Beyond Erma Bombeck: A Tale of Teen Rebellion

When I was a teenager I read Erma Bombeck books. Since the so-called "failing" public school system takes such a bashing these days, I might as well confess the resentment I felt over having to read Salinger and Hinton in junior high school (we hadn't yet dumbed down to "middle school"), under the mistaken notion that I would be interested in reading about teenagers simply because I was one. How was I supposed to relate to Salinger's neurotics? Franny and Zooey, it seemed to me, deserved each other; and as for Holden Caulfield, well! (If you're 18 years old and have the opportunity to run around New York City unsupervised with a big wad of cash and don't have any fun, you're beyond hope.)

S.E. Hinton's fiction wasn't much more relevant: greasy-haired kids from blue-collar families sneering at their social betters. Nothing like that happened at the vanilla-white-bread suburban high school I went to. It was the late 1970s, and the boys came to school armed only with those odd-shaped combs, swaddled in the back pockets of their designer jeans, to use on their odd-shaped hair. (To be honest, teen movies of the era like Breaking Away--do you suppose Dennis Christopher's leg hair ever grew back?--didn't do much for me, either. Personally, I felt like slapping those "cutters" around myself. As such movies go, give me the classics where the teenagers are played by thirty-year-olds.)

In fact, to digress a bit, we disco-era suburban teens were, for the most part, not the combative or confrontational type. Television censors hadn't yet improved the violence out of our Saturday-morning cartoons. The kids who started bringing guns, knives, and similar utensils to school were the ones brought up on things like "Rainbow Brite" and "The Care Bears." Think about it. Consider, also, how many serial killers and would-be assassins cited Catcher In the Rye not only in their defense but as their defense. You never heard a rifle-wielding maniac say "I was reading At Wit's End [Erma Bombeck's first book, also the name of her thrice-weekly column], and something snapped."

Anyway, what brought me to the writings of the late Mrs. Bombeck was a back issue of Reader's Digest that happened to be in my ninth grade English classroom, containing excerpts from Bombeck's most famous book, The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. Bombeck's humor had a lot more to do with my life than any of those dreary coming-of-age novels they kept throwing at us. Even today, I'd rather hang with a wacky housewife than some mopey, self-pitying, pimply adolescent. Wouldn't you?

Erma and I saw eye-to-eye fairly often for two such dissimilar people. She seriously lost me just once, with the following story (which she must have loved, as it appeared in several of her books and Christ-only-knows how many of her columns): Once a very long while ago, there was a cathedral whose chimes would not ring until a gift of True Love--whatever that is--was placed upon the altar. (Right there is a problem with what is clearly meant to be a morality tale. That cathedral sounds very demanding and difficult to please, doesn't it? If you want to ring my chimes, baby, you better give me just the right gift, or else I won't play.)

Anyway, all the great kings from all the great lands offered their riches to the altar. But did they get so much as a tinkle for their trouble from those ungrateful chimes? No siree. (A child would be rebuked for snooting a gift in that manner. "What do you say, Billy?") One day, a shabby youth in a shabby coat silently approached the altar. With a minimum of hype, the youth removed the coat, which was last year's anyway, and laid it on the altar. You guessed it: the chimes went bananas.

What happened to the youth after that, we're not told. Presumably, shabby coats became the "in" gift that holiday season.

This story makes the common but questionable assumption that expensive gifts are not thoughtful gifts, and that only Simple Things have True Worth. At least an unsuitable expensive gift can be sold on eBay, or given away. A homemade gift must be fussed over, used, displayed, worn, eaten (often in that order), or you're scolded for your ingratitude and lack of Values. After all, so-and-so went to a lot of trouble making that incredibly ugly, space-consuming whatever-it-is, or preparing food that nobody likes or eats. (Mrs. Bombeck often expressed her dismay at receiving fruitcake, which she hated, as a gift; that certainly flouted her "chimes" message.)

In college, as an English major, I found myself reading Good Books, a/k/a literature (most of which were in the library so I didn't have to buy them, which is the only advantage to being an English major), and Erma Bombeck went the way of Salinger and Hinton, increasingly less pertinent to my life. Mrs. Bombeck, I came to realize, always did romanticize the wrong things in the name of family values, such as the "You'll always be my baby" mentality, which of course is the nucleus of family dysfunction: I refuse to relate to you as an adult. Too, real-life cathedrals, unlike the one in the story, have never exactly turned up their altars--let alone their chimes--to monetary offerings, and neither have the people who run them. So it's no surprise that, in this age of "faith-based" federal funding, Mrs. Bombeck's chimes ultimately ring hollow.

So maybe Erma Bombeck is at least partially to blame for the bitter, middle-aged cynic whose words you're currently poring over. But at least I never shot anybody.