Dr. Seuss Day Revisited

By Elizabeth Bolton

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Tongass School of Arts and Sciences sits beneath Deer Mountain, in the Bear Valley section of Ketchikan. It is carved out of a hillside: from the front, you would never know that there is a playground nestled underneath the school, a significant benefit in a rainforest town that gets 150 inches of so-called “liquid gold” every year. The interior of TSAS is not designed like your typical American elementary school. For one thing, there are no walls. Low bookshelves separate classrooms from the three ersatz hallways that run through the building in the shape of a capital H. Each grade level is divided into two “sides,” designated by teacher (“Ms. A’s side; Ms H’s side”), with two grade levels per class. In other words: Ms. A is responsible for half the kindergarteners and half the pre-K students, Ms. H the other half (including my daughter). Sometimes the students are grouped by grade, other times by “side,” and sometimes they all come together, for Native Dancing class, for example, or to celebrate Elizabeth Peratrovich in a school-wide assembly. On March 2, 2020, Dr. Seuss Day, the main hallway which runs between the pre-K/K rooms and the 1st/2nd grade rooms is filled with electric skillets, small hams, and a handful of parents stirring green food coloring into scrambled eggs. 

Sometime between 1990 (when I finished elementary school) and 2019 (when my daughter started kindergarten), Theodore Geisel went from children’s book author to national hero. More commonly known by his nom de plume, Dr. Seuss, Geisel was the author of such books as Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Lorax, and perhaps most famously, The Cat in the Hat. If you don’t have a grammar-school aged child, you may not know that Dr. Seuss Day is celebrated like a major holiday. Here are some questions my daughter asked in the weeks leading up to March 2:

“Are there presents on Dr. Seuss Day?”

“Is Dr. Seuss Day more important than Christmas?”

“Shouldn’t we have no school on Dr. Seuss Day?”

“Is the day after Dr. Seuss Day a holiday too? How about the next day?”

“Is Dr. Seuss a saint?”

To paraphrase John Lennon: my six-year-old thinks Dr. Seuss is bigger than Jesus.

Back to TSAS, and the green eggs. Ezekiel’s mom looks askance as she stirs. “If I were going to do this at home, I would puree up some spinach and turn it green that way.” Hank’s mom nods sagely, but keeps squirting food dye into her big plastic bowl.

In the open entryway to Ms. C’s 1st/2nd grade classroom, a mom I don’t know stirs a combination of baking soda and (more) green food coloring with a woefully inadequate tablespoon. 

“It’s supposed to be goobleck,” she says, when I wander in her direction, holding my one-year-old. I think about Seuss’s canon for a minute. 

“Ooblek?” I say. It’s from Bartholomew and the Ooblek, about a king who gets tired of existing precipitation and convinces the royal sorcerers to invent a new kind. 

“Yes!” she cries. “Ooblek!” She lets me stir the goop. “It’s fun, isn’t it?” she asks. She’s right. It has a strange texture that reminds me of walking barefoot in a marsh, and it’s very fun to stir. When I accidentally drop the spoon into the muck and apologize, she shrugs. “That’s the point,” she says. “To get a little messy.”

Devin’s dad walks by, scratching his beard, peering at every table. “I’m looking for a knife, or scissors,” he says. “I want to cut open the ham.”

“We’re waiting for that too,” says Hank’s mom. Her eggs are nice and green and she stands at attention in front of them. She is retired Army and she has perfect posture.

“Ms. D is coming back with a knife,” says Ezekiel’s mom, her long black hair piled high on her head. Everyone murmurs their approval. 

There is nothing left to do near the breakfast station, so I take my little one next door into the library. Ms. S, the school librarian, has glasses and a big smile. My daughter once described someone as having “an open face,” which is a good way to describe Ms. S, too.

“Do you mind if we hang out in here?” I ask, already making myself comfortable. “There are plenty of grown-ups and not much for me to do.”

“Please!” she says, cutting strips of paper. Behind her sit red boxes that say Scholastic on the side. The book fair is next week, and I know from past conversations that this is a busy time of year for Ms. S. 

“Normally I have all the Dr. Seuss books out and ready to be read,” she says, scurrying out of her seat and beelining for a bookshelf to the right of me. She pulls out a stack of books. They are easy to spot, even with just the spines showing—each Dr. Seuss hardback has a small image of the Cat in the Hat above the title. (The confusing part, at least for my kindergartener, is that there are also Cat in the Hat images on books that weren’t written by Dr. Seuss, but are Beginner Books considered part of his library. Classics like Go, Dog, Go by PD Eastman and Snow by Roy McKee fall into this category.) Ms. S pulls out Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? from the pile—“My niece used to love this one!”—and I begin reading it to my son. At fourteen months, he is somewhere between baby and toddler. He is mostly uninterested in books, except to chew on them. Somehow we manage to make it through the book before he pulls himself off my lap and wanders into his sister’s classroom.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

The students on Ms. H’s side are engaged in various different activities, mostly Dr. Seuss related. There is a coloring page that reads “Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!” (Geisel died in 1991, at 87.) There is a slide show playing Dr. Seuss titles set to music. A few children play with blocks and other manipulatives. Some are in the adorable Writing Center—overturned apple boxes stocked with clipboards and writing utensils. For some reason my daughter is in the Safe Space, where children go when they have big feelings they need to sort out. She looks totally calm, so I’m not sure why she’s in there; I’ll have to remember to ask her after school. My son finds a step stool that has two steps on it; he climbs up and down it 47 times. The smell of ham has started to permeate the rooms. I don’t eat ham as a general rule, and particularly not ham that has been cooked on an electric griddle in an elementary school hallway, but even I have to admit that it smells delicious. 

Several parents appear in the entryway to Ms. A’s side bearing plates of green eggs and ham. In short order, the children are sitting at their small tables, tucking into the steaming plates. I pitch some softball Mom Jokes: “How are your green eggs and chicken?” “It’s not chicken, it’s HAM!” “Oh I’m sorry, of course it’s not chicken. It’s green eggs and tofu.” “It’s NOT TOFU…!”

A little boy who spends a lot of time in the safe space—let’s call him Tyler—approaches me with a copy of Green Eggs and Ham.

“Would you like me to read this to you, Tyler?” I ask. Tyler is a lot of work for his teachers, a lot of work for his parents. But I see him on the occasional field trip, or the odd class party, and for me he’s actually kind of a delight: spirited, funny, and (most importantly) he actually seems to like me. He nods. I read half of Green Eggs and Ham. Tyler starts flicking his plastic fork off the edge of the table, launching it through the air. He’s still listening. I take the fork from him. Ms. H comes by to invite everyone to the carpet to hear One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.

“We’ll finish this another time,” I say to Tyler. The children gather on the carpet. Some of them are wearing their shirts backwards. Others have their clothes on inside out. This is encouraged on Dr. Seuss Day, though it’s the sort of behavior many five-year-olds engage in anyway. My daughter is wearing two different boots. I’m not sure anyone has noticed. 

My son is losing focus. He has discovered that he can reach the colored pencils stored in glass mason jars in the Writing Center, and he is doing his almighty best to smash the mason jars and send the pencils flying. I need to extricate him before this actually happens. I kneel behind my daughter and squeeze her, explain that I have to leave. She hugs me very tight, tells me she wishes I could stay, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the book in Ms. H’s hands. 

By the end of Green Eggs and Ham, the character in the book who is not Sam-I-Am, the unnamed character who has been adamantly opposed to trying green eggs and ham, has become a convert. “You may like them. You will see. You may like them in a tree!” Sam-I-Am has been pleading. When the other character finally does, it is a revelation: “And I will eat them in the rain. And in the dark. And on a train. And in a car. And in a tree. They are so good, so good, you see!” As I pick up my son and start to walk out, I notice that Tyler has placed a sticky note on the page where we left off, in the hope, perhaps, that we will pick up there at a later date. The page he has marked is before the turn in the story, when the unnamed character lists eight ways he does not like green eggs and ham: in a house, with a mouse, here or there, anywhere, etc. I am reminded of another of Geisel’s contrarians—the infamous Grinch, who attempts to ruin Christmas but is foiled by the goodness of the Whos. I was half-dreading Dr. Seuss Day. Perhaps more than half. But I am lucky—lucky that I’m the mother of a daughter who is not embarrassed by me yet; that I am the mother of a son who still finds profound joy in climbing a step stool over and over; that I can stir ooblek, and tell dumb jokes, and read stories to children who need a story read to them. There was a time in my life when I would wake up in the morning and my heart would sink, thinking of all the things I had to do that day that I didn’t want to. That doesn’t happen anymore. Dr. Seuss Day is a reminder that life is good, and full, and rich. As Geisel might have reminded me, “Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.” As I walk out of the school, I pull my son’s hood up—something is falling from the sky. It’s a cross between rain, hail, and snow. Perhaps it’s ooblek.

“And I will eat them… in the dark.”

Three weeks after Dr. Seuss Day, TSAS is a ghost town, its un-halls and wall-less classrooms empty of students and teachers. There are no cars in the parking lot the school shares with the local Rec Center; both buildings are closed up tight. Spring break has been extended by a week. Once school starts up again, it is virtual. Coronavirus is invisible, but it can be seen everywhere in the absences, in the emptiness—more dystopian novel than silly children’s book. And even here, in the midst of a global pandemic, perhaps there is something to be learned from Dr. Seuss. “Don’t cry because it’s over,” Geisel purportedly said. “Smile because it happened.” During these early, frightening days, I try to remember that there was a time, not so very long ago, when children sat next to each other on a little carpet while their teacher read them a book; in that quiet classroom, there’s a sticky note marking a page we will one day return to.