Happy Fall from Snoopy

I was browsing through Pintage, our local gift/antique store in Calhoun, (which carries my book, by the way!) when a mug caught my eye. One side said Happy Fall, and the other showed a joyous Snoopy dancing with leaves falling around him.

I don’t need any more coffee cups in my house, but on impulse I bought it. I brought it home and put it in my kitchen windowsill. As the days are getting shorter, and we head toward winter, it has brought me joy.

Like most children of the 60’s, I grew up reading the comics in the daily newspaper. On weekdays, Peanuts ran in the black and white comics section, but Sundays were for full color and I would spread out “the funny papers” on the floor to read on Sunday afternoons. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, Woodstock and the other assorted characters were part of my life, even before they had holiday shows on TV.

We children didn’t know it, but Charles Schultz was teaching us about how to get along with each other and accept life’s challenges. The children in Peanuts lived in their own world, with little or no interference from parents or teachers. They worked out their problems.

While I probably related the most to Charlie Brown — unsure of himself, always taking the brunt of Lucy’s jokes, but continuing to persevere — Snoopy was the heart and intellect of the comic. I remember a stuffed Snoopy that I slept with for most of my young years. And I have always loved beagles.

Daddy once brought home a pair of beagle puppies, one black and white like Snoopy and the other blonde. “Which one would you have picked?” Daddy answered when Mama questioned him on why he brought home not 1, but 2 puppies. They were fun companions for me as we played in the woods around our house in Mooresville. They ran and howled after rabbits, sat with me on the back steps, and obeyed our older dog, Peppy, as if she was the strict school marm.

Novelist Ann Patchett writes in her book of essays, These Precious Days, that Snoopy sitting atop his doghouse pecking away at his typewriter was an early inspiration for her to become a writer.

“Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open,” she writes. “When the morning newspaper came, my sister and I read the funnies together. Always ‘Peanuts’ was first. I learned the happy dance and it has served me well… I was not a cool kid, and Snoopy was a very cool dog. I hoped the association would rub off on me.” (p. 78)

Perhaps Snoopy inspired me too, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. As he shot down the Red Baron in his doghouse airplane or drank a root beer in a Parisian café with his best friend, the little yellow bird Woodstock, he gave me permission to live in my imagination too. And I still spend time there.

For now, the Happy Fall mug with its image of Snoopy dancing makes me smile each morning as I stumble into the kitchen for my coffee, and then as I wash the dishes in the evening.  Like Ann Patchett, learning the happy dance and hoping that I could someday be as cool as Snoopy has served me well.