There was a time when the JFK assassination, with all its cultural baggage, affected me in that way. But only in retrospect, when I understood what a loss of innocence it was, and how the Kennedy mystique is pinned to a generation's fascination with casual wealth, elegance, and the belief in everything that you read, hear, and see on the television and in the newspapers and on the radio is absolutely true.

Momentous events seem to strike at my emotions at random. Take LBJ announcing that he would not seek the nomination for re-election. I am moved by the way he tacked that announcement on to the end of an otherwise honorable address, by how it brought those who hated him to his defense, and by the fact that his decision wreaked consequences still being felt today. But most of all I was moved by how personal it was. From out of nowhere, through his poor-boy choice of words, you were suddenly the last place you might ever imagine being: inside the head of a president.

I have been listening to the LBJ tapes on CSPAN Radio, and am impressed by how vulnerable he really was. Hubert Humphrey wrote about this in the Times a few months ago. Humphrey said that if he had known how torn LBJ was about Vietnam he would have challenged him on it. Challenged him to a no-holds-barred oval office slugfest with him and all his enemies in which all would have been forced to come together and where no one would go home until there was a solution.

I was also moved by Henry Kissinger's eulogy at the funeral of Richard Nixon. Intensely personal and dignified, we learned that one of the last things Richard Nixon heard was good tidings, forgiveness, and friendship from one of the demonstrators who nearly starved himself to death and ate his own shit 30 years earlier in protest of Nixon's Vietnam policies.

There is something about celebrity that is still, in the year 2000, impenetrable. Most people I know consider themselves, on average, to be better examples of humanity than politicians. But before JFK this was not true. There was respect for the presidency, respect for Senators, not sarcastic derision and apathy.

LBJ's redneck stomp through the White House is usually considered the end of America's respect for the presidency, but I think it started with the blushing-bride coverage of Eisenhower's colon in the 1950s.

In high school, my friend Pete made me jealous when he showed me his collection of Peanuts Classic books. I had a few, but his rich lawyer father bought him the whole damn set of 50 or however many volumes. I can still remember seeing all those books and thinking that he would probably never read or even open most of them, but if they were in my house I would have read and memorized every page.

Which is what I did with the Charlie Brown books we did have. There have been so many strips I read 20 years ago which make me bust out laughing at unexpected moments throughout my life. The one where Lucy stole Schroeder's piano and threw it into the sewer. The one where Linus describes to Charlie Brown in agonizing detail what the next 16 years of school will be like, in which Charlie Brown runs screaming. The lifetime of familiarity and comfort that those Peanuts books and greeting cards at the Family Mart or Eckerd Drugs or Walgreen's throughout Florida and the United States have given me.

The best birthday gift I think I ever gave anyone was in 1993, when I gave a friend from college a stack of Peanuts Classic books. We talked for weeks about how artistic the drawings were, and how it was not always funny, but neither was much of anything else.

So tonight I called Pete, and got right in to the Charlie Brown talk. As I found out 2 hours into the conversation, he had no idea Charles Schulz had died. But it didn't matter. We have a whole Charlie Brown comedy routine that makes no one but the two of us laugh convulsively. I will not share it now. You have to have been there when we created this routine in the hallway outside my bedroom 15 years ago to understand it now, and you have to have been in this head all these years to know why it is still funny.

Then the conversation wandered around through our enveloping grown-up concerns. Why the each of us doubts we will ever trust another person or be with anyone else for more than a weekend. Do things always change, or are they actually always staying the same?

Why is it that all things that happen lead to nothing more than another period of time spent waiting for something else to happen?

And then the seemingly lightweight questions: What is funny to God? What could any person say to make God erupt into a full-out belly laugh? Did I tell you what I was just thinking about the book of Job?

It is still true for me that the moments I remember best in this life are those when I or someone laughed and laughed and laughed. Tonight we laughed and laughed and laughed.