| CARD 1: HELLO FROM A QUIET HOUSE |
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My name is Lois Billingsley. I'm fifty-seven, I'm the part-time secretary at our church, and I have been married to
Jerome for thirty-four years. We have four sons, Gerald, Phillip, Victor and Calvin. On a Saturday in August we drove
Calvin, our baby, all six feet two of him, to his dormitory in Columbus, carried eleven boxes up three flights of
stairs, and drove home. That evening I walked into the kitchen and there was nobody in it but me and the refrigerator.
And on the refrigerator, under thirty years of magnets, were the Erma Bombeck columns.
I started cutting them out of the paper in 1966, the year after Jerome and I were married, and I taped the best ones to
the refrigerator door. When the door filled up, the old ones went in a recipe box, filed between the casseroles and the
cookies, which is where they belonged. We've had three refrigerators since then. The columns have moved every time.
So with the house so quiet and Jerome watching the ballgame, I sat down at the boys' old computer and made this page. It
is a thank-you note. I'm about three years late with it, and Erma would understand, because she knew all about mothers
and thank-you notes.
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For the young people who never got a newspaper on the porch: Erma Bombeck was the funniest woman in America, and she was
one of ours.
She was born Erma Fiste in 1927 and grew up in Dayton, a working family's girl. She was working at the Dayton newspaper
as a copy girl while she was still a teenager, and she went to the University of Dayton and graduated in 1949. That same
year she married Bill Bombeck. She wrote for the paper for a few years, obituaries and the women's pages, and then she
stayed home and raised their three children, Betsy, Andy and Matt.
In the 1960s the Bombecks lived in a new subdivision right here in Centerville, a few miles from where I'm typing this.
I never met her. I wish I could tell you I did. But we shopped in the same stores and drove the same roads, and when I
read her columns about the suburbs I knew exactly which suburb she meant.
In 1964 she started writing a weekly humor column for a little paper in Kettering, for three dollars a column. In 1965
the Dayton paper hired her to write a column twice a week, and they called it At Wit's End, and within a few weeks
it was being printed all over the country. By the late seventies she was in about 900 newspapers. From 1975 to 1986
she was on Good Morning America, too, and I watched her with my coffee while the boys ate their cereal.
The Bombecks moved to Arizona in 1971, which we in Centerville took a little personally. She wrote about Arizona too.
She worked for the Equal Rights Amendment in the late seventies, which surprised some of her readers and didn't surprise
me one bit. Anybody who'd read her knew she thought housework was real work and that the people doing it deserved some
respect.
What made her different, I think, was that she wasn't making fun of us. She was one of us. She had the same station wagon
and the same pile of laundry and the same kid who wouldn't eat anything green, and she just said out loud what all of us
were thinking in the car pool line.
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| CARD 3: HER BOOKS (ON MY SHELF) |
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I own every one of these. Several of them twice, because I lend them out and people don't bring them back, which is
the highest compliment a book can get.
- At Wit's End (1967)
- Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own! (1971), with Bil Keane of The Family Circus drawing the pictures
- I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (1973)
- The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (1976). They made it into a TV movie with Carol Burnett.
- If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (1978)
- Aunt Erma's Cope Book (1979)
- Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (1983). Jerome gave me this one for Mother's Day and thought he
was being very clever. He was.
- Family: The Ties That Bind... and Gag! (1987)
- I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise (1989). This one is about children with cancer,
the ones she met at summer camps for kids who were sick. You'd think it would be the saddest book in the world. It is
funny and brave, because the children are, and I have given away more copies of it than of any other book I own.
- When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home (1991)
- A Marriage Made in Heaven... or Too Tired for an Affair (1993)
- All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann's Dressing Room (1995)
- Forever, Erma (1996), a collection of her columns that came out after she was gone. I read it in the
car in the bookstore parking lot.
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| CARD 4: WHAT WAS ON THE DOOR |
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I won't copy her columns here. They were hers, and you should go find them in her books where they belong. But I can
tell you which ones made it onto my refrigerator and why. A few, out of a recipe box full:
- 1969. One about the first weeks home with a new baby, when you can't remember the last time you finished a
cup of coffee. Gerald was three weeks old. I read it at four in the morning and laughed so hard I woke him up.
- Early seventies. One about the family car trip, with everybody in the station wagon and somebody always
needing a bathroom fifteen miles past the last one. We were three boys by then and I taped it to the dashboard for our
trip to the Smokies.
- Mid-seventies. Her Mother's Day column about God working overtime on the model for a mother, and an angel who
can't believe the list of specifications. My sister mailed it to me. I've seen it framed in half the kitchens in Ohio
since.
- Late seventies. The one where she listed what she'd do differently if she had her life to live over, and most
of it was worrying less and sitting down on the grass with her children more. That one stayed on the door for ten years.
It's the reason I let the boys build a fort out of the good couch cushions in 1980.
- Early eighties. One about the children's rooms, and the mysteries growing in them. Phillip was fourteen. I left
it on his pillow. He didn't speak to me for a day.
- Any year you like. Every single one she wrote about kids going off to school and the house going quiet. I didn't
understand those until this August. Now I do.
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She was sick for a long time at the end, and she didn't make much of it, so I won't either. But I want to tell it plainly,
because she deserves to have it told right.
In 1992 she had breast cancer and had a mastectomy. She wrote about that, honestly and with jokes, and I cut that column out
and gave it to my friend from choir who was going through the same thing that year.
She also had a kidney disease, an inherited kind, and over the years her kidneys failed. For the last few years of her life
she was on dialysis every day, and she kept writing the whole time. She needed a transplant, and she was famous enough that
she could probably have gotten one faster than other people, and she wouldn't do it. She waited her turn on the list like
anybody else.
She got her new kidney in San Francisco in April of 1996. There were complications, and she died there on April 22, 1996.
She was 69.
I heard about it on the radio in the church office. I put my head down on the typewriter. The pastor came out to see what
was the matter, and when I told him, he sat down in the folding chair by my desk and told me his own mother used to read her
column out loud at breakfast. We sat there a while. Then I finished typing the bulletin.
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| CARDS 6, 7 AND 8: THREE OF MY OWN |
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I am not Erma Bombeck. Nobody is. But I've lived through a lot of Tuesdays, and Tuesdays were what she wrote about
better than anybody. So in her honor, here are three of mine.
The Sock Census
In 1987 I did a count. I had four sons, a husband and a dog, and in the house at that moment there were one hundred and
twelve socks. Exactly nine of them had a mate. I searched the washer, the dryer, the space behind the dryer, the inside of
the vacuum cleaner and the dog. I found three socks in the freezer, and nobody has ever confessed. I believe there is a
place where socks go, a sunny island somewhere, where they sit in pairs at last and talk about us. When Calvin left for
college I found eleven of his under his bed, all different. I washed them and folded them and put them in a drawer, and I
haven't been able to throw a single one of them away.
Four Times in the Passenger Seat
I taught four boys to drive, in the church parking lot on Sunday afternoons, in a Buick that has never been the same.
Gerald drove too slow. Phillip drove too fast. Victor drove beautifully and backed into the only light pole in the lot,
twice. Calvin drove with the radio up so loud I could feel it in my fillings, and when I turned it off he said, "Mom, I
can't concentrate in silence." Jerome was supposed to share this job. Jerome went with each of them exactly once and then
discovered he had a great deal of yard work. Every one of them got his license on the first try. Every one of them has,
at some point since, called me from the side of a road. That's what the passenger seat is for, it turns out. You never
really get out of it.
The Last Lunch
I figured it up. From Gerald's first day of kindergarten to Calvin's last day of high school, I packed school lunches for
twenty-five years. With four of them in school at once for a while, that comes to something like nine thousand peanut butter sandwiches, give or take the years one of them
would only eat bologna. I wrote a note on every napkin, and every one of them was mortified by it, and I found out later that
every one of them saved some. On the last day of school this June I packed Calvin's very last lunch. Peanut butter, an apple,
two cookies. I stood at the counter with the napkin and the pen for a long time and couldn't think of a thing to write that
was big enough. Finally I just wrote what I'd always written. Have a good day. Love, Mom. He came home and put the napkin on
the refrigerator, right next to Erma. It's still there.
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If you had an Erma column on your refrigerator, I would love to hear which one. Write to me at
[email protected]. I check the mail on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the
church office and at home whenever Jerome isn't on the computer looking up baseball statistics.
And if you're a younger mother still in the thick of it, go visit The Working Mom's
Notebook, where Lisa, an accountant with two little ones, has a chart for getting everybody out the door by 7:15. I
never had a chart. I had four boys and a prayer. Her way looks better.
Visitors to my kitchen:
   
Last updated September 25, 1999
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