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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 |
| Feral pigs rampaged through the yard, dangerously close to my leaf lettuce and loofah gourds. They were followed closely by bobcats, looking for take-out for their kittens. Coyotes howled in the distance. Not to worry I thought. There are county agencies, programs, divisions, organizations, and entire tasks forces dedicated to solving all my troubles. Right? My local government would help I thought. Someone is out there waiting for my phone call, sitting eagerly behind a government-issue metal desk in quiet anticipation of being of service—to me. Okay, sometimes I’m a giant nitwit. “Hello, this is Osceola County Animal Control. My name is Todd. How can I help you?” Trying to win friends and influence Todd, I went for lighthearted. “Hey there, Todd. I need to talk to your Feral Pig, Bobcat, Coyote Division.” Todd was a dud and not easily influenced. “Lady, it’s just me.” Another phone rang in the background. “Hang on,” he said. When he returned he was still not up for silliness or joshing about. “What do you want?” he asked. “I just need some info on the rampaging wildlife around here. I don’t want to get in any trouble, trying to do the right thing, be responsible, educated myself—that kind of thing. So, what’s the scoop on feral pigs? I just put in my spring gar . . . ” “Not our responsibility, the federal government is supposed to be taking care of the feral pig population.” He did not sound like a true believer of anything. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine somewhere in the bowels of a stately federal government building all the way up there in Washington DC, a kindly government worker, shoulders hunched, glasses fogged, heart contracting and expanding with worry over the approximately five to 12,000 feral pigs threatening Linda L. Zern’s newly sprouted Golden Queen Corn crop. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make myself see it, no matter how hard I squished my eyes shut. “In other words, no one cares. So, what if I shoot the suckers?” Todd began to chant. “You cannot discharge a firearm within . . .” “Not a problem. I live out.” Todd continued to chant city regulations. “Out, Todd, out not in. Out. I have to call state troopers if I’m attacked by roving bands of man eating men—out, way out.” The chant grew fainter. He finally paused and said, “You can call a trapper and trap the pigs.” “What? Like a big game hunter? Or somebody who digs a big pit and fills it with giant mousetraps? What?” Finding out that I lived outside the city limits changed Todd’s attitude toward me. He softened. He warmed up; he came clean. “Well, I’ll tell you, lady. We tried trapping pigs once out Poinciana way. There were thirty or forty pigs tearing up the place. We trapped one, and then somebody came and shot the pig in the trap and stole the meat,” he paused and then spoke slowly and distinctly. “There’s no hunting season on pigs.” He sighed and then had to take another phone call. “What about bobcats?” “We don’t catch those, but if you trap them we’ll come pick them up, and there’s a hunting season on bobcat.” All I could picture was a box, a stick, a string, and a hotdog—also claw marks—lots and many claw marks. “What about the coyotes? I just don’t want to shoot first and ask questions later; you know?” “Nobody’s in charge of those things, and you ain’t going to trap them either. No way,” he paused and spoke very very slowly and distinctly, “and there’s no hunting season on coyotes.” I realized that “no hunting season” was code for “fire at will.” “Okay, then Todd, pretty much what I’m hearing here is ‘Lady, you’re on your own.’” He made a non-committal snort noise and hung up. I had more questions. Like, exactly what does Animal Control control? If I report a giant panda attack will I get more action? If I shoot a giant panda, will I go to jail forever? If I’m attacked and eaten by a giant panda will you, Todd, be a pallbearer at my funeral? Overall, it was good to have clarification on the bureaucratic process, because lady, trust me, you are on your own. Just ask Todd. Linda (Stonewall) Zern |
| According to a special documentary on “body language” over ninety percent of all human communication is non-verbal. (As I type this, my shoulders are very pinched and close to my ears.) Everyone lies. I am told that this is true, because people have seen it on a t-shirt and a fictional character on television repeats it a lot. (At this point, my lips are pursed, emphasizing the fine lines and fissures into which my lipstick tends to pour.) Therefore, if everyone lies and ninety percent of communication is non-verbal then forget about what’s coming out of people’s lips and concentrate on what’s happening between their eyes. (A wrinkle shaped like a cavern just deepened near my left eye.) I hate lying. I love liars. (My right eye is twitching so hard I can hear it.) That is a lie. I don’t love liars. I try to love liars in the “love the sinner, hate the sin” way, but it’s hard, because liars tend to lie, and they can’t be trusted with your automobiles, wallet, lawn mower, good name, daughters, or your female cat, and she’s been spayed. I continue to try to love liars, but it’s a struggle. No, it’s not a struggle; that’s a lie. It’s more like a wrestle—Greco/Roman style. Liars are exhausting, because you have to listen to them lying and “read” their body language all at the same time. Or if you’re not around when the liar is lying then you have to hire someone to watch the liar lie, and if you live in a particularly dishonest society, eventually you will run out of people, to watch the people, who are supposed to be watching the people—in case the people are lying or plagiarizing or faking important governmental reports. (See? It’s exhausting.) So, if it’s true that everyone lies then we’re screwed. My favorite story about liars is a story my husband likes to tell. (I use it here with permission—no, not really. I totally stole his story.) At a father/son campout, my husband and others continually warned one young boy to cease and desist putting a sharp, pointy stick in the campfire, igniting the end of the sharp, pointy stick, and then wandering about the campground while waving the now flaming, sharp, pointy stick in the air. He agreed to stop—verbally. (The body language test results have been misplaced.) “Put that stick out,” they demanded. He put it out. Sherwood retired to his tent, only to emerge later to see the young boy standing in the middle of the campground holding the flaming, sharp, pointy stick aloft—apparently in tribute to the pointy stick fire gods. “Son!” My husband calls all boys son; it doesn’t necessarily mean a blood relation. “Son! Did you put that stick back in the fire?” The young boy said, “Nope.” We have boys. Sherwood knew what he was up against. “Are you holding a stick?” “Maybe.” “Is your hand in a curved position around a former tree branch?” The phrase “former tree branch” tripped the kid up. “Yes,” the boy said. “Is that stick on fire?” “I don’t know.” A shower of sparks made the boy flinch. His body language gave him away. I know it’s old fashioned. I know it’s considered a simple fix for a simple mind, but I like the Ten Commandments. They were written on stone, thus saving paper. They’re short. They’re numbered. They’re to the point. I especially like the one that read: Thou shalt not force me to have to learn body language to be able to tell if you’re a big, fat liar when I ask, “Who busted the loveseat?” and you tell me, “I don’t know.” And then six months later, I find broken bits of loveseat hidden behind our wedding picture and all over the house—Sherwood Kevin Zern! And all the grandkids were in on it, including Reagan and she doesn’t have teeth. (I am now leaning toward the computer screen in a combative, aggressive posture.) Yep. That’s my favorite commandment. Nah, I’m lying. Actually, I believe that there are really only two commandments and they’re my favorites. Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself . . . because people who love their neighbors don’t lie to, steal from, lust for, cheat over, shoot at, curse up, or covet their neighbor’s good looking donkeys. Nice people only need two rules, in my opinion. Linda (Read My Lips) Zern |
| Suggestions for eradicating rats in the Zern family chicken coop have included: Misc. People’s Question: “Can’t you just poison the rats with poisoned apples?” My Response: “Nope, because we’re fresh out of wizened old witches and chickens eat poisoned apples too.” Son-In-Law Threat: “If it were me, my rats, and my chicken coop, I’d burn it down. In fact, it’s the second thing I’m going to do after you die; right after I change out all the mismatched cabinet knobs in your kitchen.” My Come Back and Counter Threat: “That’s your answer to everything, Phillip, and I’m having my mismatched cabinet knobs buried with me. So there.” Friend’s Suggestion: “Grenade?” My Shocked Answer: “No!” Another Suggestion: “Flame Thrower?” My Shocked Answer: “NO!” Son-In-Law: “If it were me, I’d just throw a tarp over the hole mess and gas ‘em.” Me: “Chickens too?” Him: “Yes.” Me: “Good grief, Phillip, you sound like a Nazi.” My Question: “Are the spelunker lights on your heads really necessary?” Official Statement from the Rodent Squad (Consisting of Sherwood and Adam): “Yes, we need the lights. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV to shoot at stuff and carry a flashlight. Who knew?” SSG Aric Zern: “Why did Dad get a shotgun to shoot rats?” The Truth: “So he could nickname it ‘Shock and Awe.’” The Real Truth: “Because I wouldn’t let him put rat-shot in my target pistol.” Best Rat Killing Tip from Uncle Rick: “Flood their tunnels and then stomp them when they run out.” My Horrified Worry: “What kind of shoes are rat stomping shoes? Stilettos? Golf cleats? Rubber boots?” My Follow Up: “Where do you even buy rat stomping footwear?” My Husband’s Claim to the Most Excitement He’s had at Night in Years: “I have to confess I was so pumped after shooting those rats I couldn’t sleep, even though I had to get up and leave for the airport at 4 am.” Me: “You caveman!” Lessons Learned About Farming: “It’s hard and there’s a ton of rats.” Best Movie Line Used in Conflict: “I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” This completes the weekly briefing for Operation Enduring Rat Trap here on the front lines of country living, organic egg growing, and chicken picking. Linda (Neck of Red) Zern |
| Zeitgeist is a fancy German word, no doubt invented by a fancy German. He invented the word while thinking about what made folks, born at different spots on a timeline, chop broccoli the way they do—or history; he might have been thinking about history. Technically, the Zeit part means time and the Geist part means ghost, but the English word timeghost looked silly, so everyone stuck with the fancy German word. It’s one of those made up words that can make you sound smart when you say it, or it can be a fun name for two dogs—Zeit and Geist. Either way, it’s a real stinker to translate. In addition, zeitgeist is a word that comes in handy when you’re trying to explain why people do the strange, curious things they do or think the convoluted, murky things they think or want the bewildering things they want. It also helps explain why my grandfather was never embarrassed to play his accordion while dancing the polka. It is “the spirit of the age,” or “the spirit of the times.” Simply put, zeitgeist is the influence of the place and time in which a person lives on how that person puts on their pants—if they wear pants, of course. For my family the idea of zeitgeist is best illustrated by the chopping of broccoli, while wearing pants—or not. Let me tell you, my grandmother could chop a stalk of broccoli. Her skill with a paring knife was to be envied and studied. Every floret was cut precisely and surgically. Once she finished with the frilly head of the broccoli, she continued cutting the stalk into perfect cubes, and when the stalk got tough and woody she’d whip out a potato peeler and peel that sucker right down to the end and then cut the peeled part of the stalk into sugar cube shapes. The peels went into the coffee can under the sink and then into the flower garden to fertilize the azaleas and camellias. She never wasted one speck of broccoli, and it wasn’t because she liked it. She didn’t have teeth. She couldn’t even chew the stuff when it was cooked. Her broccoli chopping was evidence of zeitgeist, a tangible clue to “the [ghosts] of her age,” ghosts that never stopped haunting her. My grandparents lived in Chicago, Illinois during the worst financial disaster this country had endured. Before the depression, my grandmother had been a proofreader for a publishing house, and my grandfather a musician. They became junk dealers. They scrounged for junk, refurbished junk, and sold junk to survive. They saved everything from string to stoves. The spirit of their time was fear and hoarding. They never risked throwing anything away ever again, including the hard ends of a broccoli stalk. With a little less flare, my mother chopped her broccoli, not as carefully as my grandmother or as precisely. My mother was concerned about waste and want, because her parents had been concerned but not as concerned. She flailed away at the top of the broccoli and the tender part of the stalk. She never peeled. During World War II, my mother remembered being spanked, when her mom and dad caught her playing with the ration cards. She was a little girl and didn’t understand that those cards represented a week’s worth of milk, sugar, flour, and coffee. America was feeding her soldiers first, her citizens second. If you wanted broccoli you grew your own, in a “Victory Garden” in your backyard; it was a garden grown as part of the war effort, a blitzkrieg of beets and radishes to beat back fascism. For my mother and father, scrounging through city dumps or starving in the Smokey Mountains during the depression were old, fading ghosts when they married, but their zeitgeist brought its own haunting. Its ghost carried a hammer and sickle, shipped missiles to Cuba, and made their kids have to practice the proper way to huddle under desks at school, waiting for a cold war to get hot. Still, dads had jobs. Moms had cash. The Piggly Wiggly had broccoli, and a clown named McDonald built his first hamburger joint in Orlando. The Russians went down in a hail of Levi’s Jeans and French fries and everybody relaxed enough to chuck the hard part of the broccoli stalk into their new trash compacters. I paused over the garbage can in my kitchen, my hands full of damp, ragged broccoli bits. My mother’s timing was without flaw when it came to being awkward. “Are you going to throw all that away?” “Yeah, sure. The tree part is the only part the kids will eat and only if it’s dripping in ranch dip. At least I’m trying to get some kind of green stuff in them.” I flopped two fistfuls of garbage into the can. My mother placed a hand over her heart in a practiced, elegant gesture of long-suffering. “You’re grandmother would turn over in her grave.” “Gramma is still alive. She can’t turn over in her grave. She could dance a Polka on it, but that’s about it.” “Someday, we’ll all regret this,” she sighed, cryptically. “Who knows what those Russians are up to?” I looked at the lump of vegetable mush and thought that the geopolitical ramifications of Soviet re-ascendancy and global KGB conspiracy theory a lot to put on a stalk of broccoli. I shrugged, confident of my place in the eternal cycle of supply and demand. “Don’t worry, Mom; Wal-Mart will make more.” I believed that, because from the spirit of my times has evolved the expectation that what I needed I got—mostly. What I wanted would be under the Christmas tree—pretty much, and what I desired was out there, somewhere—probably on Ebay. My six-year old granddaughter, Emma, asked me for a piece of chicken, recently. I placed a lovely hunk of homemade Southern fried chicken on a paper plate made out of plastic for her. My fried chicken was a crispy brown tribute to a culture dedicated to deep fat and smelled like a picnic on a humid day next to a pond with turtles sunning on a log. She looked. She sniffed. She wilted like old broccoli. “No, YaYa, not this chicken. I want chicken that is orange.” “But sweetheart, chicken isn’t orange. What kind of chicken is . . ?” I let the question trail away, realizing that Emma was not asking me for a lovely hunk of my Southern fried chicken. Emma was asking me for a nugget—a strangely shaped, artificially colored, chunk of mystery meat—possibly poultry. She refused to eat any of the non-orange chicken. I suspected it would not be the last time. I like to imagine that someday, from the sacred confines of my antique rocking chair, I will lean forward and take Emma’s hand in mine; the other grandchildren will scoot closer, fascinated and intrigued. “Emma, have I ever told you the Zern family fable called ‘The Chopping of the Broccoli?’” She will shake her head. Several of the little ones will blink their big lemur eyes at me. “Well, once upon a time there was a strange, wonderful vegetable that looked a lot like a tiny green tree. It was grown from seeds, in the dirt, in people’s backyards next to a stack of rubber bicycle tires waiting for the rubber drive . . .” It’s not Emma’s fault. It’s zeitgeist, the spirit of her times: fast food, fast cash, fast gratification, and chicken the color of traffic cones. The wheel turns. The timeline gets longer. The ghosts fade in and out, and the children learn to chop broccoli with a style all their own, or not. |
| Rats have excellent hearing. “Honey, our son the weapons expert in Afghanistan, says that we should use a pellet gun,” I said. “What for?” He was trying to decide on the proper firepower for a night skirmish in our rat infested chicken coop. “So that the fourteen thousand or more rats living in, under, and around our chicken coop will not be scared off by gun shots when we blow the first one to bits,” I said. “Maybe I can just buy a silencer on the black market.” “Like a murderer? How about we use a plastic diet Pepsi bottle over the end of the gun like on CSI? You know, a poor man’s silencer. I can’t remember if we’re supposed to leave the Pepsi in the bottle or not. Dang it.” “Shush! They can hear you,” he cautioned. Norway rats are bigger than roof rats, and their droppings are ¾ inches long and capsule-shaped. “Are these droppings capsule-shaped?” I asked, trying to pretend I was doing a segment on Norway rats for Animal Planet. My husband and I were inspecting rat pucky. “You mean capsule-shaped like Tylenol PM or capsule-shaped like the Apollo moon rockets?” “Dang it. I don’t remember.” Hey, where are you going?” “Back to the house to look at pictures of rat poop on the Internet.” “Well, as long as it’s not porn or shoes.” Rats can carry ten different kinds of diseases including bubonic plague, murine typhus, spirochetal jaundice, Leptospirosis, rabies, rat-bite fever, and bacterial food poisoning. “Honey, I think I have rat-bite fever.” “Do you want rat-bite fever?” I felt snarkiness boil up like sap in the spring. “Yes, Sherwood, I want rat-bite fever. I’m starting a collection.” He sighed. “Do you have a rat bite?” “No, but I have a zit.” He started to look interested. “Is it on your . . .” “Careful, I could be a carrier.” Rats are crazy smart. “The rats have adapted, and I think they could be plotting.” “What do you mean they’ve adapted?” “I mean they’re avoiding the La Brea Tar Pit sticky traps like they can talk to each other about paleontology. They don’t run around the rafters anymore. And they’ve written graffiti on the bait boxes full of poison.” “What did they write?” He knows better than to question my version of any story. “It says, ‘We’re out here, and we’re crazy smart.’” Norway rats are burrowers and can undermine foundations of buildings. “Hey, Babe, where do you think the chicken coop got to?” Our rats may be vampire rats. No comment. Linda (Knowledge is Power) Zern |
| “Get in there, Linda,” My husband, Sherwood (Trigger Finger) Zern, gestured for me to precede him into the chicken coop. He was holding a gun. “I don’t want to go in there; there’s rats in there.” The miscellaneous sounds of thumping mixed with strange weepy gasps bounced around inside the chicken coop like ball bearings. (Oh man, I realized the strange weepy noises were coming from me.) “Linda, you’re the one with the flashlight.” He sounded exasperated as he waved the gun around. “But you’re the one with bullets.” “I can’t see to shoot anything if you don’t shine the flashlight at the rats.” I felt the hairs on the back of my neck try to crawl off my neck at his use of the word “anything.” The sounds of a massive rat exodus pounded from the dark corners of the chicken coop as the rats heard our voices, and I was having a hard time holding the flashlight level, due to excessive neck hair crawling. “Too late. They’ve all run away.” I peeked into the coop at my beloved rooster and his eight lovely ladies. They continued to sleep like dead chickens on their perch, oblivious to the rats, the gun, the flashlight, or the launch of our five-prong selective rat reduction program called Operation Rat Fink. A rat ran along the front of the coop. “Quick Babe, shoot it!” I yelled. He closed one eye. He aimed. He squeezed. He fired. He missed. Rats high fived each other. “There’s another one,” I shouted, shining the unforgiving beam of light on the bloated rat body with its scaly rat-tail dragging behind. (Trigger Finger) Zern closed one eye, aimed, squeezed, fired, and missed again. Rats applauded. I mentioned our rat situation to our exterminator, as I signed the You-Have-Termites-Pay-Up-Or-Live-In-A-Tent contract. He suggested getting “bait boxes” like the ones that McDonald uses. “You know like the ones you see all around the McDonalds and the Wendy’s.” There was a sudden ringing in my ears, but I made a note to include bait boxes in our five-prong plan. Prong One: Locate a flashlight. Put batteries on the shopping list. Prong Two: Saturday morning trip to Tractor Supply Company to acquire $6,000.00 dollars worth of weapons of mass rat destruction, including rectangle strips of sticky stuff, so sticky that rats are trapped in it like dinosaurs in the Le Brea Tar Pits. Prong Three: Secure the Boarders – “They can’t get their heads through this.” Sherwood held up some chicken wire. “It’s not their heads. It’s their teeth. They chew through that.” I pointed to galvanized chain link designed to restrain Orcs and forged in the fires of Mount Doom. “That should do it.” Prong Four: Borrow money from a loan shark to finance prongs one through three. Prong Five: Wander around in the dark, trying to determine effectiveness of rat traps, baits, and tar pits—also to take pot shots at fleeing rats. “So here’s what I think we should do this weekend about the rats,” Sherwood said, calling from a business trip to San Francisco. “I think we should go with the hose in the rat hole flooding scenario, and then when they run out, we shoot them, and if that fails, we stomp them.” “Good idea, ‘Dead Eye’ I’ll mark it on the calendar; it’s a date.” “Wear something slinky.” So, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out a slinky rat stomping outfit for my Saturday night date. Rat Finks beware. Linda (Saturday Night Fever) Zern |
| It’s possible to choke to death. It’s possible to choke to death—on your own spit. It’s possible to choke to death on your own spit—at Target. I know. I almost did. Right there in front of Brian, the checkout boy, who, by the way, was the only person even mildly concerned when I clutched my throat and made the international sign for, “Help! I’m choking to death on my own spit. Get help!” Heather and Maren, my adult daughters, barely looked up from the magazine rack. Only Brian cared. I think he was worried he was going to have to clean up my spittle-racked remains, should I die right there in front of his register. My fatal error was in trying to talk, breathe, swallow, and locate my debit card all at the same time. Cannot be done. But that’s me, performing without a net as usual. As I struggled for life giving oxygen, acid tears melting the makeup from my “T” zone, Maren read a People magazine expressing concern over Gywneth’s alien looking hair. Heather fretted over whether or not her credit card was going to work in the new machines at Target. I clawed at my neck wildly, flinging my head back and forth and side to side in a primal and elemental need to breathe. “Boy, that marriage will never last,” Maren said, turning the slick magazine pages. “Boy, I sure hope this card works this time. It never works in these new machines,” Heather said, digging through the black hole of a purse, hanging on her arm. When I started smacking my head against the debit card machine, eyes bulging from their sockets, Heather FINALLY glanced up. “Mom, you’re not doing it right. That’s not how you make the international signal for choking.” “She’s right. You’re supposed to grab your throat with one hand and open and close your other hand in the air. Like this.” Maren demonstrated. “That’s it. That’s how you do it,” Heather said, pointing to her sister. “Hey, what do you think of this shade of lip-gloss? It isn’t the color I wanted; they’re out of all the good colors. What is this Russia?” They began to discuss the deplorable state of lip-gloss availability. My left nostril collapsed. “Are you okay, lady?” Brian asked. “Gurgle, gurgle, gick, nawn.” It was the best I could do at the time. When I finally managed to clear my own airway by performing the Heimlich maneuver on myself by pulling the handle of the shopping cart sharply into my own sternum, I confronted my daughters. “Would Brian have had to give me a tracheotomy with an ink pen and a box cutter to get your attention?” The line of shoppers behind me broke into a rousing cheer. One nice lady said, “Don’t worry. Someday they’ll have children of their own who will stand idly by while they choke to death on their own spit at Target.” I raised my handbag in a triumphant, if weak, salute. The line cheered again. Brian grinned. I paid for my lip-gloss and body shaper, congratulating myself on finding the perfect color of lip coverage—also for surviving—to shop another day. Heather’s card worked in the new machines. Maren did not purchase the magazine. Linda (Mouth Breather) Zern |
| In a fit of desperation, I commanded my children to place a potato in the middle of my bed when someone called on the phone and in a burst of wild enthusiastic optimism tried to leave me a message, via the children. I even had a demonstration, showing them how to select, place, and display the reminder potato properly. It worked, until it didn’t. It worked when I walked into my room and seeing a potato in the middle of my bed, I would yell, “Hey, who called? What did they want? Who took the call? Who put the potato on the bed? What happened just before you put the potato on the bed? Think hard. Are you thinking?” After said child stared at the potato for a while and got over the perplexed phase (indicated by the lowering of the eyebrows, narrowing of the eyes, and biting of the lips) the light of awareness would flush their cheeks and they’d say, “Oh . . . ummm . . . ya’ some man called about something. He sounded mad or rad. I can’t remember.” Okay, the potato program had its flaws. For as long as mankind has dug tubers out of the muck, we have struggled over how to get our messages in a timely way. In the beginning, human beings did not pass on messages like “Hey gang, I just found some potatoes over here in this muck.” Instead, beginning humans grabbed the potatoes, disappeared behind a clump of bushes, and ate thme as fast of they could coordinate their jaw muscles. Soon, the rules of civilization dictated that it was important to let the rest of the tribe know a vicious tribe of potato thieves was on its way to sack and burn—well, everything, except the potatoes, of course. Then the messages became clear but annoying like “Let them eat potatoes, made into potato cakes.” We hated those messages so much we cut off people’s heads over it. America became the land of innovative message delivery systems, starting with lanterns swinging from church towers (one potato, two potato, three potato—Brits knocking on the door.) We’ve kept on improving message delivery systems to the point that at any given moment you can now receive more messages than you can either stand or interpret while waiting in the check-out line, speaking to living humans, or sitting on the toilet. (LMAOOTF, mom will you make OMG ‘tato surprise? K-Dot. M.) I still don’t know who called or why. The Zern family potato program did not work when the reminder potato would roll off and then under the bed, and start to grow—in the dark, on carpet, like a giant potato pimple. When I discovered one too many reminder potatoes under my bed doing their darnedest to become potato bushes, I knew the program had failed. Pulling one potato into the light, its trailing roots almost translucent, I called out, “Hey, who called? What did they want? Who took the call?” Sorry I’m not available right now, I’m spring cleaning—under my bed. Leave a message. Linda (Sweet Potato Pie) Zern |
| Bones and Teeth Twisting in her seat, Beverly faced us. She looked at the class, but she wasn’t seeing any anyone. She had that foggy look people get when they’ve flown away into old memories only they can see. I could tell she had gone away, remembering the day of her mother’s funeral. When she spoke, she sounded clinical and matter-of-fact. “I don’t know what I expected. I thought maybe it would be like cigarette ash, but it wasn’t, and the urn was really heavy. I had to carry it against my chest, so I wouldn’t drop it.” She paused and tipped her head. Maybe it was so she could she herself better as she carried her mother’s funeral urn or better to hear the water lapping against the wooden posts of the dock at the lake. “It wasn’t like cigarette ash at all. I mean her ashes were coarse and kind of gritty, and there was stuff in it.” I heard a few of the other students gasp as the question rolled through the class like a shock wave. What? What was in your mother’s ashes? But they were too polite, too civilized to ask out-loud. For all their pierced and tattooed bravado, they were just kids at the beginning of living. And this was, after all, a story about the mechanics of death at the end of living. Beverly blinked and her eyes focused. She came back to us in that moment as if she sensed our curiosity and chagrin. She answered our unspoken question. “Bits of bone and teeth, my mother’s partial, there were actual slivers of bone.” The Brittany or Jessica or Ella girl that sat next to me pulled her long bare legs up into her body like a stork folding up for a nap. She hunched her shoulders. Several of the boys dropped their eyes to their notebooks or played at checking their watches—uncomfortable and squirmy. Young. “You picture your mom’s memorial service as something out of movie, with music and touching slow motion moments.” She thought a minute and gave us a lopsided smile. “You sure don’t expect to get your mother’s ashes blown back in your face when you try to grant her last wish, you know? But the wind was blowing against us and when I went to pour her ashes into the water, the wind kicked up, like it does sometimes, like a mini-tornado. And bam, a cloud of my mother’s cremated ashes blew right back into our faces. I had them in my teeth, in my eyes. It stung like crazy.” In Mr. McGuinnes’ creative writing class, Beverly was like me—one of those student clichés, an older woman with teenagers and enough trouble, real or imagined, to salt-n-pepper her thinning hair. Like me, she had enough unfamiliar lines on her face to make her wonder about the stranger she was becoming, about the girl who was disappearing. To be fair, Beverly’s troubles were more immediate than mine. Her clichéd story had more chapters. Her desperation was a little more dire. Divorced and abandoned, she found herself back at school, trying to fill a schedule and a life fundamentally changed. While I was trying to find a way out of the land of cliché and foregone conclusion, to have people see me as more than a cardboard cutout. To be fair, maybe I was trying to see myself as more than a cardboard cutout. They say a college degree can do that for you. So, Beverly and I had landed in creative writing class to brainstorm our lives, trying to turn our wrinkles and middle-aged gray into poetry. “I don’t know what I expected,” Beverly said. “But it was terrible. And I wanted it to be so right . . . even though my mother is . . .” she stumbled over the change in verb tense that death requires, present becoming past. “I mean was, my mother was, or had been . . .” A drunk. A slovenly selfish drunk. It was a cold reality; a fact she had shared with the class before. As the oldest daughter, it had fallen to Beverly to clean up, mop up, and sop up, after a mother who had lived her life never washing a dish until they were all dirty—every last dish—the everyday dishes, the stoneware, the yard sale finds, the heirloom china, the paper plates, the empty butter tubs and cottage cheese containers. All of them crusted with food and heaped in the sink until they toppled onto the kitchen counters or smashed onto the floor. Beverly would go and wash dishes for hours so that her mother could use them up all over again—her own version of Prometheus’s hell. When her mother died, it fell to Beverly to wash all those dishes one last time and to try to bury her mother with some kind of respectful ceremony. When Beverly told the story of her mother’s ashes in class, she made us see it. She brought an unruly wind into our classroom, blowing human ashes into our eyes. She made us feel the burn of blinded eyes. She described how slowly human ash disappears, how it floats for the longest time. We could feel that unruly wind and taste the dust of death in our mouths. The story she related was mesmerizing and messy, and before she was done, she cried—gently, almost under her breath. Her crying made a few of the students uncomfortable. I heard the nervous titter of embarrassment and tension. I recognized Beverly’s tears, however. I understood her story and it’s strange mix of love and hate. She was describing a dance I had grown up dancing. It was a fearful dance macabre that I knew all the steps to, where a child must perform all the parts—daughter, parent, enemy, but always child. For me it was a father, who expected tributes after spending his life smashing ketchup bottles against kitchen walls. I knew what it was to be chained to a rock and lose bits of myself—endlessly. “There’s a poem in there, Beverly. You heard it. Right? The poem you should write; it’s all there,” I said. “And more than that, your heart was in what you told us.” She nodded, seeming to agree and made a few notes on a piece of paper. “Write your heart; I can’t wait to see it.” Then she wrote a poem to fulfill an assignment. It was a lovely generic ode, to some pastel mother, who had never existed. There was nothing of what Beverly had shared in class, nothing of what had made us squirm in our seats, drop our flushed faces, or swallow hot tears. It was as if the women who had spoken of bones and teeth had disappeared, along with the mother who had burned holes in the arms of her lazy boy when she fell into a drunken stupor, cigarette still smoldering between her fingers. The story we had heard was gone as well, a victim of self-censorship and maybe wishful dreaming. The class clapped when she finished reading her poem. There were polite critiques. A few of the students rolled their eyes surreptitiously. No one cried, and no one felt uncomfortable. Disappointed, I thought I understood Beverly’s wishful dreaming. Good daughters don’t shine lights on the burn marks, good daughters wash the dishes and pretend they are always stacked neatly—just so. Good daughters make all A’s on every report card. They do not complain that ashes in their eyes, sting. Disappointed and a little bit sad, I wanted to believe I understood, and eventually, I wrote a poem about the poem that Beverly could not write. Hoping, when my turn came to tell the hard stories of my own life, I would be able to find the poetry beneath the ashes. Bones and Teeth When the poet scattered her mother across the unsettled lake, she expected cigarette ash—a light clean burning. We expected a poem cobbled out of rough wood—the salt and burn of splintered tears. Instead, she gave us a poem about golden glass under a sun-kissed sky, a hallmark poem, with words that floated just on the surface of the wet. In class, when she talked it, she spoke of bones and teeth, and finding mother’s partial in the dust of cremation, how hard it was to throw mother away—into the wind. She made us see, the way ash clung to clothes and hands, how the wind brought mother back into nostrils and eyes— how slowly mother disappeared beneath churning water on a day of wind and nagging shadows. When the poet wrote it, there was the softness of nothing, pretty words on pastel paper, but when the poet spoke it, she got down to the bones and teeth and tears, down to the bottom of the lake where the muck congeals and the fish eggs wait. The poet could not hear that in the telling was the poem, and in the writing was the child—made to throw her mother away beneath heaven’s seemingly indifferent sky. |
| College Age: A journal entry (required) for a group project (required) that I was part of in my twenty-fourth year of community college (voluntary). Follow the Leader It had to happen. It was a matter of time and a cliche. Somebody was going to crack. Wednesday someone did. Suzy Q. Student made a suggestion during a meeting of the student editorial board, got shot down, lost her temper, resigned her position, turned her laptop on, and started to shop for tongue studs online. I believe that all group work follows a predictable algebraic equation which can be depicted in this way: 72xy + (- 8/3pdq) (666xyz666) – whothehellcares X upyours = TWO. Another way that this paradigm can be understood is in the following outline: 1) Let’s Re-Write the Dictionary—Backwards (Irrational Optimism Phase) 2) But I Wanted to be Queen (The Power Struggle Phase) 3) The Horse Latitudes (The Dead Horse Corpse Phase) 4) ACTUAL WORK (Where two people will do all the work, three people will watch the work being done, one person will pout, and one group member will disappear but their photograph will be posted on the wall of the missing at Walmart) 5) Didn’t I tell you that everything would be pretty close to okay? In my opinion, the editorial staff of this year’s literary magazine “The Alchemist” has reached the horse latitudes of the group work experience. In the early days of exploration, the horse latitudes were those areas of the great oceans, near the equator, known for killing heat and little to no wind. When the horses, brought by the early Spanish explorers to help them loot entire continents, died because of the oppressive heat the animal’s bodies were dumped overboard into the ocean for chum—thus the horse latitudes. I believe we have reached the horse latitudes phase of group work. Our destination is still in front of us, but we don’t seem to be getting there fast enough and we’re hot and sweaty. It is at this point that someone always breaks and may feel dumped cruelly over the ship’s railing into an uncaring ocean. In fact, considering the challenges the editorial board has faced this semester (health concerns and family challenges) we are still on schedule. We’re in the doldrums; that’s all. My contributions to the group project consist of the actual heaving of the dead horse corpses over the side of the ship and useless suggestions that no one listens to. My plan for accomplishing my portion of “the group project” include: editing the creative non-fiction selections for Monday over the weekend; purchasing a sketch pad for the mock-up of the magazine; working on additional artwork; washing Ploodle (my wee dog); not cooking anything for anyone; working on several novels (all at the same time); writing a sample mission statement; going off on verbal tangents and rants while scrubbing toilets; spreading mulch; wishing I had an extra set of eyes that could read twenty-four hours a day even when I’m asleep; and studying for another yucky algebra test. And that’s why I deserve an ‘A.’ Linda (Heave-Ho) Zern |
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