Aug 17, 2017 4 min read

Sally is missing the tip of one shoe, and Snoopy’s right ear is scuffed. But Charlie Brown’s zigzag sweater looks good as new.

The ceramic Peanuts gang is all together, posing on my daughter’s bedroom dresser. Sometimes while she’s gone, I’ll take the kids down and arrange them on her bed, just to get the belly laugh when she discovers them.

“This is why you have no friends,” she’ll say, which I think is her generation’s version of “You’re so weird.”

I am weird, but I’m hoping she’ll take to Charlie Brown and his gaggle; I want them to have somewhere to go when I’ve finally downsized to a place that has no room for them all.

The ceramic Peanuts kids were as much a part of my childhood as the music lessons and the pool and the dogs. Over French toast on Sunday mornings, our dad would recount the day’s comic. Reading Charles Schulz’s strip in the daily funny papers was like checking in to see what the rest of our family were up to. I even had a set of paperback Peanuts books – the earliest versions, in which the characters were drawn with smaller heads and more pointed features.

When our Daisy had a litter, we named the puppies Lucy, Schroeder, Snoopy, Linus and Charlie Brown.

All our neighborhood backyard plays were about the Peanuts.

The oldest kids got the plum roles of Charlie Brown and Lucy; the rest of us had to settle for the supporting roles, including Violet, who I learned firsthand never had any lines. My partner (the Farmer, as he’s known in this column) was the youngest of the neighborhood group and was cast as Pig-Pen. On the day of the performance, we doused him with a garden hose and then rolled him down a dusty hill behind the house to get him into character.

The Peanuts kids were part of the inner circle of our lives. A colleague of my dad’s at the university where he worked must have known this; she handcrafted the ceramics as a gift – perfect likenesses in shiny black and white. He carried them home in a box and we gasped with delight as he unwrapped each, lining them up on a shelf in the family room.

There they lived for many years, long after we kids had moved out.

The years brought downsizing, and now the statues are with me. If I were a knick-knack person, maybe they’d be displayed on the bookshelves.

All those kids take up a lot of space. But they don’t belong in a box somewhere – and definitely not in a thrift shop or, worse, the landfill. It says something that, almost two decades after Charles Shultz’s death, the Peanuts characters live on, in newspapers and TV specials and in movies. My own kids aren’t fans like we were. It’s a hard sell getting a 17-year-old girl to embrace the charms of a fairly depressed kid with a huge round noggin.

“But these are kids who never had any parents telling them what to do,” I told my daughter, expecting that to be a draw.

“I still don’t get it,” she said. But she hasn’t asked me to remove them yet.

And so the kids stay in her room for now, smiling out from the dresser and sometimes greeting her from the bed when I put them there – Snoopy with his smug smile and floppy ears, guileless Sally with her curls, and Charlie with his exasperated frown. My daughter doesn’t get it yet, but maybe someday she will.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.