DATE: Tuesday, June 24, 1997                TAG: 9706240047

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON

                                            LENGTH:   66 lines

LEARNING NEW LESSONS WITH A SECOND SPIN THROUGH DR. SEUSS

THERE ARE PRIVILEGES that come with having children.

I have an excuse to buy Cheetos - the puffed-up kind - and eat the entire bag. By myself. The grocery clerk assumes I'm buying them for my children, and my kids won't turn me in to the junk-food authorities, because, hey, I'm the mom.

I get to buy the toys my parents wouldn't let me have, like that Suzy-Bake oven I always wanted. Maybe even let my kids play with it a time or two. If they're really, really good.

And - perhaps best of all - I get to re-read Dr. Seuss.

And this time, I appreciate him for the genius he is. I get to meet, once again, Sam-I-Am, the Fox in Socks, Thing One and Thing Two, Yertle the Turtle, and all the little Whos down in Who-ville.

I get to hear my 6-year-old say, ``Oh Mommy, I love Dr. Seuss,'' as she hugs ``Red Fish Blue Fish'' to her pajama-clad stomach.

And, assume, for a moment, that she loves him for the same reasons I loved him as a kid.

For a moment I am transported back to my own childhood bedroom, listening to the sound of my father's rumbling voice guiding my first clumsy reading attempts. There's that same nattering fish who keeps saying the Cat in the Hat should not be about when the mother is out. And Sam-I-Am, still so determined to peddle his green eggs and ham. And Sylvester McMonkey McBean, as always, running sneetches through that machine that slaps stars onto tummies.

With a few decades between readings, I now see why a child would love this master of one-syllable words. My daughter loves Dr. Seuss because she can read Dr. Seuss without tripping over every other sentence.

And the tweetle-beetles and yottles in bottles offer so much more than Dick or Jane or Tip or Mitten or any of those other primer characters that taught us to read but bored us in the meantime.

The lessons so subtle when I was a kid ring crystal clear now:

Sam-I-Am's philosophy of just trying one bite has saved many a parent at the supper table. And seeing how those sneetches with stars on their bellies treated those with ``none upon thars'' taught us we can be different on the outside and the same in the middle. And, sure, that Cat in the Hat is a bad one at that, but he redeems himself at the end with that clean-up contraption.

A cat who picks up after himself?!

Now there's a feline that even this allergy-ridden mother can love.

Seuss was not ahead of his time as much as a man of all times.

What grown-up couldn't benefit from reading ``Oh, The Places You Will Go'' where we learn that with ``a head full of brains and shoes full of feet'' we can go great places. And that when we encounter ``bang-ups and hang-ups,'' we must be diligent in ``un-slumping'' ourselves.

Those are lessons that are as useful today - maybe more - as when I wore pajamas with feet in them.

And perhaps the very best feature of Seuss for those of us too rooted in charts and graphs and work-a-day worries is the Seuss-ville world of whimsical characters: His jertains in curtains and zamps in lamps, and dellars and gellars and zellars in cellars.

Yes, I do like them a lot.

They have opened up the world of reading to my daughter, and unleashed my imagination just as handily as when I was 6.

Like my daughter, I too love Dr. Seuss, I love him here and there and everywhere. MEMO: To pass along comments or ideas for future columns, please call

INFOLINE at 640-5555, and press 4332. ILLUSTRATION: File photo

Now there's a feline that even this allergy-ridden mother can love

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu