Dear Reader

Ikept reading it, trying to figure it out,” my mother says on the phone. “Waste of my time.” " C'mon , Mom", I say. "Mother Goose as as stand-in for 'Dear Abby'? Where’s your sense of humor?”

“Apparently not sharp enough for Reader’s Digest,” she quips.

We’re bantering about the October RD, as we do about every issue. It’s as if we’re tossing the magazine back and forth across the room, groaning and appreciating, like she would with my dad if he were alive. Except he’s not, and she lives 3,000 miles away.

She tells me she smiled throughout “The Bear Who Came to Dinner.”

She didn’t get the joke about a guy worried about running “a 401k race.” “See?” I explain. “He’s worried the race is 401 kilometers.” Long pause. “Still not funny.”

Then I hear her stop turning the pages. “‘Footprints in the Snow’ was so important,” she says.

We talk about that one for a while. When I was a teenager, my mom worked at the local mental health department. The article concerned a man sitting on a mountain in shorts and tennis shoes during a fearsome storm, hoping to die. “That woman who saved him was so strong-minded,” she says. “It’s beyond belief that she could carry it off, getting him down. I read the last page over and over. It was so beautiful.” We always loved the same stories. Mom is a keeper—high-energy, enthusiastic, blunt, a reader. She made me a reader. Now I send her a gift subscription, simply so we keep having conversations like this. Nearly 20 percent of you either give or receive RD as a gift. Let me know how sharing it with a loved one makes you feel. And thank you, as always, for reading!