The Peanut Gallery

Sitting next to my favourite dog.

Canada's Wonderland today was great. Good friends, fun rides, and the Peanuts characters roaming the park.

I spent a childhood reading Charlie Brown. My brother and I were devoted readers. Our favourites were Garfield and Peanuts. To this day it's our one true shared passion in life.

Peanuts' continued popularity fills me with joy. It's kind of fascinating that such a sad and often bleak little comic strip could bring people so much happiness, but it does. They never win a ball game, Snoopy never gets past "It was a dark and stormy night" in his terrible novel, Schroeder never reciprocates Lucy's feelings, Linus never reciprocates Sally's love, Linus is bullied by Lucy all his life, the Great Pumpkin never comes and Charlie Brown never kicks the football, among other of life's small ongoing failures.

It's a total projection of feeling like you're not good enough, never appreciated and isolated from others. No wonder it was so successful. Everyone feels that way.

But these deep emotions that I feel for Peanuts weren't what came out in me today when I ran to the characters and hugged them and got my photo taken (Oh yes I did). No, what came out in me was glee from my not-at-all recessed inner child. I felt like a kid again in the best possible way.

My friends humoured me, like good friends do. (In fact McPal rode the Snoopy ferris wheel with me. We had to borrow a family to be allowed on. Yeah, we went there.)