Spring Isn't Top Season for a Lover of Slumber

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
April 24, 1954


   SPRING is the most welcome of seasons, mainly because it releases us from winter. But nobody, save perhaps a poet or an incurable optimist, can say that spring is all good. There are things about it that try the soul.
   You dream of lovely landscapes in the spring, of velvety lawns, burgeoning rose bushes and apoplectic tomatoes. Then comes summer and bugs and blight and crabgrass. And for those of willowy will like me the dream turns to dust. My good intentions start to flag in late May. By early July my activities are reduced to brief bursts with the lawnmower and sporadic sessions with the garden hose.

   THE LOSING joust with nature, however, is not my chief complaint against spring. The restricted sleep the season imposes is what really galls.
   Dawn breaks early these days, and with light piercing the eyeballs you are hard put to remain unconscious even when it's quiet. And it's never quiet. With us always are the birds, their throats aburst with gladsome songs to salute the new day.
   A colony of sparrows abides in the ivy which frames my bedroom windows and while I am as happy as they that the nights are not six months long I would deem it a favor if they would settle for at least eight hours, thus laying off their infernal rustling and twittering until the sun was up. They arouse the killer in me, an emotion my ulcers can do without.
    I think well of the robin, but his chirp is no lullaby at 5 a.m. If he were struck mute daily until I was rested and on my legs he would win my vote for state bird.

   THE BIRDS are not the only slumber-chasers, though. My 5-year-old is the chief villain. He awakens at dawn these days and his phonograph claims his immediate attention after which he goes to work on his pegboard with a hammer.
   In an attempt to wean him to quieter activity we plied him with color books hoping the pursuit of art would engross him while his parents captured a last precious hour of shut-eye. This proved about as effective as a soapy hand on a doorknob. It brought out the lad's latent vocal ability. While plying his crayons he hummed, not loud--just loud enough to drive us mad. And after finishing each picture he would bounce into our bedroom to exhibit his skill and solicit praise.
   On Easter Sunday morning he had us limping down the bunny trail at 5:45, no sane hour even for Peter Cottontail, let alone a human buttressed by only four hours sleep. For the last two mornings my son has abbreviated my slumber by coming in and exacting a promise that I buy him a pair of wondrous canvas shoes he learned about through television. He reports that they give the wearer a fleetness of foot rivaling the speed of sound. My fondest wish is to lay hold of the composer of this commercial and take him apart.

   THE SENSIBLE course would be to go to bed early and get in your winks before the birds, dogs and children defiled the dawn. Every morning my wife and I vow to "get to bed tonight by 8 o'clock,"
   But we never do. There's too much to claim attention. There's reading to do, television and radio programs to enjoy, PTA meetings to attend, evasions planned to thwart the bill collector.
   Even when you could get a night's rest you don't. The normal routine is to fall into a chair with a book after dinner and konk off to sleep. You awake in an hour, read again, fog up again, and finally give up about 10 o'clock and totter off to bed.
   Then an astonishing thing happens. You are suddenly as alert as a foxhound. You know your finest moments of the day. So you read a couple of hours and then remember that wedge of pie which survived the dinner hour. Once this is eaten a man is conditioned for sleep. But too much of the night has fled, and at 5 a.m., when the sparrows start to frolic in the ivy and the young one opens the morning program with "Bozo and His Rocket Ship," you are more dead than alive.

   In the spring there should be a way to stretch the time from 1 to 5 a.m. from four hours into eight. Then you would not devote the first half hour out of bed to yawning and eye-rubbing and looking blankly into space. You would awaken as the deer--alert and alive. And you could say "good morning" to your wife and mean it.


Copyright 2018 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

A House Free of Junk Just Isn't a Home

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
January 15, 1955


   WITH ONLY slight exaggeration, you could call me the tidy type. A place for everything, I say, and everything in its place. I am repelled and saddened at the way many people hang on to junk they can have but nebulous use for but which they save on the dubious premise that it "might come in handy."
   I do not refer to stamp or coin collectors or folks who gather butterflies and leaves and buttons as a hobby. As a lad I collected pictures of ballplayers and found it satisfying.
   I mean the string-savers, the characters who salvage bits of tinfoil and gleefully add them to a mountainous ball, the people who cleave to used nails and rusty bolts and beaten-up doorknobs.

   MY WIFE saves sacks. One cubicle in our kitchen, which might better shelter pans, is devoted exclusively to sacks. When I asked the other day if she intended to put them through a shredder and insulate the house, she said certainly not. You need sacks for school lunches, don't you? She constantly has occasion to use sacks, she said. They were just the ticket for picnics.
   I inquired how many picnics she planned--about four a day from next June to September? She gave me one of those looks, murmured something about what the pot called the kettle, and said we would see right now who the champion scavenger was.

   FROM an upstairs closet she extracted a box in which I keep my personal treasures and made this damning inventory:
   One handful pencil stubs, 51 paper clips, 34 shirt-collar stays, one PTA membership card, one shoe horn, seven old shoe laces, two letters urging participation in the church every member canvass of 1952, nine rejection slips, one unfilled prescription for athlete's foot, seven nails, eight faucet washers, five matchbooks, 10 rubber bands, three fragments of soap, 10 buttons, six safety pins and one cigarette butt.
   There, said my wife, was as nice a milieu of meaningless debris as she had ever beheld, and hereafter, before I smarted off about paper sacks, I might put my own little world in order.

   WELL, like I told her, it beats all how stuff collects. Take the canned rhubarb in the fruit cellar, for instance. We brought the stuff with us when we moved here in the early '40s from Montana. Nobody could stand to eat it, yet it was food--of a sort. We didn't want to throw it away but lacked the courage to offer it to anyone. So there it reposes, in spider-webbed neglect, awaiting the archaeologists. I suspect that by now a couple of gulps of the stuff would set a fellow to yelling "Happy New Year"

   We also have an ever mounting store of bacon grease, which my hillbilly forbears deemed the most fittin' article for frying chicken ever seen. But my wife, a butter girl, scorns it as a frying medium. She is always going to give it to a friend who makes soap--but she never does.

   I WENT to the garage the other day to find an old pair of hockey skates which I planned to trade in on a new pair for our 6-year-old. I figured they were in a steamer trunk , a family heirloom now serving ingloriously as a platform for oil cans, stiff paint brushes and a few of our countless flowerpots. In the trunk were a pair of fenders and a headlight for a bicycle we had given away about the time of the Reichstag fire and four battered wheels that had been on a bug used in the soapbox derby of '46.
   But no skates.
   We shall find them, I am confident, the next time we move. Then, also, will emerge many another inanimate acquaintance of the long ago and we shall stroll back along memory lane to our vanished youth. Forgotten books and picture frames and curtain rods will rise out of the past, and magazines which had "such nice poems and recipes" and now rate as collectors' items.
   When that notable moving day arrives I will build a fire out back and consign to the flames those barnacles which have gathered on out matrimonial ship.
   We won't burn everything, though. You never know when you might need a hunk of old linoleum.


Copyright 2018 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
 
 
 

Leave Married Sons and Daughters Alone

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
February 4, 1956


   BEING, by virtue of long exposure, something of an elder statesman in the field of family relations, I am sometimes importuned by distraught parents for advice on how to meet trying situations. What would I do if I were in their shoes? My customary response is, "You've got me!" Or I suggest that they see a psychiatrist or someone else who is half smart.
   You can qualify as an expert, though, merely by advising them to do nothing. Often, if you do nothing, the problem will go away. I urged such a course upon a parent a couple of years ago and counted it one of the greatest favors I ever bestowed.

   THIS distressed lady was feeling neglected by her recently married daughter and son-in-law. It seems that the kids were minding their own business to an acute degree and asking none of the customary favors and handouts. They went their way and wanted the old folks to go theirs. There was little social contact, at least not enough to suit mama. She wondered what could be done about it.
   There was nothing that could be done about it, I said, nothing but to give thanks that the young ones were willing to be on their own, that they were not bumming meals or borrowing money or hinting that refurbishment of wardrobes would be nice proof of parental affection.

   MANY a youth and a maid today has an appallingly light-hearted approach in responsibility, I reminded the "neglected" mother. They buy cars on little but faith and $15 a month, get married without "eating money," and trust that fate will provide. Too often fate turns out to be the old folks. The kids figure that if they get in a jam the elders will bail them out. If the chips really are down, dad and mother also will provide shelter. This is a lousy arrangement. By this time everyone should know it. But it does get the kids in out of the snow.
   It's refreshing to encounter young ones of independent spirit and it would seem sheer folly to attempt to break down such an attitude. However, it's not hard to see why the mother in the case noted here was not moved to cheers and did not accept with good grace my advice to do nothing. She knew that marriage was a picnic--complete with bugs. She didn't want her child to suffer. She wanted her to have things, including advice from mama.

   PARENTS are natural eager beavers where married children are involved and nothing stings them quite as hard as the thought that they're no longer needed. It's difficult for them to do nothing but it's dead easy to meddle--in circumstances that are none of their business. I know what I'm talking about. I do some meddling now and again. Instead of leaving the kids alone, which is how a lot of married young folks prefer it, mom and pop either over-indulge and spoil them or make them resentful.
   There is marked stupidity on all sides. Newlyweds are stupid, not because they get hitched, but because they have not lived long enough to have perspective. Their parents are stupefied by their protective instincts.

   IT MAKES you shudder to think of fumbles made in early marriage. Back when I was a green husband, my wife and I would drive 100 miles into Wisconsin every other weekend to visit her parents. We wanted to be there and assumed that they wanted us. Up to a certain point perhaps they did. But my mother-in-law must have grown weary of the guests-for-dinner chore and wished that we lived a couple of states away. She should have given us the heave but didn't. She was too gracious a woman. Also the indulgence must have given her a satisfaction, a sense of being needed even though it meant extra work.
   When Josephine gets married, it's better that she and her mate take off for remote parts, where they are free of all the foul-ups involving relatives. But if they do live close by and insist on preserving their independence, it would be nice if they did not flaunt said independence to a degree that caused parental suffering.

   THE KIDS should not so well remember that trite warning of a year or so back that "if you're old enough to get married you're old enough to be on your own so don't expect any more help from us."
   This is a statement that on the face of it , makes complete sense. But it doesn't quite work out. Dad and mother live to learn that they did not flaunt said in- that strong.
   Nevertheless, the non-meddling policy is the right one. Do nothing and play for time, I say. Kids want to live their own lives and should, but they don't brush off the old folks permanently. After a while they have a way of "coming home" again.

Copyright 2018 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Teaching a Child Manners Is a Headache

By CHARLES M. GUHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
November 5, 1955


   THERE MUST be a way to teach manners to moppets, since some of them are mannerly, but any success I've had in this line is regrettably sporadic. My only solace is that other parents are similarly frustrated. The pals of my 6-year-old seem as averse to the little niceties as he is.
   I've long wondered why it is so difficult to cajole, browbeat, beg and admonish a youngster into saying "thank you," "please," "excuse me," "you're welcome" or "come again." But day after endless day the training goes on, with few results showing until the offspring is old enough to shave.
   They will interrupt conversations, leave the table with a lunge that would do credit to a man whose  pants were on fire, remain seated when guests arrive and act like characters raised entirely by jungle law.

   I WAS drafted for the trick-or-treat caper with my son the other evening. He said he was old enough to case the area alone but we deemed it best that the old man tag along in the shadows to see that he put a courteous arm on the neighbors and not get a dog sicked on him.

   The tour was amply productive of sweets. But it was long also on parental rhubarb. "Say thank you," I called gently when the first harvest dropped into his sack. "Say thank you," I hissed from behind a tree during the second stop. By the third I was bellowing it loud enough to hasten the fall of autumn leaves.
   By the sixth I was spoiling for a showdown. "If I don't hear you say thank you at this next house," I rasped, "we quit and go home. Do you think these people are putting jelly beans and popcorn balls into that sack for exercise? Do you, by some twisted logic, think they owe you that stuff? What is so tough about saying thank you?"
   "I am saying thank you," he protested.
   "Say it so I can hear it then."
   When the panhandling was finished and he had made inventory of his loot, my wife said to him: "Now say thank you to Pop for going out with you."
   He gave me a devilish grin and filled his lungs. His burst of gratitude rattled the dishes. He had learned well.

   WE HAVE raised a couple of children into quite gracious adulthood and I recall days when we were complimented on their deportment. Certain harassed parents even asked us our secret. But I suspect that the child whose character we are now molding is no worse, and no better, than were his brother and sister. They gave us trouble, too, but time is a great healer.
   The main stumbling block in our present struggle to implant manners, I suspect, is that our son regards me as just one of the boys. His mother is blessed with an adequate supply of brains and judgment but I border, usually, on the knuckle-head. When he is reading and needs help he brushes past me and goes to his mother. When I tell him it's bedtime he gets confirmation from her.
   I am only good for such simple chores as helping him to untie his shoes or find his undershirt. My main role in his cosmos is for horsing around. I am the bad guy and he is the good guy and we fight and he calls me a big lug, an endearing sobriquet I tolerate with good grace.
   This is no way to win respect, I realize, but it is a way to allay any fear of you a child might entertain, even when you occasionally lay one on him. I want no fear of me in my son. I'd rather be a big lug.

   A FEW months ago we called on a couple who had two boys. It was a brief, chaotic interlude. They were unshushable, irrepressible jokers who insisted on hogging the scenes. I yearned to slap them bowlegged. I dislike violence as a general disciplinary tactic but there are times when it's necessary. Hellions who make a travesty of adult conversation should be dealt with summarily.
   The other day I ran into the ideal situation. I was out extending the right hand of fellowship to some new church members and telling them where to sign the pledge card.

   AT ONE place a lad of about 12 opened the door, told me to come in and sit down and passed me a plate of mints. Then, while he went upstairs to rout father from his Sabbath siesta, his 7-year-old sister and I ate mints and talked about school, a discussion that continued in orderly, ungiggling manner after her brother rejoined us and until the father, who had won my admiration before I saw him, appeared.
   We talked for 20 minutes without an interruption, the children listening politely and occasionally participating. They may have been on their company manners but I doubt it. It seemed too natural for an act.
   If it was an act it was a good one. More youngsters  should be taught the lines.

Copyright 2018 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Why Put Style Above Comfort?

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
Of the editorial page staff
Published by the StarTribune
December 30, 1962


   I SEE THESE high school lads walking along the street on freezing mornings with warm and woolly stocking caps on the back of their heads, serving them no better than beanies.
   Half the time my own son even rams his into his pocket after leaving the house. I’ve threatened to run outside and pull it down over his ears but he tells me to forget it and quit being old-fashioned. He wonders if I ever was young.
   I don’t ever remember being young enough to enjoy cold ears, cold feet or chattering teeth and never hesitate to forget about style when weather conditions warrant.
   Perhaps it’s because I was so often cold in childhood that I now love so much to be warm. In those benighted days central heat had not yet blessed the town of my boyhood, nobody could even spell insulation, and storm sash had never been heard of. The main heating plant was the kitchen range, augmented by stoves in dining room and parlor. Drafts were accepted as a normal curse and the expression “cold as a barn” was not just a whimsical comparison. I never compared notes with the cow but am sure she kept as warm as I did.

   THUS I NOW APPRECIATE  every comfort-giving facility, and those, including my own flesh and blood, who wish to scoff at my ear-flaps and overshoes are free to do so. My wife, who eschews extra foot gear unless the snow is ankle deep, laughs at me for wearing rubbers in cold weather when the ground is bare. She says I shouldn’t act so old and infirm. Let her laugh. I prefer warm feet to cold ones and would rather be comfortable than young.
   I rate the electric blanket as the greatest thing since the wheel and never turn mine on without gratitude as I hark back to those frosty bedroom yesterdays when everyone huddled under tons of blankets and turning over in bed or sending an exploratory foot downward for the soapstone took real character.
   Ten minutes before hitting the sack I turn the dial up close to the fire mark to insure toasty repose. On getting into bed I either modify the temperature or forget to. I thus sometimes awaken with a sense of being overdone, and it takes a while to simmer down and recapture sleep. However, this is no fault of the blanket and anyway I’d rather be hot than cold.

  I CAN’T UNDERSTAND why so many garments that once blunted the teeth of winter have gone into limbo or nearly so. The raccoon coat, fancied particularly by college boys in the 1920’s, was an admirable thing and deserved enduring popularity. It has gone, however, and the storm coat is almost as dead. To say that such apparel is now anachronistic because of more warm cars and fewer pedestrians is to talk nonsense.
   Like it or not, in fair weather and foul we sometimes have to walk, and winter should not deprive us of this health-giving exercise. Indeed, we should make it a point to take brisk winter hikes regularly.
   But there’s no pleasure or benefit in such a walk if you’re shaking like an aspen, no exhilaration unless you’re warmly dressed.
   Since no trip to Florida is in my immediate future, my regret this Christmas was that my gifts didn’t include a couple of suits of insulated underwear to see me through until spring. This quilted lingerie, I understand, is quite popular with young folks, probably the lads who wear stocking caps perched atop their heads.

Copyright 2017 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Sad Story of Christmas Savings

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
Of the editorial page staff
Published by the StarTribune
December 19, 1959
 
   FATE HAS relieved me of the Christmas shopping problem. The service trades are taking my Yule savings. My wife gets a repaired furnace and my son a repaired car. These are not gifts to gladden the heart. They can’t be wrapped prettily and put under the tree. They are stuff of the every day.
   The fact that such mundane purchases had to be made at this particular time is not my fault, but I’m utterly depressed. When I join the family in carols at eventide tears are difficult to hold back and the spirit of the season is dead inside me.
   I didn’t want it so. This was to have been a truly memorable Yule, with elaborate gifts bought and paid for, and rich in the joy that comes with unrestrained giving.
   I’d had big plans. For a year I had cut down on cigarettes, haircuts and malted milks, depositing the money thus saved in a tomato can in the closet. And each time I added a quarter to my hoard I thrilled way down deep.

   BUT THERE is no certainty in this life. Justice being what it is today, the fruits of one’s toil and sacrifice can turn to ashes overnight on the flaming forge of necessity. The first warning that my tomato can cache was insecure came when the car radiator began leaking. A new pressure cap was suggested. This did no good. Inexpensive repairs never do. A new water pump was installed. This also did no good.
   Before the correct diagnosis was made—a new head gasket—the starter quit. Soon after these repairs were effected, for a princely sum, the muffler went out. So did what was left in the tomato can.

   WHILE I still reeled under this blow, the inadequacy of a recent furnace checkup became apparent. A cold snap in late November found the radiators cold at 9:30 p.m. My wife went to bed to get warm, leaving me at the mercies of an electric heater while waiting for help.
   The next three hours weren’t the worst I ever spent but they were far from the best. The heater was more hazard than help. It knocked the lights out four times that harrowing night. And while hunting and losing candles and scrounging for fuses I yearned for those simple days when one could get heat from coal and illumination from kerosene lamps. One was not beholden in those times to technicians who gave out with gobbledygook about compressors, switches, coils and filters.
   The furnace went sour again a few days later, too. It was Sunday, of course. We always hire help at overtime rates. The sewer, for example, never backs up save on the Sabbath.

   BUT SOME good came from the travail. The scrap lumber in the garage was spreading out so far it crowded the car. I burned the stuff in the fireplace—wood that I cannot burn when we have guests. My wife has the silly notion that the presence of old boards and rotten fence posts on the hearth robs the festivities of tone, particularly if nails are protruding.
   My garage is the neighborhood repository for used two-by-fours, railroad ties and shingles. Neighbors turn the stuff over to me with great shows of magnanimity, as if they were giving me their shirts. I lack the nerve to tell them to get rid of their own junk.

   TO SUM UP the glad tidings, my Christmas shopping has come to twice the anticipated cost, with nothing to show for it. The fact that I’ve insured my loved ones transportation and heat—gifts better than fine gold and just as expensive—is small solace.
   There will be a few goodies in the stockings, of course, perhaps a new shirt and belt for my son and a kerchief for malady, but so much less than I had led them to expect.
   I hope they try to understand.

Copyright 2017 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

A Family Reunion Can Be Grim

By Cary D. Shoberg
(Guest columnist for Charles M. Guthrie)
Published by the StarTribune
November 28, 1965

   THE WHOLE GANG was at Grandma and Grandpa’s for Thanksgiving again this year and Gramps said it was my turn to write a column for him and he would give me a dollar.
   I reminded him that was what he also gave my brother Mark and cousin Dave for the job and did he not know about inflation? Well, he hemmed and hawed around and said the job would be easy for me because I was so smart and in the fifth grade, but if one dollar wasn’t enough maybe it would be enough for one of the other kids who wasn’t such a wise guy and I could forget the whole thing. So I caved in.

   WHEN WE ARE ALL together there are 15 of us and quite a racket and I notice every year Gramps doesn’t stand up as good as he did the year before and I spoke that is what getting old does to anybody although Grandma stays about the same one Thanksgiving to the next and is now starting to worry about Gramps.
   “Don’t you feel well, dear?” She asked him when he was yelling at everybody to pipe down while he was carving the turkey. “What is the matter with you?”
   “A lot of things might be the matter,” he growled, “but I know one thing that isn’t the matter. I haven’t got an empty-nest syndrome.” I didn’t know what he was talking about and don’t think he did either.
   We were going to have the Thanksgiving deal at our place in Rhinelander but are building a new house which we have not moved into yet but would have lived in for a couple of months already if things had gone as expected. It looks like another couple of weeks before we get into the place.
   When we do get settled it will be great. We had to move out of our other house in September because it had been rented to another family and had to hole up in a lake cottage while the construction boys take their sweet time about getting the new house finished.
   The lake cottage was quite a ball for us kids in Sept. and Oct. but good and cold in Nov. and everybody getting croup and stuff. Mom said the other day she would loose her mind in another two weeks and Dad is starting to mumble to himself.

   SO IT WAS NICE to be with Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Tom and also Uncle Chuck’s family in a warm place with ping pong and pool in the basement and toys for Bobby and Scott even though Gramps was sort of crabby and said if we didn’t pick up the stuff before we left that was scattered from h-ell to breakfast he would ring our necks. Grandma told me he had not been right since the squirrel fell down the chimney into the fireplace and he chased it around the living room.
   The plan now is for everybody to be at our place for Christmas if the carpenters and painters ever get through and Mom can get things straightened up, but Gramps is dragging his feet. “It depends on the weather and the car,” he said. “It’s about 230 miles and if there’s snow or ice we’ll have to pass it up. If the car is acting up we won’t come, either. I am not interested in an ambulance ride or a long walk.”
   Gramps is a nice fellow when you get to know him but a real wet blanket at that.


Copyright 2017 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted wirthout the express approval of the StarTribune