Friday's Book Review: Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless

Title: Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless

Author: Scott Adams

Date: 1993

Publisher: Andrews & McMeel

ISBN: 0-8362-1737-3

Length: 112 pages of cartoons

Quote: "You could buy some other book on etiquette, and in it you might find such useful tidbits as what kind of uniform the upstairs servants should wear, or the proper way to address the Pope when you meet him in person. But if you want practical information--like what to do after you sneeze in your hand--then you have to buy this book."

This book is for giving to the outstandingly rude co-worker. It shows and tells rude people:

"If your lips are extended beyond your nose, then you are about to do something rude."

"Don't try to crush people by pushing the 'close' button" (on an elevator).

"For some strange reason it is expected that guests bring gifts to parties. Generally, a host will know if your gift is something you found in your glove compartment."

How reliable is Dogbert as a guide to etiquette? What would you expect from a fat neutered male albino lapdog? He confuses Manx cats, which have extra-thick fur and short or missing tails, with Rex cats, which have very sparse fur and normal tails. He suggests that it's normal for Dilbert's dates to flirt with other guys, perhaps rude when Dilbert's dates forget that Dilbert is still there and kiss other guys, and definitely rude when Dilbert's dates get too carried away to stop kissing other guys when Dilbert tells them that in another five minutes he'll go home.

Dogbert also seems to think it's normal to be traumatized when new mothers feed their babies in public. I think it would be healthier if new mothers kept their babies at home, away from airborne germs, too, but I could wish that some of the other Dilbert cartoon characters (perhaps Angry Alice?) had at least suggested that Dogbert and other males might benefit from therapy to deal with the inferiority complex they're showing.

Anyway, if you know the cartoons, you know the very special etiquette and logic of Dilbert's world already, so why bother about inaccuracies? Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless contains more than a hundred cartoon strips that, at the time of publishing, had not appeared, in the newspaper. 

Book Review: Country Friends Good Times

Title: Country Friends (TM) Good Times

Author: Gooseberry Patch Co.

Date: 1998

Publisher: Gooseberry Patch Co. 

ISBN: 1-888052-27-9

Length: 216 pages

Quote: "Treat yourself to a good friend."

In Ohio there is a town called Delaware. In that town two women, "Jo Ann" and "Vickie," and a few more of their friends off and on, set up a mail-order business called the Gooseberry Patch Company. They sold cute, whimsical, handwritten-looking books like this one, which is primarily a book of suggestions about cheap ways to have fun. Not necessarily the healthiest ways--they trust the reader's judgment about how many sugary or cheesy food treats will really be fun--but generally cheap ways. 

"Gooseberry Patch Co." sold out to a larger publisher but still exists as an imprint; they still have a few hundred cute little cookbooks in print. Well, if you count books like this as a cookbook. The majority of instructions and suggestions in these 216 pages are not for cooking but a recipe index does count 49 recipes for things some people will eat.

Maybe the best way to describe this book is to flip through the pages and give the suggestion at the top of five or six pages:

* Decorate a plain flowerpot with a cute little gift label (you could photocopy theirs from the book), put in some potting soil and a flower bud or seedling, and give it to a friend.

* Darn a sock by saying "Oh, darn!" and throwing it away. (Well, that's a joke. This web site knows several things to do with a worn-out sock that are more fun.)

* Start a good friends' gathering club. 

* Host an "ice cream social" party. For invitations, stick a little card giving the time and place information in green paper or plastic "glass" in an actual ice cream cone and hand one to each person invited.

* Exercise like a kid...jump rope!

* Make a gift basket for a tea loving friend: paper doilies, a tin of very special tea, a loaf of homemade bread, a jar of preserves, a lacy napkin, a beautiful antique china teacup, and a pretty jar of lemon sugar. 

Feel-good reading, for sure. The emphasis on friends, kids, and going out means that these suggestions can help cure "depression." One of the leading causes of "depression" is lack of physical activity, and these antidepressant activities will inspire almost anybody to turn off the TV, get off the couch, and do something that is fun that involves a nice low-stress level of physical activity. If these things don't help, there may be an underlying physical cause. At least it helps to rule out lack of exercise before testing for more complicated conditions.

Book Review: Sweet Revenge

Title: Sweet Revenge

Author: Regina Barreca

Date: 1995 (hardcover), 1997 (paperback)

Publisher: Crown (1995), Berkley (1997)

ISBN: 0-425-15766-0 (1997)

Length: 292 pages

Quote: “A little revenge, we should remember, goes a long way.”

Regina Barreca painted herself into an unusual corner before writing this book. She belongs to the “Women Are ‘Relational,’ Therefore Nicer” school of feminism. Hence the selfconscious tightrope-walking quality of Barreca’s connective writing in this book. Revenge isn’t Nice, she seems to be saying, and I have to pay lip service to Niceness but...

It’s easier to enjoy this book if you abandon the ideal of Niceness and reclaim a belief in Justice,. Then you can acknowledge that personal revenge, although obviously less desirable than formal justice, is what’s supposed to happen if formal justice fails. Forgiveness is a beautiful thing. Forgiveness begins with repentance.

If you have trespassed against somebody and not repented, confessed, and made some effort to compensate for what you did, you can’t be forgiven. Whatever the offended person does will qualify as revenge. The person might choose to ignore you; in that case you’d never know how long it would last, and you’d have to spend the rest of your life looking out behind you. The person might choose to be kind to you; in that case you’d have to spend the rest of your lifer knowing yourself to have been morally inferior to him/her. I recently read a book in which a minister described how he was unable to collect payment on a loan for years, until he wrote to the borrower that he had decided to repay the debt to himself in an attempt to forgive the borrower’s trespass just as God had forgiven him; the borrower made several efforts to repay the loan, but the minister refused to take the money...and he seemed to think that he wasn’t exacting revenge.,

Revenge, we see, is not a social problem but a fact of life. Trespassing in the first place is the problem of concern to society. And impenitence.

But why argue about the philosophy of revenge? What readers want to know, before deciding to read 292 pages on the subject, is whether the revenge stories in this book are good ones. Yes, there are several previously unpublished stories of creative, proportionate, even legal revenge.

Also a few stories of revenge that was disproportionate and unethical. A vindictive younger sibling sneaks into a boy’s room and turns all his pet turtles over on their backs. For me this act is out of bounds, because who knows how much or how long those inoffensive turtles will have to suffer? Now, if the guy had been a few years older, and the younger sibling had managed to turn his car upside down...

I’ll leave readers to pass their own judgments on the ethics of accidentally-on-purpose burning (a) the offender’s food or (b) the offender’s favorite record. I will offer this subjective judgment: when dissatisfied employees walk out and start a competing business that submarines their former employer’s business, I think that’s absolutely splendid.

Sweet Revenge is recommended to anyone sane enough to recognize that the Poe character in “The Cask of Amontillado,” whose revenge for a minor offense is to bury a trusting friend alive, is pure fiction.

Book Review: Kathy Sue Loudermilk I Love You

I'm sorry, Gentle Readers. Microsoft ate up my reading time today. You get reviews of vintage books this weekend. I hope to bring in some reviews of new nonfiction next week.

Title: Kathy Sue Loudermilk I Love You

Author: Lewis Grizzard

Date: 1979

Publisher: Warner / Peachtree

ISBN: none

Length: 336 pages

Quote: “There was something special about Kathy Sue Loudermilk. Even at eight, she made a tight sweater seem much more than a woolen garment.”

Fun fact about this book: “Loudermilk” is a family name actually used by real people. Not all of them live in Georgia.

Kathy Sue Loudermilk I Love You introduces several repeating characters Grizzard caricatured in his comic columns over the years, giving them unlikely names like Weyman Qanamaker and Cordie Lou Poovey. It also introduces real people, some of whom are known to history only through Grizzard’s serious columns. For many readers, the publication of this book also introduced Grizzard.

At the time of writing, Grizzard was still supporting the railroad industry against the trucking industry, supporting Jimmy Carter against anybody, and, he claimed, sincerely shocked that anyone could question anything General Lee ever did.

Women were extremely touchy about anything that sounded sexist. Grizzard wrote some columns that deliberately stated, exaggerated, an unenlightened point of view, apparently to generate controversy, attention, and sales. (Women who worked with him said he didn’t act that way in the office, nor did he write that way in his serious columns.) On the other hand, his ex, Kathy Lewis, wrote a comic expose about “life with Lewis” called How to Tame a Wild Bore. The book did not portray Grizzard as either especially wild or as especially boring, but as your basic selfish, immature young man who is not really ready for a serious relationship.

Whereupon women who feel that there’s nothing wrong with being an immature young man—only with sharing any serious activities with one—took Grizzard’s books to our bosoms. The books, not the aging boy who wrote them. He died young, apparently without a bosom on which to lean.

In Kathy Sue Loudermilk, Grizzard claims that he was threatened with bodily harm after writing a column that blamed refrigerated biscuit dough for divorce and suggested that wives should get up in time to mix biscuits from scratch. Bodily harm? Well, yes...you see, it was still 1977; due to discrimination, women did not yet have the more feminine and empowering option of writing their own syndicated newspaper columns suggesting that husbands who wanted to stay married should get up in time to mix biscuits from scratch too.

And Southern Ladies, even those of us who were only ten years old at the time, just laughed and laughed. I mean, biscuits, people. Baking-powder biscuits were invented by people who didn’t have time to cook,. Baking-powder biscuits do not require the cook to have his or her eyes completely open. Just dump a reasonable amount of self-rising flour into a bowl, add milk until it feels like biscuit dough, press it onto a pan, cut out biscuit shapes, and bake it for fifteen minutes in a hot oven. Making biscuits from scratch is actually quicker than making them from refrigerated dough, since by making biscuits from scratch you can avoid getting biscuit dough on your fingers and taking the time to wash it off. Men can make biscuits. If you have a gas or electric oven, biscuits take no more energy or intelligence than cereal.

It’s this kind of confusion that makes Kathy Sue Loudermilk more than a nostalgia trip. Oh yes, there’s plenty of nostalgia in this book, with detailed inventories of the kind of traditional Southern-fried convenience store that still exists, in some communities, even now, and columns about the great ball games and Nashville songs of yesteryear, and bleeps. Does anybody over age 35 not miss bleeps? (Bleeps were electronic sounds used to protect the ears of the upper class from any trashy language uttered within range of a live broadcast; hence “bleep” could be, as on three pages of this book it is, substituted for any rude word.) Part of 1970s pop culture was missing 1950s pop culture. But Kathy Sue Loudermilk is not merely a sentimental look at the 1950s; it’s the way the 1970s actually were. Some things were nicer back then, and some were not.

This book is fondly recommended to anyone who’s not already read it.

New Book Review: Barking Orders

Title: Barking Orders

Author: Roxy the Cattle Dog

Date: 2026

Publisher: Ironia Press

Quote: "Humans think they're in charge. Adorable, really."

Roxy is a bossy but goodhearted Black Heeler. She lives with her "upright mammals" in Toronto, where her talent might seem wasted. Bred to guard and herd cattle, she uses her talents (as she seems to see it, in this short book written from her point of view) to fend off the incursions of deliverymen and direct humans away from party dinners long enough for her to gobble up some of the savory treat food. But obviously her humans are getting dinner party stories and now at least a "concept book" out of her adventures...which include her "mission" to cheer up her human when he's sad, too.

The only thing you might not like about this book is that it's the sort of short "concept book" that works best when the scant text fills in around lots of pictures, and my advance review e-copy did not have the pictures. It's funny. Caution is advised about eating or drinking while reading this book. And at 125 pages of short sentences in generously sized type, it'd be an excellent choice for reading in bed after injuries other than broken ribs. 

The author promises a sequel, also to be called Barking Orders. I'd recommend at least adding a number, if determined to repeat the title, to help book buyers and sellers keep track of which volume they've already read or sold. If you like funny dog stories, you will want the sequel.

Book Review: Don't Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone Else but Me

Book Review: Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree with Anyone Else but Me

Author: Lewis Grizzard

Date: 1981

Publisher: Warner Books

ISBN: none

Length: 289 pages

Quote: “First, go out to your grits tree arnd pick a peck of grits.”

Grits are the peeled inner hearts of corn kernels. (Ever tried to peel a corn kernel? Traditionally it was done by soaking the corn in wood-ash lye.) Lewis Grizzard wrote many fact-based columns, some of which are reprinted in Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree, but his “True Grits” column (page 83) is pure nonsense. There are other silly columns scattered through this book, like the advice from “Dr. Feelbad” for hypochondriacs, or the “Drinkin’ Wine” column, which seems intended to sound as if Grizzard had drunk a lot of wine before writing.

Then there are the serious reactions to actual news, like the column Grizzard, who otherwise couldn’t quite forgive Ronald Reagan for having run against Jimmy Carter, wrote after President Reagan was shot. Some people thought Grizzard did “goofy” better than he did sincere columns about people he admired or missed, but he wrote plenty of sincere columns. This book contains columns on behalf of dog owners who ran afoul of new leash laws, people who were out of jobs and money, writers whose books Grizzard wanted to launch, and several tributes to athletes and local celebrities.

Knowing that Grizzard was suffering from the hereditary condition that killed him, and refused to try to buy time by practicing better health habits, lends a special poignancy to the articles he wrote in defense of unhealthy pleasures. “Take This Salad Bar and Shove It.” “White Bread or Bust.” “Refill Time in Heaven.” These are the essays of a thirty-year-old man who, at forty, would be writing that a good bowel movement had become more satisfying and memorable to him than sex was; in his early fifties he would be dead. He always knew it. Like P.J. O’Rourke’s eco-hog persona, Grizzard’s junkfood-hog persona is best appreciated as a way of whistling in the dark.

The fact that many of these columns are more than thirty years old, by now, lends a touch of nostalgia to the cover of my copy, which identifies the book as “The New Bestseller.” It’s a nostalgia trip for all who ever voted for Jimmy Carter, drove a 1957 Chevy or wanted to, yelled “How’bout them Dawgs” in a crowd or wanted to, thought “nekkid” deserved to be considered a separate word from “naked,” copied Richard Petty’s mustache and glasses or dated a man who did, doubted that any word processor would ever work as well as a Royal Standard typewriter, or found it necessary to tell someone what Slim Jims are.

If you have not had these Southern-Preppie-baby-boomer experiences, but would like to grow up to avoid foot-in-mouth moments like Joe Biden’s claim that FDR did press conferences on television, reading Grizzard’s books will help. For many people in cyberspace, books like Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree may provide the same sort of pleasure that reading Dorothy Parker, Will Rogers, and “Pogo” cartoons give me. And until time machines become reality, there’ll never be a more enjoyable way to study history. Therefore, this book is warmly recommended, not only to those who get all the references, but perhaps especially to those who don’t.

More Humorous Book Titles

Long & Short Reviews asked reviewers for lists of humorous book titles before, and this week they're doing it again. Can I think of a new list? I can try...These are books I've read. Not all of them are primarily comedy. The titles are not the only funny lines in the books. 

Scott Adams, Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel

Maya Angelou, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas

Dave Barry, Babies and Other Hazards of Sex

Lesley Conger, Love and Peanut Butter

Cathy Crimmins, When My Parents Were My Age They Were Old

Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

Hildegarde Dolson, Sorry to Be So Cheerful

Joseph Epstein, With My Trousers Rolled

Cynthia Heimel, If You Can't Live Without Me Why Aren't You Dead Yet

Stilton Jarlsberg, Johnny Optimism (the series)

Florence King, Wasp Where Is Thy Sting

Sam Levenson, You Don't Have to Be in Who's Who to Know What's What

Merrill Markoe, What the Dogs Have Taught Me

Patrick McManus, Never Sniff a Gift Fish 

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Ishmael Reed, The Free-Lance Pallbearers

H. Allen Smith, Life in a Putty Knife Factory

James Thurber, Let Your Mind Alone

P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

Bryan Woolley, Home Is Where the Cat Is

Book Review: Banana Blitz

Book Review: Banana Blitz

Author: Florence Parry Heide

Date: 1983

Publisher: Holiday House

ISBN: 0-8234-0480-3

Length: 119 pages

Quote: “‘And it’s so nice that your friend from the apartment building will be your roommate,’ said Mom.”

Although Banana Blitz was published in 1983, its protagonist Jonah Krock is a boy of the twenty-first century. He doesn’t play sports. He doesn’t want friends. All he needs for happiness are a TV, some junkfood, and his parents off his case. His parents want him to get some exercise and have a friend.

Last summer, in the first volume, Banana Twist, Jonah met a guy close to his age whom he could visit without actually walking around the block—nerdy Goober Grube, whom he doesn’t like. While trying to get into Fairlee, the boarding school whose admissions official told him the dorm rooms were equipped with TV sets and refrigerators, Jonah quoted some of Goober’s remarks for the admissions questionnaire. Now he’s been admitted to Fairlee...and assigned Goober as a roommate. Goober doesn’t like television, and although he was looking forward to the refrigerator too, he wants to fill it with fish and yeast.

Jonah persuades Goober to watch a TV show and count the number of times the word “banana” is used in each commercial in order to win a contest. However, as in Banana Twist, the comedy has less to do with bananas than with communication. Jonah and Goober miscommunicate with almost everybody, almost all the time. The result is naturally a mess of misunderstandings (and banana jokes).

Banana Blitz is easy to read, with large clear type and short simple words. It can be enjoyed by determined second grade readers, but adults are likely to chortle over it as much as kids do. 

Book Review: The Simpsons Xmas Book

Book Review: The Simpsons Xmas Book

Author: Matt Groening and Mimi Pond

Date: 1990, 1992

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-096960-1

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: cartoons in color

Quote: “Maggie’s walking by herself. Lisa got straight A’s. And Bart, well, we love Bart.”

What Bart Simpson wants for Christmas is a tattoo that says “Mother.” The drug-damaged tattoo artist who accepts Bart’s claim that Bart is twenty-one gives him a tattoo that says “moth.” Marge spends all the money she’s been saving for the holidays to have this tattoo removed.

Homer’s boss decides at the last minute not to give out any Christmas bonuses. Rather than share this news with his family, Homer retreats into anger, throws a tantrum, screams that “Christmas is cancelled,” and sneaks out to buy really cheap presents. “And for me, some breath mints...which the family will appreciate too.”

Can Christmas be more than a shopping spree for the Simpsons...or for real, three-dimensional people who have no religion? If you’ve not already learned the answer on TV, you need the book. If you enjoyed the TV special, you might want the book as a souvenir. Every Simpsons collection needs the Xmas Book. 

Book Review: Anansi Boys

Some people don't want to sell or promote anything by Neil Gaiman because, although his sexual misconduct wasn't rape, it did harm the marriage he betrayed and the "other woman" he disappointed. This is a valid concern. However, because today is Halloween and because we're all connecting with our Inner Caribbean Islanders this week, I'm reposting this post from the past anyway. Anansi Boys, which became American Gods, was a brilliant feat of folklore/horror/humor. 

Book Review: Anansi Boys

Author: Neil Gaiman

Date: 2005

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 978-0-06-051519-5

Length: 384 pages plus a preview chapter from Fragile Things

Quote: “As a general rule, the only things properly terrified by the approach of penguins tend to be small fish, but when the numbers get large enough...”

British-American Neil Gaiman begins this novel by acknowledging his debts to “the ghosts of Zora Neale Hurston, Thorne Smith, P.G. Wodehouse, and Frederick ‘Tex’ Avery.” If you try to imagine a novel that this unlikely quartet, or someone who’d tried to learn from each of them, might have written, there is a very slight possibility that you’ll have some idea what to expect from Anansi Boys.

It helps if you know that Anansi is a trickster character in folklore and that “Anansi Stories” is a West Indian name for anything from comic nonsense to outright lies. Anansi Boys is mostly comic nonsense, but it does contain at least one outright lie.

It’s not exactly a horror story, but it does have a few characters who ought by rights to be dead. Mr. Nancy, senior, is a supernatural creature who has chosen to seem dead, temporarily, in order to lend his immortality to his son, Charlie Nancy. Charlie once ignorantly arranged for a witch to transfer his magical qualities into a separate life form, a “long-lost twin” who Charlie decides wasn’t lost enough when he finds his grown-up brother Spider during the course of this novel. As each brother uses what powers he has to save the other, each matures into a complete young man. But there’s also a murder victim whose husband would prefer that she join him in the afterlife, but she insists on staying active as a ghost long enough to punish the murderer.

It’s meant to be nonsense, not religion, but since all “Anansi Stories” are based in a Pagan belief system that conflicts with Christian doctrines, fundamentalists are entitled to barn Anansi Boys from their home.

Banning it may make children more interested in sneaking peeks at it., They will probably “get” enough of the jokes to want to read the whole thing.

I would encourage children not to read this book. You’ll miss too many of the best bits if you’ve not read all the older books that went into Gaiman’s mind to produce this one, and it’s unlikely that you’d have time to read all of them before age 25. Why spoil the suspense by reading the story before you can understand the jokes? Read Coraline, or any of the Discworld books, and save Anansi Boys for later.

There’s less sex and violence in this book than there is in most horror stories, but there’s enough of both to offend some readers. Women who respect their life-giving potential will particularly dislike the character of Rosie, who has always been able to abstain from premature baby-making with Charlie, whom she thinks she loves, but flops into bed the first time she meets Spider and decides that this means she loves him more. (To be fair, at that point in the novel the brothers look identical; Rosie thinks she’s finally giving in to Charlie.) Gaiman spares us the disgusting details and slips this plot element into the story deftly enough, wrapping it up in enough British West Indian slang, that a child reader might miss it...but it’s there. If she’s really in love, guys, she won’t even think clearly enough to bother about birth control! That’s the outright lie. If she really loves you, she’ll protect you from premature fatherhood, just as, if you really love her, you’ll spare her from even having to think about premature motherhood.

On the other hand readers are entitled to appreciate the West Indian-ness of the characters. Their culture, like their genes, is a mixture of Native Caribbean, African, Indian, British, and European influences. Nobody takes much time to analyze what came from where except when, as occasionally happens, someone defies the genetic odds by looking completely “White.” Being financially well off, the characters travel freely among the islands, London, and Florida. Free to be their individual selves, they hold no prejudices (only an occasional individual grudge) and feel some empathy for the less well-to-do West Indians who can’t afford to travel off their native island.

Readers who live in places where they don’t meet people like this in real life will probably want to. I enjoyed being married to one; I enjoyed the memories Gaiman’s characters called back.

There’s also the chuckle factor...Gaiman is the student, former co-author, and novelistic heir of Terry Pratchett, and his comedic style is fully worthy of his teacher and should appeal to all Pratchett fans. Fans of Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony, Sue Townsend, P.G. Wodehouse, and/or Charles Williams may also enjoy this book.

Then there’s the sheer novelty of finding a story in English that sides with the spiders against the birds. You may still prefer birds, but you could still benefit from the mental stretch of identifying with the spiders. 

Book Review: Heavenly Humor for the Grandmother's Soul

Drats. Botheration. Max Lucado has written another book. I have an advance reader's copy on Kindle. My Kindle has been behaving so badly, the Sunday book review for this week has to be another rerun. But at least it's a good book.

Title: Heavenly Humor for the Grandmother’s Soul

Author: Barbour Publishing

Date: 2012

Publisher: Barbour Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-61626-667-7

Length: 224 pages

Quote: “[A] grandmother’s  kitchen goes beyond good aesthetics—it’s like a bakery plus love.”

This trench-coat-pocket-size book is not exactly a devotional, or is it formatted for daily reading for any specific period of time, but its 224 pages contain 75 short, cheery stories about grandmotherhood, each matched with a Bible verse, selected from the work of thirteen living writers. None of the thirteen writers is really a big name; most have written or edited at least one full-length book.

For devotional reading...I’ve reviewed some devotionals that I thought went too far in the direction of unhealthy, Stepford-Wife-like emphasis on (an illusion of) calm at any cost. A daily reading that encourages me to laugh and empathize is definitely more appealing than one that continually tells me “Go back to sleep.” For “daily devotions,” I’d prefer one that called my attention to God or the Bible rather than one that aimed to manipulate my moods, but I do like books that are funny.

Laughing out loud really does reduce physical pain. This physical process can’t be forced. If we’re in too much pain to want to laugh at anything, our bodies may need to get a different sort of biochemical boost from groaning and crying out loud. Either of those behaviors, when it comes naturally and feels right to us, works the diaphragm muscle and prompts the body to produce and release more of a set of chemicals that help relieve pain.

I believe what we as a species will always come back to, as we search for more ways to relieve pain, is that we must not just greedily grab for instant control. Drugs that instantly numb out pain work only on one part of the body for a limited time. If we try to use them beyond that natural limit, they begin to do more harm than good, become addictive, damage our brains. Letting ourselves laugh out loud at funny stories promotes healing in several different, subtle ways. Trying to force ourselves to laugh might activate other biochemical processes that sabotage the subtle, but measurable, benefits of laughing. So #ChooseLaughter when it works for you; don’t try to force it on yourself, and never even think about forcing it on others.

Meanwhile...I’ve laughed louder and longer than I did while reading Heavenly Humor for the Grandmother’s Soul, but I did laugh. These are fresh, funny short stories, all plausible as true.

In some case, a plus point may or may not be an author’s decision to go for credibility rather than comicality. On pages 22-23, Anita Higman says, “I pray my mouth wasn’t covered with jam as I buried my cheeks in that fur” (piece the grandmother wore when “dressed up”), then goes on to say, “thank You, God, for Your gentleness of spirit when we deliberately smear our jam-covered faces into Your goodness.”

First of all let’s pass lightly over the fact that Higman’s grandmother would undoubtedly have worn the elaborately processed but still slowly decomposing fur of some dirty little animal who wasn’t ready to part with its own coat when it was killed for it.Today the “fur” we wear is made of nice clean acrylic thread, and it smells clean, doesn’t harbor colonies of insects in summer storage, involved no harm to any potential pets, and is not considered particularly valuable or elegant. In remaking this story we’d want to update that bit too.

“Hearing Grannie’s beloved foosteps, little Annie dropped that sloppy jam sandwich carelessly. It slipped off the edge of the plate, slid down the tablecloth in a sticky trail, and plopped onto the floor, while Annie raced to the door and shoved her jammy little front side into Grannie’s brand new white cashmere coat that she’d been waiting for Grandpa to buy for her for their fortieth anniversary last week...and Grannie’s voice hissed and crackled indignantly in a burst of Latvian, all her hard learned English deserting her. Then she gently turned Annie around and steered her toward the kitchen, saying in Latvian, ‘Now, my darling grandchild, we see whether you can clean up some part of this mess’...”

But that’s not the story Higman tells.

Fortunately other stories are told in what sounds like their entirety. Kathy Douglas reports on a grandmother, not her own, by starting a second career as a newspaper columnist, writing about being 100 years old. “At age 102, she shooed her interviewer out...‘I’m on a deadline.’”

Then there are the grandparents, Lucy and Larry Names-Withheld, who tried skiing on a chair. “It was fun unil the skis hit bare rock...the snow made for a soft landing.”

Then there’s the grandmother who separated a toddler from a lot of expensive medical equipment, telling the child that the hearing aid and its battery are Grandma’s ears, dentures are her teeth, glasses are her eyes... “So you think that’s funny? Just you wait until you have a bunch of spare parts!”

About thirty years ago Ozarque wrote a nonfiction guidebook called The Grandmother Principles. She was dismayed, on the book tour, to meet many middle-aged women more interested in looking too young to be grandmothers than in enjoying being grandmothers. I only wish it were still possible to get her opinion of this book.

I’m not a grandmother and never will be, and what I can say about this book for grandmothers is: If you’re starting to say unhappily, “It’s not for me. I’m not yet, or no longer, or no longer even able to look forward to being, a grandmother,” stop right there. If you’re over forty, you like children, and you’re not a grandmother, obviously nature intended you to be an aunt (or uncle) instead. Grandmothers may be entitled to a special degree of “grandness” because many of them have mad e a double investment of time and effort in nururing their grandchildren, but being an aunt (or uncle) is a grand thing too. Enjoy these stories. And enjoy your nieces and nephews.

Book Review: Under His Wings

Title: Under His Wings

Author: Patsy Clairmont

Date: 1994

Publisher: Guideposts

Length: 143 pages

Quote: “[W]e move closer to the Savior and experience what it means to take shelter under His wings.”

Yes. It’s true. God is a Spirit, not bound to the gender, or even the number, much less the shape, of a single body with literal parts. The Bible calls God a “He” and a “Father,” but also credits Him with female reproductive parts (not male ones) and, in case that didn’t make the point clear enough, bird body parts. Ancient metaphoric language portrays God with a mighty hand, stretched-out arms...and wings.

In this book, drawing on her experience as a mental patient, Clairmont discusses some of the ways believers have interpreted Bible metaphors about seeking and being offered shelter under God’s mother-hen wings. Being carried on God’s soaring-eagle wings would probably have been another book.

Well, the author is known as a Christian comedian...what did you expect? But seriously, this is a book about some of the ways Christians deal with problem emotions like temptation, guilt, relationship problems, fear, and grief.

Clairmont’s individual medical case history would have been more useful to me than just another book of things Christians say to themselves and others, but obviously much remains to be learned about the precise way her emotional issues about being functionally homeless interacted with her “sweet tooth,” exercise avoidance, and other factors to produce her agoraphobia, and the precise way her doctors approached it.

But she has a right to remain silent about those things, and can hardly be blamed for using it...except that if asked she probably would have said “I wasn’t writing a case history for serious students of psychology! I wanted to offer some helpful advice for everybody!”

That was the big mistake of the whole “psychological self-help” school of thought, actually.

Clinical psychologists, working with people who are mentally ill, who don’t have present-time real-world business and family problems, offered to “help” fix the feelings of people who do have present-time real-world business and family problems. This is not always altogether bad. People who are in touch with external reality can have emotional problems, too...but the clinical psychologists forgot to explain to many churchgoing types that there are ways to tell whether the emotion is the primary problem or is even related to the primary problem, or not. When the emotion is not the primary problem, then we don’t need to waste a lot of time “validating the person’s feelings” or molesting the person’s “inner child” or otherwise playing psychoanalyst; that can reasonably be construed as an insult.(We don’t need a “friend” who does this to us, either.) We need to focus on the facts.

FIX FACTS FIRST: FEELINGS FOLLOW.

“Ooohhh! This writer is saying I can’t just waffle on about the ‘feelings’ someone has about losing their home in an earthquake—I need to share my own home with that person, if I want to believe I’ve helped? That’s craaazy!”

Maybe...but I’m not the one who needs the prescriptions for “sleep aids,” antidepressants, or headache pills.

“But if I do the chores and errands for the family with the disabled person, if I buy things from the person with the floundering business, if I avoid the gossipper instead of the person I’ve heard some vague unlikely gossip about, I not only don’t get to play psychologist, and I not only may have to get up and move my lazy body—but I might be encouraging dependency!”

That’s better than encouraging selfishness...but if you can practice frugality and bring your own expenses well below the other person’s, it’ll be a rare moocher who’s brazen enough to exploit your generosity.

Maybe somewhere Out There really lives the adult who’s become Christian-phobic and floundered through dysfunctional relationships with skeevy characters because any suggestion that she’s not perfect reactivates the panic she felt when she broke a vase at age two, who develops a bleeding ulcer before telling his father he’s not willing to care for the father at home, and all the other 1990s-style Christian versions of all the classic emotional problems Freud and Jung identified in the 1890s; I’ve not met them but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. What I’ve met, many times, and what I’ve even been, are the frazzled home nurse who needs an afternoon of respite care, the undercapitalized entrepreneur who needs financial support for their work, the person (quite different from the stereotype that comes to mind when most of us think “homeless”) who’s working a long way from home or whose home was destroyed by a natural disaster...and many more: the people who need for fellow Christians to get up, shut up, and do something useful without one word about emotional feelings, much less any obnoxious, condescending babble about their early childhood.

So I can praise Under His Wings only with faint...recommendations to a very specific, limited audience. Yes, Clairmont is a comedian. Yes, her retellings of the stories of Moses, Hagar, Naomi, and Samson, as read by people in psychotherapy, are funny. Nevertheless this is not just another book of funny stories. This is the one where Clairmont seriously describes what she tells herself to talk herself through a panic attack (and a little about how she changed her eating habits). If you have panic attacks and want to read about someone who’s successfully lived with that form of physical-mental illness for a long time, then Under His Wings is for you.

Books That Live Up to their Humorous Titles

A fad of my youth was to give books long titles that could be read as jokes, whether or not the books were funny, or even unintentionally funny. I don't remember the plots of several books with titles like Nobody Has to Stay a Kid Forever and Ask for Love and They Give You Rice Pudding that I skimmed, hoping they'd be funny, and returned to libraries, feeling that they were earnest and whiny. 

Mention should probably be made here of a young-adult novel my brother threatened to write, but afaik never did, about the special problems of being a Granola Green teenager, called All I Want Is to Eat My Date Seed in Peace. (In the 1970s some Granola Greens really did suck on date seeds as an alternative to chewing gum or smoking.)

Several of these books were aimed at readers in the early teen years, but I thought their content delivered what the titles promised. Oh, and not all of them come from the 1970s, though most do. 

The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams 

The titles of all five volumes in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy were funny at the time but are probably too familiar to everyone in cyberspace to raise a chortle any more. This was a standalone volume in which Adams proposed using real place names as words with meanings. 

Is There Life on a Plastic Planet by Mildred Ames 

Two teenagers who don't like each other much meet some people who seem like the perfect friends, except that they're not human. 

Miss Piggy's Guide to Life by Henry Beard 

The most popular character on "The Muppet Show" discusses topics like fashion, etiquette, and health. This book is totally 1980. Read it and, if you remember 1980, you're time-travelling.

Stop the World Our Gerbils Are Loose by Theresa Bloomingdale 

1970s mom-com. 

The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank by Erma Bombeck 

1970s mom-com. Often bundled together with If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries What Am I Doing in the Pits and other volumes of Bombeck's comedy columns. By this time cartoons of children's bare bottoms weren't considered funny; detailed reproductions of 1970s fashions were. 

On Getting Old for the First Time by Peg Bracken 

In which the retired humor columnist reflects on other people's aging processes and now, with fresh amusement, on her own. 

The Cat Ate My Gym Suit by Paula Danziger 

Marcy, who is overweight and hates gym, falls in love with a sympathetic teacher, Ms. Finney. Then Ms. Finney quits her job. 

If I Ever Get Back to Georgia I'm Going to Nail My Feet to the Ground by Lewis Grizzard 

Reprinted newspaper columns, mostly funny. Sometimes bundled together with other collections like Don't Bend Over in the Garden Grandma You Know Them Taters Got Eyes. 

How to Tame a Wild Bore by Kathy Grizzard Lewis

An ex-wife's stories about living with a man whose mother failed to teach him basic self-care skills like cooking, cleaning, and mending. 

This School Is Driving Me Crazy by Nat Hentoff

What's driving Sam crazy is having to go to the school where his father is the headmaster. He has more ordinary teen problems, and wants to solve them himself with no help from his father.

The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff 

Teenagers learn about censorship when local adults want to ban Huckleberry Finn. 

There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos by Jim Hightower 

Snarky humor about facts from early versions of debates still raging today. 

You Got to Dance with Them That Brung Ya by Molly Ivins 

She was a Democrat, but the tackiness of Bill Clinton made her ask herself why. 

Due to Lack of Interest Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled by Irene Kampen 

An empty-nest mother tries to go back and finish her college degree. 

Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman 

A teacher's first term in an urban high school, told mostly through messages on scraps of paper she receives from students and co-workers, with a few explanatory letters she writes to an old school friend in the evenings. 

Please Don't Eat the Daisies by Jean Kerr 

Early 1960s mom-com. Includes a cartoon illustration of the mother trying to spank tots fresh from the bathtub and observing that you couldn't have imagined how many bottoms a pair of twins seem to have. So younger readers may not like it, but I grew up with it and did and do. 

I'll Love You When You're More Like Me by M.E. Kerr 

Teenagers feel unloved by older people who disapprove of their choices. 

Nobody Is Perfick by Bernard Waber 

Graphic fiction. In the title story a boy called "Peter Perfect," who has never lost so much as a glove, motivates other kids to picket, waving signs like "Peter Perfect is perfectly horrible." 

Who Wants Music on Monday by Mary Slattery Stolz 

It's not about music. It's about what happens when the "pretty and popular" blonde sister and the "late-blooming" arty sister like the same boy. But it is funny.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain 

This book could be said to have started the fashions for time travel fantasies and for long funny-or-at-least-ridiculous titles. A man finds himself transported through time and space to a world he can bedazzle with his superior knowledge of technology. 

Pardon Me You're Stepping on My Eyeball by Paul Zindel 

A snarky, funny boy and an earnest, love-starved girl make a romantic adventure of disposing of his father's ashes.

Celebration of Laughable Legislation

In preparation for April Fools Day, this web site celebrates some laws that have actually been enacted in Virginia and Tennessee. 

Fair disclosure: These were selected a few years ago by a newspaper editor, who shall be nameless, whose obvious purpose in writing his article was to object to a relatively reasonable law against posting images online that "are likely to frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional distress." He just wanted not to go to jail for printing photos of Candidates Trump and Harris during the last presidential election. 

Anyway, here's our refined selection of his selection. Each of these things has actually been in the law in some part of Virginia or Tennessee. It's not necessarily in the law now. I just wanted to share the giggles as I tried to imagine how these laws might ever have been written, much less how they could be enforced.

1. It is a crime to sell a hollow log. If someone wants a hollow log, you must make it a gift.

2. It is a crime to shoot any game from a moving vehicle--other than whales. It is legal to shoot whales from a moving vehicle in Tennessee. It is probably not a viable plan to take an obese person who has no reason to live into Tennessee, shoot him, and claim that you thought he was a whale.

3. If eight or fewer women are living, or renting bedrooms, in one house, it is still necessary to prove that they're using the place for the purpose of bringing in men and having sex with them for money. If nine or more women are living in one house, that alone may be considered proof that they're using it for that purpose. While this law presumably was written with an implicit understanding that no school, sorority house, or prison would be prosecuted...

4. It is a crime to catch fish with a lasso. However, it's not a crime to waste a day trying.

5. It is a crime to share your own Netflix password...not someone else's.  

6. It is a crime for a woman to call a man and ask for a date. Fellows? Stop waiting. If you want a date, pick up the phone.

7. It's illegal to flip a coin to decide who pays for coffee. This must be decided before entering the cafe. If you can't keep track of who paid the last time, you must draw straws.

8. Every business is required by law to have a hitching post for horses. 

9. It is illegal to transport an ice cream cone in your pocket. The law says nothing about whole pints. There are days in Tennessee when shoplifters would be positively motivated to stuff whole pints into their pants pockets, so if they have a problem with illegal transportation of ice cream, this should probably be addressed.

10. It is illegal to tickle a woman, but legal to tickle a man. 

Let's end this with a consideration of a law that makes sense to me, if it didn't make sense to the newspaperman. It is illegal to drive a motor vehicle while asleep. If your eyelids start to feel heavy, park the car. 

Drive carefully, and while fully awake, Gentle Readers.

Book Review: P.J. O'Rourke on the Wealth of Nations

Rationally or not, I think I ought to have chosen an Irish book for today. I did not do that. Bad blogger. Sit. Stay. Here is a book by an Irish-American author.

Title: P.J. O'Rourke on the Wealth of Nations 



Author: P.J. O'Rourke

Date: 2007

Publisher: Grove / Atlantic Monthly

ISBN: 978-0-87113-949-8

Length: 195 pages of text plus 47 pages of quotes, references, and index

Quote: "That self-interest makes the world go round has been tacitly acknowledged since the world began going round."

As an explanation of what's in humorist P.J. O'Rourke's digest version of The Wealth of Nations, it's hard to improve on the blurb on the dust jacket. "The Wealth of Nations was first published in 1776 and almost instantly it was recognized as fundamental to an understanding of economics. It was also recognized as being really long...over nine hundred pages...and...you also need to peruse Smith's earlier doorstopper, The History of Moral Sentiments. But now you don't have to read either...P.J. has done it for you. He has slogged through all of Smith's works."

Fair disclosure: Tenth grade economics put me to sleep faster than any other subject to which I was ever exposed. Proof: I "read" the teacher's very own anti-Communist tract--required--and wrote a pro-Communist term paper and took an F for the course. Nobody has to be fifteen years old forever and eventually, after a few more years of neurological maturation, I was happily married to a certified Economist. Our home was full of books about economics. I actually read some of them. I even read The Wealth of Nations, in a consciously clueless fashion similar to the way I've been reading a collection of Renaissance Spanish poetry. The main thing I learned was that I was glad my husband "retired" from practicing economics and found happiness as a middle school tutor in the D.C. school system.

But if P.J. O'Rourke had been teaching that tenth grade economics course, I think I would have learned something, even at fifteen.

O'Rourke achieved fame as a gonzo reporter, unreliable narrator, self-proclaimed 1960's drug experimenter, probably best known for outrageous road trip stories published in Car & Driver and Rolling Stone. It's hard to imagine how he'd write if he were serious; unlike Dave Barry, he's not published a straight "my son was injured in an accident and I have nothing funny to say" column. You have to get this book, the most serious book he's written, and read it to see how. It's quite a feat. He manages to be serious and seriously funny at the same time.

"[I]t is never a question of folly, sacrilege, or vulgarity to better our circumstances. The question is how to do it."

"Coercion destroys the mutually beneficial nature of trade, which destroys the trading, which destroys the division of labor, which destroys our self-interest."

"Adam Smith's flow of goods and services needs to be accompanied by at least the threat of another flow--getting a drink thrown in my face."

"Smith, the lonely  pioneer, is sodbusting the vast untilled prairies of econometrics. There was hardly such a thing as a reliable statistic in the eighteenth century."

"As Smith himself declared in Moral Sentiments, "We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.""

This tribute to two of the most ponderous, abstract, soporific Great Books ever written will keep readers awake, give non-economists enough understanding of Smith's ideas to quote at parties, and even guide potential economists through Smith's books and/or tenth grade (or, these days, undergraduate) economics class. Smith had his lively moments. O'Rourke highlights them, and summarizes the long dull patches between them in a readable, memorable way.

If this were a new book, it'd be worth Tweeting my way through, the way I keep trying to do with The Conservative Heart (I'm still on page 126; bear with me, Tweeps). It's not a new book any more. It is, therefore, a Fair Trade Book. I have one copy at home with which I don't intend to part. I have access, via Amazon, to additional copies I'd be delighted to retail to you, for the usual $5 per book + $5 per package for shipping, for a total of $10, of which I'll send $1 to O'Rourke or a charity of his choice. (If I can track him down, anyway; Laura Ingraham has yet to choose a charity here.) Four copies at one time would thus add up to a total of $25, which you would send to either of the addresses that should be showing in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and O'Rourke or his charity would get $4.

Post for 1.22.25: Funny Book Quotes

Participation in this week's Long & Short Reviews blog challenge is down. "Funny book quotes" requires us to get up, find a book, page through it, find a quote, and quote it exactly...

Ah, but I just read a review copy of a book that had some good funny lines. This was  Rangikura by Tayi Tibble. It's a short book of short essays and free verse. Do not be deceived. It's a challenging read; among other things the author throws in a Maori word or phrase on almost every page. If you are from New Zealand, or if you don't mind looking up Maori words, you'll probably like the book. It's mostly about the universal experience of being young. Millennials can relate; the rest of us can reminisce.

The quote, which also appears in my reviews:

"she realised that life

was not going to be fair

but it could be

ferocious"

I like funny books. Douglas Adams', Mark Twain's, Erma Bombeck's, and Florence King's funniest are in the older part of the house. Y'know what? It's 9 degrees Fahrenheit outside and when I crawl out from under the pile of knitted fabric here on the screen porch, I'm sprinting straight to the warm room where I shall let the cats in, turn on the hot-air fan, and burrow into an even bigger pile of knitted blankets. I am not going into the older, colder part of the house to look for books.

There are lines I can quote, or possibly misquote, from memory. Look these up before reusing. They're not even the funniest lines in the books; they're just the ones that came to mind first. Generally I think the funniest bits in a book are entire scenes where the comic effect has built up slowly. Some really funny bits that come to mind, e.g. from Terry Pratchett, aren't here because I read them later in life and am not confident about quoting them from memory; nearly all of these lines come from books I read before I was full-grown, which is why the list, like publishers' lists of that time, has no Cultural Diversity. I just want to indulge in a half-hour or so of seeing how many I can remember...

"Do people want fire that can be fitted nasally?"

--Douglas Adams, in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, when the various telephone cleaners, personnel managers, and other "useless b*y loonies" who've been sent away from the planet Golgafrincham are trying to find out how to make a fire

"If it had not been a pleasure it would have been a duty to hate Uncle Wilbie Culpeper."

--Joan Aiken, The Embroidered Sunset

"I should like to be a beautiful butterfly,

All blue and yellow and green and red;

But I should not like

To have Dan put camphor on my poor little head."

--Louisa May Alcott, Little Men

"'It's all right'," she said. 'It's organically grown.'"

--Lisa Alther, in Kinflicks, in a scene from Ginny's lesbian affair where vegetables are being wasted

"Grundy Golem was the size of an inconsequence."

--Piers Anthony, in Golem in the Gears, where I suppose describing Grundy as a golem is an act of inappropriate cultural appropriation, but it's a funny book

"You fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye"

--Margaret Atwood, Collected Poems 

"There was the strangest odor of onions about the young Woodlawns...But she forgave them, because of their tears of grief."

--Carol Ryrie Brink, Magical Melons, at the end of a story where the children have been baby-sat by a relative who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer

"Jessie was not as ill-natured as she was silly."

--Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess

"Irish proverbs always turn out to be insults in disguise."

--M. Grant Cormack, How the Rabbit Took a Ride

"Garnish with nuts, bolts, and old washers."

--Elizabeth Enright, Then There Were Five, scene where brother is teasing sister about her interest in cooking

"How gold's the King of Egypt?"

--Eleanor Farjeon, The Little Bookroom, in a story suggested by a news report that wheat found in an Egyptian tomb was still golden and mold-free

"If I Ever Get Back to Georgia I'm Going to Nail My Shoes to the Ground"

--Lewis Grizzard, the title of the book

"There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos"

--Jim Hightower, the title of the book

"Dearer to me than the evening star

A Packard car

A Hershey bar

Or a bride in her rich adorning,

Dearer than any of these by far

Is to lie in bed in the morning."

--Jean Kerr, Please Don't Eat the Daisies

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

--C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

"'Watch it, Linkletter,' I say to myself. 'Your hatband seems to be shrinking!'"

--Art Linkletter, in The Secret World of Kids, describing his own struggle against feeling that he was entitled to all the attention being a TV star got him. The book, which is about what Linkletter felt that he and his wife had done right with their five children, was soon withdrawn from reprinting, despite popular demand, after one of the children died by misadventure. If he were still alive I wouldn't quote it here, despite having chortled over it in middle school. He's not. I think the book's due for a reprint.

"'But Merrill,' you might say. 'Merrill, Merrill, Merrill...' Then again, you might not, because you have already exceeded your quota of opportunities to use my first name."

--Merrill Markoe, Merrill Markoe's Guide to Life

"Beauty is twice beauty...

when it is a matter of two socks in winter."

--Pablo Neruda, "Ode to My Socks," I forget whose translation

"HOP HOP We like to hop.

HOP POP We like to hop on top of Pop.

STOP.

You must not hop on Pop."

--Theodor Seuss Geisel as "Dr. Seuss," Hop on Pop, recently recalled to my mind when a certain large cat climbed onto a mound of knitted blankets and unerringly braced her weight on a paw planted directly above the hollow at the base of my throat

"When beetles fight these battles

in a bottle with their paddles

and the bottle's on a poodle

and the poodle's eating noodles..."

--T.S. Geisel, Fox in Socks

"The black side of her hair's turned white. And the white's gone green--a horrid shade."

--Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, describing the final rout of Cruella de Ville

"Scrub the soap thoroughly with the washcloth, and then hang up your neck."

--Caskie Stinnett, reprinted in The Family Book of Humor, final line of an essay on the way his son's brain seemed to scramble the keywords in directions

"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

--Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

"And when you've finished, if any are whole,

Send them down the hall to roll!

...That's what Bilbo Baggins hates,

So carefully! carefully with the plates!"

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

"...and it would take the tartar off, too, and mostly the enamel with it..."

--Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn, where the king and the duke are describing the scams that got them chased out of various towns

"It is not often that someone...is a good friend and also a good writer. Charlotte was both."

--E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

"I've just become a Socialist...You work for the abolition of private property, and start by collaring all you can, and sitting on it."

--P.G. Wodehouse, in Mike and Psmith. This line got the author hated and slandered but he never tried to suppress the book.

Book Review: I Want to Grow Up...

Title: I Want to Grow Hair I Want to Grow Up I Want to Go to Boise

Author: Erma Bombeck

Date: 1989

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: 0-06-06170-1

Length: 174 pages

Illustrations: color inserts of children’s artwork

Quote: “At the moment they stop being a kid and turn into a child with cancer, the smiles disappear.”

At Wit’s End, Just Wait, I Lost Everything, The Grass Is Always Greener, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, and Aunt Erma’s Cope Book were hilarious. Motherhood and Family were, just slightly, predictable,and after Family Erma Bombeck reached that dreaded point in a comic writer’s career when the writer is asked to write a whole book that’s earnest and sweet. Dave Barry wisely turned down that offer. Bombeck was persuaded that children with cancer wanted a funny book about their shared experience. This is that book.

It’s funny in spots, but...Laughing out loud, life with cats has taught me, is what we humans do instead of purring; it usually expresses a pleasant feeling and, if that pleasant feeling happens to coincide with unpleasant feelings about something else, the acts of laughing or purring work internal muscles and activate biological mechanisms that make us feel better. People recovering from cancer, and their families, need to laugh out loud, long and often. Funny books, records, and movies help. A humorist has a high spiritual calling in this world.

However, the experiences that prompt laughter in real life don’t always work in books. When you are the patient or the family member caring for the patient, then, in the moment, you can laugh out loud about cancer itself. You scrub the patient’s favorite coverlet in the tub, dry it, get it smelling fresh at last, and within half an hour it’s nasty again. Either you or the patient says “Lather. Rinse. Repeat,” and this becomes the funniest joke ever to use this line, funnier than all other jokes that used this line together, and you roll about and paw the air. But this kind of moment is not meant to be shared. Someone else laughing about your illness or your caretaking is not funny. Someone else’s laughing about their illness or their caretaking is a gross-out.

So this was the one of Bombeck’s books that people bought to complete their collections, or encourage a favorite author who already knew she wasn’t going to have a very long life either, or support the cancer research funds in aid of which the book was sold. I’d pick any of Bombeck’s other books over this one for personal pain control.

In this book we meet children. The last thirty pages of this book are a roll call of cancer patients and their siblings who laughed at cancer in ways Bombeck worked into this book. They are painfully adorable children. They wrote in from several countries where Bombeck had a following, including France as well as New Zealand. Some of them did grow hair and grow up. Some of them went to Heaven, and some even went to Boise. Some of them may still be alive today.

They stick their artificial legs out of doors or under tent flaps to make people think a whole person is watching or listening.

They turn their prosthetic feet backward.

They pour fruit juice into specimen cups, then freak out nurses by saying “I think I’ll run it back through” before anyone runs actual lab tests on these “samples” of sick comedy.

They build snowmen with carrots stuck in their back sides for transfusions.

They race wheelchairs.

They joke about their hair falling out, telling inquisitive people “I joined the Marines,” or claiming that then-popular TV tough guy “Kojak is my father.”

They hug their doctors tight, saying “I hope I never see you again.”

One of them, in full remission and growing fast, shows Bombeck around the campus of the university hospital where she went for chemotherapy. Another one affectionately nicknames one of the best university hospitals in the world “Motel Hell.”

Nearly all the ones we meet had survived, and several had gone into remission, during the time the book was written.

They’re still very, very sick, and their parents and doctors are still very, very sad .(Mothers, Bombeck reports, did most of the caretaking and fretting in 1989. Fathers were “rare birds”; in 1989 a lot of younger men had become those “Sensitive New Age Guys” who cried real tears about being turned down for dates or being late for meals, but fathers still felt a need to reframe grief as anger, growling about how “if some guy was harassing your daughter you could rip his throat out, but you can’t do anything about cancer.”)

And research, of course, helps people with cancer live longer. Donations may be made...pick your cancer research fund; you undoubtedly have one.

Bombeck’s focus on the kids who joke about cancer makes this book less unpleasant to read than I may have made it sound but, if you want to shriek and cackle and make your children want to share a full-sized book with you, pick any or all of this writer’s other books.