Another Great Lady

Back in 1996, when Erma Bombeck died of kidney disease, every print and broadcast outlet in the country ran a piece about her: the lady from Dayton who one day sat down and began sending dispatches, from the front lines of parenthood, that grew into a column and 11 books and a weekly slot on the tube. Though uniformly fond, many of these tributes seem slightly dismissive, framing her as “housewife humorist” or clever dabbler.  In a tribute in The Boston Globe, Diane White noted this too, speculating it was perhaps Erma’s choice of subject matter that led people to see her as a “suburban mother who started writing columns as a lark.”But as White also reminded us, she was a 32-year veteran of deadline journalism. Just like me, only I’m now closing in on 35 years on the job.The morning of her death, my friend Cindy called from her desk at work. I see Cindy rarely since the long-ago days when she had me as her 12th grade teacher. The first thing she asked: Was I writing about Erma this week? “What gets me,” she said, “is how they make it sound like the column was just some easy thing she wedged into the odd-half hour.” But no one spending a half hour could hope to put it the way Erma could always put it. She said she once lived in a place so small she had to iron in the playpen. She said if her kids had looked as good as the kids of her perfect neighbor, she’d have sold them. She spoke about the child who could "eat yellow snow, kiss the dog on the lips, chew gum that he found in the ash tray," but wouldn’t drink from his brother's glass.I quoted some of this in a get-well column I wrote and sent her three years ago when 20/20 first revealed the extent of her illness. In one of the pieces, she was imagining how each of her three kids might someday recall her, one as "the thin...dark-haired [mom] who used to read me stories, bake cookies, paste my baby pictures in the album “; one as "the somber-looking bleached blonde who used to put me to bed at 6:30 and bought me a dog to save on napkins"; and the last as “the grayish lady who fell asleep during the 6 o'clock news and was going to show my baby pictures - when she took the rest of the roll at my wedding.”She had just that light way of remarking on things like Time and its effect on us all. She told the truth, beginning in an era when the “Women’s Pages” revolved chiefly around the woman’s role as consumer, cook, and student of etiquette.She also dealt with the feeling that comes to women raising kids in America’s insular families: "No one talked about it a lot, but everyone knew what it was. It was a condition, and it came with the territory." That condition was loneliness. I learned about this loneliness when I left my job teaching to care for some babies. When the babies napped, I read the paper and met the writer who would one day change my life. When the babies woke, I put them in boots and snowsuits and pushed or walked or carried them, somewhere, anywhere I could find another woman in another house trying to do the hardest job on earth all by herself.Today by conversation’s end, Cindy and I hadn’t figured out a time when we could catch up more by phone, much less get together. “How about I call you at home some night?” I asked, picturing her there relaxing with her husband and one-year-old. “Are you kidding?” she said. “ That’s the last place I have time to talk!”Erma would totally get that. I hope she and Maya Angelou are having a great old laugh in Heaven right now.

More Maya Angelou, on Men

She also had this to say, Ms. Maya Angelou, when that same interviewer from TIME magazine asked “Did you inherit your mother’s fondness for guns?”“I like to have guns around. I don’t like to carry them," said Maya.“Have you ever fired a weapon?” asked the person from TIME.“I was in my house in North Carolina. It was fall. I heard someone walking on the leaves. And somebody actually turned the knob. So I said 'Stand four feet back because I’m going to shoot now! Boom! Boom! The police came by and said ‘Ms. Angelou, the shots came from inside the house.’ I said ‘Well, I don’t know how that happened.’Well now we know that It’s wrong to feed falsehoods to  cops - of course! -  but  the way I look at it, those two cops were probably guys and it's really is never a mistake to  keep a pretty tight hold on how you communicate  things to a guy. “You want to control the information when it comes to your man,” said  my very own mother-in-law regarding my relations with her own darling boy.  “Timing is everything,” she added, nodding her head in emphasis.I believed her. Hadn’t she just recently told me about the time when, driving home from HER mother-in-law’s house carrying on her lap the  extra platter of the eggplant parmesan that she'd made for the family, her own young husband patted her knee and said while it had tasted perfectly fine, really it just wasn’t QUITE as good as the way his mother made it? And hadn't she in response and on the spot opened the car window and tipped the whole drooly platter out into the street?Yes she had, indeed she had.I love stories like these two, told by Ruth Payne Marotta and the wonderful Marguerite Johnson AKA our Miz Maya Angelou. They inspire me and make me want to also say to any men who mess with me: Stand back four feet now.Son.And get ready for what’s comin’ at you now - and you'd best HOPE it's just a platter of eggplant. :-)

maya angelou

“You endured some really horrible things, mostly at the hands of men,” somebody at AARP ‘s Monthly magazine said to Maya Angelou in a 10 question Q & A  last spring. “Have gender relations improved?Here’s how she  responded:"No, I think men are as crazy as they were and women are as crazy as they were."I think it’s wise when women say what they like and don’t like and will and won’t take. Men ought to do the same. I've never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some but I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married quite a lot of them."As I say, gotta love her!