Sammy Says

By Eleanor Lippman

It’s hard to remember, but there was a time before cell phones and Zoom calls and instant messaging when keeping in touch with people who lived far away was only possible by means of expensive long distant telephone calls or by writing letters. My brother and I, living on separate coasts, came up with an interesting alternative. We stayed in touch using portable cassette tape recordings that we sent back and forth. Each cassette tape, smaller than a package of filter cigarettes (remember those?), held up to an hour of conversation and could be mailed for little more than the cost of a first-class postage stamp.

And so began the excitement of finding a cassette from my brother in the day’s mail and listening to my brother, his wife and their two sons chatter away. Then my husband and I set the very same tape to ‘record’, respond, and mail it back.

About that time, morning coffee break where I worked was turning into a joke-fest competition. Employees filtered into the break room around ten o’clock, got their coffee and then told jokes, everything from lame knock-knock jokes to shaggy dog stories, in an attempt to outdo the previous jokester. There were some very raw and adult jokes tossed in as well, and I often wrote down the punch lines so I could tell the jokes to my husband.

So, I started opening my recorded response to my brother and his family with one or two of the funny quips I picked up at work. There were so many   I never seemed to run out, and soon I was including them without remembering that my two young nephews were also listening.

So what, I figured. They were too young to understand the very adult jokes.

One day, I picked up the telephone and heard my sister-in-law’s very upset voice.

“We have a problem,” she said.

Panicked, I thought something very serious had happened for her to make a long-distance telephone call.

She explained. The head of the nursery school where four-year-old Sammy spent his days, called and asked my brother and his wife to come in for a private meeting.  They were ushered into her office, and she said that something had to be done about Sam. Sammy, the very clever and loveable, happy, well-adjusted child. What could possibly be the matter?

“Well,” she said, “Sam often comes to school and gathers his little friends around him, engages in animated conversation, then collapses on the floor in riotous laughter, leaving the other children absolutely clueless.”

Curious, the adult caregivers started paying attention to what Sam told the other children. To their shock and surprise, he was repeating the adult jokes he heard me tell and was reacting just as he saw his parents do when listening to what I had said. The most amazing thing was that he was able to remember and mimic so well how I told the joke, and how his parents responded, that the adults in the nursery school started listening to him and laughing too.

It became the talk of the place: little four-year-old Sammy telling raunchy jokes without a clue as to their meaning and entertaining the staff in the process.

It had to stop.

And it did.

Recently I came across a small cardboard box containing paper clips, scissors, some very old and unusable Scotch tape, and, of all things, the very last cassette tape my brother sent me before his untimely death, which left a grieving widow and two pre-teen sons.

Memories flooded back of years of exchanging tapes, of hearing my nephews grow up, of staying in contact with my brother and his family, but best of all, the memory of four-year-old Sammy telling dirty jokes he didn’t understand at nursery school, keeping the staff entertained and amazed.