06/25/2026
In case you missed our summer newsletter, here is our feature article, written by Wayne:
"Bluey"
Our grandchildren in Miami have a morning routine: a snack, a cup of juice, and quiet time in front of the television until the rest of the household awakes. During a recent visit, while I was performing my morning ritual of making coffee, I was invited to join them for an episode of something called “Bluey”. I admitted I’d never heard of it. Apparently, I was one of the last people who hadn’t discovered “the best show ever”.
I sat down to humor them, fully expecting ten minutes of polite tolerance, followed by an excuse to go check my email. Instead, I discovered that Bluey is a cartoon about an Australian family of dogs who somehow run a more functional household than most sitcoms I’ve watched. There’s six-year-old Bluey, her little sister Bingo, their endlessly patient Mum, and their father, Bandit- a grown man who plays make-believe with the energy of a golden retriever that’s just spotted a tennis ball. Each episode runs ten to fifteen minutes and somehow manages to teach real lessons to kids while sneaking in jokes clearly written for the parents in the room. Bandit, I should mention, is basically a large, exhausted child with a mortgage. I related to him on a spiritual level.
What happened next is a blur. One episode rolled into the next. I laughed. I kept laughing. At some point, my coffee cup went empty, so I stood up to refill it, and that’s when I noticed the room had gone suspiciously quiet. And empty. I called out to my wife, Wendy, asking where everyone had gone. She informed me that I had been sitting there watching Bluey by myself for about an hour, laughing alone.
A few months later, our grandchildren from Maine came to visit, and naturally, I asked if they wanted to watch Bluey. They’d never heard of it either. “What?” I said, “It’s only the best show ever.” We started with my favorite episode, “Smoochy Kiss”. In it, the girls decide they want their father entirely to themselves, so they hatch a plan to keep their parents apart and prevent a single smoochy kiss from ever taking place. They smuggle Bandit away and hide him from Mum, only to discover up close and personal that he has smelly armpits, mysteriously smelly “fluffies”, and has recently relieved himself on his own foot and used Bluey’s shirt to clean up the evidence. Thoroughly disgusted by their own father, the girls promptly hand him back to Mum, smooches and all. Hilarious.
History, as it turns out, repeats itself. One episode rolled into another, and I sat there laughing, fully absorbed, completely unaware of the passage of time or, apparently, the quiet departure of my entire family. At some point, I looked up and realized again that I was sitting alone. “Hey,” I called out into the empty room, “where did everyone go?”