The wit and wisdom of Erma Bombeck...plus, ALIENS!!!
I well remember reading, and greatly enjoying, the Friday Erma Bombeck humor column in the Charlotte Disturber (“The Pravda of the South,” as the old-timers sitting around the tobacco-juice-spattered wood stove at Mt Holly Farm Supply used to call it) when I was but a wee sprat. After running across this Bombeck quote over at MisHum's AoSHQ ONT:
When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me.”
…I was inspired to go looking for more. Happily, I found plenty.
Someone asked me the other day if I had my life to live over would I change anything.
My answer was no, but then I thought about it and changed my mind.
If I had my life to live over again I would have waxed less and listened more.
Instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy and complaining about the shadow over my feet, I'd have cherished every minute of it and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was to be my only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.
I would never have insisted the car windows be rolled up on a summer day because my hair had just been teased and sprayed.
I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded.
I would have eaten popcorn in the "good" living room and worried less about the dirt when you lit the fireplace.
I would have taken the time to listen to my grandfather ramble about his youth.
I would have sat cross-legged on the lawn with my children and never worried about grass stains.
I would have eaten less cottage cheese and more ice cream.
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.
Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere
There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.
Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.
When humor goes, there goes civilization.
Lots, lots more where that came from, all of it wonderful stuff. Fifteen rara avis columns from Erma's early days writing for the The Arkay News—actually kinda-sorta the house organ for Rike’s department store in Dayton, Ohio, where she took a clerical job in 1946 (!) at the tender young age of 19 (!!!), with contributing to the AN being one of the job's duties—can also be perused here. To wit:
In one Arkay News column, Erma described the many benefits of working at Rike’s Department Store: “…Rike’s hospital would give me my Carter’s Little Liver Pill free of charge if I needed it — I could consume 2,624 calories for only 26 cents in the store cafeteria, and if I adhered to my criminal tendencies, I could even clip recipes from the magazines in the ladies’ lounge.”
In another column, about her experience as a sales clerk, Erma wrote, “I wasn’t behind the counter five minutes when I spotted a prospective customer headed toward the door. Using the old running tackle that brought victory to Notre Dame in 1935 I apprehended him. ‘I don’t believe you’ve seen our notions counter,’ I said jumping up and down on his chest.”
All 15 columns, which were originally published between August 1946 and November 1947, can be read in their entirety. Original copies of the magazines are located in the Rike’s Historical Collection in the Special Collections and Archives at Wright State University.
Why yes, I DO fully intend to work my way through all fifteen of those Arkay Bombeck pieces over the next cpl-three days, and will probably be posting more quips and quotes from ‘em over at the CF Mothership after I’m done reading. Why do you ask?
What terrible things it says about how very far our society has fallen that Erma Bombeck's gentle humor would be incomprehensible to contemporary “Americans,” the timeless perspective therein either disdained as “dated” and therefore irrelevant or just condemned outright as being the product not of insight and intelligence, but of some nebulous, unspecified form of “bigotry” and/or “privilege.”
Said insights and humor were once universally understood and appreciated in America That Was, just part of our shared cultural experience. How very sad, then, that today they should come across almost like bizarre artifacts from some far-distant alien planet, transported to us across galaxies in a funky flying saucer.
As such, can it really be just a coinkydink that the Roswell incident of fame and legend occurred in the summer of *gulp* 1947, smack in the middle of Bombeck’s tenure at Rike’s in 1946-47? THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, PEOPLE!
Be all that as it may (or may not), I’ve long felt that Western Civ could greatly benefit from emulating the Oriental reverence for the wisdom of their elders. Erma Bombeck’s work stands as irrefutable backup for the validity of that notion, I think.