IN THE PAGES

Dear Spike:

With your father's attention often compromised by work, you've become quite adept at keeping yourself entertained (particularly with with pie pans, wastepaper baskets, empty oatmeal containers and other items that weren't made in China for pennies on the dollar and that we didn't need to purchase for dollars on the penny — go figure.)

Oh, you have plenty of other toys. You have a whole basket of stuffed animals (many purloined from your mother) and lots of toys that beep and whistle and jingle and zip. You have a box of wooden boxes that you love to fill up, empty and fill again. And you have a little computer that you like to pound on (saving your father's real computer, which you also like to pound on.)

But your books are, by far, your favorite playthings. Yesterday you spent a good hour — maybe more — sitting on the floor of your room and flipping through the various stories as I sat on the rocking chair and belted out an article about chronyism in city government. And today you're back at it again.

Although I know it will be quite some time before you can read the words, you seem to have a pretty good idea of how these things work: Open left to right, one page at a time, until you get to the end — then pick up another and start again.

Your mother is a bookworm. Your father is a newspaper junkie. Voracious reading is pretty much in your blood, if not your very genetic code. And so I won't be surprised if you taken a keen interest in the written word. But I'll still be proud. Because if there's one very good way to spend a few minutes, or a few hours, or a few days, it's buried in the pages of a great book.

Love,
dad