Left Foot, Right Foot and Other Nonsense

A book landed on my porch last week, one I didn’t know existed. And one with a surprising topic, at least for Theodor Seuss Geisel.  

For years, I’ve collected Seuss books, starting with the Bright-and-Early board books

Left foot, right foot, I read to my preschoolers. Wet foot, dry foot . . . high foot, low foot.

They couldn’t get enough of the pure nonsense, wanting me to read again and again. They didn’t know that they were learning rhythm and rhyme and repetition, all precursors to reading.  

My kids moved on to I-Can-Read books, feeling smart as they deciphered Green Eggs and Ham. Using only 50 different words—all one-syllable, except one—they followed the exploits of a man who steadfastly refuses to eat the green eggs and ham. 

I would not like them here or there, I would not like them anywhere, my kids read with deep feeling, thinking, perhaps of the zucchini we had for dinner. They didn’t know that Dr. Seuss had a lesson in store. When the man finally tries green eggs and ham, he says, I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!

As a teacher, I used Dr. Seuss’s issue books to illuminate concepts. The Sneetches shares themes with The Outsiders. The Butter Battle Book introduces the Cold War, The Lorax works well alongside Thoreau’s Walden, and Yertle, the Turtle helps students understand the Nazi regime. And I even took Seuss’s Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! to college, using it to introduce educational ideologies.

I was no longer teaching in 2021 when Dr. Seuss Enterprises released a statement saying it would discontinue six Dr. Seuss books. These books, the enterprise said, “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Though I was no longer teaching, a lesson formed in my head—a lesson about how easily we are shaped by the sensibilities around us, how naturally we orient toward centering our own people and decentering others. If I were teaching, my students and I would discuss hurtful stereotypes in the shelved Seuss books. And we’d read Horton Hears a Who, the book about an elephant named Horton, who believes that everyone should be treated equally. And we’d ask, how can this happen? The good and the bad all mixed up together in one author?

But I’m no longer teaching. These days I sit with my nonagenarian parents in doctors’ offices and hospital rooms.

And Dr. Seuss has a book for this too—You’re Only Old Once, the book that landed on my porch last week and a book he wrote when he was flattened with cancer treatments.

He describes the waiting room:

There you’ll sit several hours, 
growing tenser each second, 
fearing your fate will be worse than you reckoned. 

And the hospital tour: For your Pill Drill, you’ll go to Room Six Sixty-three . . .

And the check out:

When at least we are sure you’ve been properly pilled, 
then a few paper forms must be properly filled 
so that you and your heirs may be properly billed. 

Dr. Seuss’s humor and whimsy is a secret sauce that helped Baby Boomers learn to read and to explore hard realities in safe places—nonsensical, pretend worlds. In his book about growing old, a book for obsolete children, as its cover says, he does this again, using humor to show what’s coming for Baby Boomers, in a way that they can (maybe) laugh about it.

And this is why Seuss books, from The Foot Book to You’re Only Old Once, line my bookshelf.