Nyanko's Basket

This has been a very hard diary for me to write.

Harper passed away on February 18th this year after an extremely sudden illness, with a prognosis for extremely poor quality of life and a lot of pain and suffering. The decision not to subject her to further pain and suffering was not one I made lightly. I remembered all the things that had happened while we were together.

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Here’s something that she shared with me last Halloween:

I think I've figured out why the Peanuts story of the Great Pumpkin has always deeply appealed to me. I like pumpkins, so that ticks one box, and I love Peanuts, so that's another. When I was a child, every year around this time the Peanuts HalloweenTV special--with its jaunty Vince Garaldi theme music--stirred my little kid's heart with the joy, the color, and the inherent theatricality and drama of fall.

Now, the story of the Great Pumpkin is a bit of irreverent, irreligious cheek on Schultz's part that thrills me as an adult. Here, religion for once is playful. Here, the Great Pumpkin doesn't require gruesome sacrifices or recitations of docile fealty from the Peanuts gang; they just hang out in the Pumpkin patch in the moonlight and wait for him or her (or Eir) to appear and edify them with his resplendent pumkininess. They're into it because it's fun, it's silly--a little scary--and if Linus is right this time, potentially amazing. What more could a kid ask for?

The gang's yearly Great Pumpkin ritual is funny and sweet and wistful. The wistfulness of Linus's Pumpkin worship is allegorical of the human desire for something magic to show itself and deliver us from the mundane round of squawking teachers and factory bosses of everyday life. Like Springsteen's sublime image in Born to Run of Mary's dress, waving as she stands on the porch waiting for "a hero to rise from these streets"--as a *boy's* hero of the night, the Great Pumpkin is another kind of enchantment, a potent magic that's risen from the imagination of a precocious, melancholic 4th grader. It is a religion gladness, of togetherness and goodwill, with its own kind of in interpid faith, because the Peanuts gang never gives up on the Great Pumpkin. This is the religion of childhood, which, of course, is imagination itself.

If you would like to share your own remembrances of Harper, feel free to in the comments. Please keep it civil though.