Word: dead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...line zappers come from her side of the table; Bill will breeze into the house and announce with a big smile that he has just been to the library and that all of her books were in. She replies that he looked like a dead fish after his last road race and that he had better slow down. "You don't understand," she says. "I'm too old to shop around. You're it." The strong affection between the two is evident...
...until years later did Erma think of her mother's tough-minded energy as wise or heroic. What she felt at the time was a daily desertion. When her mother married a moving-van operator, Albert ("Tom") Harris, two years later, Erma gave him the classic drop-dead greeting: "If you think you're going to take my father's place, you're crazy." His attitude, she says, was "This kid needs sitting on." Eventually Erma and Tom made their adjustment. The incredible self-centeredness of children, normal and natural but often savagely cruel, has been...
...writing columns: "I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair." This archetypal wisecrack is, after her heartfelt growl about the overmeticulous neighbor who waxes her driveway, probably the best known of Bombeck's nifties. It has a dead-on, chisel-it-on-my-tombstone truthfulness. But for the moment, no one paid much attention to her capering. She did a column a week, at $3 each, for the Kettering-Oakwood Times, a suburban weekly. Her desk was a piece of plywood supported by cinder blocks in the Bombeck...
...Henry's sentimental tales. One tells of a mother who died of cancer, leaving each of three sons a letter that began, "I always loved you best . . ." Among the most effective is the story of an old Jewish widow who chats happily every night with her dead husband Seymour. Her grown children think she is batty and put her in a home. She does not care; she gets through to her husband there too, and in fact meets another old woman, who says cheerfully that, sure, her own dead husband talks about Seymour...
...decline; such complaints are a necessary part of the ritual of visiting it. But this year in particular the visitor feels like a tourist in a glass-bottomed boat, gliding over a dying reef: here a brilliant polyp, there a parrot fish or sea fan, but acres of dead whitishgray coral to tell the real story...