Gems from Ms. Bombeck

Erma Bombeck put the Capital C in Domestic Chaos. Reading her collection of newspaper columns in Forever, Erma, is like eating popcorn: I can't put the bowl down. Every time I think I will read just one more, I find that another 30 minutes have slipped by in hilarity. 

Here are just a few of the gems that I have come across:

The first and only time I was on a ski slope, I had the attention of every person within a two-mile radius. 

My husband seemed to think it was because I was the only woman on skis carrying a handbag.

I can't help it. Do men actually believe women enjoy lugging around a handbag everywhere they go? By the time everyone in the family unloads their stuff on me, I feel like an anvil salesman.

And this lament:

I don't know what my husband thinks I am made of. After spending a day ironing in front of my television, I am so emotionally involved in the tormented lives of my soap opera heroines, you'd think he would sense that I can't take on his problems, too.

"If you're going to share some big, fat trauma with me forget it! I've just lived through three miscarriages, two trial separations, a nasty interfering grandmother, a broken-down actress who's a lush visiting her daughter in prison, a cheating wife, a custody suit, and a neurological workup. I'm exhausted."

Her take on Losing One's Identity:

I contend it's the absence of time to herself that breaks a homemaker's back. Some days it's like living in the eye of a hurricane. It's refereeing a family of differences. It's puppeteering a houseful of personalities. It's making more decisions in a single hour than an umpire makes in nine innings. It's the constancy of a job that runs from one night into the next day and into that night and into the next morning.

And one more:
We've talked before about my husband, the Prince of Darkness. I've told you how he has dedicated his life to turning off lights. How he turns off the porch light before our guests have reached their cars in the driveway. And how he figured the Donald Duck night-light cost 8 cents a year and pulled the plug on it.

Well, I want to correct an erroneous impression I may have left with you. There is one moment when the cost of a light is no object. It can never burn too long or too brightly. In fact, it is the only 200-watter in the entire house. I'm talking about the light by the bed he shines in my eyes when I am trying to sleep and he wants to "read a little to get sleepy."

A lighthouse should have such a light. Night baseball games and operating rooms should benefit from such a radiance.

The other night I asked, "How long are you going to read?"

He said, "Whenever I get sleepy. Why?"

"Because I want to know how much Number Thirty sunscreen to use on my eyelids."

Erma Bombeck Tells It Like It Is

Erma Bombeck
1927-1996

Do you remember Erma Bombeck? She wrote a newspaper column, "At Wit's End" chronicling her life as a suburban housewife in mid-western America beginning in the 1960s and running through the late 1990s. She was funny and my mother adored her. I remember Mom reading her columns and laughing out loud at the breakfast table. 

Ms. Bombeck was a busy woman. She also wrote for magazines, went on speaking tours, tried her hand at writing for television, and published more than a dozen books with titles such as The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression, and If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits.

I had not thought of this funny lady in years, but I came across a collection of her columns that cross four decades, Forever Erma, on the library's ebook shelves.  

I dipped into her section called 'Food for Thought' where she first muses on losing weight: "I have dieted continuously for two decades and lost a total of 758 pounds." 

In another column she hopes that someone will write a cookbook called Cookbook for the Suburban Woman With One Car That is Used by Her Husband which would give substitutions in recipes for ingredients that the cupboard is lacking.

And, here is her response to her doctor's inquiry as to how often she exercises: "I leaned over a week ago Thursday for what I thought was a gingersnap cookie in the carpet, but it turned out to be a cork coaster and I haven't taken a chance since."

Other sections include 'Home Sweet Home', 'Housewife's Lament', and 'Dear Old Dad'. 

It will be fun to read what Ms. Bombeck had to say that so delighted my mother at the breakfast table.