Danger! Danger!

 

One morning when I was 11 or 12 and riding the school bus with a classmate, I turned to him and asked, apropos of nothing, which of his parents he liked more -- his mother or father?

He stuttered for a second and then shrugged. 

Sitting in front of us was one of the school teachers -- a nun probably in her 50s. She snapped her head around and scolded me.

"Shame on you," she said. "I hope he loves them equally. What a question to ask!" 

Properly chastened, I started to explain but then decided it was better to leave it alone. 

We rode the rest of the way to school in silence. Until then I did not know how obnoxious the question was.

I came to my bold inquiry honestly, though, having only the night before read an exchange between Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt in which she asked the very same question and when CB stammered to reply she hit him with her classic "wishy-washy!!"  

I imagined real life would go the same way as the comics, where characters said and did the most outrageous things to one another for laughs, no hard feelings or scolding from eavesdroppers. 

That I thought that's how the world worked was no fault of Charles Schulz, the creator of Lucy and Charlie Brown, the editor or the publisher of the volumes of strips I devoured nightly or anyone else. It was my wrong thinking that was corrected -- in typically "sisterly" fashion -- and I did not do it again. 

I suppose today there might be some anxious someone (maybe in Florida) waiting to pull Peanuts from library shelves for corrupting gullible children, making them treat their classmates badly and sowing seeds of division and resentment in families.

Nah! That kind of thing only happens in books.