Evolution of an Item / RIP Mari Schindler

For those of you interested in where this stuff comes from, here’s a little story.

This started out as a one-line This or That item:

“No misfortune is so bad that whining about it won’t make it worse.”
― Jeffrey R. Holland

The source: the Pickles cartoon. Which got me to thinking. Feb. 15 would have been my mother’s 84^th birthday, except for her death from cancer a decade ago. Among the many traits we shared was a love of the comic strips in the newspaper. Her two favorites were Pickles (of which she said, “How did they get a camera and microphone into our house?”) and Rose is Rose (of which she said, “I feel like Rose is me”). So, when I read them each morning, I think of her, and am happy she raised an upbeat, optimistic, romantic feminist, and sad she’s missing this part of his story.

I miss her. We all miss her. Death is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

A note in passing: cartoonists, I find, generally do their research pretty carefully. Although I never double-checked him, I suspect Charles Shulz used real bible verses in Peanuts. Doonesbury hews scrupulously to the facts, sometimes even with footnotes. Even some of the highly implausible things I see in Candorville or (God forbid) Mallard Fillmore often turn out to be “ripped from the headlines.”

Comments

[Clark Smith]

Mari was a force of nature. I miss her, too. I love how she decided to stop cooking and just go out with your dad to the "carriage trade" restaurants he had scoped out on his milk runs.