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 |  It's who we are. It's what we stare at in the middle of the night. It's a bug zapper. |
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My friends, When we were young and newly hatched—also young and in love—my husband and I lived with our four young children on the Space Coast of Florida. The massive propulsion of rocket and shuttle launches from Cape Kennedy often rocked the windows and doors of our little love cottage. We were always properly respectful and impressed by the reach of mankind’s achievements. It was a point of pride to stop whatever we were doing (dishes, dinner, dancing, sleeping, fist fighting, etc.) to watch the eastern horizon—hands on hearts, tears in eyes—as the United States of America raced into the frontier of space. One deep, dark morning (about 2:00 am) I shook my husband awake to watch yet another triumph of human advancement. “Get up,” I mumbled to Sherwood, “the shuttle’s going up. We gotta’ watch.” Sherwood moaned, “The garbage is out all ready. Let me die.” He did not open his eyes. “Come on. We should watch. Night launches are amazing.” He dragged himself upright and clung to the window ledge behind our bed. We knelt, with our chins braced on the ledge, our bleary eyes fixed on a blazing light in the eastern sky. We watched. The light did not appear to move. We stared some more. The light remain fixed. We struggled to focus. The light blazed away. We waited for the light to fade into the blackness of space. It did not. We watched and watched and watched. The light stubbornly refused to move. At last, collapsing back into my pillow I said, “Honey, go back to sleep.” Sounding confused, miffed, and a little whiney Sherwood asked, “Why?” “Because for the last eight to ten minutes we’ve been staring at our next door neighbor’s bug zapper.” He went back to sleep. And I lived to worship at the altar of space exploration another day. This story pretty much sums up who we are, and how we got this way—excessive staring at bug zappers. And this is my blog, a space-age way of recording one’s thoughts, ideas, embarrassments, and foibles for the entire known world. Once upon a time, I would have made this record on papyrus, rolled it up, stuffed it into a ceramic jar, and asked to have the whole thing buried with me in my sarcophagus. I still might. Disclaimer: Some of the stuff you will read here is true. Some of it is not. Some of it is the result of wishful thinking. Some of it is the result of too much thinking, and some of it is the result of too little thinking. But all of it will be written with joy and laughter, because the alternative is despair and weeping, and isn’t there more than enough of that stuff out there? Thank you for your support, Linda (Zippity the Zapped) Zern |
| My husband hasn’t worn a wedding ring since the emergency room folks had to hacksaw it off. He was wrestling with some teenagers in a swimming pool. They broke his ring finger. “You boys better settle down before someone gets hurt,” I remember saying. My husband hasn’t had the full use of his right knee since he hopped over a fence trying to help our neighbor catch his escaping bull. His ACL detached, causing his leg to dangle loosely—my husband’s ACL, not the bull’s. “Sherwood, maybe you should try opening the gate first?” I remember yelling. My husband ‘s knuckle is scarred where he rammed a loose prong of field fence into his hand. He was loading a roll of field fence onto our truck at Tractor Supply. When he showed me his gushing wound and asked me if he thought he should get stitches I said, “It has been my experience that when you can see the stuff that’s supposed to be on the inside of your skin from the outside, you’re going to need stitches.” “Babe, you should probably put your work gloves on,” I remember warning. A couple weeks ago, my husband slunk out of our bedroom into the foggy morning to play racquetball with several younger, sprier men. I said, “Don’t go. But if you go, don’t fling yourself around like a twenty year old. If you do fling yourself around like a twenty year old, make sure you have someone to drive you to the emergency room, because I’m not doing it. I have things to do today.” He scoffed at my scorn. Later that day my husband came home from racquetball and worked on the duck pen, fed the animals, and mowed the front pasture—with a potentially BROKEN wrist. He refused to tell me he had fallen while flinging himself around like a twenty year old. I trimmed the hedge and watched him mowing the pasture. He had to keep his left arm bent across his chest. Every time he crossed in front of me he hit a bump, which caused him to double over the lawn mower steering wheel in agony; he continued to pretend his hand didn’t feel like it had been partially severed. Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. Back and forth, he rode by, like one of those rabbits you shoot at in a shooting gallery. Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. It was like watching the Shoot the Sherwood Off the Lawnmower Arcade Game. At one point my vision blurred, and I thought if I had a gun I’d shoot him off that lawnmower. Our son, Adam, drove my husband to the emergency room later that day. The bone was only “compressed” not broken. He was supposed to wear a wrist brace for three weeks. He didn’t. My husband is an accident monger. A monger is a person promoting something undesirable (hatemonger, warmonger, bad judgment monger.) On the other hand, I am a cynic monger or a prophetess. Linda (Butterfly Bandage) Zern |
| Who the Bleep Did I Marry, Evil Kin, Swamp Murders, and the list goes on and on. They’re television shows that showcase true crimes. I love them. I learn so much. Sometimes I take notes. From the show, Who the Bleep Did I Marry, I’ve learned to be suspicious of slick talking guys who paw through my panty drawer looking for my bank statements. I don’t actually know any slick talking guys who paw through my panty drawer looking for my bank statements, but I remain suspicious of them. Watching Evil Kin keeps me on my toes. I have a checklist. Do the neighbors resemble zombies? Do the neighbors resemble people who resemble zombies? Do my evil kin resemble the neighbors? Check for fresh graves in the neighbor’s backyard. Don’t get caught. But it’s Swamp Murders that has given me the biggest heads up. What I’ve learned from Swamp Murders is that the body always floats—sooner or later it floats—always. This isn’t just true of dead bodies; this is also true of a lot of stuff you’d rather stayed down there in the muckity, muck bottom of the swamp . . . like sales receipts. Like sales receipts tucked away in the bottom of boxes, stacked in the garage, waiting for garbage day. Receipts for pointless, silly purchases that add little to no value to my life except that the purchase was pretty and I wanted it. Those sales receipts. They float. Like dead bodies thrown in a stinking swamp they bob right up to the top of the slimy water or the top of the box the hat came in. I love hats. I love fancy hats you can’t wear in public, because the public who wore these fancy hats are all dead Victorians—not swamp murder dead—but still dead. My husband does not appreciate my fancy hat problem. So I try not to stress him with my fancy hat problem. It’s better that way. Luckily, he’s an engineer so he rarely notices when I’ve added another hat to my fancy hat collection. He rarely notices that we have rugs or furniture or walls. Unless . . . he finds the stinking receipts. My husband’s voice boomed from the garage. “Hey, what’s this receipt for?” “What receipt?” “The receipt in this box, under these other boxes, under this stack of Goodwill stuff.” I had a sinking feeling that I knew which receipt had floated to the surface of my fancy hat swamp. “Receipt? What receipt?” Delay, deflect, deny—I watch modern day politics, I know how to stall the inevitable congressional hearing. “This receipt for a women’s white felt riding hat with lace veil.” “I’m sorry what was that?” His voice bounced and echoed a bit. “Linda!” Do you have any idea how many boxes were out in that garage? A stinking swamp’s worth that’s how many, and just like on that show where people are always trying to dump the evidence in the middle of the dankest swamp that stupid receipt bobbed straight to the top of the cardboard heap. Busted. Linda (Hats Off) Zern |
| We are a civic-minded couple. We vote. We pay taxes. We watch cable news and shout at the television. We watch CNN in airports and shake our heads. We volunteer in our communities. We are Osceola County Volunteer Mounted Posse members. Well, my husband is one of those—him and Miss Kitty, his horse. I’m just applying to be a one of those—along with my free horse, Jayla. Right now, I’m in volunteer limbo, waiting to be finger printed, lie-detected, drug tested, and questioned. My free horse is waiting to grow hair in her ears, but that’s another story. Until the county calls, I rub lotion on my free horse, hoping she’ll grow hair. I practice posse stuff, and I continue to live clean and free. Sometimes my posse husband and I ride our horses down to Lake Toho. We practice walking passed cows, plastic bags, deer bones, barking dogs, speeding cars, metal grates, and a graveyard. It’s important to de-sensitive horses to things that might frighten them, which is everything. Horses have been wolf food since God kicked Adam and Eve out of that garden. It’s made them skittery, the horses, not Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are skittery for different reasons. One of the jobs of the volunteer posse is to look for folks who’ve wandered off: kids, seniors, dead people. The way I see it if I fell out of an airplane and ended up naked in the woods, not alive, I’d want somebody to come and find me besides the raccoons. On a trip down to the lake we noticed a cloud of smell that murder mysteries like to refer to as decomp. We rode on. Our horses didn’t twitch or snort. “Wow, that’s some bad smell,” I said. “Yep. That’s a big dead something all right,” Sherwood said. We rode on. Passed the cows, next to the cemetery, down to the lake. And back again. The smell had not dissipated. “Wow, that’s some bad smell,” I repeated. “Yep. That’s a big dead something all right,” Sherwood said. “And there it is,” I said. And there it was, someone’s really big, really stinky, really dead cow, in plain sight and in plain smell, in the pasture next to the road. Somehow we had managed to ride right passed a thousand pounds of odiferous cow. Some posse members we were. “Wow, I’d have to give us a big F on locating dead cows in the woods.” “Yep,” he said. That’s country living. Wolves eat horses. Cows drop dead. Vultures fight the Bald Eagles for road kill. And free horses are never free. But if you fell out of an airplane and ended up naked in the woods, not alive, you’d want someone to come and find you, even if their free horse had no hair in its ears. Linda (Leg Up) Zern |
| The fourth brother in the grandkid gang was snotty, crying, dirty, and done. I pointed at it and told my daughter, “Take that one home, wash it, pat it, and put it to bed.” The third brother in the gang felt that I had dissed his littlest brother. He began to mutter. His face closed like a fist. I tried to interpret his three-year old muttering. Nothing. “Heather,” I said to my daughter, “what’s he saying?” She listened for a while. With more optimism and hope than knowledge she reported, “He’s saying, ‘I’ll love you forever.’” Zac’s face now resembled angry granite. “Heather, look at his face. I don’t think he’s saying, ‘I’ll love you forever.’” She sighed and then reported, “He’s saying, ‘I’ll scratch you all over.’” Ah ha! That was more like it. This incident typifies what I like to call the Wishful Thinking Syndrome. It was wishful thinking that Zac was waving a fond goodbye to his old YaYa with charming declarations of undying devotion. There’s a lot of Wishful Thinking Syndrome going around I’ve noticed. It’s wishful thinking that professors who are busy trying to sell their books will be available to help you sell yours. It’s wishful thinking that low self esteem, broken hearts, damaged egos, and sociopathic behavior can be fixed with quick cash. It’s wishful thinking that food without butter, salt, fat, and sugar is going to be as good as food with butter, salt, fat, and sugar. It’s wishful thinking that bread and circuses are going to work forever. (See history of the Roman Empire) It’s wishful thinking to believe that hot flashes will make you grow taller after age fifty or before age fifty. It’s wishful . . . well, you get the picture. Wishful thinking is a direct result of the modern notions that human beings deserve trophies for breathing, that buying a Wraptastic will change your life, and that everything billed as ‘based on a true story’ is true. Get real. The three-year old kid is not telling you he’s going to love you forever—this time. This time he’s threatening to claw you with grubby fingernails. Sigh. It happens. The news isn’t all bad, however. It is my hopeful wishful belief that for every busted thought-wish, there are those rare and dazzling moments when our wishful thoughts actually reflect reality and the kid is saying that he’s going to love you forever and the purchase of a Wraptastic does, in fact, change your life. But those moments are both rare and dazzling, which makes reality way better than wishful thinking—sort of like having a unicorn to ride to the free puppy store. Linda (Scratch Resistant) Zern |
| We live in a rural setting. I often blog about the idyllic nature of our enchanted lives: gamboling goats, preening ducks, rustling leaves, slowly circling vultures. It’s a dream. Especially when our Muslim neighbors fire up their bone saw on the festival of Eid. It’s a traditional Middle Eastern festival celebrated with bouncy houses for the kids and large curved knives for the slitting of goat throats. It attracts nosy neighbors peaking over the fence (that would be me) and the nosy neighbor’s friend. (That would be my friend.) “Did I exaggerate?” My friend watched as a bearded man neatly cut a goat’s throat. She looked at me with big eyes and said, “Not one bit.” “I’m so glad you’re here to be a witness. I think maybe people think that I make this stuff up. I mean I do make stuff up but this is not the stuff I make up if I did make up stuff like this. You know what stuff I mean?” “Not one bit.” “Exactly.” The sound of an air compressor kicked up and a man stuck an air tube into a goat carcass inflating the goat’s skin. The goat carcass took on the shape of a helium balloon on Main Street, Disney World. “Hey, that’s pretty slick,” she said. Another man stripped the goat’s skin off like a used condom. We looked at each other. “Did I exaggerate?” “Not one bit.” My friend and I retired to our red neck yard circle to enjoy lemonade and eavesdropping on the neighbors. Wind rustled through the maple tree leaves. Crickets sang. We watched as the neighbors loaded a steer into a handy homemade guillotine then brought the knife down and . . . a child screamed with laughter from the bouncy house. Overhead a circling wheel of vultures hovered over the neighbor’s gut pile. Sunlight sparkled in a bucket of blood tossed to lower the level of the blood barrel. A mockingbird practiced its bald eagle screech. Something skittered in the lantana. My friend and I relaxed to the sound of the bone saw and the knowledge that Halloween was right around the corner. Linda (Make Mine Mutton) Zern |
| My husband can make numbers dance. It’s a computer analyst thing. Numbers take the place of words in my husband’s binary mind. What you can’t say with a 0 or a 1 isn’t worth saying. I, on the other hand, love the wordy majiggles, sometimes making up new twinkle words right on the spot. Words are magic. In my mind, words are like pieces of a glorious puzzle that fit together in endless combinations to form blazing snapshots framed in braided twists of golden licorice. You see the basic problem. I spend my days tapping away at letters, blending them into words—also mowing, chopping, burning, edging, mucking, grooming, raking, planting, growing, dragging, and nailing, but that’s a subject for another day. My husband reads what I write and says, “Good.” He says it always and forever, because the word “good” is his describing word of choice. No matter what I write, how much or how little, how sad or how happy, he will call it good. No matter how much he likes a piece or how moved he is by it, or how hard it’s made him laugh, he has one and only one word to bestow on it. GOOD. Not wonderful. Not amazing. Not wham bam thank you Sam. Just good. I can’t decide if a one or a zero represents the word good in his binary brain bucket. My latest project is a novella (a short, sweet novel) set in rural Florida in the mid ‘60’s called Mooncalf. It’s a very serious, literary work requiring a lifetime’s worth of blood and bone. He read Mooncalf. When he finished reading, he paused, pondered, and said, “This is terrific.” I just may have a Pulitzer Prize winner on my hands. To illustrate what I’m up against, I’ve compiled a Sherwood Zern compliment lexicon: It’s good. (Said in a neutral tone) 1. I know you were making sounds resembling our mother tongue, but I wasn’t listening so I’ll play it safe. 2. What? That’s good. (Said with no discernable intonation) 1. Why do you insist on reading this stuff to me when you know I prefer to read it myself. 2. No, really, I’m listening. Good! Of course, I mean it. (Said in a clipped, sharp way) 1. I’m on a conference call and I forgot to mute it. Well, isn’t that good. (Repeated) 1. What’s for dinner? 2. Did you take my power cord? 3. When are you going to get a job? That’s dang fine good. (Eyes glued to computer monitor) 1. I didn’t understand a word you just read; it must be stellar. And then . . . Linda, this is really terrific. (With eye contact and vocal inflection) 1. I love you, babe. Hang in there. 2. Dr. Suess received twenty-seven rejections before he was published. I believe in you. 3. You misspelled cooties on page eighty-three. So back to page eighty-three I go, working like the devil to deserve such high and mighty praise from the king of the binary people. Linda (Good, Better, Best) Zern |
| According to my computer engineering husband, it’s important to find the weak spot in the computer software—that should it fail—causes all the other spots in the system to cramp up, keel over, and die. That weak spot is a pimple on the butt of everything—sort of. Or it’s the string on the collar of that made-in-China shirt. Give it a quick tug and the sleeves fall off. This weak link is called the single point of failure. It’s the single piece of broken crud in your life that is responsible for the systemic destruction of all the other crud in your life that you hold dear. In our world the single point of failure is a tire on a John Deere garden cart. It’s flat. And that ruins everything—absolutely everything. That tire is our single point of failure. We have horses. They poop. A lot. They poop a lot in the barn. And as I have stated in the past, farming is the business of purchasing animals that poop and then moving their poop around. Our John Deere garden cart is the official poop mover. I NEED that cart to move poop, or the poop builds up to gargantuan, mountainous proportions that threaten to avalanche onto small children, burying them alive. I mean it. One tire went flat on the garden cart. My husband pumped it up. It went flat again. He filled it with magic blow up stuff. It went flat again. He took the wheel off and dragged it to the John Deere tractor repair shop, run by the meanest married couple on the face of the entire earth. No really. This couple is so mean that we play Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who has to go and drop off the flat tire. Sherwood lost. He took the tire to the shop. The shop was closed. Seems the John Deere repair shop couple were so mean John Deere had to shut them down and put them out of business. Burned the repair shop to the ground and sowed the acres with salt. (No, I made that last bit up.) Meanwhile, the poop pile continued to build. “The John Deere repair shop couple were so mean, they’re out of business,” he said, holding the still flat garden cart tire. “Now what?” The poop pile grew another foot while we talked. “Well, I thought about buying another whole wheel deal, but it’s about the cost of the whole darn cart.” “Now what?” The top of the poop pile shook loose, rumbling to the barn floor. Road apples danced and rolled near our feet. “How about using the wheelbarrow?” he said. “It has a flat tire.” “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Exactly, or in our case it’s, “A tire! A tire! My kingdom for a tire!” Before the whole kingdom fills up with poop and tips over like the island of Guam if you put too many marines on it. (During a House committee meeting, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia said he feared that stationing 8,000 Marines on Guam would cause the island to "become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.") True Story!! Single point of failure? How about the whole darn federal government? Linda (Scoop) Zern |
| When I tell folks that I’ve been to places like Korea and Australia, they always say the same thing. “Oh, I would love to travel like that. That’s so exciting.” No. It’s not. It’s brutal. It’s thirteen hours at a pop squished in an airplane seat the size and shape of no one, and unless a person is the general consistency of pudding I cannot imagine anyone but a pudding pop person flying comfortably. Traveling is not exciting. Arriving is exciting. Arriving is the part of traveling that has something going for it. Unfortunately, by the time many travelers get to the arriving part they have been going through the traveling part for so long they have a difficult time appreciating the actual getting to where they’re going part. And the more you travel, the worse it gets. My husband of thirty-plus years travels a lot for his work. When I say a lot I mean he has been fondled by strangers in airports on every major continent except Africa. It’s starting to take its toll. Recently, after a grueling return flight from South Korea, we flew into the delightfully bankrupt city of Detroit, Michigan. The experien was a lot like looking across the DMZ into North Korea—no one seemed very happy with the situation and everyone is pretty sure it’s the other guy’s fault. But we were home. Almost. All we had to do was clear customs, get through immigration, retrieve our already checked luggage, go back through security, take our shoes back off, get fondled by an Amazonian woman declaring that I was wearing a belt because “the machine SAID so,” Note: I was not wearing a belt, redress, repack, find the shuttle bus, fling ourselves onto the bus, race the final ten gates to THE proper gate which was changed from the previous faux gate, locate our ticket information, and finally collapse into yet another airplane seat designed for pudding people. Having fun yet? Yeah, me neither, especially when my husband lost his mind at one point in the ordeal, stood in the middle of the airport, observed two customs agents stamping forms in slow motion, and yelled, “This is a F-----g mess.” “Boy, we’re traveling now,” I said. Calmly I took his arm and hissed, “Be quiet, you crazy. Airport jail is real. Believe me.” Pulling up my shirt, I demonstrated the stretchy nature of my 110% stretchy band on my stretch pants. “Does this look like a belt to you? What? No?” He pretended to understand me by ignoring me and grinding his teeth. “Well, like I told the Amazonian TSA chick, ‘If that machine is telling you that I have a belt on then it’s defective and you should contact the manufacturer, because it’s broken.” Several airports officials that could have been working but weren’t working watched us with jaundiced eye. We shuffled into line tried clicking our heels together three times and saying, “There’s no place like home.” Because, there is no place like home, and that’s what I’ve learned from traveling. Linda (Elastic Band) Zern |
| I am a mature college student (i.e. a grownup), and I loved my anthropology class. Anthropology is a class where the half-baked theories hit the proverbial road. My anthropology teacher asked the class who thought that falling in love was a choice. Two hands went up. Mine and the teacher’s. Everyone else (i.e. the young and delusional) thought love was a chemical reaction brought on by twerking. I think they should all wear T-shirts that read: Not responsible for my chemicals! I could fall in love with anyone, anytime, anywhere. At the end of the semester my teacher pulled my final exam paper out of my cramped, clenched, nerveless fingers and said, “You’ve got success written all over you.” I’m going to have that printed on a T-shirt. I love the idea that I have things written all over me, the same way I love college. In college nobody complains when you use hefty pretentious words and think deep thoughts—out loud and in front of people. Then I go home and the guy with whom I have mixed DNA in the blender of love says, “You gonna fire up that stove any time soon?” And I say, “I did. Last week. You remember?” So, I’m going to get another T-shirt that says, “I’m too short to cook.” Because I am too short to cook, and my face is way too close to the fire, and I get sparks and grease in my eyes, not to mention all the scary murderous knives sitting around the kitchen waiting to stab people to death. Or I’ll wear a T-shirt that says, “Kiss the Short Chick. Order Takeout.” I just wish I had success written all over me, all of the time. Unfortunately, sometimes I have “Help me! I'm melting!” written all over me; usually in the middle of the night when I’m sneaking around the house attempting to turn the thermostat down to a temperature approximating permafrost to combat the effects of hot flashes that are hotter than a pot of boiling lobsters. I need a T-shirt that reads, “Caution: I’m hot. Literally.” I once went to church and had someone tell me, “Linda, we’ve just chosen you to be the person most likely to be burned at the stake.” I would rather not discuss the individuals who thought I had this sentiment written all over me. I’ll just call them the grand inquisitors in pointy hats crowd. In this case, I should wear a T-shirt that says, “Joan of Arc is my Home Girl.” Once, in a Tae Kwon Do class, and about the time I was feeling swift, strong, and capable, my body on its way to becoming a honed instrument of confident death dealing against the knife toters out there—also mean people—the lady behind me tapped me on the shoulder. Randomly, I executed a powerful roundhouse kick through the danger fraught air next to her face. Kick. Snap. Retract. Rub surreptitiously at the thigh cramp. She narrowed her eyes at what she might have thought of as my pointless leg flailing and said, “I’m not sure if you know this or not but you have a dryer sheet stuck to the back of your uniform.” She plucked a dryer sheet from the back of my martial arts uniform and handed it to me. I tucked it into my lovely purple belt and practiced more powerful leg flailing at imaginary mean people. That day I had, “Hey, Dork, you have a dryer sheet stuck to your shoulder!” written all over me. I vetoed that T-shirt. People in my Zumba class have told me that I should get the “Having the most fun!” award, and that’s a T-shirt I could get behind. Or maybe it could say, “Getting my money’s worth.” When they say bump, I bump. When they say grind, I grind, and sometimes I throw in a poorly executed martial arts kick for old times sake and to see if my hip socket still rotates that far. Here’s hoping that whatever’s written all over you is inspiring, noble, grand, and true—most of the time. Linda (Write On!) Zern |
| One of my favorite movie lines of all time was from an old movie where a bunch of ancient Greeks stood around waiting for another ancient Greek guy to cut open a live chicken and “read” its entrails. Entrails are guts, in case you’re wondering. Are you following this? They [those ancient Greek types] used to take a live chicken and then CUT IT OPEN. Then they’d shake the stuff that was on the inside of the chicken out of the chicken onto the kitchen table and look for messages while other ancient Greek types stood around waiting for the six o’clock news. Probably as accurate as cable news, I’m thinking. In the movie, the entrails reader saw nothing but ominous, disastrous news in the pile of chicken innards—all this is also known as a bad, bad omen. The king of the Greeks after listening to the chicken gut reader give them the BAD omen news looked him in the eye, and said, “We reject your omen.” I love that. That’s brass. That’s guts. That’s . . . hard on the chickens. This fictional movie scene sums up what I believe is wrong with bad religious substitutes—folks can take them or leave them. It’s the fatal flaw when worshipping at the altar of The Great Church of Science and Statistics or the High Church of Me, Myself, and I. It’s easy to reject the omens. The latest scientific research suggest that you should exercise more and less; eat meat or never; put the baby to sleep on its back, front, side, head; power nap; never power nap; cold therapy but not hot compresses, stand up sit down . . . fight, fight, fight. Honestly, I reject the scientific omens. Lightning strikes! Now, lightning strikes I believe in. I once saw lightning hit the ground next to us while we were driving in the car. The lightning strike was invisible, but there was an impressive explosion of dirt, a smell of burning ozone, and a molar rattling crack of thunder. It was like a sign from God—also an omen. “Wow, did you see that?” I said. “What?” My husband mumbled. “The invisible lightning that almost blew us up. It was six feet away.” “Are you asking me if I saw invisible lightning?” I recognized the sound of skeptical disbelief when I heard it, but I kept at it. “Seriously, you didn’t hear that thunder? We were almost hit by lightning. What can that mean?” His knuckles resembled kitchen cabinet knobs as he clutched the steering wheel and growled at surrounding traffic. “It means that God’s aim must be off today, because he was shooting for that moron in the truck in front of us.” “God’s aim is off? This is not a comforting thought.” I contemplated the idea that God was having a bad day at the gun range. “I reject your omen,” I said. “God was definitely sending a message . . . and he was sending it . . . to you.” “What are you talking about?” “It’s a sign. Like those guys who used to cut open chickens and get messages from their guts.” “Okay, I’ll play along,” he sighed. “What’s the message?” “We should get more chickens.” And that’s how omens work at our house. Linda (Gizzard Guts) Zern |
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