My Excitable Breakfast With Samantha, Saliha, and a Little 60-Year-Old Masterpiece
Saliha and I were in Maine this week and we had breakfast with my friend Samantha. We had not met in person before today. We walk into this little breakfast place and there she is. Samantha hands me a gift. It is a little square book that is titled “I Need All the Friends I Can Get.” There is no author on the outside of the book, just the title in bold 60’s style lettering. The book is worn. It’s old.
Inside on the blank first page Samatha has written a note to me. It says, Dear Mark — Thanks for being a friend to so many! Your friend, Samantha. 6–3–25.
Above that is a previous note. It is in a much finer hand, in thin ballpoint letters. It reads, Dear Jamie…, Just to say that I love you lots — and thanks for being the wonderful you — As Always yours, Lee. It is dated Feb 1966.
This little book is 60 years old.
Samantha smiles and tells us that the first dedication writer has added little notes throughout the book. You’ll see them in a few of the accompanying photos.
I get a little overwhelmed when I first meet someone. Not because meeting people is unpleasant, but because I track so many things about someone in the minute back and forth of relating, especially in person. So much warmth and joy emerges for me about their expressions, their stories, the way they lean into life, how they joke, their choice of drink, how they gesture, the way the sun is slanting in a window. The implications of meanings, phrases, gestures, intonations, every aspect of relating.
Moment by moment, I’m considering the vastness of the contexts of Saliha and Samantha’s lives, each of them from opposite sides of the globe. The story of their lives not just spoken but implied, indicated, hinted at, owned, celebrated, all cascading in. I marvel at Saliha and Samantha’s joy in showing up so completely with new people in a world with doesn’t always make that safe for any of us.
Every two seconds there’s something new I want to respond to along with the constant voice in my head reminding me to let them finish what they are saying. It is a river of impressions, a raft of two-second thoughts one following on the heels of the next, each swept away by something new, rolling through, coming next and next and next.
I look down and realize I’m still holding the book. The cover doesn’t have the author’s name and the page with dedications has no text. So I turn the page and there it is. It’s a Charles Schultz book. It’s Charlie Brown. It’s Peanuts.
Samatha and Saliha are relational powerhouses. I kid you not. Forces of nature those two. The three of us are talking about family, life, meaning-making, how-we-met stories, and as my two-second thoughts are popping up and getting swept away, the part of my brain with capacity left over says, “Oh, so this little Peanuts book must be a sort of Hallmark Card kind of book that has greeting card style quotes about friendship and a Peanuts cartoon alongside each quote.”
I have been a collector and a fan of comic books since I was seven years old. To this day, I have 5,000 comic books in boxes under a bed in our home. If you show me any comic book image from the 60’s or 70’s I can probably tell you who drew it and who inked it. During my long career, I have also been an animator. I won the 2007 Broadband Internet Emmy Award for an animation I did for the Sierra Club titled Big Fun With Global Warming. Go ahead, have a look. I’ll wait.
I read Peanuts religiously as a child. It spoke true. Schultz pulled no punches. I still view Peanuts along with Calvin and Hobbes as examples of the highest forms of literature due to their rich and unvarnished honesty about the internal dialogues of children. So, I’m holding this book in my hands while having a conversation with Samantha and Saliha. The book is pulling my focus, but its draw is no match for the two human beings before me. We talk about life and families and LinkedIn’s crappy shadow-banning and all points in between.
Suffice to say, I put the book on the table. I had believed it to be a disconnected set of quotes with cartoons borrowed from Peanuts newspaper comics.
Turns out it is not. Not at all.
Until Samantha handed it to me, I have never known this book existed. I Need All the Friends I Can Get is one of the first long form narrative Peanuts stories by Charles Schultz. Arguably Schultz’s breakthrough long form narrative is his amazing cartoon titled A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was written by Schultz and was produced over the course of six short months before being broadcast on CBS on December 9, 1965. It was universally expected to be a flop even by its own producers. It had no laugh track. It had music by Vince Guaraldi, a jazz pianist. It was about a kid who was depressed in spite of it being Christmas. It remains one of the most beloved stories in American culture. Kids still get this story. All of us do.
Schultz’s I Need All the Friends I Can Get predates A Charlie Brown Christmas by more than a year. It is a particular kind of rare treasure. It is our chance to see Schultz’s earliest exploration of a long story form.
Schultz’s ongoing creative constraint had been the three-panel comics format of the daily newspapers of the day. Even the longer form Sunday color comics did not result in what this little book allowed Schultz to do. It spools out in that lovely child’s meandering way that Schulz is so very good at. And like A Charlie Brown Christmas, when the point of it arrives, we realize the story did not meander at all. Not remotely. It speaks to our child’s heart. I’ve included some of the panels here for you to take a look at. You can buy the book on Ebay. I hope yours has a lovely 60-year-old dedication too.
I want to talk a little about the looping gentle human narrative of this book. It opens with Charlie Brown saying “Nobody cares if I live or die.” Just take a moment with this. This is actually how children talk. We don’t want them to say things like this, but it doesn’t change the truth of it. Schultz is first and foremost deeply honest in his depiction of children. They can be sad. They can be cruel. They can be insensitive, distracted, and they can be so very kind. But most of all, they can be lonely.
What Charlie Brown expressed is a universal feeling for all of us as Americans. We knew it as children and we know it as adults. We just don’t admit it. Charlie Brown was so very popular because he was the canary in the coal mine for American disconnection in our post war PTSD-riddled consumer culture. The greatest generation was never allowed to speak of the horrors they had endured both in the war, but also in the terrors of the great depression. Just get on with it. Just keep going. Here, have a new car. A dishwasher. A drink. Maybe two.
Perhaps loneliness in America took root among those deep traumas, but it is now a growing epidemic. CIGNA’s research tells us that nearly half of American adults feel “sometimes or always alone.” Imagine, if you are in a room with twenty people all chatting. Ten of them feel they live lonely lives.
Think about it. Any meeting you are in. Any softball team you are on. Your kids’ PTA. Your own family. Half of everyone you know are deeply lonely. This is happening even as they are working, raising families, loving their spouses.
You may be one of them. I know I have been. Maybe I still am. But deep and ongoing loneliness is something we rarely admit to ourselves, much less say out loud to someone else. Except for Charlie Brown. He has the courage to say it out loud. Bro did some brutally honest men’s work.
About halfway through this little book, Charlie Brown runs into Lucy who asks “What’s the matter with you?” I knew even as an eight-year-old that when Lucy shows up, we have to get ready for what’s coming next. And we all knew what was coming next because her voice is so very familiar.
Charlie replies, “I don’t have any friends… I don’t have one single person I can call a friend.”
Lucy says to Charlie Brown “I think you try too hard Charlie Brown… Be like me. I don’t need any friends… I’m self-sufficient!”
Charlie Brown replies, “Not me… I need all the friends I can get.” On the next page he says I’ll even settle for a fair-weather friend.”
Lucy walks away saying, “Poor ol’ Charlie Brown… He really should try to be like me. I don’t care if I have any friends or not…”
And then Lucy says this. “Just so I’m popular!”
Lucy just comes right out and says it. She doesn’t care about having friends, she cares about being popular, which means she cares about status. In a culture like ours, which drives epidemic levels of disconnection, status is the only form of self-validation allowed.
Millions of us, chasing the false narcotic of social status. Social media sells us this isolating idea every day. We have been tricked into thinking that more followers, more clicks and likes, make a better life, create genuine community. They do not. And failing to see that distinction is a dangerous and deadening force in our culture. The epidemic levels of loneliness we are facing have the same health impact as smoking. Studies by the CDC and others confirm higher rates of heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, even cancer. Cancer metastasizes faster in lonely people.
And men are most at risk. The work of Niobe Way, Judy Chu, Gary Barker, PhD, Ashanti Branch and so many, many others are telling us exactly how our culture of masculinity is breaking boy’s connection the world at an early age. Shaming boys and men for wanting close authentic friendships, to express our emotions, to share what’s going on for us.
Schulz knew the value of friendships and surprisingly, we all know it too, but we are wary of admitting we are lonely. It is shameful for a man to admit he wants more meaningful friendships. Or even any at all.
You can read about how our Man Box culture of masculinity drives boys’ and men’s disconnection in an article I wrote for Ms. Magazine.
Mere months ago, Mark Wiedmann and I started WalkingTalkingMen.org. Benjamin Trustman, a new friend for us both showed up almost immediately. I have a growing circle of friendships, right here in my own neighborhood.
I didn’t invent the idea. Men Walking and Talking has been going on in Great Britain since 2021. (Thanks guys for the inspiration.) Our walks here in the US offer a simple way for men to create real, lasting, local friendships. We are doing it on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Jonathan Jacobs is doing it in Los Angeles.
But know also that any man can do this in the neighborhood where you are. We don’t need a penny. We don’t need to manage it. Reach out if you have questions but it’s your walk, brothers. In fact, anyone who wants more friends can do a walk, men, women, non-binary people, but men in particular need this kind of mechanism for making friends. And then, oddly enough, we open up, connect, create meaningful friendships. Pretty quickly, actually. .
Which brings me back to Samantha and Saliha, a little 60 year old book, and waterfall of two-second a-ha moments at a breakfast place in Maine. Humans are designed to feel such excitement and joy in connection. We are wired for this. It is where all true validation and resiliency resides. Real, lasting friendships are the key to our physical and mental health. I grew up in isolation and loneliness, patterns which carried into my adult life for half a century. But I am finding when I stay open hearted, I’m able to create real lasting connection.
If you’re a man who is trying to find the courage to say “I need friends,” one way is to pay attention to the infinite number of times that artists like Charles Schultz have told us the truth of this. Our moment of courage is when we turn and look. When we look directly at the void of disconnection both in our culture and in our own lives and realize that it is not “just the way things are.” It is not.
Come find our how to begin your own walk at WalkingTalkingMen.org.
And thanks for the cool book, Samantha.
BTW, here’s how the story ends.
