We are pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.

This is nothing new for the balding boy. Charlie Brown has been falling victim to Lucy's little trick every year for, oh, about a million years now. And the trick was getting old even before “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz passed away and the strip went into permanent re-runs. (Wait a minute. Isn't one of the characters actually called “Re-run?” I think so.)

Anyway, we stopped the re-runs in our daily paper years ago. The Sunday News hung on, until now. Hesitant though the editors are with messing with ANYTHING comic-wise, we are going with “Rhymes with Orange” effective next Sunday, July 15.

Several readers (that's more than three, fewer than 3,000) have suggested it to me. So here goes. I'd be happy to hear your reactions.

“Peanuts” was famous for never hearing from adults, other than a “waaah, waah, waaah” off-stage. That's too bad, in a way. Kids can learn things from grownups, and grownups can certainly learn from kids.

On the 4th of July, as grandson Ike watched, I was failing miserably at making noise with a blade of grass held just so between my hands. Along came his mother, who blew the grass loud and clear.

“That's because you're old, isn't it?” Ike asked me.

The lady of the house, who has informed me that we are looking for a new McQ. mansion, was waxing poetic the other evening about tenements.

“We should get one,” she said, as simply as if she were adding “milk and juice” to the grocery list.

“That way, three generations of the family could all be in one place, on different floors.”

I was tempted to ask if this could be all boys on one floor, girls on another, but temptation passed. Instead, I told her, simply, that it wouldn't work because neither she nor I speak a second language and I'm not about to learn.

“Tenements were good when the grandparents came from the old country,” I reasoned. “They spoke Yiddish or Irish or French or Armenian and they taught their kids the old ways, in the old tongue, and they smoked Camels, or rode them, and their teeth weren't so good. I don't think we would be allowed to live in a tenement.”

Still, it was another clue that we won't be relocating to my hometown of Candia anytime soon.

We didn't have tenements in Candia. I had to ride my bike several miles over to Patten Hill Road just to rub elbows, or play dominoes, with my grandmother. And although she had a gold tooth, she and her sister, poor women, only spoke English. I was deprived as a child. I think I shall apply for a public grant of some kind, perhaps in the form of a mortgage. Or for grass-blowing lessons.

Write to Joe McQuaid at publisher@unionleader.com.