Erma Bombeck, the legend. I didn’t realize how old she was, either. ;) In this book she chronicles her family’s move from a cramped city apartment to the wonders of Suburbia.
mind you, this was back when Suburbia was brand-spanking new, a wild frontier. before there were post offices and schools there. they actually moved in before television became popularly available, which, when you think about it, is a huge cultural change. and fodder for some delightful parodies.
I can relate to her completely in some instances:
“Let me lay it on you, Cleavie, the high spot in my day is taking knots out of shoestrings- with my teeth- that a kid has wet on all day long.” (p. 29)
“For a moment, there was only the silence of a toilet being flushed consecutively, two dogs chasing one another through the living room, a horn honking in the driveway, a telephone ringing insistently, a neighbor calling to her children, the theme of “Gilligan’s Island” blaring on the TV set, a competing stereo of John Denver, one child at my feet chewing a hole in the brown-sugar bag, and a loud voice from somewhere screaming, ‘I’m telling.’” (p. 94)
oh, can I ever relate. ;)
but in other ways, I’m too atypical to relate to her. it really hit home when she was parodying/conveying her desperate loneliness to her friend, who was sitting with her in the house having coffee, and she was constantly interrupted by friends calling her on the phone and showing up on her doorstep out of the blue. and I thought, wow, that is so not my life. that is so not my life that if I dreamt something like that at night, I’d frame it and put it on the wall as it would be the most unrealistic thing I’d dreamt all year, even compared to the dancing rhinoceroses.
it’s brilliant, mind you, but you have to be close enough to her experience for the humor to really shine through. and I never realized how different my personality was from Erma Bombeck’s. (I only read her all the time when I was growing up.) I’m just such an odd duck.
Still love her, though.
between the reaction I had to her and to Dave Barry (a growing melancholy!), I think I will just not even pick up Lewis Grizzard’s work. he used to be my favorite of all. but I’m not in the South anymore, and I’m afraid to look and spoil the good memories. ever since he wrote once about being in an airport in the North and being brought Pepsi instead of Coke, and the waiter saying, “It’s the same thing”, and him jumping up out of his seat with “No, By God, it’s not!”... that endeared me to him forever. ;) so, I guess I’ll leave him be, at least for now. even though I’ve always wanted to read his book Elvis Is Dead And I Don’t Feel Too Good Myself.
sounds like my kind of book. but I'll wait.
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