One Voice

As little as I’ve been writing recently, I ought to be ashamed to do this. But I came across this piece from January 2004 and thought it was both funny and relevant.

Now you’re really going to have to listen to me.

I received a letter from Cambridge, England, notifying me that I had been selected as one of the 2,000 outstanding intellectuals of the 21st century.

That’s right, we bad. We bad.

Sorry, but I couldn’t help channeling Richard Pryor in “Silver Streak” for a minute there.

Seriously, here’s how the letter started:

“The Oxford English Dictionary defines intellectualism as the ‘doctrine that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from pure reason’ and it follows by saying that an intellectual is ”a person possessing a good understanding, enlightened person.’   Surely, therefore, this definition is the reason for your selection to be included in this prestigious publication which is due for release in late 2004.”

Well, gosh.

Now I’m no slouch. I read two newspapers every day, I finish the crossword puzzle more often than not and I can usually beat the contestants on “Wheel of Fortune” to the correct answer.  Sometimes I don’t even need to buy a vowel.

But intellectual? I’m not even the leading intellectual in my own family. My wife has doctorates in astronomy and geophysics, my daughter has two bachelors degrees – both with honors – from UCLA and my son just finished his first semester of college at Cal State Northridge with a 4.0 average.

In my house, I’m the freaking village idiot.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If Bill Cosby, Elayne Boosler, Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin all lived together, one of them would have to be the least funny guy – or girl – in the house.

And if Willie, Mickey and the Duke lived together – when they were all living – one of them would have been the least athletic. I’m thinking Duke.

No competition at all.

So it’s all a matter of comparison. Put me in a phone booth with Dubya and I’d be the first one to find my way out. Yeah, I know he’s got degrees from Yale and Harvard, but my guess is the names “Pierce” and “Bush” – momma’s and daddy’s names – had more to do with that than any grades he actually earned. If Dubya had a brain, he’d be outside playing with it.

Put me up against ol’ Dub in a battle of wits and I’d refuse to fight. There’s no honor in beating an unarmed man, even if it would be soooo much fun.

Anyway, I’m no dope. Just ask the folks in Cambridge. Those limeys know brains when they see them. We’re talking about the land that gave us Billy Shakespeare, Bert Russell and Monty Python.  I’m part English myself, on my mother’s side and way back on my natural father’s side. Of course, I’m part German too, and the Germans have a fine intellectual tradition of their own — Goethe, Nietzche, Goebbels.

Oh, never mind. Every nationality, every ethnic group, has its great thinkers and its morons. For every Benjamin Franklin there’s a Benny Hill, for every Apostle Paul there’s a Pauly Shore.

And for every Mike Rappaport, well, there’s a Mike Rappaport. Like most people, I’ve got my smart side and my goofy side.

But hey, Cambridge likes me. Cambridge thinks I’m one of the finest minds of my generation. Cambridge figures I might do something great someday.

Uh, Mike … Isn’t this another one of those books where they’ll put your name in a book with a few thousand other wannabes as long as you pay $300 or $400 to buy the special leather-bound edition?

Not at all. If you want the book, you can buy it for whatever they’re selling it for – in pounds, not dollars – but they stress that you don’t have to buy the book in order to be listed in it.

They love me for my mind. Not my money.

But didn’t you buy the book when they put you in “Who’s Who in America?”

Sure, but that was because I wanted to donate a copy to the public library. I didn’t want to be one of those prophets who was without honor in his own small city of 24,000 people.

Uh, yeah. Whatever.

Yeah, I bought the special leather-bound edition and looked inside at my bio once or twice. Then I donated it to the library. Dang book wouldn’t fit in the bookcase, and I needed more space in the bottom of my closet for my shoes.

That’s not the point, though. It’s one thing to be in “Who’s Who in America.” They’re not particularly selective. I think Dubya, Pee Wee Herman and the guy who mows my lawn are all in there. But if someone thinks you’re one of the “2,000 outstanding intellectuals of the 21st century,” that’s really something.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Vanna White is calling.

My younger sister is a great thinker and a real activist. She sent me an article she wrote for The Horn Book in which she argued very effectively that we ought to stop dividing children’s books into books for boys and books for girls.

Thinking back to my own childhood, when I read several hundred books a year, I remember that boys were pushed toward Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys while girls were given Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. That’s probably oversimplifying it — I never read much of any of those series — but I read a ton of baseball books and most of the science fiction written by Robert Heinlein.

A lot of those books came from the Carnegie Library in my mother’s home town. I usually spent several weeks visiting my grandparents every summer, and I would check out five or six books every other day. But there were a few books — rare ones — that I would read over and over again as the years went by.

They weren’t the so-called iconic books of my generation. I never read any Tolkien, and books like “On the Road” left me cold. I did read “The Catcher in the Rye” a couple of times, but I never thought it really spoke to me. Holden Caulfield was half a generation ahead of me.

There was one book, though, that sort of came out of nowhere for me. My dad was born in New York City and grew up in Brooklyn. Starting when I was 7 or 8 years old, we spent time with our grandparents in Brooklyn nearly every summer. I never made it to Ebbets Field, but I saw so many other fascinating things about America’s favorite city-within-a-city.

I don’t know how old I was the first time I read “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” The book had been published in 1943, and the story it told occurred more than a generation before that. I don’t think it was the first book I ever read with a female protagonist, but it was certainly one of the first ones that really resonated with me.

It was such a beautiful story, so completely American. Francie Nolan lived in grinding poverty in the years just before World War I, but loved her life and believed that it would get better.

She was the granddaughter of immigrants from Austria and Ireland, with a hard-working mother and a charming, alcoholic father who worked — when he worked at all — as a singing waiter. She essentially had nothing, but she loved so many things about her life and didn’t feel like anyone owed her anything.

The amazing thing about the story — and I downloaded it onto my Nook to see if it was as I remembered — is that while yes, Francie is a girl, there isn’t anything “girly” about the story at all. She is first and foremost a person, an individual about whom we care deeply.

Second, she is completely and totally an American of the period in which she lived. She isn’t some phony Horatio Alger story. She doesn’t go from rags to riches; she survives her childhood and is headed off to college. It’s pretty apparent she has a chance at a good life.

What more can anyone ask of a real story?

It’s amazing how much my relationship with television has changed over the years.

I was never a big TV viewer when I was young. While I ultimately became a big fan of “Star Trek,” I never watched even one episode during the years it was shown on ABC. The first show that ever became “appointment” television for me was “Dallas,” which came on in 1978. It was around that same time that I first got HBO, and for most of the next decade I watched a lot more movies on cable than I did regular shows with all their commercials.

I still had a few shows that were appointment TV for me — “Dynasty,” “Moonlighting” and, starting in 1986, “LA Law.”

I don’t know if there was ever a show that had a cooler theme song/credits sequence. Starting with the jazz saxophone riff, and then the sound of the trunk slamming shut and showing the California vanity license plate reading “LA LAW.”

That image totally resonated with me. I was born in California, and even though I had never lived there, I had visited the state with my first wife in 1978 and then by myself earlier in 1986. My goal from the time I had started my career was someday to make it to the West Coast, and “LA Law” was so totally ’80s California that almost every time I watched it, it reinforced my desire someday to live there.

Two months after the show came on the air, I moved to Colorado.  Two years later I moved on to Nevada, still watching “LA Law” every Thursday night at 10 p.m. (it had been 9 p.m. in St. Louis and in Colorado) The show lasted until May 1994, by which time I had lived in Los Angeles for four years. I had stopped watching by then. Most television dramas start getting weird after five or six years, and I was working a lot of nights by then anyway.

Appointment television was becoming a lot less important to me by then. In the last 20 years, I only had one show that mattered to me that much, and after four or five seasons, even “The West Wing” wasn’t worth making the effort.

Of course, the advent of DVDs changed all that. All of a sudden, I could buy an entire year’s worth of a show and watch it as quickly — or as slowly — as I wanted, and I didn’t have to sit through commercials. There were numerous shows I hadn’t watched that became favorites on DVD — “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” “Boston Legal” and others.

But “LA Law” never seemed to come out on DVD. The earlier hit show by creator Steven Bochco — “Hill Street Blues” — hadn’t done all that well, and to date only two seasons have made it to DVD.

Now season one of “LA Law” is out, although technically I don’t think it has been released in this country. The box that came from Amazon says it’s a Region 2 (Europe) DVD, although it plays just fine on my Blu-Ray player. The schedule for release in the United Kingdom is for a season to come out every three months, so who knows?

I do know that at the beginning of every episode, hearing the sax riff and the slamming trunk and then seeing the license plate takes me back in a way no other shows do. For a minute, it’s 1986 again. I’m 36 years old and still working my way toward making my dreams come true.

Short takes from a journey through a disorganized mind:

When people used to describe a period of time by saying it was “40 days and 40 nights,” they generally weren’t referring to five weeks and five days or to 960 hours.

No, when they said 40/40, it was a colorful way of saying “it was a long time, but we’re not sure exactly how long.”

Well, when I tell you I have completed the first 46 days of my effort to get back into shape, I am referring to the specific number — 31 days of March and 15 days of April — and I have a specific result. I have lost 42 pounds. Of course it’s essentially the same 42 pounds I lost two years ago en route to losing 112 pounds in six months.

I wish I had kept track — or better yet — that I could just remember exactly how much weight I have lost in all the various and assorted diets of my life. I’m pretty sure that it’s at least 400 pounds, which would be great if I had weighed something like 550 and how was down to 150. Of course that’s not the case; I have been on nature’s roller-coaster ride for the last 30 years or so, and at some point the mechanism is going to break.

I’m actually pretty good at losing weight. I just suck at keeping it off.

That has to change.

***

In my room.

Something about my office — the one room in our lovely house that is all mine — just makes me happy. Deep down happy.

Nicole has done a truly wonderful job of decorating the rest of the house. Our house is a real showplace. But my one room, with all its movie posters, sports memorabilia, photos and the like on the walls, is the nicest room I have ever had that I could call mine.

The built-in bookcases, which are packed to the gills with books and DVDs, fill an entire wall. A television set and storage cabinets occupy the opposite wall. I’ve got four autographed jerseys, of which there’s room on the walls for two at a time. Right now I’m looking at John Elway’s No. 7, and I’ve got Johnny Bench’s No. 5 on the wall behind my left shoulder.

Chipper Jones is packed away for now, and I’m looking forward to the arrival of a fairly rare minor league jersey of Tom Seaver from his one season below the major-league level. He was 12-12 with Jacksonville in 1966. The very next season, he won 16 games for the New York Mets.

***

It has been nearly 15 years since television shows started coming out on DVD, and there is one that has been in my sights for almost all that time.

I was living in St. Louis when “LA Law” first debuted in 1986, and almost everything about it spoke to me of how much I wanted to live in California.

I had always had my sights set on the San Francisco Bay Area rather than the Southland, and I nearly got a job in Marin County in January 1988. That didn’t happen, though, and in 1990 I got a job in Los Angeles and moved south to spend the next 20 years of my life.

When we left for our retirement in Georgia in November 2010, I was more than ready to leave. But now that the first season of “LA Law” is finally out on DVD, watching it really brings back memories.

Good ones.

Spring is here.

I made it onto the golf course to play nine holes yesterday, and as has been the case lately, my game was sort of erratic.

Last spring, I was playing a great deal of golf, and I had some of the most amazing rounds of my life. I broke 80 three times, with an overall best round of 78. Even better than that, though, I had one round playing only the front nine where I had eight pars and one bogey for a 37.

That round was really cool, because I had pars on the first eight holes and missed a putt on the ninth that would have given me a tremendous milestone — par golf.

Generally when I’m playing well, I’ll shoot around 40 or 41 on the front nine. I know the holes well enough that I can usually shoot par on about half of them. But right now I’m a long way from that kind of consistency.

When I played yesterday, I bogeyed seven of the nine holes. I parred one of them, but it was on the remaining hole — No. 6 — that I had my best moment this year, golf-wise.

The hole is a strange one. It’s a relatively short par four (about 335 yards), but you can’t see the green from the tee box. You hit your first shot uphill, and it’s crucial to stay in the middle of the fairway. It’s an easy approach shot to the green from here, but that’s where the hole gets interesting. The pin placement is everything here. If it’s a red flag, it’s on the flattened out left side of the green and a relatively easy par. But the other 75 percent of the green is much tougher, sloping downward all over the place so that a less-than-perfect shot will either go through and out the back or will slide off the front of the green down into a depression.

I rarely par the hole and it’s not at all uncommon for me to wind up with a double bogey.

But yesterday I had a good tee shot, 200 yards just over the crest of the hill in the middle of the fairway. My second shot was one of the best I’ve ever hit on this hole. With the pin placed far to the right near the back, I put my shot slightly to the right of center and far enough back that it didn’t roll away. I was left with about an 18-foot putt and my goal was to get it close enough to tap in for par.

At least that was the plan. What actually happened was I rolled in the 18-footer for a birdie, my first ever on No. 6 when the flag was blue.

It was kind of an odd way to shoot 42, but it definitely fit in with that old saying about golf — all it takes is one great hole or even one great shot to leave you feeling wonderful and eager to get back out there again.

I’m not sure what it was that motivated me to make these lists, but last summer I posted an earlier version of this on Facebook. I picked my five favorite films in a lot of different genres, and then I picked my No. 1 film in each category.

Now the last thing I want to do is just cut and paste what I wrote last summer, even if this is for a different audience, so what I thought I would do was expand each category to a top 10. Within the 10, they’re in no particular order, except that the one title in boldface in each group is my favorite.

Here goes:

Bull Durham

ACTION/ADVENTURE: Die Hard, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Rock, The Abyss, Armageddon, The Adventures of Robin Hood (the 1937 one), Air Force One, Patriot Games, Con Air, Fail Safe.

COMEDY (FUNNY): Animal House, American Graffiti, Night Shift, My Favorite Year, Used Cars, Duck Soup, After Hours, Sleeper, Tootsie, Some Like it Hot.

COMEDY (SATIRE): Bedazzled, Best in Show, Lord Love a Duck, The Loved One, Smile, Putney Swope, Modern Romance, Saved, Serial, State and Main.

DRAMA: The Godfather Part II, The Grapes of Wrath, Casablanca, To Kill a Mockingbird, True Confessions, Twelve Angry Men, Chinatown, Gone With the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago.

FANTASY: The Wizard of Oz, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, It’s A Wonderful Life, Streets of Fire, Peggy Sue Got Married, Superman, Pleasantville, Chances Are, The Princess Bride, Back to the Future.

FOREIGN (LANGUAGE): After Life, Shall We Dance, The Wild Child, Il Postino, Changing Times, Cinema Paradisio, Closely Watched Trains, Tous les Matins du Monde, The Sorrow and the Pity, Das Boot.

Hanover Street

GUILTY PLEASURES: Joe vs. the Volcano, Real Men, Hanover Street, A Small Circle of Friends, Stealing Home, Purple Hearts, The Long Kiss Goodnight, American Dreamz, The Hollywood Knights, Shining Through.

HORROR:   Dawn of the Dead, Freaks, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein, Gotham, The Others, Shaun of the Dead, An American Werewolf in London, Shock Corridor.

MUSICALS: West Side Story, The Music Man, Bye Bye Birdie, Woodstock, Singin’ in the Rain, A Mighty Wind, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Meet Me in St. Louis, Guys and Dolls, Moulin Rouge.

ROMANCE: Love Actually, Notting Hill, Windy City, Blume in Love, The Electric Horseman, Just Like Heaven, Somewhere in Time, Sleepless in Seattle, Electric Dreams, When Harry Met Sally.

SCIENCE FICTION: Blade Runner, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET: The Extraterrestrial, When Worlds Collide, Time After Time, Forbidden Planet, Star Trek (2009), Galaxy Quest, Total Recall.

SPORTS: Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Bang the Drum Slowly, A League of Their Own, Rocky, For Love of the Game, Hoosiers, Tin Cup, Pastime, Seabiscuit.

My favorite movie.

THRILLERS: North by Northwest, The Birds, Vertigo, The Maltese Falcon, Dead Again, Pretty Poison, The Last Seduction, Silence of the Lambs, Mystic River, From Russia With Love.

WAR: Testament, On the Beach, Gallipoli, The Human Comedy, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Guns of Navarone, From Here to Eternity, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, In the Valley of Elah, Threads.

WESTERNS:  Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Magnificent Seven, The Searchers, Little Big Man, Tombstone, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Fort Apache,  Rio Bravo, Stagecoach (1939).

Not an endless highway, but ...

And the road goes on and on … and on.

Two years ago, first in Texas and then in California, I thought I had successfully managed to get my life straightened out. I lost 112 pounds and got into an exercise routine that had me walking for at least two hours every day.

I weighed 168 pounds, the first time in more than 20 years that I made it under 170, and I swore to myself I would never let things get out of hand to the point where I had to diet for six months just to get healthy. I didn’t need to starve myself or spend hours doing grueling exercises to maintain my healthy weight; all I needed was to eat sensibly and walk every day.

As it turned out, I couldn’t do either. A foot injury got me out of the habit of walking, and by then I was already getting back into the habit of eating too many things that were bad for me.

By summer I was back to 230 pounds and by late fall I had gained back all the weight I had worked for six months to lose.

Yikes.

I learned an important lesson, but it wasn’t one that made me happy. I learned that no matter how hard I work to lose weight and get into shape, no matter how I promise myself I will never be overweight again, I cannot trust myself.

I get thin, I get fat, I get thin again …

Pretty depressing, huh?

But for every negative, there is a positive. And if I can’t manage to keep the weight off, what matters is at least I keep trying. So as I wrote earlier, when the calendar showed March 1st, I began the Great Diet and Exercise of 2012. I weighed 284 pounds, four pounds heavier than I had ever been in my life and 116 pounds more than I had weighed at the end of October 2010.

One day at a time, and now 31 days — the month of March — is in my rear-view mirror. I walked more than half of the days and I got more conscientious about it as the month wore on. I ate on average a little less than 1,100 calories per day and I had the best weight loss month I’ve ever had on any diet in my life.

I dropped 34 pounds, and while 250 is still pretty horrible, it’s a lot better than 284 and it’s one helluva good start.

One month down.

Five to go.

When did we become a country in which everyone felt they had the right to tell everyone else how they should or shouldn’t live?

My guess is that it was right about the same time when our politicians slipped from simply smarmy down to viciously venal.

It actually all fits together. We evolved from people who read books and had intelligent discussions into people who vegetated in front of their television sets and only believed what the loudest voices told us to believe.  This may be difficult to fathom, but until first radio and then television came along, one of the most popular forms of entertainment in small-town America was going to an auditorium and listening to lectures.

Chautauqua

The Chautauqua movement would be almost impossible to comprehend these days. The very idea that most of the folks in a small town would go to an auditorium and spend two or three hours listening to a presentation designed to make them more informed about some aspect of the world is so far beyond modern reality that it might as well be science fiction.

Benjamin Franklin was the one who said the Founding Fathers had given us a republic — if we could keep it — and H.L. Mencken was the one who said in the 1920s that the republican would fall within a hundred years. Mencken gave two reasons — stupidity and greed — and both appear to be in full flight in 2012.

It would be easy — and probably wrong — to say the average member of the public is stupid because he’d rather watch “Jersey Shore” than PBS or listen to Justin Bieber instead of grand opera. The average person is a lot more stressed by life than folks were a hundred years ago.

My late father often told us that our generation had a lot more stressful choices to make than his had. He had health insurance through his job for his entire career, and he had a pension when he retired. He didn’t have to buy insurance or make decisions about 401(k) accounts or individual retirement accounts. His generation — the one that survived the Depression and won World War II — had far more stability in their careers. My dad worked for one employer for his entire career. By contrast, my closest friend hasn’t had a full-time job with full benefits for more than two or three years of the last 25 years.

The fact is, more and more people feel like control over their lives is slipping away from them. Whether it’s conservatives telling them they can’t have an abortion or liberals telling them they shouldn’t be smoking or eating meat, everybody seems to be in somebody’s face these days. And as worried as so many people are about their finances, many certainly resent being told how they have to spend that money.

One of the biggest problems is that while once we were a country where people sincerely believed we were all in it together, today working people have as much in common with Donald Trump or Bill Gates as they do with an extraterrestrial. In fact, just about the only thing we all have in common anymore is that we all are born and we all die.

I just finished reading a book I first read nearly 50 years ago — Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach.” The Gregory Peck-Ava Gardner film made from the book is a classic, but there really aren’t many movies made from books that surpass the printed word.

The book is far more poignant in dealing with its subjects as the end of the world approaches, a world destroyed by politicians and military men. Parents worry about dying before their infant children, an old woman wonders what will happen to her little dog when she isn’t around to feed him. Folks who never gave a thought to international politics, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone to live their lives, died for the hubris of the rich and powerful.

My guess is that most people don’t care at all how other people live their lives as long as those other people don’t affect them. My friend is fond of that old cliche about your right to throw your fist ending where his nose begins, but he has always defined his nose rather loosely. Back in 1978, when you could still smoke a cigarette without making a federal case of it, I remember him and his girlfriend hassling someone in a cafeteria who was smoking at the next table.

I’ve never been a smoker, but I have a feeling that’s where our society’s holier-than-thou complex got started. Once was the time that people who smoked were courteous about it and tried to avoid blowing smoke where it wasn’t wanted. But after a while, that wasn’t good enough, and now there really are some people who would like to prevent smokers from lighting up in their own homes.

Is it even possible anymore for us just to respect each other as human beings? It doesn’t affect me in any negative way if gay people want to marry each other, or if kids want to meet at the flagpole before school starts and praise Jesus. But if you were to listen to some people, these forms of love and worship are worse for our country than all three of the Kardashian sisters combined.

I suppose the problem is that issues became so complex — or at least seemed to — that average people decided they had no chance to understand them. So they chose the loudest voice that made sense to them and started believing everything they heard from that person.

Once was the time we elected people like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Now we have a president who started running for office after two years as a U.S. senator and a challenger who doesn’t even have the charm of Thurston Howell in “Gilligan’s Island.” We call people intellectuals and great thinkers whose politics come straight from the novels of a fourth-rate writer like Ayn Rand.

Couldn’t we at least try for John Steinbeck?

I don’t think it’s too late to save our country, but time is definitely a-wastin’. We need to get rid of the bums, the hypocrites and the grifters and look for some honest folks to make our laws. But more important, maybe most important of all, we need to understand that a gay couple in Hawaii and a foot-washing Baptist couple in Alabama have a lot more in common than they do dividing them.

Most folks just want someone to love, someone to share their happiness and the chance to work for a better life.

Oh, and most of them aren’t at all fond of politicians.

See, that’s a start.

Do you ever get the feeling that all the great comic strips are disappearing?

There used to be at least three or four strips that I made the effort to see every single day — Doonesbury, Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, Tank McNamara. Now two of them are gone and I haven’t seen Tank in a long time. Only Garry Trudeau keeps plugging away. He’s now in his fifth decade doing Doonesbury, which I’m sure is a surprise even to him.

Peanuts

You may notice I didn’t mention the greatest strip of them all. When Charles Schulz died in 2000, he was only a few months shy of doing 50 years worth of “Peanuts.” At its peak it appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers and was translated into 21 languages. There were books, stuffed animals, television specials and even a successful Broadway show (“You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”). The strip and all its incarnations and merchandising earned more than $1 billion for Schulz.

He did all the inking, lettering and writing from beginning to end. “Peanuts” might have been the greatest one-man show in history.

Starting a few years after Schulz’s death, Fantagraphics Books began publishing a complete record of every single daily and Sunday strip in two-year volumes. Most other strips that are anthologized are “best of” collections, but “Peanuts” was so good that you could open any one of the books to any random page and get a good laugh for yourself.

If there were to be a vote to choose the most iconic character from a comic strip, you’d have to figure Charlie Brown — the most lovable loser ever — would top the list.

Unless Snoopy did.

Other strips have come and gone, but 12 years after Schulz stopped drawing “Peanuts,” reruns of the strips still appear in most American newspapers. The topical references to Bob Dylan turning 30 or to Howard Cosell broadcasting football may be dated, but the characters will never fade.

At some point, I’ll collect the entire set of Fantagraphics Books. I’ll read them myself, but mostly I’ll keep them for the pleasure they will bring Maddie and Lex, my two grandchildren.

Who knows? It just might be that Charles Schulz and his “Li’l Folks” will be the closest thing to Shakespeare when it comes to lasting writing from the second half of the 20th century.

We could do a lot worse.