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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 |
| I blame Disney and that “Bambi” movie for convincing an entire generation of folks that animals are born knowing how to sing and dance and are okay with wearing Santa hats. They aren’t and they’re not. I mean has anybody watched the Discovery channel lately? Lions eat lions. Lions eat hyenas. Killer whales eat more politically correct whale babies, or bits of them. Hyenas eat lions, and if hyenas could swim they’d eat whales. And then they’d eat the Santa hats. Daddy lions do not hold baby lions up to the sky while all the savannah animals sing, worshipfully. Savannah wildebeests kick baby lions in the head when the mommy lions are trying to disembowel the wildebeests. I also blame air conditioning. It’s separated human types from actual air and the real animals that live out in the actual air of the savannah. Recently a visitor to our farm, no doubt raised on Disney and weaned on Captain Planet, was taking pictures of the throbbing world of nature that surrounds us out here—trying to eat us. My husband, Sherwood, always helpful with the suggestion making, suggested the photographer come back on a day when the American bald eagles were in town doing their raptor thing. “You should be here and take pictures when the eagles carry off our neighbor’s ducks.” He pointed. “They swoop out of those pine trees over there and snatch the ducks right off the top of the pond. It’s wild kingdom. Now those would be some action shots.” The photographer’s face registered horror and shock. Plowing ahead like a bald eagle looking for duck soup, he continued, “Around here, when somebody yells, ‘Bald eagles! Incoming!’ we all run out to the porch to watch. It’s better than TV, no commercials.” The photographer turned to my husband like he was holding an axe and wearing a black hood with eye slits and said, “But isn’t that cannibalism?” Nope! It’s life and death and Animal Planet. It’s only cannibalism if the ducks are wearing Santa hats. I blame Disney and air conditioning. The invitation is open. Come on out to the country sometime, and we’ll watch the bald eagles fist fight the vultures in my front yard over raccoon corpses, and then I’ll show you where the bobcats and coyotes rumble over territory and baby goat nuggets. Then we’ll have lunch at The Catfish Place where we can eat alligator and soft-shelled turtle. Ignore my daughter when she sees turtle on the menu and moans, “But turtles are so slow.” Linda (Eat or Be Eaten) Zern |
| Fixture “Remember one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Daddy said when they got to the garage sale and handed her a one dollar bill. It’s what he always said. Mia hated the way the wrinkled dollar smelled, but she loved the way it made her feel and what it meant—time with Daddy. “Daddy, doesn’t it make you think of the beach?” Mia pointed at the sheets, stretching over the lawn and covered with candy dishes and yellowed Tupperware. The breeze tickled at the frayed edges of the sheets and tangled her ponytail. His crooked smile made her think of a question mark. She tried again. “You know . . . that raggedy line of seaweed after the water goes out? That’s all mixed up with broken shells but if you walk slow and look hard you can find a whole sand dollar that’s not all broken to bits—sometimes. It’s like that to me here.” Daddy held her hand as they wandered through card tables piled with blouses and winter sweaters. He always wore his work coveralls streaked with grease on the pockets when they went treasure hunting together; his name stitched in blue and black on his chest. “Like finding a great deal.” “Like sea treasure,” she said. He left her in front of a table with books and puzzles and games. Sometimes he looked at her like she was a sand dollar hidden under a pile of torn chip bags and barnacles. She thought he looked tired and rumpled like the money. “You’re a funny girl, Mia.” It made Mia feel itchy when grownups said things like that to her, not sure if it was a good thing to be a funny girl who saw seaweed in the flutter of sheets on the grass at a yard sale. He left to look for sensible treasures like torque wrenches and channel-lock pliers. She picked up a book and was disappointed to see that she’d read it and was rejecting the puzzles as too easy when the glitter of sun on glass caught her eye. Maybe it was glass or crystal or even diamonds? Piled next to her were jars, dishes, mismatched pots and pans, and somewhere in all that jumble the tantalizing sparkle of magic. She felt it. Mia walked to the edge of a paisley blanket and saw it—a glowing facade of crystal arching away into an elegant curve. It was a crystal ball, a real one, half hidden and tipped on its edge against a chipped bowl. She froze when the sun hit the crystal ball and splintered into a hundred shards of glittering fire. The sign read, Everything One Dollar. Mia could hardly breathe. She looked at her daddy and flipped a hand at him, not wanting to give it away, but tempted to yell at him to hurry. Hurry, hurry before someone else discovered their crystal ball and scooped it up. She waved harder. “Daddy,” she said, tugging at his shirtsleeve. “Daddy, do you see it?” She didn’t want to take the chance and point, so she dipped her head towards the blanket, whispering, “Daddy, there. Look! Next to that broken bowl. Can you believe it? And it’s only a dollar. It’s magic for only one dollar.” “Mia, what do you want me to see?” He squinted. “There daddy.” She bent down, desperate enough now to pick the crystal ball up, to hold it in front of her like a chalice. He looked at it and then looked at her, puzzled. “What do you think it is?” He pulled the magical globe out of her hands. “Shhh, daddy, they’ll hear you.” How could he not know? “Daddy, it’s a crystal ball! Look . . . just look!” “But honey,” he said, turning the ball of glass over in his chapped hands. He shook it. Tipping it back over, he watched as a shower of dried up mosquitoes fell out of its hollow-center. “We have one just like it in the bathroom.” He held up a dusty glass covering for a bathroom light fixture. “Oh,” she said, softer than a breath. “But I thought . . .” She covered her mouth with her hand to hide the way she needed to bite her lip—hard. Her hand smelled like the money—sweaty skin and fingernail dirt. He tossed the light fixture back into the heap and patted her on the head. “Next time, funny Mia. Next time you’ll find treasure.” |
| For My Brother, the Reformed Teaser-Slash-Terrorist Colic, that’s what causes terrorism. My brother (as a small boy) was the biggest terrorist I have ever known. In addition, his early colic is legendary. My mother describes falling asleep while standing up, holding my crying brother as his baby bottle nipples melted in a saucepan. When he finally quit being colicky, he started to tease and terrorize. Therefore, colic causes terrorism. My theory is that in retaliation for having suffered indigestion for the first six months of his life my brother became a militant, extremist teaser-slash-terrorist or he’s one of those people that finds a calm, safe, peaceful existence boring. People who are born drinking adrenalin like its orange juice. That’s my second theory. As a dedicated teaser-slash-terrorist, my brother was relentless, inventive and unstoppable. Some of his favorite methods of inflicting torture-slash-terror were to flick my ear or jab my ribs until I wanted to perfect my water boarding techniques. A lot of times he liked to knock things down; you know, like sand castles, stacks of blocks, doll houses—me. Often the ear flicking attacks were without warning or pattern. Once, when I was trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich he popped up and started flicking on my ear in a random teasing-slash-terrorist assault. I told him to stop and began drafting a UN resolution for sanctions against the little pest. He kept flicking. I brushed his hand away and threatened drone air strikes. He came back flicking—harder. I tried to ignore him while I scooped a giant glob of peanut butter out of the jar with a butter knife. He flicked away. My ear started to throb. The peanut butter shifted on the knife—slipping and sliding. Flick. Pause. Flick. Pause. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flickety, flickey, flickey, flick-flick-flick. I knocked his hand away and thought about sending in some special forces with a kill order. He came back flicking. And on it went, the teasing-slash-terrorism . . . until I whirled on him like a snarling wolverine with opposable thumbs capable of holding a knife. I fully intended to stab him in the stomach. My only hesitation was that I hadn’t upgraded my butter knife to a machete or a bunker buster bomb. “Stop touching me,” I screamed, “or I’ll stab . . .” I looked down at the knife blade. It was naked. There was no giant glob of peanut butter. There was nothing but a grease stain where the peanut butter used to be. “Where did the peanut butter go?” He shrugged and made a move to flick my ear. Mom walked through the door. My brother retreated from the field of battle to re-group and look for bomb parts for IED’s. Over the next few months, I searched the kitchen quietly (strictly black ops) for the missing glob of peanut butter. Flick-boy laid low. One morning my mother said, “What is that up there?” “Hurlick?” I mumbled through milk and cereal. “That, up there, on the wall. What is that?” I glanced up. High over our heads, in the shadows of the kitchen’s “open beam” ceilings was a streak of oily grease and a petrified wad of peanut butter frozen to the paneled wall. Dragging a stepladder over to the wall, my mother had finally located the missing peanut butter evidence. Flick-boy said, “Linda did it.” I reached for a knife. The United States Army recognized in my brother a raw talent and made him the boss of all kinds of other folks who, as kids, grew up tormenting their brothers and sisters half to death, and who were addicted to adrenalin. He became a big dog in the army and he got to flick the ears of some really bad boys who deserved it. And in a great twist of universal teasing, I have a son just like him. God must be a boy. Linda (It’s not nice to tease the writer sister) Zern |
| Everyone I can think of wants to survive the mediocrity of their present lives long enough so that they can “be able to travel and see the world.” I can’t figure it out. My husband flies thousands of miles every year as part of his livelihood and when people ask him if he plans to travel when he retires he says, “Only if I’m evading INTERPOL,” which he might have to do if he doesn’t smarten up about travel packing. Traveling with Sherwood (the Jackal) Zern is enough to make me quite content to keep myself to myself, on my porch, in my rocking chair, watching the neighbor’s cows try to sneak out of their pasture and into another neighbor’s pasture—also I have a fabulous mattress, unmatched by any hotel, hostel, or inn I’ve ever stayed at. Sherwood is searched at the airport weekly. He is profiled regularly. He is frequently targeted for a “fat deposit anomaly” on his leg. The TSA finds him questionable and for good reason. He packs like the Uni-bomber on vacation. On a trip to Boston via Logan airport, I stood next to my husband as his luggage went into the x-ray vision machine but never came out. We’d lost the airport luggage lottery—again. The conveyor belt went forward and backwards. Various frowning TSA folks gathered behind the screen. A few pointed. Frowns deepened. A couple of them peeked at us over the machine with narrowed eyes. It could only mean one thing. Sherwood’s backpack for work was about to have its privacy violated, and we were going to have to watch. A chatty federal employee, I secretly dubbed Eye-Spy TSA Guy, pulled out of the Jackal’s backpack, and I’m not kidding: a mouse; two, not one, TWO power packs; an external hard drive; one USB cable; other miscellaneous cables, wires, and connectors; a wallet; sunglasses; a cell phone; a cell phone charger; an extra cell phone battery; keys; pens and pencils; books; folders; loose change; and two, not one, TWO laptops. I’m pretty sure I spotted the remote to our television in the pile, but I couldn’t swear to it. The Eye-Spy TSA Guy exclaimed in exasperation, “Do you know what all this [word that means poop] looks like?” We shook our Middle American heads. “It looks like a crazy ass’d bomb; that’s what it looks like. You should try putting this [word that means poop] in plastic containers, so we can tell what all this junk is.” “Would Tupperware be best or maybe Rubbermaid?” I said, trying to look cooperative and compliant. “What’s this? A damn detonator,” he said, holding up a damn detonator looking device. “Our garage door opener. I think.” I shot Sherwood with visual detonators and evil eye bombs. Eye-Spy TSA Guy called over his cronies. “Look at all this crazy ass’d [word that means poop]; he’s got Staples electronic department in here.” The cronies observed, “Wow, he’s mobile man.” Sherwood and I laughed nervously. Under my breath I hissed out warnings and dire predictions. “I ain’t taking the rap for this buddy boy. I’m already wording my statement to turn state’s evidence and ‘cut a deal.’” Sherwood laughed nervously. That’s it. Until Sherwood gets that backpack of his under some kind of control, I’m flying solo—in my dreams. Travel Tip of the Week: Always pack mix-and-match separates and keep your bomb [word that means poop] in Tupperware. Peace out, Mrs. Sherwood (the Jackal) Zern |
| “He’s not there.” Sarah, my daughter-in-law, said. Strains of the processional music continued to pound through the Harold & Ted Sports Center as the Rollins College graduates tromped by in their dignified acetate gowns. The relief on their faces bordered on spiritual delirium. “There are only two hundred and fifty graduates. It’s not like we could have missed him. Good grief. Did anybody see Adam?” I prompted. The blank looks on the faces of our family bordered on stupefying. “He’s not there; I looked.” Sarah swayed like a blue orchid in the breeze one hand on her camera, one hand at her throat. She peeled her hand off her throat and stared at the palm of her hand. “The palms of my hands are getting sweaty. Where could he be?” We all stared at the, now sitting, graduates in their identical, dignified acetate gowns. “Look for a skinny neck,” I advised, “and slumpy shoulders.” Several people squinted. No. Nope. Nada. Nothing. No Adam skinny neck sightings. I’d like to say we waited for several minutes to concoct impossible conspiracy theories, built on implausible bits of logic, mixed with low levels of radioactive cynicism, but I can’t. The goofy theories were immediate. “I hope he didn’t get kidnapped.” (His wife) “Or robbed, or raped.” “He’s at the wrong graduation ceremony.” (His sister) “Or we’re at the wrong graduation ceremony.” (His other sister) “Oh man, he’s speaking, and it’s a trick so that we have to listen to him give a speech.” (The sister who thought Adam had wandered into the wrong graduation ceremony) “I know; he’s getting an award, and it’s a surprise.” (His mother) “The whole thing has been a ruse; he’s only been pretending to go to college at night for years and years, and it’s all coming undone. He never graduated.” (His father with a moan) “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s getting a prize.” (His mother again) “I’ve never heard so much bad Intel, and I work in Afghanistan.” (His brother) “Do you think he’s fainted, fallen, or broken something?” (His wife again) “Daddy?” (One of his daughters) I looked harder at the fidgeting group of graduates in their seats and there under the 1971 banner was a neck, ears, and shoulders I recognized, because I’d washed behind those ears, kissed that baby neck, and patted those shoulders more than once, back when he was just a sunny little boy who loved baseball and Ninja Turtles—back when he brought me fists full of crushed wildflowers with the roots still attached, back when he belonged to me and only me, back when he was mine. “There he is.” A collective sigh of relief went up from the group as Adam Carter Zern graduated Summa Cum Laude from Rollins College. MORAL OF THE STORY: I like to think we are a reasonably intelligent family. Several of us have college degrees of our very own and the United States government trusts one of us with expensive weapons systems, but sometimes we can be full on dopey. Linda L. Zern (Mother of the Graduate) |
| FACT: The average human female (domesticus raise the rooficus) can lift approximately 77, 000 times her own body weight. I know because I, myself, have been known to lift small automobiles. Why? Because I was rearranging, of course, and the car looked bad where it was—also for purposes of spring-cleaning. During the period of time when we moved—from Florida (the motherland) to North Carolina (not the Motherland) and then moved back to Florida (now the blessed motherland) and house sat for six months in Winter Springs (Mildew Palace-there’s a story there) and then moved to an Oviedo apartment (underneath the apartment of some frat boys and their blowup doll) and then we moved to a condo in Celebration (Dr. Suess world)—we managed to drag our stuff from Hither-Town to Yon-ville—also two fledgling kids and one cat. For two hundred and fifty dollars a month, our stuff lived in luxury and ease in a climate controlled storage unit on Aloma Avenue, until I decided our stuff needed rearranging—also moving—again. One minute I’m looking at our stuff, not liking the way it looks all jumbled in that storage unit for two hundred and fifty bucks a month, and the next minute I’m hauling boxes roughly the size of dumpsters around and trying to shove them into the trunk of a Grand Am, by myself. How did I do it? I am domesticus raise the rooficus. I employed the scoot, tip, walk, creep, tilt, tip, swing, drag, and counter balance method of moving asteroid sized objects. If I can budge it, I can move it. Take for example, a wardrobe box (taller than my five foot, one inch head) I became determined to move. I immediately recognized that the wardrobe box would be easy to tip over. FACT: For the domesticus raise the rooficus this is not a learned knowledge; it is purely instinctive. Tall boxes fall over like dominoes set up by a drunk. I began by jamming myself between the wall and the wardrobe box, and I pushed it over. Once the box was on its side, I attempted to employ the dragging method. But this was one tall mother . . . of a box (also heavy,) and it did not respond to the dragging method. Never one to say, “You’re going to rupture something.” I next attempted the walking method. This method consists of wedging oneself between the wall and the tall (also heavy) box and kicking it from one side, moving it three inches to the right. I repeated this action on the other side, moving it three inches to the left and a fraction of an inch forward. This is called “walking” the box. Forty-seven years, I mean minutes, later, the tall (also heavy) box was in the parking lot, and I was trying to decide which method to employ to lift the sucker into the trunk of my car. Let me put it this way. I know how they built the pyramids with only croc dung and sticks. I continued to move mountains all weekend. On Monday, I was afraid I’d given myself a do-it-yourself hysterectomy, so I begged my teenage son to help me. He could tuck multiple boxes under each hairy armpit and slouch with them to the car. I remain envious. “See son, I’ve been lifting boxes roughly the size of bunk beds. Can you help me?” “Mother,” he began, while grazing from a bag of dusty Doritos and sitting on a couch I had carried in on my back, “you know how I feel about the entire cycle of packing and moving and packing and moving, again and again, in an endless spiral of cascading doom brought on by our overdependence on material items used to define and validate ourselves in a corrupt society. You know I want to be an intenerate soapbox lecturer without purse or script.” He grazed on. “I think my hysterectomy is flaring up.” Raising a disdainful eyebrow, he said, “Hummmph!” “Did you know that I can life approximately 77, 000 times my own body weight?” “Then what do you need me for?” he said. “Get up and help me, or I’ll tip you over and use the tilt-kick-drag moving method on you.” “Let me get my shoes,” he said. FACT: A drone is just a teenager without a couch. Oh, by the way, do you want to know what was in the wardrobe box (taller than my own head)? There were two tons of teenage son’s Star Wars memorabilia including light saber and pose able action figures—overdependence, my eye. Have a great week and don’t lift anything heavier than a hamster wheel. Linda (Queen of the Drone People) Zern |
EMP Envy Mother Preening, Each Monkey Picking, End Moon Ponging, Era Made for Pimples . . . An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse. It can be used as a bomb. It’s a bomb that’s heck on microwaves and such. I am an electromagnetic pulse bomb. It’s not my fault. I was born with extra electromagnets—also extra pulses. The evidence: Example #1 of my EMP capabilities - I bought a Kindle, which is a nifty machine that uses electric to suck up all the words in the world at the cost of $7.98 per book. The power cord of my kindle disintegrated like a cracker in a mud puddle. Holding the crumbling power cord in my hands, I tried to show it to my husband. “Is this normal?” Bits of plastic power cord coating rained down like . . . like . . . well, rain. Sherwood, my darling husband, did not look up from his electronic machine masters of which there are three. “Did the dog chew it?” Exposed wires bulged like worms from the dissolving plastic along the entire length of the power cord. Plastic sawdust coated my hands. “It was plugged into the wall socket, behind the bookcase,” I said, squinting at the bare wires. “I mean, Ploodle did eat a couple of my computer cords, but unless Ploodle has become a wire eating beaver who can burrow under a bookshelf . . . seriously, look at this.” Note: Ploodle is our five-pound Yorkshire terrier who has a history of chewing computer power cords, chicken throats, and brassieres. He raised his bleary eyes from the glare of artificial computer lights—Sherwood, not Ploodle. I held the cord up. It continued to dissolve in my electromagnetic pulse bomb hands. He gave me a professional diagnosis. “That’s weird,” he said, turning back to his computer, also known as the mother ship. “There’s a scientific explanation,” I mumbled. “There has to be.” Example # 2 When I bought the computer before this computer and the computer before that one, the nice people at the Apple store gave me a free I-POD. It seemed a fun little gadget, and a lot of people tried to take it from me. (You know who you are, you thieving yetis.) But I said, “No!” The thieves narrowed their thieving yeti eyes at me. I said, “It’s mine.” And then I said, “What does it do?” There was an involved demonstration in which various of my offspring punched mysteriously at the surface of the silvery gadget and then flashed the results of their strange finger movements to me and said loudly, “See!” and “Hear!” Then they handed it to me. I put the gadget my overall’s pocket and went out to garden while listening to Freddy Mercury sing about plump people riding on bicycles and living forever with rhapsodic bohemians. Every time I bent over to pull weeds it fell out of my pocket into the dirt and worms. The I-POD no longer works, BECAUSE I AM AN ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE BOMB—Duh!! Example # 3: I haven’t had a normal conversation on the telephone since we got rid of the “tele” part of the name in phone and changed it to “cell.” I have a bubble around my head of electromagnetic pulses that sucks up all the cells out of the cell phone the way some people can suck all the fun out of a Facebook status. The bubble also interferes with satellite transmissions, or I have a bubblehead. Example # 4: I can shoot static electric lighting bolts from my fingertips, but that’s only any good if you want to set dryer lint on fire. Conclusion: I hate being an EMP bomb. I want to be a bombshell or a super hero. Linda (Outgoing) Zern |
| WARNING: Attempt At Writing Serious Literature - Read At Your Own Risk When I was four years old, going on five, the world teetered on the crumbling edge of nuclear annihilation. It was really annoying. The possible end of human existence meant that there was nothing to watch on our black and white television set, because the man I thought of as someone’s grandpa had been talking and talking and talking--forever. It meant that none of us kids were allowed outside to play hopscotch or stickball because of where we lived and where all our dads worked. Rose Marie Drive was too close to Cape Canaveral to take a chance on hopscotch. When the moon rockets roared into the sky the ground shook and sliding glass doors rattled. We were in the radius. It meant that instead of being at work writing technical manuals, my father was sitting at our kitchen dinette, his fingers fluttering and thumping against the Formica. When he turned to watch the flicker of the television, he looked like a man who’d forgotten where he’d put his glasses when they were on the top of his head all along. When the picture got fuzzy he mumbled bad words. The rabbit ears on the top of the TV probably needed someone to crumple the tinfoil up better, but who cared; it was just old people talking. Based on the latest low-level reconnaissance mission . . .[Redacted] Guanajay Intermediate-range Ballistic Missile Site #1 will probably be fully operational on 1 December . . . [Redacted] --CIA Daily Report, "The Crisis USSR/Cuba," October 27, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University) When my father wasn't watching the television, he scribbled on a piece of notebook paper, drawing heavy thick lines. My mother hovered. She complained that her eye was twitching; she pushed her finger against one eyelid while my father scribbled and talked. "It's true, what they're reporting. A-1-A is a parking lot, everyone trying to get out of the Keys. The police are trying to keep the intersections clear. No one going the other way, just Army trucks . . . troops. We couldn't get out if we wanted to. We've waited too . . ." "Late," my mother said. "The Christensens left yesterday." I should have listened more carefully to the way she was saying what she said, but I was only four. I hadn't perfected the art of low-level reconnaissance, yet. Still, I watched and listened and colored while sitting on a bar stool at the breakfast bar in our new house on Rose Marie Drive in Titusville, Florida. That breakfast bar was one of the big selling features for those cookie cutter row houses, a stretch of crisp, white Formica, jutting out from the kitchen countertop in a seamless length of modern design. It was where all the neighborhood kids lived when we were inside, to eat our TV dinners and be out of our parent's way. It was where we sat and eavesdropped on the exotic customs and culture of an alien adult world. I loved sitting there with our dog, a stuffed sausage of a Chihuahua, panting at my feet, waiting for me to sneak him all my supper. I would swing my dangling legs back and forth, like a quiet satellite on the fringe of my parent's universe. The space under the breakfast bar was another kind of place--a snug, close, hide-and-seek spot tucked away from grown-up worries, a handy choice for emergencies and pretending, a handy choice for disappearing. Between the garbage pail and the end of the counter, the breakfast bar was a child-sized refuge and retreat, like a card table with a blanket thrown over it, it felt safe under there. The strangeness of my father sitting in the kitchen, drawing on notebook paper when he should have been at work made me uneasy, in a vague, ants-in-the-pants kind of way. My father didn't draw. He didn't come home early. When my father did come home from Cape Canaveral, he flopped into an E-Z-Boy lounger and made me rub his feet. They smelled terrible. Home early, he drew lines and circles and scribbled important looking words. Curiosity pulled me down from the barstool. The glyphs on his paper drew me like a treasure map. The dog trailed behind me his nails tick, ticking against the linoleum. I pointed to the notebook paper. "What's that say?" My father kept writing and my mother made her fingers into a hard teepee. They ignored me. I tried sounding out the strangest of the words by myself, bit by bit, the way I'd figured out by learning to read "Constantinople and Timbuktu" at the end of Hop on Pop. "G-en-er-aaaaa-t-or, gen-er-a-tor." I made the G soft and the A short. "Long A. G like J. Gen-er-A-tor," my mother corrected. "Is a generator part of the package? It looks very complicated," she said, "and expensive." "Butch says that all we need is a rough sketch and this buddy of his can come and dig a hole in a day or two. It's like a pre-fab deal. Dig a hole, dump it in, and then you add stuff. Shelves and shit, any way you want it." "But isn't it too late? The Christensens left yesterday. They're probably to Tennessee by now." She sounded like the only kid in class not to get an invitation to the best birthday party of the year. "There's nothing left at the store, worse than a hurricane." My father wrote the words B-O-M-B and S-H-E-L-T-E-R in fat important letters across the top of the paper. He pressed so hard the pencil lead snapped. "Shit. Get me another goddamn pencil." My mother hustled to the junk drawer still muttering about empty shelves and too little time and things worse than hurricanes. My father drew tiny circles on a straight line, inside a rectangle. "Are those rocks?" I asked, pointing to the circles, inching closer to my father's side. "Food. Cans. Canned goods. Peas. Tuna. Beans." I got too close. He pushed me back with his elbow. "Go eat something. Make her eat something for Christ's sake." The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. -- President John F. Kennedy, Address to the Nation, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 22 1962 (from the American Rhetoric.com website) A tiny worm of worry twitched behind my bellybutton. My mother and father started to argue. This was back and forth talk I recognized, the cadence of verbal warfare as familiar as any Dr. Seuss book. It started over my criminal, selfish waste of food. It drove my mother crazy that I didn't eat. It made my father crazy when my mother got crazy over me not eating. I watched my father carefully for signs that he might want to teach me a lesson tonight, making me sit in front of a plate of ice cold fish sticks or mashed potatoes for the longest time, because people were starving, somewhere or everywhere. I couldn't remember. Then their anger became a tug of war of words over canned goods and ways to hide from bombs and our neighbors leaving yesterday and something called fallout. My mother wanted to drive away from the fallout. My father wanted to pretend that there was time to build a place to hide away from the fallout by digging a hole in the ground, in our backyard, behind the new chain link fence. I knew about bombs from the big kids who went to school and how you had to practice hiding under your desk so the terrible bombs couldn't find you. It was the Russians. Those Russians weren't starving, but they were making missile-bombs to drop on our friends at school and our house and daddy's work and the Spooner family with their seven children and my best friend Teresa and the monkey bars and . . . I looked over at the dog, waiting under my barstool for fish sticks to come raining down from the sky. "What will our doggy eat when we hide from the bad bombs?" "No dog food. No dog. Just people. Tell her." That's when the worm of worry started to crawl around looking for a way out, trying to find someplace to hide. I started to worry about how the dog would know to get under a desk if I didn't help him. "Don't be like that. It's not like we're actually going to build this silly thing. Let her pretend to bring the stupid dog." At some point, I started to cry. "I'm not doing this for my health. You can't put a dog in a bomb shelter. Where's a dog going to shit?" He looked at me, and I knew I looked booger-crying-ugly because of the way he stared at me, disgusted. "Shut up that noise. You can't have dog shit in a bomb shelter." My mother laughed. "Do you know how stupid that sounds?" Then, my father's face started coming apart like a broken coffee cup, all his face lines became sharp points and stone edges. United Press reports eruption of violent rioting and terror bombing in more than half dozen Latin American capitals. It states that La Paz, Bolivia, was the scene of street fighting near the United States Embassy involving 3,000 anti-American labor union members, pro-American demonstrators, and police reports five killed and twenty-six injured. --CIA Daily Report, "The Crisis USSR/Cuba," October 27, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University) "You're blaming me for the goddamn Cuban Missile Crisis? What have you done? There's nothing here." He marched to the kitchen cabinets and started flinging doors open, some of them banging closed again, and one door ripping loose from its hinges. It dangled from the one remaining hinge. It was always like that with my father and mother, missed cues, vague hints of disapproval, the low burn of rising tension and paranoia, and then the inexplicable blowup. Grabbing boxes of noodles, he threw them over his shoulder, an open box of spaghetti skittered across the kitchen floor. He dropped a jelly jar. It shattered into glittery grape-smeared dust. A bottle of ketchup exploded, splashing across the linoleum. My mother started to back away from the pick-up-sticks of loose noodles, the grape jelly full of glass, and the angry words that were not going to stop, not for a while. The dog licked ketchup off of the floor. I remembered to shove my fist against my teeth, so I could make the crying stop when I jumped down from the barstool. Scooting on my bottom, I wedged myself next to the garbage can under the ultra modern, Formica covered breakfast bar. Globs of food dripped and drabbed down the side of the cabinet under the bar where I would sneak food into the garbage or the dog. My mother couldn't see underneath the counter to clean the spills. Stuff got stuck under here. I pulled the bar stools in tight, trying to protect myself with a toothpick barricade against an explosion of condiments and pasta. I glued my chin to my knees, listening to my father empty out our kitchen cabinets, listening to the sky falling. The dog yelped. He scurried under the breakfast bar and pressed himself against my leg. "Bill, stop!" The barrage ended. The cabinets emptied. He stomped away to listen to the president explain about the end of the world. Kneeling, my mother started putting little pieces of jelly jar into bigger pieces of jelly jar. When she saw me jammed under the breakfast bar she started crying but not louder than President Kennedy talking in the living room. I stayed under there for a long time even when my mother had finished picking through shattered glass and sweeping ruined noodles into a dirty pile. I knew to stay put until the all clear sounded or bedtime. I stayed until our fat dog licked my face, making me laugh, because his breath smelled like ketchup. He smelled like dinner, the dinner no one was going to remember to make me eat. The Cuban crisis, we hope, marked an end and a beginning--an end to violent adventures designed to overturn the equilibrium of world power, and a beginning of fresh initiatives for peace, including a new attack on nuclear testing, disarmament, overseas bases, and on world social and economic problems. --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Memorandum For the President- "Post Mortem on Cuba," October 29, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University) When I was four years old, going on five, the world teetered on the crumbling edge of nuclear annihilation. It wasn't the scariest part of my childhood. |
| Our five-pound Yorkshire terrier, Ploodle, does not go to a dog groomer. His mother puts a bowl on his head and cuts his hair with loving hands at home. I am Ploodle's stylist. I also own the bowl. When Ploodle looks like a possessed oven mitt, I know it is time to "trim him up." When I'm done he often looks idiotic. Sometimes, for a bit of whimsy, I leave the hair on his legs longish so that he looks like he's wearing UGG boots. People laugh at him, but he's a very secure fellow and has a fine self-deprecating sense of humor. After giving Ploodle a crew cut in honor of crew cut awareness week, I ended up with a tiny haystack of fuzzy Yorkie hair that I wrapped in a towel (for immediate disposal in the garbage), but then I forgot and stuffed the towel with the whole hairy mess in the wash machine, which got washed on the "Heavy" cycle, probably more than once, and then got stuffed into the dryer and dried on "High Heat-Cottons." The haystack of Ploodle hair turned into a toupee--a bad one. I called my husband. "Honey, I can't find it." He's used to getting phone calls from me, in the middle of the day, that contain little or no context, information--or sense. He's used to not knowing what the heck is going on. "What? What can't you find?" "The toupee." There was a pause. It might have been beyond pregnant. "Remember?" I said, frustrated anew at my husband's lack of mind reading talent. "Remember? That wad of Ploodle hair I showed you; the wad of hair that kind of got cooked in the dryer into a giant placemat and that ended up looking like it was made of Yeti armpit fur? Remember?" The memory came back with a thud. I know; I heard a thud sound. "Oh right, it was disgusting." "Okay, so I put it in the bathroom trash, but now I can't find it." "Well I don't have it." Sherwood is working in Detroit. He flies home on the weekends so I can keep him up to date on important stuff. I wandered through the house trying to decide if I had dreamed the whole dog hair toupee incident. "I can't find it anywhere." I noticed another one of the dogs wearing what looked like a mustache. "Wait a minute. Either Coco is trying out a disguise, or I think I'm onto the location of the missing toupee." I followed a breadcrumb trail made out of dog hair toupee bits. Still talking to Sherwood, I walked into our bedroom. Ginger, our soldier son's English Bull-dog, looked up, her mouth full of either the butt end of a molting moose or the missing hairpiece. "Never mind. I found it." "Thank goodness. For a minute there I was afraid that you were going to accuse me of having packed the darned thing." He clicked off. Ploodle stood by, looking embarrassed. "What are you embarrassed about? It's just hair. I got all the way to the gym with a piece of that white sticky tape from a lint roller stuck in my waistband, trailing out like a castle banner. And some woman walked by, saw it, made a face AND DIDN'T BOTHER TO SAY ANYTHING." Ploodle had the good grace to blink. "That's right; just about the time I think I'm looking hip, fit, and cool, it's a safe bet that something ridiculous is going to be stuck in or on the back of my pants." Ploodle wagged his nubby little tail. I sighed. "I'm just glad it wasn't your dog hair toupee stuck to my pants. Wouldn't that have been hard to explain? Ploodle, Ginger, Coco and I decided to go play jump over the horse poop piles until dinner. Linda (Close Shave) Zern |
| I recognized that look as I stared at vacant eyes, gaping mouth and body language that screamed, "Feed me!" I remembered that look, sitting on my couch. I knew a hungry teenager when I saw one. The problem was that this "teenager" was a bird--A BIRD--a half grown scruffy-feathered, gap-beaked blue jay bird, and it wanted to be fed. Typical. I had just scratched up an earthworm with my garden rake. What could it hurt? I fed the earthworm to the scraggly blue jay teenager bird. It was a bucolic, earthy gardener's moment. Charming. It was also summertime. Our air conditioner was broken. Typical. So, I called the AC man, a nice congenial man with interesting tattoos on his large muscles. He looked like he could tunnel out of a prison or had. He arrived and got to work puttering around the air conditioning unit. I puttered around my garden. The entire time I had that strange, eerie feeling that someone was watching me . . . and yelling at me. Typical. There it was, plopped on a mulch pile--slouching, staring, and yelling--the blue jay teenager bird. Not only was the pimply bird slouching, it looked like it needed a shave and some deodorant. Typical. I walked closer. Its mouth gaped open. I attempted to shoo it away. Its mouth gaped wider. I talked to it and said, "What's your deal?" Its mouth almost unhinged at the jaw. I recognized that look. It wanted to be fed--again. Get a job, I thought. The AC man finished his puttering and brought me the bad AC news. We stood shoulder to shoulder, the invoice on his clipboard a history of AC neglect. He gave me the total. I sighed. I wrote a check. Blue jay teenager bird, its tiny brain firing on all 1.5 cylinders, recognized "worm-getting-lady." It sailed, erratically, from the top of the mulch pile, past my face, to land on AC man's shoulder. I screamed. AC man used his large muscles to toss his clipboard. AC man screamed. The teenager bird's mouth gaped open. It didn't budge from its shoulder perch. I thought I should explain why I had collapsed onto the ground. "I'm so sorry. The baby bird thinks that I'm its mother. I fed it a worm. It startled me." AC man tried to dislodge the blue jay teenager bird from his shoulder. It reluctantly flew away to a nearby tree branch. "Wow, how amazing was that?" I said, trying to sound like Snow White, who had the power to sing birds out of trees and was used to them landing on various body parts. "Lady, you shouldn't scream like that." He took my check and retreated to his work van. I took my rake and retreated to my garden just as the blue jay teenager bird (once again recognizing "worm-getting-lady") dove at my head from the tree branch. It crash-landed onto my hair. I screamed the scream of the banshee and began running blindly, flailing wildly, and sobbing hysterically. The blue jay teenager bird's mouth gaped open as it clung to my wildly bobbing head. AC man's van, its window tinted, never moved even though the engine was running. I streaked across the yard, back and forth, in front of the work van. The bird rode on my head like it was waiting for the eight- second count in a bull riding competition. I thought I detected the soft lilt of laughter, but seeing as how my screaming went on for while, I could be mistaken about that. Finally, blue jay teenager bird noticed a fat grub on the ground and flew off in an attempt to feed itself. And that's how I became an empty nester. I promise; this story is true, mostly. It is an example of creative non-fiction, which is the truth dressed up to go to a party. For example, I could have been wearing a hat, but it's funnier if the bird landed in my hair. Happy spring, Linda (worm-getting-lady) Zern |
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