The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [62]
A more regular humiliation was forgetting to bring money for savings stamps. Savings stamps were like savings bonds, but bought a little at a time. You gave the teacher 20 or 30 cents (two dollars if your dad was a lawyer, surgeon, or orthodontist) and she gave you a commensurate number of patriotic-looking stamps—one for each dime spent—which you then licked and placed over stamp-sized squares in a savings stamp book. When you had filled a book, you had ten dollars’ worth of savings and America was that much closer to licking Communism. I can still see the stamps now: they were a pinkish red with a picture of a minuteman with a three-cornered hat, a musket, and a look of resolve. It was a sacred patriotic duty to buy savings stamps.
One day each week—I couldn’t tell you which one now; I couldn’t tell you which one then—Miss Grumpy or Miss Lesbos or Miss Squat Little Fat Thing would announce that it was time to collect money for U.S. Saving Stamps and every child in the classroom but me would immediately reach into their desk or schoolbag and extract a white envelope containing money and join a line at the teacher’s desk. It was a weekly miracle to me that all these other pupils knew on which day they were supposed to bring money and then actually remembered to do so. That was at least one step of sharpness too many for a Bryson.
One year I had four stamps in my book (two of them pasted in upside down); in all the other years I had zero. My mother and I between us had not remembered once. The Butter boys all had more stamps than I did. Each year the teacher held up my pathetically barren book as an example for the other pupils of how not to support your country and they would all laugh—that peculiar braying laugh that exists only when children are invited by adults to enjoy themselves at the expense of another child. It is the cruelest laugh in the world.
DESPITE THESE SELF-INFLICTED HARDSHIPS, I quite enjoyed school, especially reading. We were taught to read from Dick and Jane books, solid hardbacks bound in a heavy-duty red or blue fabric. They had short sentences in large type and lots of handsome watercolor illustrations featuring a happy, prosperous, good-looking, law-abiding, but interestingly strange family. In the Dick and Jane books, Father is always called Father, never Dad or Daddy, and always wears a suit, even for Sunday lunch—even, indeed, to drive to Grandfather and Grandmother’s farm for a weekend visit. Mother is always Mother. She is always on top of things, always nicely groomed in a clean frilly apron. The family has no last name. They live in a pretty house with a picket fence on a pleasant street, but they have no radio or TV and their bathroom has no toilet (so no problems deciding between Number 1 and Number 2 in their household). The children—Dick, Jane, and little Sally—have only the simplest and most timeless of toys: a ball, a wagon, a kite, a wooden sailboat.
No one ever shouts or bleeds or weeps helplessly. No meals ever burn, no drinks ever spill (or intoxicate). No dust accumulates. The sun always shines. The dog never shits on the lawn. There are no atomic bombs, no Butter boys, no cicada killers. Everyone is at all times clean, healthy, strong, reliable, hardworking, American, and white.
Every Dick and Jane story provided some simple but important lesson—respect your parents, share your possessions, be polite, be honest, be helpful, and above all work hard. Work, according to Growing Up with Dick and Jane, was the eighteenth new word we learned. I’m amazed it took them that long. Work was what you did in our world.
I was captivated by the Dick and Jane family. They were so wonderfully, fascinatingly different from my own family. I particularly recall one illustration in which all the members of the Dick and Jane family, for entertainment, stand on one leg, hold the other out straight, and try to grab a toe on