There have been a lot of reruns on TV lately and a lot of old expressions pop up to remind us of things from 20 or so years ago. We are treated to programs from the years when my children were teenagers (and they’re now rapidly approaching retirement age.) I guess it’s only natural that all this looking back has brought to mind some of the expressions that were popular during my own late teens. Not only do the expressions worm their way out of the past — they drag along vivid and fond memories of the friends who filled my life then.
My strictly monitored teen years precluded any of what my dad called “hanging out” with my peers. So I was denied exposure to much of the lingo of my generation at that time. This was probably a good thing in the long run, and is likely one of the reasons I am so fussy about the terrible things we manage to do to corrupt our language. Going off to college at barely eighteen, I reveled in my new-found freedom and spent a good deal of my time “hanging out” with my new friends. Being fairly inept socially, I made friends slowly; some through contacts with my roommate and dorm neighbors, but mostly through my classes and part-time job at the University Library. At the library, I worked most days with another Merit Scholar named Gary. He was big and awkward and fiercely determined to learn about the world he had missed as an orphaned boy raised by his grandfather on a farm near Marengo. He attended concerts and plays, special programs and on-campus guest lectures, sporting events and practically everything our prepaid student activity fees entitled us to. I was his “date” at many of those events and I learned about the broader world right along with him. Gary frequently used an expression that I quickly adopted. When speaking of something nearly impossible, he would say. “You couldn’t do that with a Doing Machine,” as if there were, indeed, technology available to achieve the impossible. I liked the expression — it seemed to use humor to counteract frustration and despair and deliver the message that you weren’t alone in your limitations.
Neither Gary nor I looked on our friendship as a boyfriend-girlfriend situation; he introduced me to some of the friends he acquired at the dorm where he stayed. Ronnie from Waterloo was tall, good-looking and articulate. He melded into our small circle of friends who mostly worked at the library, lived in the same dorms or shared classes. We attended afternoon movies when admissions were cheaper, went bowling frequently, and dressed up to walk across the footbridge to attend opening nights at the University Theater. Ronnie liked to describe an amusing situation or person as being, “funny as a rubber crutch,” though I personally thought that a rubber crutch would be anything but funny. Then came Wayne, a sweet and talented fine arts major who introduced me to Bartok’s music and painted my portrait. He accepted the inevitable by saying, “That’s how the cookie crumbles.” Frank, a fellow art student who made a sculpture of my head, and Gary’s sister Raejean joined our group, then Maxine, a new employee in our department at the library. Our job there consisted of what seemed akin to defacing new books by writing call numbers on their spines with a heated stylus, pasting corresponding identification inside the front covers, adding pockets for check-out lists and reminder slips for return dates, and embossing the title page with the library logo. All this vandalism, while necessary, seemed destructive to me, but was somewhat offset by two factors.
Because of the nature of the job, we could talk and joke while we worked, which largely canceled out the tedium. We played word games and laid plans for things to do after work. The biggest treat, for me at least, was the chance to see, handle and browse through all those beautiful, new, interesting books that we handled for every department library on campus. Nobody seemed to mind if I spent a lot of time leafing through a beautiful new art book or reading a chapter or two from a novel. “And that’s how the cookie crumbled.”
A former volunteer and substitute teacher in the Solon schools, Milli is an artist and poet who lives near Morse where she also creates unique greeting cards and handmade books.