2020 Was A Charlie Brown Year
I’m Welcoming 2021 With Open Arms
It was a Kodak moment.
Both girls were home, we were all snuggled up in blankets, lounging around in new PJ bottoms, watching Charlie Brown Christmas. Ruby snored softly on her MyPillow bed, the rain pelted on the big window behind us, the sputtering gas fireplace tried to warm the cold room and I worried about popcorn oil staining the new blue wool on the recovered sofa. Oh holy night, right?
When we got to the scene where everyone starts to laugh at Charlie Brown and his little Christmas tree, all those fifth grade feelings came rushing back to me. I held it together through the rest of the holiday week and into this first week of 2021, but this morning, trying to wake in the black darkness of the Seattle winter, those laughing comic characters stirred me to consciousness.
Can’t you see them? Wide, half-moon mouths gaping open, heads cocked back on rubber little necks, stick straight pencil mark hair, wire-y curly q doodle hair, Pigpen’s cloud of dust filling the space around him and the Gang?
I feel sad if Peanuts wasn’t a part of your morning routine. George Schultz was a shot of creativity and comedy at our breakfast table every day. We weren’t sophisticated enough to get Calvin and Hobbs’ satire and humor at 3405 Huntington Place. But we loved a little “Good grief, Charlie Brown” on the way out the door to Houston Academy.
I had my own funny, not so funny Charlie Brown moment back in fifth grade. I made an announcement one day after lunch to a small group on the sidelines of the playground that included my fifth grade teacher and some friends. Even though Mama had just chopped my hair into a Shag and I still carried around what I heard referred to as baby fat, I was a budding gymnast. We used to call it tumbling back then. I declared right then and there in Dothan, Alabama, that I wanted to go to the Olympics.
I opened my own half-moon mouth and declared a goal.
And the flood gates of laughter unlocked. The most poignant and piercing of all was my sweet teacher, who simply shook her head and smiled and said something to me like, “Now, Reisha, you know that’s not going to happen.”
Her exact words aren’t what’s important but the spirit behind them is. I’m not promoting a trophy-for-all-mentality here, but let’s not declare the game over before the first play.
I’m afraid this is what we do to high school students these days. I’m afraid we silence them, we busy-work them, we standardized test them, we Stanford-Harvard-UC Berkeley them until they have lost the scent of their own smell.
What I loved in grade school and still love today are the wild stories of childhood, the raw tales that are still twisting our minds and driving us to find ourselves in new ways. And I that’s what admissions officers want to read too.
I’m still clarifying my goals for 2021 and not making any announcements yet, but one thing remains consistent: I will continue to help students discover themselves and their stories so they can write essays that impact their college admission.
And keep checking here for more of wild, raw stories of my past as I search for my truths of today. Come along!
