When I go home to visit my parents for the weekend, my trajectory when I first arrive at the house always follows the same path: from the back door to the front hall, where I dump my bag and shuck off my shoes in the configuration most likely to get tripped over by another family member; from the front hall around through the dining room and pantry to the refrigerator to browse for a snack; and from the refrigerator to the kitchen table. Although I no longer live at home, I haven’t varied this particular routine since early in high school. Once at the table, I settle down with my snack and a copy of the “Today” section of the Newark Star-Ledger. The “Today” section has all the goodies that the New York Times would never dream of committing to typeface, like comics, horoscopes, the jumble, and of course Ann Landers and Dear Abby and Hints From Heloise – in short, the absolute dregs of print publishing, and thus my favorite parts of the newspaper by far.

My mother and my brother enjoy the “Today” section also (my father sticks to the Wall Street Journal and would probably not so much as glance at Ann Landers even if every other piece of printed matter on earth had perished in a giant blaze), and I suspect that, like me, they continue reading it because they can’t believe how much it stinks. The comics page in particular begs for some merciful editor to lead it around back and shoot it between the eyes, but I’ll get to that later. Let’s start at the beginning of the section with the fashion blurb. The fashion blurb has a charming, almost surreal Dick-and-Jane simplicity about it; usually accompanied by a several-years-out-of-date photo, the column will advise readers, “Looking for a sensible addition to your summer wardrobe? Try a dress!” Not a particular cut or length of dress; not a specific summery pattern or color; just . . . a dress. Finding this sort of counsel singularly unhelpful, I generally skip directly to Hints From Heloise. Hints From Heloise started out as an advice column on how to save money by recycling trash and junky stuff into new and useful stuff in a creative way, but these days, the letter-writers engage in a breed of household-economy one-upmanship that defies belief. These women (men almost never write in) have progressed from innocent egg-carton kiddie krafts to full-blown junkyard-salvage psychotic fugue, to the point where even Heloise seems to think that they need to get a life. The Heloisians save everything – everything. They collect little bitty pieces of string, and they tie all the pieces together to make a big ball of string, and eventually they build a shed in the backyard out of toilet-paper rolls and used Ziploc bags, and they store the big ball of string in the shed. They fashion bicycle chains out of discarded pop tops. They save their own feces for use in the garden. Heloise used to respond to the tips of householders with other tips of her own, but now she blows them off with a terse, “Good idea,” so as not to encourage them further. I for one look forward to seeing what they come up with next. “Ma, oh my god, check this one out – this lady in Des Moines saved up the fuzz from her lint trap, and after a year, she had enough lint to stuff a queen-size duvet and matching pillow!”

Then I turn the page to Dear Abby and Ann Landers. At least Hints From Heloise has the occasional useful tidbit on how to repurpose stockings with runs in them, but Ann and Abby don’t have any useful tidbits at all. First of all, I cannot abide the holiday poems, and furthermore, I cannot abide the readers who write in to say that they forgot to cut out the Arbor Day (or Grandparents’ Day, or Flag Day, or One-Eyed Veterans With Lupus Day, or whatever Damn Day they’ve chosen to celebrate for the umpteenth time instead of answering their damn mail for once) poem when it ran last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and could Ann/Abby please run it again, for the twenty-ninth year in a row, because they find it so touching and such a wonderful sentiment, and they’d like to clip it and frame it for the one-eyed veteran with lupus in their lives. I don’t know about you, but I have a feeling that the one-eyed veterans probably put their own eyes out with safety scissors after reading that sappy Thanksgiving Prayer one too many times. Second of all, on the few days of the year not allotted to wretchedly trite verse, the twins spend the bulk of their time apologizing for crappy advice they gave in previous columns; publishing open letters of apology from reformed drunk drivers to the families they killed behind the wheel, even though these families obviously cannot read the letter, because they died; advising disgruntled grandparents to stop giving presents to their grandchildren if they don’t get thank-you notes, and if this fails, to stop speaking to little Johnny and little Janie altogether; and settling various fracases involving correct wedding etiquette by coming down firmly on both sides of the issue at once, often on the same day. The bride absolutely does, and totally does not, have the right to ban small children from the ceremony. Asking for cash gifts represents the height of bad taste, as well as the height of modern practicality. The groom certainly must wear traditional white-tie attire, unless he doesn’t want to, in which case he certainly must not. The couple should do what they want to do, and the couple should do what their parents want them to do also. (From here, it looks like the couple should elope.) Finish off this rondelet of indecisiveness with the “Gem Of The Day,” which usually involves a witticism on the war between the sexes circa 1964, and there you have it.

Next, a quick buzz through Miss Manners to cleanse the palate. I aspire to Miss Manners’s crisp and disdainful prose, and to her ability to tell people to shut the hell up while maintaining an irreproachable decorum. Whatever your feelings on the little-kids-at-weddings question, you have to admire a woman who advises her petitioners to leave their children at home until they turn eighteen. Speaking of little kids, let’s visit the comics next. We have a game in my family in which we try to avoid looking at “The Family Circus,” because we hate “The Family Circus,” especially little Billy and his horrible puns, and we really hope Bil Keane wanders out into traffic soon, but we can never avoid looking, and every morning one of us groans aloud at the fey adventures of “The Family Circus,” and then the others say, “What? ëFamily Circus’? Why’d you look at it?” and the one who read it says, “I don’t know. I couldn’t help it,” and then the others have to look and see what inspired the groan this time, and the others groan too, and my father just sits there and shakes his head. Ever since the retirement of Gary Larson, the comics page has gotten truly grim, and the comic strips that most desperately needed to follow Larson’s lead keep torturing us with the same “jokes” over and over again. “Heathcliff”? Not funny, take him to the pound. “Garfield”? Ditto. “Andy Capp”? Never funny, and why his wife hasn’t either booted him out or developed a drinking problem herself, I have no idea. And as for “Dennis The Menace,” I understand the need for retirees to save money, but don’t the Wilsons have enough cash for a front-door lock? Hello! Don’t want the kid barging in uninvited? FASTEN THE FREAKIN’ CHAIN! Latch the gate! Build a wall! Dig a moat, buy a Doberman, sell your house! This! Is! Not funny! And can we please marry Cathy off already? Please? Cathy and Ziggy and Funky Winkerbean and Mark Trail can all move to Utah and live in gorp-addled bigamy for the rest of eternity, and they can take Marmaduke with them, because the Angel Moroni himself could not make these characters funny. (Yes, I know “Mark Trail” isn’t supposed to be funny. I just wanted to use the word “gorp.”)

Just when I have worked myself up into a lather about the lameness of the comics and begun planning my own comics-page debut, since even though I can’t draw a convincing stick figure I could still churn out more entertaining strips than these, I flip to the horoscopes. The Star-Ledger runs lovely, stupid, vague horoscopes that truly could mean anything. Apparently written by the same oracle as the fashion blurb section, the horoscope says things like, “Today, something will happen. Tomorrow, something else will happen, and you will have contact with people,” or sometimes, “A relationship may change,” or it just gives generic guidance like, “Don’t let emotion get the best of you.” The horoscope also includes a special longer section called “If Today Is Your Birthday,” which spins even more generalities: “Aries tends to have nostrils, and any given day finds you breathing through them. In the year ahead, you will probably eat pasta at some point.” Gee, thanks for the tip.

Sometimes I read Dr. Brothers, but more often I don’t, because she does a lot of little quizzes to test the readership’s knowledge of topics like homosexuality and drug abuse. Inevitably, the fatuous questions make it pretty easy to get six out of eight correct – “True or False: Homosexuality is sick and wrong” – which always makes me “better informed than most on this subject.” A quick eyeball of the “Eye On TV” section reveals that someone has interviewed Delta Burke for the tenth time in as many weeks, so I close the paper and clean up my snack dishes.

I don’t really see why papers still include these sections. I don’t want them discontinued, mind you – I love the “Today” section – but do people really write to Ann and Abby and then sit waiting for the answer before proceeding with their lives? Do people really turn eagerly to the comics section in case Andy Capp doesn’t play rugby that day? Sure, if more people read Miss Manners, we’d all benefit, but I do wonder what kind of draw these sections have (outside my house, of course, where it functions like an electron magnet). I wonder what will become of the advice-column genre when Ann and Abby retire, or die. The comics will surely survive, but what about Heloise? What about the crosswords – not the Times crossword, but the other ones, the bad ones, the ones easier than the one in “People”? More importantly, what will become of me when I actually have to read current events instead of burying my head in the gardening column?

The Star Ledger in all its glory.

Abby in all her glory.

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