away with the leaves. It snuck up on me a few days ago when I saw that the Peanuts television specials from the 60s have just been rereleased, with all due attention to quality. I thought about the scene where Royal takes Margot out for ice cream, to make amends, and the tender theme carol from A Charlie Brown Christmas plays. The Peanuts gang is there in Wes Anderson's gang, especially in the underdog sympathies, Chuck and Linus's oft-mocked sincerity, and the Lucy-ish notion of who gets to boss who around.

The dearest symbol of the season, for me, is Charlie Brown's scraggly little Christmas tree (Tannenbaum, in Deutsch) found amid gaudy aluminum commercialism. You may not remember just how often Charlie Brown laments that everyone has "gone commercial" — almost as often as he correctly identifies himself as "depressed" or the other kids cruelly call him "stupid". People suffer a similar amnesia with It's a Wonderful Life, forgetting how brutal it really is. (Capra and Stewart had just returned from the war.)

When I keep an apartment I like to get a little Charlie Brown tree for the holiday, for cheer. It must be got by trudging to the far corner of a tree farm with a bow saw.

If Peanuts contains another symbol as powerful (and even more universal) it is the unseen Little Red-Haired Girl, object of Charlie Brown's unrequited love. Inspired by Charles M. Schulz's own lost love, of course — the one who got away. From Schulz's biography, "I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone whom you love very much. A person who not only turns you down, but almost immediately will marry the victor. What a bitter blow that is."