Made-up Words
Note: a version of this essay appears in episode 001 of the PeteBrownSays podcast.
In most cases, made-up words grow from a child’s misunderstanding, and they stick around because they’re adorable, or easy to remember, like totes adorbs. When my daughter was in kindergarten, she referred to a hide-a-bed as a Honda bed, and we still say this in my family to this day.
Today, I want to tell you the story of another made-up word in my family, one that comes from my own childhood. I was in kindergarten when my family moved from a smaller single-story ranch in one suburb to a larger two-story in the next suburb over. To ease the transition, I suppose, my Mom had my room painted blue, and went to the local Hallmark store bought and hung a series of posters featuring members of the Peanuts gang.
There was Snoopy wearing sunglasses with the words Joe Cool across his sweatshirt. Linus and his blanket sat under the quote “Happiness is a warm blanket,” which always confused me a bit, to be honest, because the way Linus holds his blanket, you know, seems like it’s more for anxiety and less for warmth.
But the poster that I remember in the most detail, the one I laid in bed and looked at and thought about almost every morning, was a profile of Charlie Brown, laying in his bed, his covers pulled up around his head. The room is keyed in dark purples and blues, and there are little lines around his eyes that Charles Schulz would use to indicate stress or upset. Charlie Brown stares blankly out of frame. Above him is written the phrase “Thought for the day: Go back to bed and hope tomorrow will be better.”
What the fuck, Hallmark?
I’m always perplexed by this memory when it surfaces — and it does surface, more often than I like to admit. It’s a great example of when a product ostensibly for kids is actually written for adults, who might have the context and fullness of time to shake their heads knowingly and think “Oh yeah Been there, Charlie Brown. Been there.”
But when you’re six, you struggle with what Charlie Brown is suggesting here. Stay in bed? For a whole day? What? Why? What’s going on, Chuck?”
But then, then you go to elementary school, and you ride 45 minutes on a school bus twice a day, this in the era before getting all upset about bullying was a thing, the atomic wedgie era, I call it, when your underpants were yanked so hard that the band tears off and when you try to escape, swinging your Evel Knievel lunchbox in wild arcs— just to make create some space between you and those who have inexplicably chosen to torment you, only to see it kicked out of your hands, the lid dent and break off and the thermos inside fall and scatter across the floor, the age when kids would gang up to shove your head in a toilet and flush it and gleefully call out Swirly! Swirly! Swirly! and you can do little more than endure it, and wonder why your teacher never bothered to ask a single question about why you’ve returned to class from the bathroom soaking wet.
You have those days, quite early in your life, you experience that fullness of time, and you find yourself, in grade three, wearied, with stress marks around your eyes, and you lay in bed and look at this poster that some fuckers at Hallmark thought would even be remotely appropriate for kids to hang on their walls, and you think, you think “I get it now, Chuck. I get it. This life sure seems for shit sometimes.”
I think back to my room and this poster often. I’ve spent years of my adult life battling depression, seeing an army of therapists just to keep myself going. And it’s alarming how often I find myself laying in my bed, thinking about my Charlie Brown poster, thinking of the miles and miles and hours and hours between this day and that, marveling at how a world of travels and fifteen thousand days can pass and you still find yourself back here, where you started, trying to deny the truth of this day’s thought: Go back to bed and hope tomorrow will be better.
I feel, now, that I should point out that like many kids of my time, I loved Peanuts. I read the comics every morning in the Plain Dealer while I ate bowl after bowl of Cheerios and girded myself for the bus ride. My parents bought me collections of the comics for birthdays, and in our family we watched every Charlie Brown holiday special there was. Which is all to say that while Chuck and I had a shared understanding about the shitiness of the world, we both also enjoyed the heck out of Snoopy’s antics, marveled at Schroeder’s piano playing and thought seriously about dropping a nickel in Lucy’s can for some much needed psychiatric advice.
And I think it’s because I studied those posters in my room, and because I read strip after strip in the paper, that one day, in art class, in third grade, when we were given a large sheet of newsprint to make our own poster, that I started drawing Peanuts, and though constrained by my third-grade level skills, somehow produced a fairly accurate re-creation of Snoopy sitting with Woodstock atop his doghouse. Somehow I had absorbed the tiny details of each character — the inset of Snoopy’s ear, for example, and the confusion of Woodstock’s feet. Kids at my table looked over and said “Hey, that’s pretty good,” and I, having never really receiving positive praise from my peers, didn’t know what to say. So I said “I know,” and I kept drawing.
Next to the doghouse, I drew Charlie Brown holding a picket sign — a square of poster tacked to a stick. The Peanuts kids could often be found in their comic strips picketing around their neighborhood holding signs like “Welcome Great Pumpkin” or “Today is Beethoven’s Birthday.” I suppose that this was away for the characters to create some agency for themselves — making a sign and tacking it to a stick and wandering their streets with it, as if to declare this is who I am, this is what I’m all about.
Which is probably why I drew Charlie Brown, whom I don’t remember doing any picketing in the comic strip itself, holding a picket sign. And why I wrote on that sign “Be nice to Charlie Brown day.”
Because I think I wanted Chuck to do something about his predicament. To declare that he was worthy of decent treatment. To give him a reason to get out of that damned bed because he was pretty sure today would be OK.
My poster then received the very highest honor a third grade artwork can receive: the teacher laminated it.
Lamination! Lamination! To forever seal your document inside two heat-pressed sheets of clear plastic. To give it a much better chance of making it home untorn and onto it’s rightful place of honor on the family refrigerator.
Which is where I put my poster when I got it home. I should mention that my parents were not very big “artwork on the fridge” types. My Dad was of the opinion that only direct and honest feedback was of value when it came to his son’s artwork; I once showed him a drawing that I had made of a purple helicopter hovering over a waterfall, and he said “this picture’s a fake. The only detail is the helicopter and it’s not drawn very well.”
That might have been the last thing I ever showed him. I was in first grade.
So you can imagine that I was feeling pretty confident about my laminated poster if I brought it home and put it up on the fridge by myself. Check that out, Dad. It’s laminated, bitch.
At dinner that evening, I waited for someone to remark on the awesome Peanuts poster that now graced the fridge, and when they didn’t I finally asked if they had seen my poster.
“What’s beniceto?” my Dad asked.
“What?”
“Beniceto,” my Mom said. “Why is Charlie Brown saying Beniceto?”
At this point, it dawned on me that my handwriting, always a challenge, and the available space on Charlie Brown’s poster had led me to write “Be nice to” with no discernable spaces between the words. And my parents were reading it as one word: Beniceto. And I remember feeling so defeated by this that I just stared straight down at the pork chop on my plate while my Mom tried to make this all seem funny.
“We thought you were learning Italian,” she said “Beniceto! Beniceto!” and then, “Come on. You know we’re only teasing you.”
She said this latter sentence to me a lot while I was growing up. But I’ve never done well with being teased, no matter how minor the joke may be. It’s as if my ability to roll with teasing was flushed down that toilet years before, along with my dignity and my ability to laugh at myself. Swirly! Swirly! Swirly!
I took the poster off the fridge when I did the dishes that night. I don’t know what ever became of it.
I do know what became of Beniceto, however. It followed me as I grew up, hung out in the back of my brain, and when I had kids, I taught it to them. When you’re raising kids, I’ve found it’s handy to have one word that gently reminds someone to be kinds to others. My daughter is in middle school now, and has some teachers who quote “hate our whole class” and quote “give us ten times as much homework as the other kids.” And I listen to her vent with as much empathy as I can muster (which — admittedly — is never enough).
But if her complaining crosses a line, gets personal about a teacher or another student, I’ll softly rejoin “Hey, now. Beniceto, ok. Beniceto.” And my kids know that this means “be nice to” someone, because the truth of the world is that sometimes life can be for shit, but we don’t have the luxury of going back to bed and hoping for a better tomorrow. For whatever little and tiny bit it’s worth in this sometimes shitty world, beniceto, I say. Beniceto.
