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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 |
| The day the county tells me I can’t have a bonfire or chickens in my yard is the day I pack my bags and relocate to . . . Mount Doom or Cuba or the Florida outback or Alaska. I haven’t decided yet. Country living is three things: poultry, walking outside in the dead of the night in your **scanties, and—of course—fire (brush, trash, and bon.) Everyone burns stuff in our neighborhood. Mr Medina, next-door neighbor and three-legged animal collector, occasionally lights up a bonfire that smells like a ritual goat sacrifice, and when he’s over there stoking his strange flames of yowling stink I have forbidden the grand children to breathe deeply, but this is the country and so we live and let burn. It’s our way. The only real fire etiquette rule around here is “Thou shalt not burn down thy neighbor’s anything.” So when Heather yelled, “Holy smokes! Phillip’s set the giant pile of bone dry sticks on fire,” and I spun around in time to see a fire shooting two stories in the air with flames licking at the brittle edge of a small stand of gasoline filled pine trees next to the chicken coop, I admit to being a bit unprepared. My son-in-law is like that. He’s an Eagle Scout. He has a merit badge for setting things on fire and then putting the fires out with urine. Running to assess the potential for neighborhood conflagration, I ran to the bonfire only to be driven back by the force of the heat, as a four-year old wandered by to throw a random broom into the fire. Phillip appeared from my barn with a handful of scrap wood used for picture frames and staking tomatoes. “Hey, Mister, where’re you going with that wooden stuff?” The Eagle Scout didn’t slow down. “You’ll thank me some day.” I doubted it. A six-year old dragged a perfectly decent wooden footstool with only a few spider webs on it towards the fire pit. I started to argue with the six-year old about the value of furniture restoration and refurbishment when I heard Phillip yelp. “Mr. Randy’s field is on fire.” My other neighbor’s field was, in fact, on fire. I ran for the end of the hose, sensing more than seeing Phillip’s race for the spigot. “Hit it!” I yelled, thinking fire hose; instead I got Cub Scout weeing on a campfire from a garden hose that was nowhere near long enough. “Seriously Phillip, must have more water! The flames have jumped the property line.” I watched flames nibbling at clumps of newly mown grass, eating their way towards Mr. Randy’s own burn pile, Mr. Randy’s barn, and Mr. Randy’s dirt digger. That’s what the kids call a front-end loader—a dirt digger. Isn’t that cute? Yea, well, we almost set it on fire. Then Phillip cut my water off entirely. I stared in disbelief at the end of my DRY hose, as Phillip raced from spigot to spigot in a convoluted hose re-distribution plan. “Phillip! You are a terrible fireman! And I’m not kidding.” Fire continued to spread as Phillip popped out from behind the chicken coop like a cork out of a bottle dragging an auxiliary hose. “Here. Screw these together.” Phillip flung hose at me and disappeared. I didn’t want to tell him that I had a hard time screwing hoses together even when things weren’t on fire, but panic gave me strength and the threat of being sued for burning down my neighbor gave me dexterity beyond my own. Luckily we’ve had a wet spring and summer and Mr. Randy’s field was not the tinderbox it could have been, and water flowed eventually in sufficient strength and straightness, and so the dirt digger was saved—and so was our home owner’s insurance deductible. And the minute the county tells me I can’t burn down the neighbor’s barn—almost, pictures featuring those “unspeakable” ex-husbands, ancient tax records, raggedy scanties, or old algebra homework, I’m out of here—just don’t know where yet. Linda (Fire Starter) Zern ** Scanties: A southern word meaning clothes traditionally worn under the clothes worn on the top; clothes you can wear in the middle of the night outside in the country because no one can see you unless there’s a fire somewhere. |
| My husband’s two favorite words in the English language are complimentary and sex, and if he ever sees them used together in a sentence he’s going to stroke out. I exaggerate. Still, I am concerned that his lifestyle is becoming, how shall I say, A GREAT BIG FAT SPOILED PROBLEM. Sherwood is a computer consultant with the brand new title of Director. (Maybe it means he’s a computer consultant who directs . . . computers? I don’t know what it means.) But here’s his job description: rich “clients” pay him to tell them what they want to hear; they give him large amounts of money to be at their beck and call; these “clients” pay for his food, lodging, and transportation; sometimes they take him to dinner; often they treat him as if they own him, and he is often propositioned and made to feel cheap and used. My real concern isn’t how Sherwood does business; it’s that he likes it so much. For the right amount of Marriot “points” (complimentary points given by the hotel chain in some incomprehensible rotating scale that pass as a kind of faux currency to be used in an ivisible Marriot black market) for the right amount of points, my husband will do anything. For the right amount of points he will take cold showers, sleep in dirty beds, stay in hotel rooms without alarm clocks, channel changers, or sheets. He is “saving up” and when the service is deplorable he barters for more points. If he collects enough points he can trade them for cruises, free hotel rooms, and ownership of a small Greek island. He says when he gets “enough” points we will spend a weekend alone in a Marriot, of my choice. I don’t believe him. I don’t think there are enough points in the world to satisfy the bottomless pit of hunger that “living on the road” has produced in my husband. At any moment, day or night, he can tell you the exact number of points he now has, how many points he will soon acquire, and how many points he needs to get the good stuff (presumably that Greek Island.) “Only ten million more to go,” he will say, a savage gleam in his computer-directing eye. He can even quote you the total number of points he will have accumulated at the exact moment of his death—based on various longevity studies. The rest of the family finds his idiot savant ability somewhat unnerving, but then again, sometimes we take him to parties and show him off. In addition to the endless pursuit of complimentary points, Sherwood has developed an entire value system based on all things free. If it’s on a plate and looks like it’s not tied down or wax, he will help himself. I watched him come out of an apartment leasing office with his mouth and hands stuffed with complimentary cookies. “These are great,” he mumbled, cookie crumbs spewing onto his shirt. A nice young leasing agent stuck his head out of the office as Sherwood left and said, “Hey, Mister, those cookies are for the kids.” “Run,” Sherwood shouted around chocolate chip dust. We ran. He turned to me as we leapfrogged over a hedge and asked, “Want one?” “You’d eat dirt if had the word free on it.” I raked a branch of evergreen from my hair. Complimentary is a serious business in my husband’s Marriot Rewards Program world-view. Even now, when I travel with Mr. Computer-Director it is customary for him to wake me gently at 6:00am with a sweet whisper. “Come on! There’s a complimentary breakfast bar. Let’s hit it and hit it hard. Oh, and wear your pants with the big pockets.” Actually it’s become our family motto—Hit it! And hit it hard! No, really, we’ve embroidered it on stuff. Our family crest is a field of complimentary pillow chocolates with two rampant toothbrushes riding on an ice bucket. Linda (Complimentary Upon Request) Zern |
| How could I know that butter would be my undoing? Our days are so often filled with those seemingly inconsequential decisions dictated to us by heritage, DNA, and the chemistry of our own evolution from hagfish, that precipitate the unanticipated cascade of events that taken together form the framework of our lives—roads less traveled and all of that mush. I have no idea what that last sentence means. I blame my mouthy Irish ancestors for its very existence. What can I say? I like butter on crackers—a lot of butter. I blame my love of oily spreads on my socialistic Danish ancestors and their love affair with lard. Having been lured to America by wild tales of endless opportunity and vast bottomless vats of cheap, available bacon fat, my fair skinned people left their native fiords and quaint fishing villages in Scandinavia and with little more than two nickels in their pockets and a lot of recipes calling for large amounts of grease, they came. They came, and they settled in Chicago where they immediately went to work, played accordions, and smeared butter on crackers. Passing their Danish butter-loving heritage down to their children and grand children they taught us to think of butter on crackers as a viable alternative to junk food—junk food not having been invented yet, and so I like great globs of butter on crackers; it comforts me, which horrifies my McDonald’s hamburger swilling children. Buying butter is in my blood—so to speak. Which is why I almost died at Walmart in front of the dairy case where they store tubs of, you guessed it, butter, butter substitutes, or vegetable oil spreads. In a brilliant scheme for sopping up spills, floods, drips, and leaks Walmart now uses sausage shaped bags of absorbent beads about the size of guinea pigs—the bags not the beads; think, baby diapers for puddles. Unfortunately, like baby diapers, these soaker sausages have a carrying capacity and then they explode, forming a beady oil slick capable of launching battleships or dislocating a little old lady’s hip. When I hit the puddle of exploded greased beads and my legs slid to opposite ends of the store, I could feel my hips doing odd and uncomfortable things; I could also feel my throat screaming. In that slow motion moment I had two thoughts: 1) Thank goodness I take Zumba (a Latin based exercise class requiring the frequent and even excessive use of one’s hips.) 2) Who should I ask about getting the security tape for download on YouTube? Several people pointed at my screaming dilemma as I clung for my life to the lip of the butter case, straddle legged as a new born foal, and one employee came over to ask me if I was okay—also to blame corporate headquarters for their new policy of using the super soaker sausage beads. No one thought to get a mop. Later, as I reflected on that out of control cascade of consequences of having been raised a butter loving Dane, I realized that my whole life had passed before my eyes, and that a majority of said life has been spent buying vegetable oil spreads—also butter substitutes. Frankly, the entire incident made my blood boil, a reaction I blame on my Native American heritage, a heritage typified by the hunting of large sharp fanged mammals for their grease, which my ancestors proceeded to rub into their own hair. Linda (Woman Down in Dairy!) Zern |
| Florida is a semi-tropic, sultry, and exotic state where rain is called liquid sunshine, and the Spanish guy who named it fully expected to find a fountain full of botox. Winter is the season where Floridians put on sweaters and walk fast to their cars. Florida is paradise. Florida is also wormy. Big worms, little worms, beggar worms, thief worms. Pinworms are a fun little worm that lay eggs in a part of the body usually associated with sitting, booty dancing—also spanking. Pinworms are party worms that come out at night to . . . well . . . booty dance, also to lay their eggs in a place where the sun don’t shine. Pinworm eggs can be found in dirt, air, shady places, warm mud, and toddlers. It is very easy to “get” pinworms. I have had pinworms—in MY PERSONAL BOOTY. I got them from my grubby toddler kids, who were not above eating dirt, licking dirt, bathing with dirt, or painting with poop in dirt. It is very easy to “get” pinworms; as far as I can tell, pinworm eggs lurk absolutely everywhere, including the moon. One semi-tropic, sultry, and exotic Florida evening, I remember sitting straight up in bed and gasping. “Honey, honey!” I shook my husband’s shoulder. He mumbled something about a goose and then rolled over. I shook harder. “Honey! Wake up!” Panic made my voice shrill. “I’ve got them!!!” “What! Whaaaat . . . is . . . it?” He rumbled awake. “Do I need the baseball bat?” He scratched his ear and admitted, “I don’t know where it is.” “Sherwood, listen to me.” The hair on the back of my neck began to creep in sympathy with other parts of me that were just plain creeped out and itching. “I’ve got pinworms. I know it.” “Should I get the baseball bat?” “No! Pinworms, man, pinworms,” I grabbed him by his shoulders.” I have them!” I lowered my voice to a raspy gag. “I . . . can . . . feel . . . them . . . moving!” He grimaced, looking confused and a little frightened. “What should I do?” I said, imagining creeping, crawling, and nefarious inching with the vividness of a creative writer high on inspiration. “Find a cork?” His suggestion was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it. “Listen, Mister, if you don’t watch out, I’ll make you do the “tape test” for pinworms.” He looked suspicious. “That’s right. The tape test, where you take clear tape and press it to the skin of my . . .” He moaned faintly, while looking faint. His dismay became contagious. Hysteria clawed its way through my brain as I lunged for the phone and dialed my gynecologist’s emergency number. While waiting for a call from the mean old nurse they make you talk to when you’ve called with an emergency that isn’t really an emergency, I felt a pathologic need to start running in circles. I ran. “What are you doing?” My husband had found the baseball bat under the bed and cradled it like a baby. He watched me without blinking. “You know you can’t outrun the pinworms, right? They’re along for the ride.” The phone rang. I stopped running and answered it. Explaining in a rational calm scream, I yelped, “HELP ME! I have worms!” The mean old nurse said, “You realize that pinworms are not considered an emergency or life threatening.” “Maybe I wasn’t clear. I HAVE WORMS IN MY PERSONAL BODY PARTS!” “Mrs. Zern you have called your gynecologist’s emergency phone number in the middle of the night because you suspect you might have an infestation of Enterobeus Vermikularis,” she sighed. “I’ll call in a prescription in the morning. You’ll live.” The phone clicked off. The next morning I had to give a speech in front of approximately two hundred of my peers with pinworms still creeping about my person, and I did, in fact, deliver that speech. And that’s why I’m one tough mom, and it’s very hard to rattle me with threats of global warming, global cooling, global annihilation, or global xenomorph attack. I’ve known true horror—and I lived. Lind (Cork It!) Zern |
| “Is that guy biting that girl’s thigh?” My son pushed a computer screen with a picture of a guy biting a girl’s thigh in front of my face. I squinted. Not only was it a picture of a young man biting a young women’s thigh, I knew the biter boy. “Don’t you know that guy?” My son began to scroll down to other pictures of the young man in question biting other questionable girl bits. “Yeah, I know him,” I sighed. “Didn’t you . . .” I cut him off. “Yeah, I wrote him a letter of recommendation for the college of his choice . . . so, apparently, he could go to that institution of higher learning and bite girl’s meaty leg parts.” “Wow!” I agreed. “Do people on social networking sites know that we can see them?” My son looked at me with a puzzled frown. I closed my eyes with visions of thigh biting dancing in my head. “You know; I think it’s kind of like my theory of why people pick their noses in their cars. Glass feels solid, even if it is see-through, and I always want to yell, ‘We can see you!’ But no one ever hears me. Apparently, it’s also sound proof.” This incident just highlights why writing letters of recommendation can be so problematic, because the world has become a thigh biting, obscene gesture shooting, booby flashing extravaganza, while I still blush when I fill out the forms in the gynecologist’s waiting room. The blush is off the world’s rose, that’s for sure. So I have decided that in all future letters of recommendation that I am asked to write I will include the following disclaimer: What I know of this candidate, student, or potential employee does not include knowledge of: thigh biting photo’s winging their way across the world wide web; strange or twisted philosophies concerning Marxists mass murderers and their views on day care, first names, or the proper running of a gulag; lying to Israeli officials; or superficial tattoos displayed prominently on bits that can be chewed on by boys whose friends are sober enough to hold the camera steady. I’m not kidding about the blushing part. My gynecologist once looked at my face and neck, his glasses slipping to the end of his nose, and poked my cheek with his finger. “What’s that?” he asked. I knew immediately, but I refused to admit to my old-fashioned red-faced shame. “Are you blushing?” He looked at my fevered cheeks with squinty eyes. “That’s amazing,” he continued. “Nobody blushes anymore.” He poked me again. “Look at that.” He acted like he’d just discovered an extinct species of pigeon nesting on my head. Sighing, I shrugged and pulled my exam gown closer to my throat, covering my embarrassed shame with a paper towel, wondering who wrote my doctor his letters of recommendation. I’ve got nothing against public confessionals of guilt to save the taxpayer the expense of a trial, stocks in the town square where you get to throw old veggies at the town bully, and admitting to your most embarrassing self deprecating moments for their humorous uplifting quality, but don’t cry when you—finally and at long last—realize WE CAN SEE YOU and, boy, do you look silly! Linda (Once Bitten, Twice Shy) Zern |
| Looking for Love Under the Merge Sign (Warning PG – 13 Due to Racy Rooster Talk) A professor asked the college class, “Who decides if a baby is a boy or a girl?” One bright young thing piped up and said, “Society.” After my son related this fascinating tale of modern American education, I walked out to my chicken coop and watched as my thirteen roosters commenced to crow, spur, posture, fight, flap, peck, and gang rape their way through my flock of hens. “Who told you, you were roosters,” I yelled. I sold twelve of the thirteen roosters to my next-door neighbor for six dollars and fifty cents a piece. He got a bargain. My hens got some relief, and I learned a lesson about the nature of the species. Roosters do not lay eggs. According to a recent scientific (so it must be good) study men think about sex 2,072 times every second of every minute of every day—girls, not so much, but this is, of course, because of rigid social conditioning and that poem about snips, snails, and puppy dog tails. Personally, I’m glad my mother did not socialize me to be a boy so that I would have to think about sex constantly. I occasionally enjoy thinking about—oh I don’t know . . . breakfast or the Civil War. When my husband was born, his mother, fooled by his resemblance to a rooster, socialized him to be a boy, which means that when he became a teenager he enjoyed riding naked on motorcycles through the Florida back woods, but not to worry; he likes to point out he always wore tennis shoes so that he could shift and to protect his feet. Now my husband (of thirty-one years) flies away to various locations around the globe on Sunday afternoon and gets home on Thursday nights, and I used to pick him up at the airport, my heart filled with that little frisson of happiness and excitement that accompanied the notion of my man coming home from the sea. I was always glad to see him—for about five minutes, and then he would talk. I make him take a taxi now. While coming home from the airport, trying to merge into a steady stream of traffic, and not get us crushed under a shuttle bus, I would often say, “I’m so glad you’re home, honey.” A noise not unlike the sound of pizza being digested would greet this announcement. “So how was your week? How was your flight? See anyone interesting in the airport like Caesar Milan?” Silence. Silence. Quiet and then more and a bigger silence and then . . . “Let’s get it on,” he would say. “What?” My hands would clench convulsively on the steering wheel. “Should I pull off the road next to the palm tree or do you want to wait until we pass the merge sign, and please tell me this isn’t your idea of romance?” The conversation often deteriorated from there. What I want to know is who told my husband he was a rooster? I’d like to thank them, because after thirty-one years, four kids, and seven grandchildren he’s still crazy about me. What can I do? We’re just getting to the good part and I, for one, am glad that roosters do not lay eggs. Linda (Henny Penny) Zern |
| “It could be worse.” It’s what people say when something truly icky happens in your life, and it’s supposed to 1) make you feel better because other people feel worse or 2) make you feel worse because it highlights what a big whiney baby you are. It’s kind of like a game, a game that you never, ever want to win. When folks show up at the hospital, take one look at you, cross themselves (and they’re not Catholic) and say, “Holy smokes, it could NOT be worse,” then you have lost the game. For us the “it could be worse” game often involves insect life—often termites. We put our first house on the market and two weeks later termites flew out of the load-bearing-holding-up-the-ancient-aqueduct wall. The next house we put on the market the termites waited a month to do their thing. As I remember it, the termites boiled out of our wood frame house in an Egyptian plague cloud while the realtor was parading potential buyers through it. Okay, it’s not the worst thing that could happen, but it is spooky in a coincidental, paranoid curse of the insect wood eaters kind of way. So, we must conclude it could be worse. And here’s how: 1. The termites could have flown out of the attic of our house after eating their way through the foundation, stairs, television, and picture frames. Instead they flew out of the bottom. It could have been worse. 2. The termites could have been some new, freak industrial clone bugs, capable of eating an average size house in under eight hours, so that when we got home from work we would be greeted by a pile of sawdust and a microwave. (We lived pretty close to the nuclear power plant. It could have happened.) 3. The termites could have been glowing and looking for human orifices to colonize. 4. The termites could have been armed with flame-throwers. 5. The termites could have been followed by a troop of termite eating monkeys, who would now be living in the bushes, hunting termites, throwing poo, and looking for humans to jeer. Monkeys, I am informed, are disgusting. 6. The termites could have been flesh eating. See how fun and helpful this little exercise can be? Before you know it you’re counting your blessings, calling the exterminator, and toasting your good fortune that the termites are swarming away from your house and towards your neighbor’s house with the really big dog that likes to come to your house looking for monkeys and to take a dump in your driveway. But it could be worse; your neighbors could own a rhino. Linda (Big Whiney Baby) Zern |
| A peeve is a vexation. A pet peeve is a vexation that nips at your metaphysical ankles and wets on the sateen pillows of your soul. I hate pet peeves. One of my most ferocious pets called peeve are toenail clippings. They’re ugly, grubby, and seemingly everywhere. I can take the craziness of reality television (almost), the injustice of modern American tax brackets (with rancor), and the relentless optimism of Madison Avenue marketing tactics (I’m being vaccinated) but I CANNOT take toenails. It’s a pet peeve of mine. Once I stood on the second floor of my two-story foyer and looked over the banister, only to see a wad of clipped toenails mounded in a tiny pile below me in the front hallway. Those toenails were not mine. As I stared down, I concluded that some unknown toe-groomer had been clipping their toenails on the second floor landing only to send their trimmings cascading down to the hallway below. I also concluded that I might, quite possibly, be living with Visigoths. The same week, I began stretching for my Tae Kwon Do class only to come face to face with several detached toenail clippings—less than a micron from my personal face. They were not mine. This meant that someone (probably a Visigoth) thought it a great idea to groom their shaggy toenails while practicing martial arts. During class, I worked out my horror by punching and kicking the dummy shaped like a white Hun invader extra hard. Soon after, I spent a few days in a Florida hotel, and you guessed it—toenail clippings—on the carpet, next to the bed. They were not mine. I tried not to black out. But the worst was what I like to call “The Popeye’s Affair.” Standing in line, to purchase the best and greasiest fast food chicken ever, I glanced down and spotted—someone’s toenail. Looking at my husband I pointed and choked out, “Is that what I think it is?” “Yep, that’s a toenail.” He ordered the three-piece chicken dinner, extra grease. A thousand questions popped into my head: How did the toenail get there? How did it get out of its shoe? Was the toenail running away? What kind of barbarian clips their toenails in line at a fast food joint? Can the second Middle Ages be far off? Civilization is a fragile agreement between individuals, consisting of written and unwritten rules, one of which is “Thou shalt not discard bits of ones self where others can find those bits—ever!” It’s vile. Let me conclude by saying, “Keep toenail clippings in their place and out of my sight,” and if you know who is clipping their toenails on the landing in my house, do the right thing, and TURN THEM IN. I’ll have DNA testing done, if I have to. You know I will. Linda (Vexed and Peevish) Zern |
For me, life has been about the moon. I was there watching when the rockets sliced through the earth’s gravity into space for the first time. I watched our engineer fathers sitting on the roofs of our row houses with their hands reaching to the sky, in a kind of holy benediction, as they cheered, “Fly, baby, fly!” Some of them cried. We were racing the Russians to the moon, and we were going to win. I was six. Then in high school, it was moons of a different sort. Moons that you pressed, displayed, and wagged. They were the kind of moons that got you suspended. Not to mention, the streaking, but streaking is comparable to the action of comets, I suppose. To strip naked and run flailing and flapping through the high school cafeteria could make you a legend when I was seventeen. I’m not saying I ever went streaking or became a legend. I’m just saying that I could testify with some expertise about the phenomenon of streaking—and the mooning, of course. During the middle years, I watched women go into space for the first time, and thought I would have liked to have been one of them, had I been born in a different time, a different world. Instead, the women I knew were space travelers of a different sort; they traveled to America, which was like the moon compared to The Old Country. That’s what they called where they came from, The Old Country, and they taught me by action more than words that women have always been brave and adventurous and capable—always. It’s society that gets it wrong sometimes. Now, I don’t look at the moon as much as I used to. I look at my grandchildren looking up into the night sky. With the light of the moon and stars sparkling in their eyes they whisper, “Wow!” and I remember what it was to be six and see magic in the fire of trailing rocket exhaust. You can cover the whole moon with your thumb; you know. It’s an illusion, a trick. It’s a lesson the universe teaches us about perspective—and magic. Linda (Moonstruck) Zern |
| When I was a younger woman, I lived on hope and change—and nagging. I used to hope that nagging worked and could change the speed at which the world moved. And when I say “the world,” I mean men; okay, really I mean one man—my man. It took me a while to figure out that nagging is like all other expulsions of internal body gases—frequent, noisy, and rank, because it can turn the most sympathetic of subjects into an unattractive shrew surrounded by a cloud of toxic methane, not unlike a tent full of Boy Scouts farting the alphabet. I can nag the alphabet. I’m that good. I had a lot of raw material to work with in my husband, Sherwood the Great—procrastinator. As a kid, he attended one Boy Scout meeting where they tried to make him pound a nail with a hammer. He never went back. He decided he didn’t have to learn to pound a nail right that minute, not when he could wait and learn to pound a nail, later, when he learned to fix the heater coil in the hot water heater, sometime the last day of how about not right now! When one of the heating coils burned out in the mechanical unit that kept me in the hot bath water to which I had become both accustomed and addicted, I grew determined to show the world and my critiques (generally people who share my propensity for freckles) that I could make a reasonable request for repair work without a nag in sight. I could do it. I could live nag free. I could quit anytime. “Sherwood, I can only fill the bathtub halfway full of hot water, and even if I lay down flat on my back the water does not cover all my girl parts. Some stuff always sticks out. It makes me sad.” Rubbing his manly jaw he looked intrigued. “One of the heater coil’s probably burned out.” “Should I call the hot water burned out coil man?” I crossed my arms over my chapped . . . umm . . . er . . . girl parts, hoping against hope that my husband’s grisly-monkey-man-brain had not snapped into stones-as-tools mode. Too late. “Nope! Nothing to it.” “Dear, you should know I have made a solemn oath, covenant, and New Year’s resolution not to mention my desire to not have to struggle to submerge my anatomy in a half-full tub of tepid water to you again, in any way, shape, form, or language—domestic or foreign, and yes I realize I have used a double negative. I will not nag you over this. I will not. I cannot for I have oath-ed an oath.” “Heater coil . . . got it.” “No, I mean it. I’m on the nagging wagon.” He looked skeptical and started making vague motions with his hands. He appeared to be cracking invisible coconuts with an invisible boulder shaped tool. “I mean it, Sherwood, I will not mention this to you again, and I will not fix it myself or employ anyone else to do so; why you may ask, because I’m a stubborn piece of work. That’s why. Consider it a psychological study in the socio-ramifications of motivating men with repetitive words of infinite negativity to get stuff done. ” He cracked more invisible coconuts. “I mean it; this is my last nag on the subject.” And it was. He appeared to be sharpening his invisible boulder tool. A month passed. I tried sponge bathing out of a bucket of steaming hot water. It was messy. Two months passed. I gave a method of full body water rotation a try—back, front, side, side, back to back. By the time I got back to my back, I was usually crying. Three, four, and then seven months swirled away like the soapy water at the end of a luxurious soak, and still I nagged not. I tried showering with my much taller husband but got smacked in the eye with his elbow so many times, I worried about retina damage, besides he hogged the hot water, and I hate showering. Nine and then ten months passed away like the dew from Heaven. I remained a goose bumpy nag-less wonder: no request, reminder, or repetitive phrase passed my blue lips. Time continued to pass. How long did it take for my stones-as-tools-man to fix the hot water heater coil without the stimulus or benefit of my nagging? ONE YEAR, one chilled bone aching year, that’s how long, and then while changing out the heater coil, my husband stabbed himself in the knuckle with a screwdriver, exposing the tendon. He tried holding the gaping flesh together with a dinosaur bandage. It took six stitches to finally cover the tendon up—twelve months, six stitches, and the development of an irrational fear of goose flesh that’s how long. Abandoning my nag free experiment, I have since honed my harping to a fine and delicate art, surpassed only by my liberal use of satiric and scathing one-liners. I can nag in my sleep. I can nag in reverse. Sometimes I nag using only my eyes and a well-timed twitch. I can’t say that my husband moves any faster, but at least I can make my contribution to any given problem feel like a sharp stick of motivating female persuasion. Linda (Rub a Dub-Dub) Zern |
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