Fun with Dick and Jane
The Booglet is sick tonight, runny nose, feverish and wanting a lot of book time. Okay sweetheart, Daddy will read whatever you want.

“Dick and Jane,” she says in that little voice that would make me do anything. Eat glass honey? Sure, watch Daddy. Mmmmm, I’ll chew this up and spit you out some beads.

So Dick and Jane it is. For those of you born while Reagan was president, you may never have actually seen a Dick and Jane reader. These maddeningly repetitive stories teach reading through rote memorization of word forms—I know, I read them in school. Now I’m reading them again.

“Up Puff. Up, up up.”

“Oh oh oh. Funny funny Puff.” Ugh. This is killing me but my daughter loves them and she’s so quiet except for her little sniffly nose, burying her head into my shoulder while twisting her blankie with her little hands. I read dutifully, adding color to the otherwise dry storyline.

My mind drifts while my mouth works. Baby Sally would be close to fifty years old by now. Father and Mother would be long dead, passing along their worldly goods to their heirs, Dick, Jane and Baby Sally. I imagine Dick becoming a speech pathologist, Jane a licensed mental health counselor (she always seems to be the pacifier between Mother and Baby Sally). But Sally. Sally’s harder to get a handle on. Cute kid, the baby. I imagine Sally working in New York for a major brokerage firm as in-house counsel in charge of mergers and acquisitions. She occasionally jets back to the Midwest to humor her older brother Dick and her older sister Jane, all the while berating them for living in a red state. Sally’s single, never having settled down for a family. She’s got a high seven figure retirement fund, stock options in the money, and a healthy bonus each year. She likes her martinis—dry. About this time of year she takes off for two weeks and goes down to St. Thomas USVI to enjoy her timeshare, to catch up on reading and to SCUBA dive. She’s still attractive but waning in that way that sells botox injections and eyelid work. She’s thinking about it at pilates…

Funny funny Sally.