OutTakes
by Edd Merritt

Hey Elvis, What’s on the Flip Side of Spring?
Woke up this morning
Put on my slippers
Walked in the kitchen and died
And, oh what a feeling as my soul went through
the ceiling. . .
“Please Don’t Bury Me,” John Prine

I’ve seldom been one to stand on ceremony. When I see it coming, I often pop the question immediately, “What’s the alternative?”
So, since this issue of the News focuses on springtime and flowers and rebirth and youth and all the timely things we look forward to in May, my thoughts are drawn back to old timey stuff. Not music necessarily, although there’s always that element; rather, I find myself focusing on how I and others of my era view growing old and express it or study it for meaning. Boring, right? Well, blame it partly on aging, but also partly on my son.
He e-mailed me a National Public Radio link to an article about women’s study groups, asking in his note, “Doesn’t this remind you of Grandma?” Well, of course it did – of Grandma (Thel to her friends), her colleagues in her Midwestern study clique, Pitzy, Porcia, Rhoda, Marylou, Louise – the Tuesday Girls, they called themselves, as in, “I’d love to help you with your geometry, Edd, but I’m terribly involved with my paper for the Tuesday Girls.”
How often did I as a youth have to strike out on my own bike, because my mother was busy preparing her study group presentation and couldn’t be bothered with mundane matters like peewee baseball or Boy Scout meetings? My father would escape to his office to “dictate,” rather than hear the latest rendition of Mom’s report.
Trying to find paper on which to jot a note in our house was often like trying to find raw gold dust in the meat department at the Piggly Wiggly. Every scrap contained notes scribbled in Grandma’s distinctive handwriting, practiced and honed to perfection at Waseca elementary school and refined even further while teaching high school in “The Cities.” Her findings or, often more likely, her musings, were seldom filed or even copied into a notebook. Rather they lay where they were written. The kitchen table seemed a major repository, but her desk upstairs had a stash that would make Hunter Thompson proud. Once found, however, the key element to understanding each note often lay in the ability to translate it. A) Only Grandma knew the Tuesday topics, and B) only she, in our house anyway, understood her own special shorthand in which she transcribed all her notes, including her grocery list.
“Mom!” I’d holler. “I need some paper for school. Everything I see around here has notes on it about — as near as I can decipher — 16th century collars in the royal court of Holland or the complete Encyclopedia Britannica guide to fairies. Don’t we have anything that isn’t tainted by your Tuesday Girls?”
A ten-year-old devours action, not words, so the paper I claimed to need probably would have turned into airplanes rather than bibliographies.
However, now, 55 years later, I’m beginning to understand my mother’s interest in ideas as things that bring meaning into life. I don’t think my current curiosity stems from being denied an education (although, college was, unwittingly, probably an object of one of my early “Why” questions). No, interestingly enough, with retirement comes a certain freedom away from production of things and movement toward production of ideas that give things meaning.
I find myself actually remembering books and concepts kicked around by my freshman English professor. And they carry much greater immediacy, interest and meaning to me now than they ever did in 1960. Road trips then carried immediacy, particularly after a long winter on an all-male campus. Housemothers took on a luster that most sixty-plus-year-old single women only remembered from World War II times.
A friend’s mother, Mimi, bore that luster. She was a supply sergeant in the South Pacific who traded food for a tank to transport beer through the jungle. My housemother would have loved her story. My mother and the Tuesday gang would have called her action unladylike. Yet, some of them, I know, secretly wished they’d had the opportunity.
In my own aging, I find myself gaining meaning alike from themes growing out of sound data as well as themes growing from slightly florid fiction. Ironically, I think I have some of my college struggle through structured learning to thank for that, although one would be hard pressed to see my grades as indicators that much learning took place. Yet, one of the things I harp against as a senior member of society now is the tendency of our culture to hold to a strictly linear view of education. I’m a firm believer in the dictum that it is often wasted on the young. The conglomeration of things that go into its ingredients come from so many different sources that one has to be completely open to and inquisitive about a whole range of perspectives. The danger of casting the cognitive net too narrowly lies around every bend. I’m afraid we’re seeing this happen on a world plane, and I certainly don’t have an answer to its solution. Schooling is not the only action needed.
And, to my mind, religion can be even more dangerous. Despite theology’s attempt to provide historically sound bases to faith bound in goodness, it keeps running amok in the absurd quagmire of human nature. I wish I were confident in the existence of a rational scheme behind the universe, because that would, for me, provide better reasons for belief and the testing of that belief.
I’m not sure how far down this line of introspection and reasoning the Tuesday Girls ever traveled. I have a hunch that they may have stopped short of establishing their own theology. However, a reliable scheme for the universe may yet lie on scraps of paper that littered my mother’s kitchen table, concealed carefully in those shorthand notes that only she and good old what’s-his-name in the great beyond understand. The answer could be carved right into the pine table, as Thel prepared for her presentation with all the diligence, care and procedural ritual of Big Popi stepping to the plate. I still think of her kitchen as Grandma’s Tabernacle, just to be on the safe side.