Life is not a bowl of cherries

I thought of another pet peeve: People who say prostrate when what they should have said is prostate.

It's just my personal opinion, but I don't think there are many places outside of a doctor's office where the word a person should have said is prostate.

Moving right along...

Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) was a woman from Ohio who is best known for her humorous newspaper columns and 15 books, most of which became best-sellers if Wikipedia is to be believed.

I don't know about the insides of her books, but some of her titles are very humorous. They include:

I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (1974)
The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank (1976)
Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (1983)
If You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home (1991)

We will not be going down any of those particular rabbit trails today, but what you choose to do in the privacy of your own home in your spare time is entirely up to you, of course.

The rabbit trail we have chosen for today is Erma Bombeck's 1978 title, If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

When I said Erma Bombeck is best-known for her humorous newspaper columns I didn't mean that the newspapers were humorous, I meant that her columns were humorous and appeared in newspapers. By the way, where else would columns appear? Magazines have articles; newspapers have columns. Do I have to explain everything to you?

Getting back to cherries, way back in 1931 Lew Brown and Ray Henderson wrote a song called "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" that went like this:

Life is just a bowl of cherries;
Don't make it serious;
Life's too mysterious.
You work, you save, you worry so,
But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go.
So keep repeating it's the berries;
The strongest oak must fall.
The sweet things in life
To you were just loaned,
So how can you lose what you've never owned?
Life is just a bowl of cherries,
So live and laugh at it all.

I think Messrs. Brown and Henderson were delusional. In 1931 Herbert Hoover was presiding over a deepening Great Depression. The stock market had crashed two years earlier. Banks were failing right and left. The dust bowl was just about to appear over the horizon. Life is just a bowl of cherries? Seriously?

I have thunk and thunk on the subject (you would probably say thought and thought but this is my blog) and it is my considered opinion that life is not a bowl of cherries.

What is life exactly?

Those of you are tempted to tell me that Voltaire said, “Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats” will be stunned to learn that it was historian Peter Gay who said that, not Voltaire, according to the quoteinvestigator.com website.

St. James said, or at least he would have if he had spoken English of the King James variety, “What is your life? It is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away.”

William Shakespeare put the following into the mouth of Macbeth, in iambic pentameter yet: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”

Perhaps things are not quite that dire.

Or maybe they are, but we can amuse ourselves in the meantime by reading books by Erma Bombeck.

That advice from 1931 is worth considering.

Live and laugh at it all.