Relay: Goodbye, Charlie Brown

Good grief, Christopher Walsh! Let go of the past, already!

You’ve gone far in a few short years. It wasn’t so long ago that, desperate for any merriment at all, you dragged a sad little Charlie Brown-caliber pine tree up the 75 steps and into your decrepit Brooklyn apartment, decorated it with a handful of dull ornaments and semi-functioning light sets, and . . . and then sat alone reading “The Catcher in the Rye” for perhaps the 15th time.

But today, you live, once again, in the blissful beauty of the South Fork. You love your work. You’ve got a cozy little apartment and a car, and best of all, a woman who loves you. Last week, the two of you bought bright new ornaments and lights, and later you returned to the old Hrens nursery, site of so many long-ago Christmas tree acquisitions, and carefully selected the perfect tree for that cozy apartment. Later, when she arrived home from work, you lovingly decorated the tree together and, sitting before your accomplishment, shared a fine Cotes du Rhone as Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Kay Starr sang sweet Christmas melodies from long ago.

You don’t feel like Charlie Brown anymore, sitting at the outdoor psychiatrist’s office of Lucy van Pelt and complaining of an ill-defined melancholy. “Instead of feeling happy,” he sighed, “I feel sort of let down.”

I don’t, and why would I? Amagansett is done up so prettily, decorated trees, wreaths, and lights everywhere, and, while Santa was nowhere to be found when we made it to the square on Saturday in the early afternoon — contrary to the promise of so many communiqués — spirits were bright after an Irish coffee served up by our friend Tom at the Meeting House.

A DVD of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” featuring the late Vince Guaraldi’s sublime jazz soundtrack, sat for a week on my desk at home. I have seen it dozens of times, owned the soundtrack for decades, and often attempt, with little success, to replicate it on the piano.

I finally persuaded Cathy to watch it with me. She liked it well enough, but was soon reading, and then dozing, while I shattered the silent night with ham-fisted renditions of “Linus and Lucy” and “Christmas Time Is Here” from the soundtrack. It’s always so much fun.

Long overdue, and even longer past Holden Caulfield’s age, my aversion to letting go of childhood is finally diminishing. I well remember class trips to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where “everything always stayed right where it was” behind the glass. “The only thing that would be different,” he recalled, “would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all.”

But it’s okay — it’s only natural — that I, that everything, would be different. “Everything changes, nothing remains without change,” said Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Buddha, the awakened one. One hundred miles and so many light years removed from that sad December in Brooklyn, Christmas may still provoke that regression to a time, as Van Morrison sang, when the world made more sense. But the past is history, the future is a mystery, and there is only now, which, as someone pointed out, is called the present. And what a glorious gift it is.

“Life is about working things out,” Cathy said in her adorable French accent. “You are not meant to be a little child. You are meant to be grown up by now.”

She’s right, of course.

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.