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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 |
| No one builds memorials like the military. No one. Their monuments to memory are built on the blood and bones of friends and brothers. When our son returned to Fort Hood, Texas from his first deployment to Iraq, we visited him. He was anxious to show us the place where he lived, relaxed, and worked. More than that he was anxious to show us the 4th Infantry memorial from their victory in that bloody and broken part of the world. In gratitude to the fallen soldiers of the 4th Infantry, the original artist took his bronze bust of Saddam Hussein and recast it. He turned a tyrant’s face into the figure of a grieving soldier as he knelt in the sand before the empty boots, rifle, and helmet of a dead friend. Behind the soldier a tiny Iraqi girl reaches out to touch his shoulder—in comfort, in gratitude. It is a heart stopping moment of remembrance. The names of the lost and dead circle the artist’s statue in a curve of glittering stone. Everything about that memorial whispers, “Hush. Hush. Be still. Be quiet. And know that someone died for you.” We watched a group of teenagers laugh and joke their way across the open field as they came our way. Throwing a Frisbee, they looked what they were—young and happy and alive. Their Frisbee game continued right up to the moment they stepped into the circle of the dead. And then silence—even reverence. One of the girls knelt and lit a candle in front of one of the names on the wall. Her friends stood quietly as she prayed. When my husband and I got home from Fort Hood we sat in our church’s Sunday meeting. Young men prepared the bread and water for the sacrament, covering it with a clean white cloth. The room around us was filled with chatter and noise. People talked and visited. Church business was done. I looked again at the sacrament table seeing it for the memorial that it was supposed to represent. I thought of the sacrifice it symbolized, of the blood and bone given for me, of the eternal truth that the price of freedom is blood and always has been. And I heard a still small voice whisper, “Hush. Hush. Be still. Be quiet. And know that someone died for you.” |
| It started with a loud transformer pop on Wednesday. The lights flickered, dimmed—went dark. I held my breath. I had emails to check, cable news to yell about. Then the lights bounced back on. I exhaled and thought about and then rejected the idea of doing laundry in one of my energy sucking major appliances. Later that same day, granddaughter (age 9) reported her discovery of a dead carcass at the base of the power pole—type and style, squirrel. No correlation between the first popping incident and the corpse discovery occurred to anyone on our emergency response team. Okay, I am the emergency response team. I didn’t get it. Transformer. Squirrel. Big Boom. Light should have gone on, in a manner of speaking, but no. At four, in the very dark morning of Thursday, the Zern family power grid was brought down, and I mean all the way down . . . by a single assassin squirrel. The machine that conditioned our air ground to a halt. The fans that stirred our conditioned air around spun ever more slowly. The lights that blink and wink and twink in the night were gone. Darkness swallowed more of the blackness. I thought I heard a squirrel howl. I fumbled for a candle, a torch, a hurricane lantern. My son-in-law threw himself behind the wheel of their crappy Jeep, searching the neighborhood for signs of electric. The babies grumbled for fresh water, cool air, clean diapers, warm milk, and sweet nightlights. Darkness, like smog, settled over our lives. We waited for the morning’s light. As we waited for the power company to fix us, we looked at the French fried body of the terror squirrel. Someone observed, “Geez, who needs an EMP attack, a couple million well trained suicide squirrels and America’s back in the stone-age. I repeated this bit of clever repartee to the power pole guy. He neither laughed nor smiled. He calmly stepped over the body of dead squirrel and said, “I’ll see what I can do.” And he did. The moral of the story is that although I store water in plastic milk jugs for just such emergencies, the thought of pouring that water into a clean baby bottle and feeding it to an actual baby made me itch. On Friday, I ordered a month’s worth of sterile canned water, good for fifty years or the zombie squirrel apocalypse, whichever comes first. Linda (Testing, Testing) Zern |
| When I found four gold plated dessertspoons in the toe of my riding boot and pennies stuffed the fingers of my riding gloves, I knew Grandkid World had officially arrived in our lives. My husband and I now have ten grandchildren; please note, I don’t look old enough to have five grandchildren. I am the YaYa. Being a Mommy means twenty percent fun and eighty percent worry. Being the YaYa means eighty percent fun and twenty percent worry, because you know that whatever weirdness the kid is up to he’ll out grow—or he won’t. It’s no skin off the YaYa’s nose. Being a mom made me gray, and being a grandmother makes me want to learn how to ride a dirt bike. It also means that I have become the Oracle of All Wisdom for my daughters on various matters of the mothering kind, leading to conversations like this: “Mom, feel Conner’s head,” Conner’s mom said. Conner’s head was small, fuzzy, and three weeks old. I picked up Conner and felt his head. It felt small, fuzzy, and three weeks old. “What is that?” Heather asked, pointing to his perfect head. “Where?” “On the top of his head.” “You mean his soft spot? Heather, you know babies have soft spots.” I watched Zoe’s two-year old ponytail as it bobbed its way past me, through the living room—nothing soft about the head under that ponytail. Zoe is Conner’s big sister and official hard head. “I know it’s his soft spot,” she said, grabbing the baby from me. “But isn’t it deeper?” “Deeper than what?” I ran my hand over his perfectly normal skull—again. “You know! Deeper than average!” I must have looked blank and stupid, because she decided to explain the theory of Conner’s deepening head hole. “Because, Mom, I caught Zoe poking his head with a Q-tip, and now I think his soft spot is deeper.” Zoe was building a small fort out of Q-tips under the couch. She was also pouring water over her own head out of a measuring cup from the kitchen. “Could he be lobotomized now?” My daughter’s frown was deep, pained, and serious. I recognized this as one of those moments when I could practice my excellent reflective listening skills. (Note: Reflective listening is a technique where you repeat back to a person their very own words, pretty much because you can’t believe someone that intelligent could say something that dopey.) “Now let me understand you. You think Zoe took a Q-tip, gave Conner a lobotomy through the soft spot on the top of his head, and now his brain is ruined. Is that about it?” “Yes, yes. Feel his head again.” I felt his head again, and then I felt Heather’s. She’ll relax. She’ll have to, because one of these days she’ll walk into a bedroom and find one of the kids (sound asleep) with his/her pants around their ankles, and a Fisher Price thermometer stuck between his/her knees. And through a little detective work, she’ll uncover the fact that while this kid was taking a nap, the other kids tried to take the sleeping kid’s temperature—rectally. They failed, but it was a close house call. It’s what the sports commentator said a couple of weeks ago about cross-country skiing at the Olympics. “You’ve got to save something for the hills, Christina. You’ve got to save something for the hills.” Bingo! As the official YaYa, I would like to say to the young moms out there. “You’ve got to save something for the hills, honey. You’ve got to save something for the hills.” Because if you think Zoe giving Conner a lobotomy with a Q-tip is the worst of it, you are going to lose this race. Linda (Been There, Worried About That) Zern |
| I have to pay my children a dollar every time I mention their names or their children’s names in public. It’s why they don’t care if I write about their barbarian kids or highlight the fact that their lives are six kinds of crazy. That’s the secret to writing about embarrassing family life stuff—ready cash payments. The problem isn’t having fodder for the writing; the problem is what constitutes public? I mean I only share my family’s most intimate, personal potty problems with a couple dozen strangers OR one to two thousand of my closest most intimate friends. I have no clue how many people are “out there” in cyber world these days. My blog only has three followers and two of those are the same person, but my statistics have jumped from seven page views per month to eight hundred page views per month. But I’m pretty sure that seven hundred ninety seven of those page views are a Croatian chick that’s been trying to hack me. So frankly, I think mentioning my children’s names in “public” on Facebook and Blogger.com and then having to pay them a dollar per public mention is a scam. Doesn’t the word public mean more people than me, and that Croatian chick? The correct answer is yes. Here’s the disclaimer: I started sending electronic mail to friends and family nearly fifteen years ago (before blogging had a name) as a way to 1) stay in touch while living in a **hostile, foreign land 2) journal my most important, spiritual moments, but mostly I just write about poop, and 3) practice writing sentences with all the grammar stuff contained therein. They say writers should write about what they know. What I know is that getting a two-year old to poop in the appropriate container can be more challenging than finding Waldo. I know that a dump truck full of sand is better than a warehouse full of video games for keeping kids busy. I know that watching and listening to children grow is more instructive than most expensive college instruction these days. Or as Conner (age 7) observed about a new daughter-in-law in the family, “Auntie Lauren is part of our herd now.” He paused, considered, and then asked, “What kind of herd are we anyway?” “We’re a human herd,” his mother told him. What I know is that life is eighty plus or minus years, depending on how often I drag myself to the gym. Eighty plus or minus years, that’s it, and that trying to have it all is a good way of having nothing much of anything. So I choose. I choose family. I choose to laugh. I choose to write about laughing at my family, chickens, horses, rouge ‘possums, hamster infestations and invite you to do the same. Don’t worry about the herd getting its feelings hurt, because it’s mostly a herd of honey badgers, and as everyone knows honey badgers don’t care. Besides, it’s amazing what the promise of quick cash can do to foster self-deprecating humor and a healthy awareness of the herd’s collective daffiness. Linda (Round ‘Em Up) Zern ** North Carolina |
| I’m bummed. I found out my grown daughter saw me naked, and I don’t own a Wraptastic. (Disclaimer: I know. I know. As far as trouble goes these DO NOT MAKE THE CUT. But humor me.) “Hey,” my husband said. “Maren saw you naked.” I felt various body parts clench and quiver. I sucked in my rapidly approaching senior citizen discount stomach. It ignored me. “Completely?” “Yep,” he said. “The blinds were open, you were wandering around the bedroom—without clothes, and she walked by on her way to get a Coke in the office.” “It was ten o’clock at night. Who drinks Coke at 10 pm?” He shrugged and popped the top of a Coke. I huffed and puffed. “Stringy! That’s the word she said came to mind the last time she saw me naked.” “Maybe you shouldn’t be naked so much of the time,” he said. That was rich coming from a guy whose fondest teenage memory involved motorcycles and riding nude through the Florida underbrush. Don’t worry, he likes to explain, he had tennis shoes on so that he could shift. Back in the day, it was called “streaking.” Now it’s called a misdemeanor. “Don’t be naked so much! I was taking a bath! Maybe I shouldn’t let so many people wander around peeking at me—morning, noon, and night—and that includes you.” That started it—worst day ever. And then, thanks to Madison Avenue and the miracle of televised commercialism, I realized that I don’t own a Wraptastic, and I’m not sure how I’ve managed to live without one all these years. According to the Wraptastic commercial, a Wraptastic is a plastic contraption that can tame those pesky rolls of plastic wrap that cause the world such unending grief by sticking to all the wrong stuff, twisting into hideous knots, and in extreme cases getting tangled around your head suffocating you. Don’t even mention, the crappy cardboard boxes that plastic wrap are sold in, what with their deadly strips of metallic, tearing teeth. Deadly! Tearing! Teeth! I know it’s frightening because the actors look completely horrified when they cut parts of their hands off on those deadly, tearing, teeth while trying to wrap up a hoagie. Enter the Wraptastic: life changing, happiness inducing, freedom providing, and quick. So quick. It’s a plastic contraption that can change your life, if only you owned one, and I don’t. First there was the naked thing and then this Wraptastic debacle. Worst day ever. If only I had a Wraptastic, I could wrap my nakedness in Saran wrap, put on a white fur hat and boots and call myself a Q-tip. Note: The Q-tip joke is a Phyllis Diller bit that always lifted my spirits when the going got tough. Thanks, Phyllis.) Linda (Better Luck Tomorrow) Zern |
| Our one-year old granddaughter tried drinking water out of a plastic bottle for the first time by wrapping her lips around the opening, throwing her head back like a college student on spring break, and chugging harder then a drunken sailor. Water exploded over her head. Forgetting to un-tip the bottle as she pulled it away from her mouth, water gushed down her chin to cascade like a waterfall over her dress until it soaked her socks. “Hey, I drink water just like that!” It’s always exhilarating when you recognize yourself in the rising generation. “I know, and it’s horrible.” My husband sounded forlorn and a little sad as he stumbled away from our extremely damp granddaughter. Avoiding direct eye contact he seemed less than impressed with my connection to our posterity. Grabbing a bottle of water that advertised being pumped from the bowels of a fresh water spring located under Mount Olympus and decanted into a plastic bottle designed by a computer, I threw my head back and guzzled, throat convulsing. Water squirted out of my nose. “Linda, do you have to drink water out of a bottle like that?” He grimaced, looking away. “Like what?” I swiped the back of my hand across my dripping chin. “Like you’ll never get another drop of water again for as long as you live—and eternity—like the water bottling industry has just announced that all the water in the world has been teleported to the moon. Seriously, it drives me crazy.” Tipping the bottle back, I gulped until the sides of the bottle collapsed. “Like that. Good grief, woman, take a breath,” he said, clawing at his own throat. “ Why do you throw your head back like that? You drink like you can’t trust gravity to work. Just let the natural elements of the universe help you.” I let my head drop forward as I gasped for the universal element of oxygen. I had a cramp in my neck. “I don’t throw my head back.” He smirked. “You throw your head back, wrap your lips around the entire bottle opening, and squeeze the water into your mouth like you’ve just dragged yourself across Death Valley.” He picked up a bottle of spring water pumped from the original Fountain of Youth with minerals added for flavor. He prepared to demonstrate. “Here! Let me show you.” Then Sherwood Zern, husband, lover, and friend, put his lips daintily to the rim of the bottle, gently flipped his wrist and sipped water while keeping his little finger extended. I thought he looked like a sissy llama at the watering trough at the zoo, but I had to admit he had a definite flare that I quite possibly—lack. The problem now is that I’m so self-conscious about the way I drink water from a bottle, I have to hide in the corner at the gym so that all the other sweaty, thirsty water drinkers won’t mock and point. It’s like finding out you can’t dance after a lifetime of dancing in public—a lot—and it makes me wonder what else I can’t do better than a toddler. Linda (Bottoms All The Way Up) Zern |
| Watching that Elvis impersonator dude get arrested, interrogated, searched, accused, and observed with a jaundiced eye for possibly whipping up a batch of Ricin in his kitchen made me wonder. What would our neighbors say about us on cable TV if they hauled us off for cooking up crazy crap in a crock-pot? Allegedly. See something. Say something. I’ve been trying to imagine what the neighbors are “seeing” at our place when they peek over our wire field fence, realizing if I said something every time I saw something at my neighbor’s house, I’d have the See-Something-Say-Something folks on speed dial. I mean how weird does it have to be to qualify as something? It’s not hard to imagine one of those breathless, throaty cable reporters stuffing a microphone in my next-door neighbor’s face and asking, “So, is it true that the Zern family had some unusual weekend rituals? Allegedly?” “Rituals, no, but they seemed to be overly found of circling.” Reporter nods and asks, “Satanic symbols? Hex signs? Crop circles?” “No. Nothing like that, but when they sit outside in their crappy lawn chairs they always wind up in a circle. But it migrates.” “What does?” The reporter will look perplexed but intrigued. “The yard circle. In the summer they circle under that big maple tree, but in the winter they land on the septic tank.” Our neighbor gets tired of pointing and drops his hand. “And did you see that as an indication that they were cooking up crazy crap in a crock-pot.” Hesitating, my neighbor will scratch his head. “No. But those grandkids are constantly peeing on stuff.” There it is. Public urination and yard circles. Our family would be good for at least a charge of felony mischief. But that’s not as bad as what goes on at our next-door neighbor’s house. Allegedly. Our neighbor’s eight-year old son informed my daughter that on Sundays his family likes to practice “knifing.” She asked, “What’s knifing?” “You know,” he said, “when you make a target and practice throwing knives at it.” I’m a little embarrassed to admit that our family is way behind on its knifing practice. Don’t tell. Linda (Don’t Look. Don’t Tell.) Zern |
| During the festival of Eid this year, our Moroccan neighbors rented a bouncy house, enjoyed carnival games, and slaughtered forty farm animals (assorted goats, sheep, and three cows.) We enjoyed our neighbor’s festival from the comfort of our lawn chairs under the live oak tree in our backyard. I for one, appreciated experiencing a slice of Morocco without having to travel to Morocco, but that’s our neighborhood for you. It’s stuffed full of diversity. The festival of Eid celebrates the end of Ramadan and is as close to a hoot-a-nanny as you can get without being either a hoot or a nanny. Celebrating Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, goats and sheep are butchered to honor the sparing of Isaac when God provided a “ram in a thicket” (see the book of Genesis in that big book called The Bible.) There’s a lot of talk of diversity at Rollins College where I go to school. We speak of it. We debate it. We celebrate it. We swim in it. But until you’ve listened to your neighbors bone sawing their way through forty animal carcasses you’ve only dreamed of a universe full of the diverse; you’ve never lived next to it. Grab a lawn chair and come on over if you want the real experience. Daughter #1 pulled her lawn chair up next to mine and asked, “What’s happening now?” “Not much. The traffic jam on Kissimmee Park Road of folks coming with coolers and gunnysacks has eased off and everyone seems to be settling in to party down.” “What’s that sound?” The air rang with the energetic sounds of whirring blades. “The bone saw.” “Well, I’ll be,” she murmured, popping the top of a Coke. “Hang on,” I instructed, leaning to my left, her right. “Check that kid out that just dropped his Igloo cooler.” She leaned forward. “Which one?” “Right there. The cooler on the ground, see it? The one with the haunch of beast that just rolled out.” “Sure enough,” she said. “What is that? A leg? A rump? A pot roast?” “Not sure, but it’s absolutely got a hoof hanging off of it. Pass the popcorn,” I said. A good time was had by all. Mr. Abe, our neighbor, asked me later if their festival of butchery bothered us at all. I told him, “Nope. There’s a reason we don’t live in a sub-division with a homeowner’s association. It’s your property and your goats and your bone saw. Slaughter away.” He gave us a goat in appreciation. The goat was alive. We took it. And that, my friends, is diversity in all its undiluted purity. Linda (Neighborhood Watch) Zern |
| One of the kids in my first grade class took our teacher’s shiny, new magic markers and flushed them down the classroom toilet, causing a massive plumbing crisis. It was a big overflowing deal. I don’t know why the kid did it. Because he/she was a crumb? Because there was a toilet and it had a flush handle? Because magic markers are evil? I never understood it. Not then and not now. The unfortunate result of the above vandalism is that the principle came into our first grade class and gave us “the talking to.” It was probably the finest speech I’ve ever heard on civic responsibility, the evils of clogged drains, and the importance of feeling guilt for misdeeds. He threatened us with not being allowed to use the classroom potty—ever again, amen. Halfway through his lecture I broke down weeping uncontrollably, thinking that I should, would, must confess to a crime that I had not committed. I wasn’t guilty. But I felt guilty. I felt like something you’d flush down the toilet. To my knowledge the guilty party was never caught, and I know for a fact that the only one who broke during the principle’s big talk was the skinny, little freckled girl in the third row—me. What I learned that day in first grade is this 1) that a single wicked person can clog the toilet up for everyone 2) that angry officials don’t have much in their quiver except angry words, silly new rules, and finger pointing to get to the bottom of the clog, and 3) the only kids who ever really feel bad about bad stuff happening are the good kids. I still think about that kid, and it makes me so mad because it was so unfair. And it’s still so unfair that one or two or a handful can create situations that wind up punishing us all. Shame on them. Linda (Sad and Mad) Zern |
| He thought I’d shut the front gate. I thought he’d shut the front gate. Truth be told, the front gate was swinging open like an old man’s zipper at half-mast. And I had just opened the barn gate, letting the horses romp off to the front pasture where the front gate flapped wide. My husband looked at me stupefied as his foundation quarter horse, our Morgan posse horse, my Arabian mare, and the kid’s chubby Welsh pony thundered passed him. “The front gate’s open. Are you nuts?” He took off, trying to outrun the herd. Now, I’m not saying my husband has lost a step or two over the years, but dang that man has lost a step or two. Sherwood Zern used to be the human equivalent of a gazelle-panther-hawk. I remember watching him react to the crack of a softball bat like a hunting panther attacking, cover left field with the ground eating strides of a gazelle, sail through the air—horizontal to the ground like a hawk swooping—catch the softball in the gaping maw of his glove, hit the ground with a forward tumble and roll, and then catapult to his feet, holding the fly ball in triumph over his head—while talking trash about the opposing team. That man could move. As I watched him shuffle, skip, dogtrot to the front gate, I couldn’t help but get a little nostalgic and misty eyed. I sure did miss my husband’s ACL, the one that he pretty much snapped off in his right knee when he jumped a fence trying to help our neighbor catch his rampaging bull. That was the same knee that he’d dislocated while playing softball like a gazelle-panther-hawk, and he rounded second that one time, trying to stretch a double into a triple. That time he wound up in outpatient knee surgery, got juiced up with sodium pentothal, and proceeded to demand that I do unspeakable things to him while in the recovery room. That man had some brass. But then I remembered that the horses were trying to make a break for the tasty grass along the front ditch next to the road. “You’re never going to make it,” I shouted. “Wave your arms.” I took off at a hopping, skip-walk to help out, but then I realized that trying to run only made me wet my pants. So I stopped. I sure did/do miss my bladder control. The arm waving worked. The herd skidded away to the tasty grass along the front fence and the gate was shut. But not without the sad and sobering reminder that our days of racing carefree and wild with the herd were over and that now our place was shuffling along as best we could at the rear of the pack, hoping that we’re not the first one to be picked off by wolves. FORGET THAT! I take combat kickboxing at the gym where I practice kicking wolves in their snarly faces on a regular basis, and I can always start wearing Depends. What we’ve lost in speed we more than make up for in arm waving wisdom and sheer tenacious wolf punching meanness. Linda (Roundhouse to the Face) Zern |
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