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I’m on vacation this week, so instead of a regular newsletter, I decided to examine a children’s classic that has been taking up a lot of my brain space lately. Back next week!

Raising children frequently offers one the opportunity to revisit the touchstones of one’s youth with a more experienced, critical eye. Who among us has not wondered how Garfield knows that it is Monday, or why Mickey is a mouse who owns a dog?

But perhaps no artifact of children’s pop culture feels more bizarre, more confounding, or, on closer inspection, more fascinating, to me than the multivolume story of Amelia Bedelia.

Written by Peggy Parish from 1963 to 1988, and continued by her nephew Herman for decades after, the Amelia Bedelia stories revolve around the eponymous Amelia, a rosy-cheeked woman with a starched apron and a perpetual smile who spends her days absolutely laying waste to her employers’ home.

Asked to “change the towels,” she cuts them to pieces. Asked to check Mr. Rogers’ shirts, she covers them with a checkerboard pattern. Asked to strip the sheets off a bed, she tears them to shreds.

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