Correspondence, for Some, Is a Chore

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
April 7, 1956


   EVERY TIME we go to a wedding and afterwards look at the newlyweds' loot I suffer a twinge of pity for the bride, thinking of all the thank-you notes she will have to write to keep on speaking terms with the donors.
   Woe to the bride who fails to do the job adequately. She must know that you sent the bath towels and not the place mats and she must pen an adequate paragraph or two praising our selection of color and saying that they are just what she and Wilbur needed most even though they got enough bathroom accessories to last until their silver anniversary.

   WE GOT a "thank you" from a bride a couple of years ago who definitely was my kind of a gal. "We appreciate your gift very much," it said. "John and I will find it very useful."
   Here was labor-saving phraseology, a note that might have been mimeographed, since it could cover everything from carving sets to pot holders. My wife deemed it a poor thing, but she would. She enjoys writing thank yous, is highly skilled at it, and expects to receive good ones. But I thought the bride's note good enough. I don't enjoy writing notes of any kind, don't receive many, and am satisfied with conditions as they are.

   IN ALL fields of correspondence I am a practical blank and so are my blood relatives. Some taint of character stifles more than a trickle of mailed exchanges. On my wife's side, however, there is a solid phalanx of pen pals. At least a couple of fat letters arrive every week from a sister, brother or aunt. And seldom does a day pass that my mate doesn't dash off a letter to some member of her family.
   She does it without effort. Writing notes in the car while I drive her to town is routine procedure. She can write on a bus, day coach, truck, roller-coaster or surrey. She can write sitting, standing or lying down. She can write on a purse, shoe box or package of ground round--legibly and lucidly, with never a pause. She is a true champion.

   IF SO gifted, I might write more, too, but I cannot write by hand at all, being unable myself to unscramble the code. In my youth I aspired to be a doctor and wish now I'd followed through. I'd be an expert at writing prescriptions.
   I must have a typewriter and a desk. The light must be right and so must the inclination. Even then I am practically helpless, having nothing to tell the victim. Life limps along in the same old routine and there seems little sense in boring anyone with the fact that I attended a meeting of the church finance committee Tuesday or that we had the Browns in for scrabble. I write at Christmas time to my brother and sister, of course, and in July to tell them we'll be out to vacation off them. That about buttons it up.

   THEY ARE as good at writing as I am. I can expect a couple of letters a year but no more. This year has been a blank but I'm undismayed. It's only three months old.
   My sister would write once a week, I suppose, if someone held a gun at her head.
Brother Bud is worse, if possible. When he writes it is never mere chit-chat. He has something to say. Whenever I get a letter from him I take it from the envelope with palsied hand, knowing it will contain news of transcendent importance--something like"Uncle Zeke left all his money to the dog and cat shelter, the heel," or, "Hurrah, they stuck oil on the west forty."

   WHEN HE is going to pass through Minneapolis he never considers it necessary to pen an advance warning. A couple of years ago, when in town between planes, he routed my wife out of bed at 2 a.m. to exchange pleasantries over the phone.
   She realizes now that she married into a family of screwballs and is resigned. But she used to rate the situation as practically scandalous and would entreat me to write. "Don't you owe Janey a letter?" she'd ask. "I don't know," I'd reply, "my memory isn't that good."

   BUT HE who would attribute our infrequent letters to lack of family affection would be wide of the mark. Our mutual regard, I like to think, is so deep that it need not depend on weekly or monthly epistolic enrichment. My brother, sister and I are a devoted trio. We are very close, especially as concerns postage.
   On his last birthday I broke precedent and sent brother a card, more as a gag than a greeting. I never had an acknowledgment and didn't expect one. But I know what his reaction was. He considered it a scurvy trick--and it was. It violated the stern code of the clan.

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.

You Aren't Aging? Look at Old Photos

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
February 18, 1956


A BUNCH of the relatives were whooping it up over some old photographs the other night, amused and astounded at the ravages the years had wrought.
   We had come, by recent inheritance, upon the collection, a picture story of my wife's side of the family.The booty included one elegantly embossed leather album containing characters dating back to the Civil War.
   It proved good more for gags than historic significance, since nobody present could identify more than two or three persons pictured. We fell to speculating on what family patriarch could name them.
   "Uncle Knute would know who they were," a sister-in-law mused as she turned the pages. She had something there--but not much. The grass had been growing on Uncle Knute's grave since shortly after the Taft administration. He may even have been one of the guest stars in the album.

   MY WIFE said there was a third cousin or something somewhere in Florida who was a "perfect nut" on genealogy and she might help us. She might, of course, if we could find her, but anyone of sound mind would think twice before trekking south to hunt around for a shirt-tail relative on the off chance that she could pin a name tag on some yokel holding a derby hat, with his hair creased down the middle, and standing beside a high-back chair and behind a handlebar mustache.
   When we finally confessed frustration my spouse said this should teach us a lesson. It was a shame to have pictures of ancestors you didn't know, people who might be sturdy branches of the family tree. She was going to get out all the pictures we had and write names and dates on the back so that when we died our beneficiaries would not be left in the dark.

   THIS should make those who follow after us very happy. As of now I am a mere twig on my family tree and have little time left to branch out. I think it will make small difference to those who look at my picture 100 years hence if they know whether I am Great Grandfather Charley or his fourth cousin, Adelbert Smith. I am not exactly steaming with curiosity about the folks in that old album, either. It is not my side of the family--which is essentially hillbilly--but is composed largely of Swiss cheese producers who migrated to Wisconsin from the old country before the turn of the century. I am not overly impressed by their pioneer contribution to new world eating, being the one odd-ball in-law who can take Swiss cheese or leave it alone.

   BUT THE collection included other more endearing photos, pictures taken 10 to 15 years ago of aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers and children. Then came the memories, the big laughs, and a  few tears of regret.
   There is little apparent change, from week to week and month to month, in the appearance of those you see frequently. The face you look at while shaving stands up reasonably well from day to day. It's only when you examine an old picture that you know time is not the great healer it's reputed to be.
   Looking back at us that evening were little children, now grown and married, and relatives, then in reasonable bloom, now gone to seed. The aging process is one of life's insidious certainties. You tell yourself that you feel better than you ever did. Perhaps you're convinced of it. But when you look at snapshots taken in 1943 and compare them with those taken last Christmas you begin to have doubts.
   In the one you are a trim 160 pounds. The eyes retain a certain eagerness of youth. In the other there is a puffiness around the jowls and midsection, and resignation clouds the bifocalled eyes. While it is a fact that age lends charm and distinction to the fortunate few, in most cases the opposite is true.

WHENEVER I feel that I have time by the forelock I think of an enlightening experience of 1953. My young son accosted me one day with a snapshot. I recognized the picture as one of my wife and me taken before we were married. I always had rated it a faithful likeness.
   "Good picture, isn't it?" I said.
   He agreed that it was. "But who," he wanted to know, "is that guy with mother?"


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.


 

What Have You and Spouse Got in Common?

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
April 21, 1956


   A PET conviction of the match-makers is that both parties to the marriage contract must have much in common to be happy. If you discover that you and Prudence don't have similar tastes and temperaments, you had better back out of the deal as gracefully as possible before the clergy makes it binding, else there will be the devil to pay.
   Believe this if you will, but I refuse to buy the whole package. Although you would start with two strikes on you if you and your lady had no mutual interests, you can get along passing well if you see eye-to-eye in a mere 50 percent of the area.

   THIS does not mean, as the slide-rule boys might have you suspect, that you and Prudence are on speaking terms only half the time. It does not mean that your marriage must be temporary. If it did, divorce would be more the rule than the exception.
   If, before you and your beloved felt you could decide that you were meant for each other you had to compare likes and dislikes and undergo a psychiatric check, you'd probably retreat into permanent bachelorhood.
   As I get it, a fellow marries a girl because he loves her and even his prior knowledge that she is crazy about Liberace and green onions will not dissuade him.

   SIMILAR tastes and similar interests imply similar traits and nothing could strip the marital gears quicker than the latter. Suppose two reticent souls get married and then can't think of anything to say. What a stupid situation! Not as bad, of course, as the mating of two blabbermouths, but certainly not sparkling. Or let a couple of hot-heads be joined. Their mutual regard for pickled herring or "The $64,000 Question" will not keep them from screaming at each other.

   The chatterbox, I'm sure, makes a better go of marriage if he or she weds someone who doesn't always have something to say. And the hot-head would do well to exchange vows with his opposite, a person of tolerance and restraint.

   I HAVE been mulling over the things my wife and I don't have in common and have toted up quite a formidable list. They are little things, perhaps, but even little things can grow with the years. In the face of these divergent tastes, traits and opinions, however, and maybe in defiance of the psychological percentages, we have muddled through without benefit of expert counsel or apparent need of it.
   This despite the fact that milady likes cocoa for breakfast and I can take it only to arrest starvation. This despite the fact that she likes cake and I prefer pie, that she cannot stand milk while I love the stuff, and that she sips coffee only under social duress while for me it is as vital as air.

   THERE ARE other differences. Football is my wife's favorite sport and baseball is mine. I doubt that she can tell the difference between the split-T and the single-wing but she can name the teams in the Big Ten and knows there are 11 men on a side.
   She does not know what the World Series is all about and she might even suspect that the  National league is on the attorney general's list of subversive organizations. As a consequence relations get a bit strained about this time of year, when I am glued to a ball game and she is making pointed references to the sad state of the yard.
   I like western movies and she likes the song and dance variety. I coaxed her to the cinema a couple of years ago only to have her sleep like a baby through "High Noon." I could not find it in my heart to blame her much, being stirred only slightly myself. Had I known, however, that Grace Kelly was destined to become the princess of Monaco, the Duchess of Valentinois, the Marquise of Baux and such I'd be flapping yet, no doubt. I was wheedled into attending "An American in Paris" and, because merciful sleep would not come, sat through the long dance sequences blanketed in boredom.

   BUT WE are as one in many ways. Neither of us can get to bed at a civilized hour. We both love fried chicken and corn on the cob, we both play horrible bridge and are indifferent to television, and neither of us chews gum in church.
   In the big things we are highly compatible. And that, I confess, is a help.

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.

Time for Concern, Not Escape

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial/opinion page staff
published by the StarTribune
September 18, 1966


   I WAS OUT in the back yard passing a football with Jimmy Tierney, my 11-year-old pal from next door, when J. Adelbert Picklewurst, my know-it-all neighbor, wandered over.
   He watched us a minute and sniffed. "Fine thing," he growled. ""The world is going to pot and you fritter away your time with a football."
   "Well, you can't spend all your time worrying."
   "Quit rationalizing. You can at least show some concern. There is much too little of it. There is too much escapism, too much interest in the Vikings and the Packers and 49ers and not enough thought about Viet Nam. People are more absorbed in the World Series than in the race riots or pollution. We are headed full-speed for the abyss and nobody seems to give a hoot."
   "But," I reminded him, "you've told me several million words about baseball. I thought you were both a fan and an expert."

   PICKLEWURST SUCKED on his pipe. "I am," he said modestly, "but now it's time to put away childish enthusiasms. What difference does it make who wins the National League pennant, with Armageddon at bat? And why should we rend our garments in anguish and ask why the Twins didn't start playing ball until so late? All this doesn't make the slightest difference in the price of pork chops, the wage and price guidelines, or slaughter on the highways. I'm through with sports for the duration."
   "For the duration of what?"
   " Viet Nam, mainly. If things go on as they are we'll get into war with Red China. Then the fat will be in the fire for sure. You newspaper boys are supposed to know everything. Why don't you come up with some solutions instead of so much lofty but tenuous prose? You wail about the threat to democracy. Why not offer a formula for negotiations with Hanoi?"
   "Well," I said defensively, "De Gaulle made a proposal we didn't like because it would involve loss of face."
   "And of course we can't lose face." Picklewurst jabbed me in the chest with his forefinger.
   "Quit throwing that damned football a minute and listen. What's better, loss of a little face or loss of thousands of GIs in an Asian land war that could last into the next century?"
   Not wishing to have him around for the rest of the day, I threw the football back to Jimmy and said nothing.

   "WE COULD USE some solutions, too," said Picklewurst, "to the race question. All Washington can think about is more civil rights legislation."
   "What would you do, ban protest marches, lock up all the bigots, or what?"
   " I'd do more about it than toss a football around or wonder about Sandy Koufax's arthritic elbow or Willie Mays' home-run production. I'd do some heavy thinking--and I am doing some, incidentally--about how to generate more tolerance in the human heart and get the price of beef down to where you didn't have to buy a roast on the installment plan."
   He refueled his pipe and continued. "As a matter of fact, while you squander time, I'm going home now to resume my deliberations and do some serious reading." He looked at his watch. "Heavens!" he exclaimed, "I'm seven minutes late." He hurried off.
   "What he's late for," Jimmy grinned, "is the Pirates and Cardinals. They're on TV today."


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.

Thrilling Experiences Pay Off

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
September 6, 1958


   THE OTHER day I huddled with my literary counselor to sound him out on what path I should take to arrive at another rejection slip.
   He told me that the personal experience article seemed very hot at the moment and that test pilots, athletes, jockeys, reformed drunks, gamblers and drug addicts all were having their day in the magazines.
   "The one big drawback in your case," he continued, "is that you never had any interesting experiences."

   "WHAT DO you mean?" I protested. "I'm right on the verge of writing a piece titled, 'I Was a Forest Service Smoke Chaser.'"
   "Hmm," said my counselor. "This is a facet of your career about which I had not been apprised. When were you a smoke chaser?"
   "Well," I said, perhaps lamely, "back about 1925. give or take a few years."
   "You take them," he said. "And my congratulations on a good memory. Did anything interesting happen, by chance, while you were chasing fires? Did you get a leg burned off or rescue a fair maiden? Is there anything that would be remotely entertaining in this resurrection of ancient history?"
   "Let me think," I parried. "I ate baking powder biscuits for a week straight and fried doughnuts over a campfire."
   "Put it in your memoirs," my counselor yawned,"and file it away in a bureau drawer. It will be something for you heirs to throw away when they're cleaning up the place."

   AT LEAST two elements are vital to the personal experience article, he said. It has to be comparatively recent and it must interest more people than the members of one's family.
   "It should be spectacular, such as climbing Mount Everest or crossing Lake Superior in a washtub. Failing that, it should deal with the author's surrender to temptation and his final triumph.
   "One could not possibly sell a piece titled "Women Are a Waste of Time' or "Why I Never Drink Liquor,'" he said, "because such titles imply neither temptation nor surrender--and thus there is no final victory. But you might find a buyer for "No More Cuties for Me" or "I've Had My Last Hangover.'

   "YOUR trouble," said my counselor, "is that you are colorless and middle-of-the-road. You have no bad habits worth mentioning and are disgustingly healthy. You've never had heart surgery or amnesia. You don't even have hay fever. You aren't impetuous and the only hobby you have is mooching cigarettes. You are normal and consequently uninteresting.
   "If you want to succeed in the personal experience field you have to do more than go for the groceries on Saturday morning. You must do something like going below in an aqua lung and killing sharks with a can-opener. You might even do something crazy, such as living in a tree house or sitting on a flagpole. To the outsider your life roughly parallels that of a Hereford, except that the Hereford's is more exciting. He gets slaughtered."

   MY COUNSELOR is doubtless right. I feel a vast inadequacy. Somehow I have missed the boat. While there is merit in an upright life, in a good credit rating and membership on the ways and means committee, there is no drama here, no hot breath of danger or ache of hunger, no gnawing desire for a slug of Old Cornstalk, no thrill of suspense.
   People dream of fame in sports, medicine, finance, politics and letters. Time and kicks in the teeth often squeeze the juice out of such meditations. But mine continue, in a sporadic and anguished sort of way.
   However, I'm not about to go on a two-year drunk just to have something to write about when I sober up. Neither shall I sit atop any flagpoles or fight any sharks.
   A home-body may not have much to go on but I figure that for his own peace of mind he'd better stay in character.

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.

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.