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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 and I were high school sweethearts. For our first date, he asked me to the homecoming dance. Before he asked me to homecoming, several of my peers told me that Sherwood Zern would be asking me to homecoming. Remember this was high school, so there was a lot of pre-homecoming date warnings and alerts. My peers were like the oracles of doom. “Watch out, that Sherwood Zern is going to ask you to the homecoming dance, and he’s handy,” they intoned. I thought “handy” meant he knew his way around the business end of a hammer. It didn’t. Turns out handy meant something else entirely. We worked it out. He joined my church, and I didn’t slap his jaw off. What we never figured out was why my husband was not so great while using the business end of a hammer, screwdriver, wrench, nail, or duct tape. It’s like he lost some fix-it genetic lottery. Some boys can fix connectery thing-a-ma-nots in the wall socketersocks and some can’t. My boy can’t. Now don’t get me wrong. My boy is smart—way smart. People call him from the far corners of the earth to figure out why they can’t download the universe straight to their decoder rings. Smart. He tries to be hammer handy, but he doesn’t have that “fix-it” gene. He has the “stab-yourself-in-the-knuckle-with-a-screwdriver-exposing-ligaments” gene. It’s wildly frustrating, not to mention a strain on our insurance deductible. I’m pretty good at fixing stuff, if it’s low to the ground and not screwed on too tight. I’m short and arthritic. Over the years, I’ve learned to be patient waiting for things to get fixed at our house. I’ve also learned to improvise. Recently the stopper in my bathtub gave up the ghost. Stomp. Push. Stomp. Stomp. Smash. Nothing. Comforting bath water continued to drain away through the worn out tub plug. I looked at my husband. He was taking a steamy hot shower. It’s important to note that I don’t like baths. I require them. Without hot baths taken in large garden tubs, I will turn into a pile of calcified toothpicks. True story. “Want to join me?” he said, leering at me from the shower steaminess. That’s my boy. Still handy in his own way. “Nope! You hog the hot water and tend to give me black eyes with your elbows.” Wrapped in a towel I padded out to the yard, scrabbled several ham-sized stones from the garden, dragged them back into the bathroom, and started stacking them onto the defective tub plug. “What are you doing? I can fix that.” “I know,” I said, “Because you’re a big, strong, manly fix-it man fixer. I just need to take a bath tonight and for the foreseeable future. It’s nothing personal.” The rocks started to take on the appearance of a tiny but functional pyramid. Water pooled around the stone formation. I took a bath with bubbles and river rocks. As good as fixed. We have two sons. One can ‘make the shot’ at one thousand, two hundred yards and the other one married Sarah, a woman who’s pretty handy with a hammer. Good to know. When things get too ridiculous, like when the handle on the shower enclosure stays busted for five years which forces me to have to pry open the shower door with the end of a nail clippers, because I’m too short to reach over the top of the shower door and push it open from the inside, I’ll call Sarah. She’ll fix it. Linda (Busted Flush) Zern |
| Girls want their ears pierced because we dress them in pink as soon as they can breathe and burp; that’s what my women college professors taught me in the post-apocalyptic world following the bra-less sixties. Boys become boys because we tended to hold them by one leg and dangle them over toy fire trucks. Girls become girls because we didn’t toss them in the air high enough or let them bounce when we dropped them. That was the theory—sort of. After thirty years of being married to a boy, thirty years of raising two boys and a gaggle of grand boys, and about a thousand years of interacting with boys and girls of all ages in my society, I would like to go on record. The theory that boys and girls are exactly alike is craziness brought on by pre-menstrual cramping. When I was still newly hatched, recently married, and without personal offspring, I continued to cling to echoes of my college discipleship; I was very young. I was idealistic. I was a bright light of feminist idealism. My boys were going to cuddle dolls and reject catapults. I believed that—right up ‘till the boy/girl twelve-year old canoe trip. My worldview flip-flopped when I went on a church canoe trip with twelve-year old boys and twelve-year old girls—true, whatever gender identification damage caused by pink and blue booties had already been done, but they were a fairly typical bunch of human offspring. I was in charge of the pink bootie crowd. What I learned about twelve-year old girls at the time included: they cannot canoe; they can bounce off of things while in a canoe (the bank, the other bank, and the giant felled tree in the middle of the river); they worry about snakes, alligators, bears, goats, and humidity’s effect on ponytails; they tire easily. What I learned about twelve-year old boys still haunts me. As I piloted my little ship-load of chirping girls up the river and back to base camp, I noticed one of the boys seemed to be dangling like a piece of loose fruit from a gnarled tree branch stretching out over the river. He also seemed to have no pants on. The reason he seemed to have no pants on is because he didn’t. The dangling tree branch boy was . . . hmmm, how to be delicate when discussing the antics of twelve-year old boys? The mind staggers, but I make the attempt. One of those boys, the dangling one, was in the middle of producing a certain organic by-product by hanging his bottom over a tree branch and allowing the organic by-product to drop into the water—just ahead of us, near a bend in the river. Please note: This organic product is produced when enormous amounts of Papa John’s pizza are consumed around a campfire and . . . oh, forget it. He was pooping in the river. This idiot kid was hanging his butt over a tree branch and pooping in the river. Twenty-two seconds later, coming toward our canoe was nightmare torpedo of slow moving, softly bobbing, and horror evoking—poop. One of the more highly emotional, hysteria prone, sharp eyed girls in my canoe screamed, “It’s coming straight for us.” Then she pointed. The pointing was not necessary. Then they all began to scream—to a woman. I confess I may have yelped. As the leader, I attempted to steady the crew. “Stea . . . dy. Steady. Steady on, ladies.” The poop torpedo bobbed closer, and ever so slowly—closer. Now the point of all this is to simply say that I have never, ever, in my life heard of any female of my acquaintance say, “Hey, Emily, climb up in that tree yonder, take a dump in the river, and then we’ll hang around in the bushes to see what happens.” That’s what those blue bootie-wearing boys did; instead of hiding their faces in masculine shame, they hid in the bushes to see “what would happen.” I’ll tell you what happened. I dug my paddle into the water once the danger had drifted passed after bumping our hull once or twice, and yelled, “Paddle harder girls! We’re going to kill us some boys!” So when my daughters have come to me over the years to complain about some inexplicable quality of incomprehensible maleness, I simply make sure they understand some basics. “Boys are disgusting and they have poor potty manners.” Then I look my daughters, square in the eye, and sigh, “And yet we still want one.” It has ever been thus . . . Linda (Run Silent, Run Deep) Zern |
| My husband and I got rid of our kids the old fashioned way. We swaddled them, wiped them, smothered them, adored them, bossed them, and then firmly and finally kicked them out. They went. It was too late. We were addicted to the swaddling, wiping, smothering, adoring, and bossing. We were addicted to the caring. The dog arrived just as the kids escaped. That dog, and the fur coat she came wrapped in, was proof positive that my husband and I had lost what little equilibrium we had left. Just as our home became clean, comfortable, and hypoallergenic, we filled it with a mammal that sheds the equivalent of six angora sweaters per lunar cycle. She’s hairy. We have adapted. We buy lint rollers in case lots from a start-up company in Indonesia. We qualify for the large quantity discount and the company Christmas card. Our account rep’s name is Omja; it’s a name that means, “born of cosmic unity.” Last night as my husband pointed out that we were closing in on our thirty plus year wedding anniversary I was distracted by a tumbleweed of dog hair drifting languidly through the air. Waving a lint roller like a road flare, I expertly whipped floating dog hair from the air. “Hold still,” he said, and with a flick of a wrist, he ran a lint roller over the back of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas. I trembled and jumped a bit. He said, “Sorry, I thought—you know—dog hair. There was dog hair on your . . . back parts.” He gave me a half grin and a shrug. I thought I saw dog hair drift onto his head. I nodded and rolled his head. Climbing into bed, my husband lint-rolled his pillow and then mine, while I ran a lint roller across the part of the bedspread that catches our chin drool. In tandem, we ripped fur clogged sticky strips free from matching lint rollers, wadded them into clingy balls, and tossed the wads over our shoulders. “Honey, have I told you that the last thirty plus years have been,” I said, pausing, as an errant dog hair floated by, “a thousand kinds of fun.” He smiled his special smile, and ran a lint roller down the front of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas. I giggled. A dog hair, stuck in my lip balm, made my lip itch. I smiled my special smile. Just as he leaned in to kiss me goodnight, our sixty-pound canine hair factory vaulted onto the bed and shook. Dog hair showered down like dandelion seeds in May. We lint rolled our own faces. Pushing in between us the dog flipped onto her back, burped a burped that smelled vaguely of plastic, shoved her four hairy legs skyward, and fell asleep in a puddle of her own fur. “A thousand kinds of fun,” I repeated, quietly. We tapped our lint rollers together. They stuck. We left them that way all night. Now that’s love born of cosmic unity. Linda (Fur Ball) Zern |
| **People hunt and fish so that they have good stories to tell around the cave, campfire, or dining room table—besides all the other reasons people hunt and fish (see the little star things at the beginning of this sentence.) I love the hunting and the fishing for the stories. First, I want to say that hunting is hard. Contrary to the perception perpetuated by people who eat chickens and cows clonked on the head by other people, hunting is like finding a needle in a giant wilderness and shooting at it while the needle turns invisible. Animals are slicker than an eel’s fanny at getting away. Second, hunting is hard. I had no idea how hard it was. On a recent hunting trip to Kyle Ranch (a little slice of Texas heaven) I was left breathless at how challenging it can be to shoot invisible needle-like animals. Literally, breathless. As our guide drove us over, up, down, and through thousands of acres of bouncing Texas hill country looking for ground venison, I found myself in the backseat of the pickup truck. The pickup bristled with weapons. My husband rode “shotgun” with a rifle. I hung my head out of the backseat window. As every jouncing mile passed, my adrenalin ratcheted up. My soaring excitement might have been visible from space. I sniffed the wind. The smell of Texas cedar filled my bloodstream. My head swiveled as I scanned the heavy underbrush. I quit blinking. I started to pant. My thundering heart threatened to crack ribs. Blood pounded in my head. Then I saw it. It was a giant, staring, frozen whitetail deer not hiding, completely visible, looking at me. I went on point, stuck my finger out of the window, and in a normal sort of voice (neither loud nor soft) I said, “Right there.” She bounded away before I could say a bad word, which I did say—loudly. She bounded away like a wild animal confident that she was 1) not the kind we were looking for 2) faster than a speeding bullet, and 3) able to become a see-through needle any old time she wanted. My husband turned around, reached out, patted me on the head, and said, “Good eyes. Good eyes.” That’s when I realized that I’d become the dog. And that’s my first hunting story. Linda (What a good girl!) Zern **People also hunt and fish to match wits with animals who are able to hide behind branches the size of matchsticks, to provide lean chemical free meat for their families, and to earn their supper the old fashioned way by stealth and skill rather than clonking. |
| My husband (Sherwood Kevin—they called him Sherwood not Kevin—go figure) and I have racked up a fairly impressive list of most embarrassing moments over the past thirty plus years of marriage. There was the time Sherwood ran out of gas in the drive-through of McDonald’s where he had to push the car up to the “pick-up” window. Then there was the knee surgery/Sodium Pentothal fiasco when Sherwood had a little trouble coming “out of it” and told the Nazis’ (i.e. nurses) in the recovery room that he had four wives and thirty-seven children and a really HUGE . . . um . . . REASON for all those wives. Talk about “Big Love.” Then there was the bubble gum on the hairy buttocks incident—also Sherwood. He’s racked up a fairly impressive list of embarrassing moments. But remember I haven’t even begun to discuss the reams of charming, noxious, embarrassing moments involving various body fluids erupting in public places from our children during the “four kids, six and under” years. The mistake is to assume that once the children are potty trained and the hubby’s knee rehab is over, that the humiliation is finally over. You know, the embarrassment of being alive and breathing in various gases which produce still other gases—when mixed with, oh say—a Coney Island hotdog. If anything, the relentless march of age just makes for a lot of fun opportunities to be total bags of gas and droopy body parts. Now, “most embarrassing” is almost a competition, and I’m thinking that I might have taken the lead. From a recent phone call confessional: “Boy, did I have an embarrassing moment today at work,” my husband began. Not shocked, I asked, “Oh good grief now what?” “Well, I got up from my desk to greet some co-workers, and when I stood up I just let fly with a giant . . .” Cutting him off, I yelped, “What!?” “You know.” “No, what? You let fly with a groan, a moan, a sigh . . . what?” I paused and embraced the dawning truth. With slow drip horror, I said, “You. Did. Not!” “Yep! Right there in my cubicle.” “Did anyone say anything?” “Nope. But their faces said it all; it was so embarrassing.” Silence descended over our conversation like a helium balloon filled with methane. “Well,” I said, “I think I’ve got you beat.” “I don’t know; that was pretty embarrassing. I’d never met those people before.” Skepticism mixed with humiliation in his voice. “I’m telling you; I’ve got you beat.” “Okay. Shoot.” “You know how on Mondays I clean house in my big old sweatshirt, and I don’t wear . . . you know, anything . . .” “Rubber gloves?” “No, under my clothes! I don’t wear, you know . . . foundation.” (Foundation is a Southern word for bra. It’s a cultural thing.) “And you’re not talking about makeup.” “Right.” “So, I had some stuff I needed to put in one of those plastic snap Rubbermaid totes, you know those plastic storage buck-ity things with the lids that I buy by the truckload from WalMart?” “Yes.” It was a worried “yes.” “Okay, so after I shoved the junk into the plastic thing and I went to snap the lid closed,” I said, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, “I snapped the end of my . . . self in the lid.” Silence. “You mean, the part not wearing foundation,” he said. “Roger that,” I sighed. “But the worst part is that the plastic lid was closer to my waist than my chin when I snapped my . . . self into it.” “Wow, bummer. Okay, you win. You now hold the most embarrassing moment prize.” “Gee, thanks.” “Don’t thank me. Thank Mother Nature.” And so it droops; I mean goes, and so it goes. I’ve never been one to herald “the dignity of man” much, because I’ve never found any part of living to be very dignified. Mostly it’s just people pretending that nothing disgusting ever comes out of their noses or other orifices—ever. But it does, and we all know it. Not only does disgusting stuff come out of us all the time, sometimes it lingers in the air and wafts over into the cubicle next to you. So here’s hoping that this week finds you downwind and your droopy bits safe from snappy plastic lids. Note: If you find these references too obscure please email me, and I’ll be happy to tell you that Sherwood farted in front of some clients he had never met, and I snapped my nipple into a Rubbermaid storage container. Linda (Flopsy) Zern |
| My husband (Sherwood Kevin—they called him Sherwood not Kevin—go figure) and I have racked up a fairly impressive list of most embarrassing moments over the past thirty plus years of marriage. There was the time Sherwood ran out of gas in the drive-through of McDonald’s where he had to push the car up to the “pick-up” window. Then there was the knee surgery/Sodium Pentothal fiasco when Sherwood had a little trouble coming “out of it” and told the Nazis’ (i.e. nurses) in the recovery room that he had four wives and thirty-seven children and a really HUGE . . . um . . . REASON for all those wives. Talk about “Big Love.” Then there was the bubble gum on the hairy buttocks incident—also Sherwood. He’s racked up a fairly impressive list of embarrassing moments. But remember I haven’t even begun to discuss the reams of charming, noxious, embarrassing moments involving various body fluids erupting in public places from our children during the “four kids, six and under” years. The mistake is to assume that once the children are potty trained and the hubby’s knee rehab is over, that the humiliation is finally over. You know, the embarrassment of being alive and breathing in various gases which produce still other gases—when mixed with, oh say—a Coney Island hotdog. If anything, the relentless march of age just makes for a lot of fun opportunities to be total bags of gas and droopy body parts. Now, “most embarrassing” is almost a competition, and I’m thinking that I might have taken the lead. From a recent phone call confessional: “Boy, did I have an embarrassing moment today at work,” my husband began. Not shocked, I asked, “Oh good grief now what?” “Well, I got up from my desk to greet some co-workers, and when I stood up I just let fly with a giant . . .” Cutting him off, I yelped, “What!?” “You know.” “No, what? You let fly with a groan, a moan, a sigh . . . what?” I paused and embraced the dawning truth. With slow drip horror, I said, “You. Did. Not!” “Yep! Right there in my cubicle.” “Did anyone say anything?” “Nope. But their faces said it all; it was so embarrassing.” Silence descended over our conversation like a helium balloon filled with methane. “Well,” I said, “I think I’ve got you beat.” “I don’t know; that was pretty embarrassing. I’d never met those people before.” Skepticism mixed with humiliation in his voice. “I’m telling you; I’ve got you beat.” “Okay. Shoot.” “You know how on Mondays I clean house in my big old sweatshirt, and I don’t wear . . . you know, anything . . .” “Rubber gloves?” “No, under my clothes! I don’t wear, you know . . . foundation.” (Foundation is a Southern word for bra. It’s a cultural thing.) “And you’re not talking about makeup.” “Right.” “So, I had some stuff I needed to put in one of those plastic snap Rubbermaid totes, you know those plastic storage buck-ity things with the lids that I buy by the truckload from WalMart?” “Yes.” It was a worried “yes.” “Okay, so after I shoved the junk into the plastic thing and I went to snap the lid closed,” I said, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, “I snapped the end of my . . . self in the lid.” Silence. “You mean, the part not wearing foundation,” he said. “Roger that,” I sighed. “But the worst part is that the plastic lid was closer to my waist than my chin when I snapped my . . . self into it.” “Wow, bummer. Okay, you win. You now hold the most embarrassing moment prize.” “Gee, thanks.” “Don’t thank me. Thank Mother Nature.” And so it droops; I mean goes, and so it goes. I’ve never been one to herald “the dignity of man” much, because I’ve never found any part of living to be very dignified. Mostly it’s just people pretending that nothing disgusting ever comes out of their noses or other orifices—ever. But it does, and we all know it. Not only does disgusting stuff come out of us all the time, sometimes it lingers in the air and wafts over into the cubicle next to you. So here’s hoping that this week finds you downwind and your droopy bits safe from snappy plastic lids. Note: If you find these references too obscure please email me, and I’ll be happy to tell you that Sherwood farted in front of some clients he had never met, and I snapped my nipple into a Rubbermaid storage container. Linda (Flopsy) Zern |
| Moon n 1. The natural satellite of the earth, 5. Any disk, globe, or crescent resembling the moon. (Let’s fly to the moon.) To Moon v 1. The act of smashing your pimply nether regions against the glass of the window of a quickly moving vehicle, on the turnpike. (Mom, that idiot just mooned us; speed up so we can get his license plate number and report him to the authorities.) Moonstruck n 1. Believing the authorities care. My daughters and I were assaulted on the turnpike. Do you want the facts of the assault or the resulting trauma? By the way, the word “assault” means roughly “vulgar things that happen to you without your permission,” or in the Vulgar Latin it means vulgar people without their pants on. Okay, the facts of the assault. On first glance we were a pretty cute group: Heather was 8.10 months pregnant, Maren was newly engaged, and I had wrinkles older than the combined ages of the assaulters. Whatever the reason, we were picked out of the never-ending stream of turnpike traffic. Heather recognized that we were being followed by a van full of lunatics (get it—lunatics, lunar, moon) when she said, “Mom, get away from this jerk; he’s about to run us off the road.” Looking back I noticed we were being followed by a van with its lights on. I could tell the lights were on because they were shining inside my trunk. “What a lunatic,” I muttered through grinding teeth. I slowed down so that the lunatic could pass me and get on with his very important life. The lunatic slowed down. “Mom, switch lanes; he’s not going around,” Maren said, shooting the lunatic dirty looks through the rear window of the car. Her hands were clenched around an imaginary neck. I switched lanes. He switched lanes. This disturbed me so much that I tried to shoot him the evil eye through my rear-view window, which caused me to lose focus on the semi-tractor trailer in front of us. I stomped on the brakes. Lunatic boy stomped on his brakes. I changed lanes. He changed lanes. I slowed down. He slowed down. I almost ran off the road. He laughed. I wished for super hero powers like laser beam eyes. Maren sighed, “Oh good, he’s finally passing.” She sank back into her seat, closing her eyes, exhausted. Then without warning, Heather screamed, “Oh no, no, no!” She flung her hands up to shield her face. “An enormous, hairy, pimply a**.” Then she clutched her swollen abdomen as if to protect the innocent child within. I looked at her face and what I saw there will go with me to the grave. The horror! The horror! Well, that and the fact that I’d never heard Heather use the “A” word—ever. It was pretty shocking. Maren yelled, “Speed up! Let’s catch them. We’ll take pictures of them with our camera phones.” “And then what? Make posters!” I held the steering wheel steady. “No, face it girls, we were mooned.” I paused for effect and then said, “You know they could be a van full of sex slavers trying to crash us, steal us, and sell us.” They both rolled their eyes. “Let’s go to the mall,” I said. “To the mall,” Maren chirped. “To the mall,” Heather moaned. "To the mall,” I concurred. And away we went to the mall. But be warned, somewhere out there is a van full of sex slavers looking to crash, steal, and sell a likely looking car full of girl types, or just a van full of bored college kids trying to impress each other with their bare-bottomed daring and dash. Either way, they’re lunatics. Linda (Green Cheese) Zern |
| 1 Behold, we doth still tarry in the land of three sides and speak of our travails and triumphs there. In the year in which the Mayans spoke of as “the end of all things,” we doth still prosper, in that our numbers increased and our joy groweth strong. 2 And the begats consisted of both a new grand boy, which was called Griffen, and a new grand girl, which was called Hero. And thus were the numbers of our rising generation brought to nine. 3 And thus we did continue to party much with singing and with dancing and with glow sticks and with the playing of the vinyl records which I, even the YaYa, doth keep and preserve. And the rising generation doth enjoy both “Marching Band Music” and “The Beatles.” 4 Wo unto Poppy, who didst proclaim that the partying had grown too great, for we didst ignore him in his wo, and we didst dance about him while singing “Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang.” 5 And Poppy did ride forth on his horse, Miss Kitty, to practice much with the volunteer mounted posse, so that he might sally forth to apprehend those that did wickedly at “The Loop,” a place of much buying and selling and movie watching and petty theft. 6 And I, even the keeper of the records of my people, did accidently becometh a senior at Rollins College, in the land known as Winter Park. And many were astonished. 7 Even Aric, the eldest, did becometh engaged to one Lauren of Saint Cloud and there was rejoicing and thanks given. 8 In this selfsame year of 2012, Heather and Phillip didst begat Griffen, the last boy of four, in addition to Zoe. And Zoe didst weep when told that she wouldest have yet another brother. 9 In the same way, Maren and T. J. didst bring forth Hero, their second of two daughters, and they didst open a business on Fairbanks which they calleth “The Salon” and they didst become a small business and they didst “build that” themselves, yea after they were blessed by one who is called “rich.” 10 And the youngest of our offspring, even Adam, and his goodly wife Sarah waited with thanksgiving for the third of three daughters to be born unto them. And Emma didst rejoice in a sister in that she didst believe that a brother wouldest be a lot of trouble and wouldest want “to wrestle her up” like unto Zoe’s brothers who didst “wrestle up” all they saw. 11 And thus ended the twelfth year of the twenty-first century and we grew strong in the land of the three sides and we believed that our God did go before us as a pillar of fire, leading us in the way of truth and happiness. |
| My husband was in Bahrain. I was at home in Saint Cloud. I was attempting to explain to him, yet again, the nightmarish challenge of being me; I was attempting my explanation through the miracle of a long distance cell phone connection. “No, no, it’s the television in the bedroom that doesn’t work now.” “What happened?” he asked. I could almost see him running his hand through his hair. It’s the gesture my husband makes when he wishes he could turn himself into a earless deep sea squid so he doesn’t have to listen to me. “I told you. I had to take the VCR from the television in the bedroom and hook it up to the TV on the porch so I can exercise out on the porch and now the television in the bedroom doesn’t work anymore.” “What VCR? We don’t have a VCR.” Now that he mentioned it, VCR did sound kind of wrong. I crumpled my eyebrows together and came up with a better name. “Not VCR then. That machine. You know that movie machine.” “DVD player?” he offered. “Okay, whatever.” “And why did you have to unhook the DVD player inside the house?” I made a rude noise. “Ugh! I told you! Because the channel changer thingy for the movie machine on the porch is lost and I can’t scroll through my exercise tape so I can’t work out and keep my stupid girlish figure so you won’t leave me for an idiot baby bimbo.” “Tape?” he asked, feeling his way through my mouse maze of thinking. “We . . . we don’t still have . . . tapes? Do we?” I switched my cell phone from one sweaty ear to the other sweaty ear. “Okay, fine, not tapes. Whatever those roundish little record looking things are. Good grief. Try to keep up.” “DVD’s?” “Yes. That’s it. I had to unhook the DVD player from the television in the bedroom and hook it up to that hunk of junk television on the porch and now I can’t make the television in the bedroom work because there are a thousand wires going to a million kinds of nowhere. Arrrgggghh.” “Why can’t you exercise in the bedroom?” “What? Are you kidding me? I told you why” I said, thinking that I was pretty sure that I had told him why I couldn’t exercise in the bedroom, probably, maybe . . . “because the rug scoots when I do jumping jacks and the tile hurts my knees. You know my knees, the knees with the burning in the bone parts knees? Who cares? I want to exercise on the porch. That’s why.” Then he said that thing that makes me wish that I were a Killer Whale playing with my food by tossing it into the air on the Discovery channel. “Linda, is the TV plugged in?” I couldn’t answer him because various teeth were colliding against each other. He kept right on going. “Why did you unhook the DVD player again?” “Because if I don’t exercise soon I will break someone.” “Don’t you mean something?” “No.” Long distance phone calls are tricky. Long distance explanations are challenging. But sometimes, long distances are your best bet when building a happy and healthy marriage. Linda (High Impact) Zern |
| When you hear yourself screaming, “Sherwood, grab the hose; the dog is on fire,” you know that you are—once again—the butt of some giant cosmic joke, not to mention the dog. We are country folk. We sit outside a lot. We make fires. We own dogs. We sit outside around fires with our dogs. It’s a lifestyle. You have to respect it. (If we sat outside naked, beating tom-toms while reciting cowboy poetry with our dogs you’d have to respect that too—if it’s a lifestyle. That’s what I have learned in college.) I am a lazy fire pit builder. I like to hearken back to my Native American heritage by slapping a random length of wood onto the fire, letting the ends hang over the sides. When the log burns in half, you shove the ends in. Easy. Peasy. Others in my family would rather court hernias by slapping logs against trees, whacking branches on the ground, or slamming hunks of solid wood over their knees to try to produce the “correct” size. Mostly, they just look like learning disabled Sasquatches. It’s fun to watch. The down side to my method of fire building is that blazing hunks of junk sometimes fall out of the fire pit, raining down like space junk re-entering the atmosphere. Sometimes blazing hunks of junk fall into the dog’s tail. No, not sometimes—once, it happened once. What I learned when the dog’s tail caught on fire: I have the reaction time of a Navy Seal, Sarah (my daughter-in-law) who is very pregnant does not have the reaction time of a Navy Seal, and my husband is . . . a learning disabled Sasquatch. CoCo, my very hairy collie/retriever mix, had cuddled up to the fire pit when a blazing bit of junk fell out of the fire pit into her very hairy tail bits. Her tail fluff began to smoke. She was oblivious. I leapt out of my chair and screamed, “The dog is on fire.” Sarah screamed and tried not to wet her pants. Sherwood continued playing ‘Angry Birds’ on his machine. The dog’s tail blazed up. Reacting like a Ninja taking vitamin-B 12, I started to kick sand onto the dog’s tail. I continued screaming, “Sherwood get the hose the dog is on fire.” CoCo remained oblivious. She may have been playing ‘Angry Birds’ in her head. A smell straight from Dante’s Inferno rolled over me. Coughing bitter coughs, I started to stomp on the dog’s tail. She lifted her head, confused. Sarah continued screaming and doing Kegel exercises. I stomped on the dog until a giant chunk of frizzled and singed tail fuzz fell out of her tail. She got up, walked to the opposite side of the fire pit, flopped into the sand, and fell asleep—probably wondering when I’d had my stroke. Sherwood looked up from his machine, annoyed that I was yelling at him. “What did you want me to do about it?” he said. I thought about becoming an angry bird and pecking him to death. I threw more wood into the fire pit instead. CoCo snored. Sarah tried to catch her breath. Our lifestyle continued. And you have to respect that or be labeled a judgmental, diversity hating, cowboy poetry bigot. Linda (Fire Retardant) Zern |
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