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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 |
| Girls want their ears pierced because we dress them in pink as soon as they can breathe and burp; that’s what my women college professors taught me in the post-apocalyptic world following the bra-less sixties. Boys become boys because we tended to hold them by one leg and dangle them over toy fire trucks. Girls become girls because we didn’t toss them in the air high enough or let them bounce when we dropped them. That was the theory—sort of. After thirty years of being married to a boy, thirty years of raising two boys and a gaggle of grand boys, and about a thousand years of interacting with boys and girls of all ages in my society, I would like to go on record. The theory that boys and girls are exactly alike is craziness brought on by pre-menstrual cramping. When I was still newly hatched, recently married, and without personal offspring I continued to cling to echoes of my college discipleship; I was very young. I was idealistic. I was a bright light of feminist idealism. My boys were going to cuddle dolls and reject catapults. I believed that—right up ‘till the boy/girl twelve-year old canoe trip. My worldview flip-flopped when I went on a church canoe trip with twelve-year old boys and twelve-year old girls—true, whatever gender identification damage caused by pink and blue booties had already been done, but they were a fairly typical bunch of human offspring. I was in charge of the pink bootie crowd. What I learned about twelve-year old girls at the time included: they cannot canoe; they can bounce off of things while in a canoe (the bank, the other bank, and the giant felled tree in the middle of the river;) they worry about snakes, alligators, bears, goats, and humidity’s effect on ponytails; they tire easily. What I learned about twelve-year old boys still haunts me. As I piloted my little ship-load of chirping girls up the river and back to base camp, I noticed one of the boys seemed to be dangling like a piece of loose fruit from a gnarled tree branch stretching out over the river. He also seemed to have not pants on. The reason he seemed to have no pants on is because he didn’t. The dangling tree branch boy was . . . hmmm, how to be delicate when discussing the antics of twelve-year old boys? The mind staggers, but I make the attempt. One of those boys, the dangling one, was in the middle of producing a certain organic by-product by hanging his bottom over a tree branch and allowing it to drop into the water—just ahead of us, near a bend in the river. Please note: This organic product is produced when enormous amounts of Papa John’s pizza are consumed around a campfire and . . . oh, forget it. He was pooping in the river. This idiot kid was hanging his butt over a tree branch and pooping in the river. Twenty-two seconds later, coming toward our canoe was nightmare torpedo of slow moving, softly bobbing, and horror evoking—poop. One of the more highly emotional, hysteria prone, sharp eyed girls in my canoe screamed, “It’s coming straight for us.” Then she pointed. The pointing was not necessary. Then they all began to scream—to a woman. I confess I may have yelped. As the leader, I attempted to steady the crew. “Stea . . . dy. Steady. Steady on, ladies.” The poop torpedo bobbed closer, and ever so slowly—closer. Now the point of all this is to simply say that I have never, ever, in my life heard of any female of my acquaintance say, “Hey, Emily, climb up in that tree yonder, take a dump in the river, and then we’ll hang around in the bushes to see what happens.” That’s what those blue bootie-wearing boys did; instead of hiding their faces in masculine shame, they hid in the bushes to see “what would happen.” I’ll tell you what happened. I dug my paddle into the water once the danger had drifted passed, after bumping our hull once or twice, and yelled, “Paddle harder girls! We’re going to kill us some boys!” So when my daughters have come to me over the years to complain about some inexplicable quality of incomprehensible maleness, I simply make sure they understand some basics. “Boys are disgusting and they have poor potty manners.” Then I look my daughters, square in the eye, and sigh, “And yet we still want one.” It has ever been thus . . . Linda (Run Silent, Run Deep) Zern |
The boycott is on. I refuse to watch anything remotely related to “reality” on television: not crab hunting shows, or shows about people who have tumors that look like crabs, or (and especially) anything depicting women who exist in a permanent state of crabby-ville. Reality is crap and apparently full of crabs! And I say this in the most non-judgmental and inclusive way of which I am capable. My boycott has resulted in the relentless purchasing and endless viewing of movies with dialog, plots, and (if I’m super lucky) lace jabots. The Young Victoria is my latest addition to a growing collection of movies where the touch of two ungloved hands can make your back teeth itch and the skin of your earlobes sweaty. As I am wont to say, “It ain’t real life, but it should be.” I make my husband, Sherwood the information technology wizard, watch. He struggles a bit with my BBC, PBS, and Master Piece Theater devotion. Sherwood is a crab man. As the young Queen Victoria sailed across an elegant dance floor in her voluminous ball gown with the prince of her dreams, I look over to notice my husband’s face has become a puddle of perplexity. “Why aren’t they speaking Hamletonian?” My own face crumpled and sagged into drooping confusion. My jowls may have hit my chest. “Speaking . . . what?” “You know those Hamletonian words.” Sherwood has a habit of assuming I have access to his database, and that I know the password and his username. I began attempting to decode the Sherwood-speak, as the young queen on the screen continued to twirl—her skirt flying out like a standard from a castle tower. “Hamle . . . tonian . . . do you mean Hamlet, the Danish prince?” Sherwood looked like a man who would prefer to be watching crab hunting in a room full of crabby women than a movie about England’s longest reigning monarch to date. “Isn’t this movie about English people?” he asked. “You know, English people that speak that Hamletonian type stuff?” “Hamlet? Shakespeare’s tragic play about a Danish prince . . . that Hamlet? Are you trying to figure out why the actor’s aren’t speaking Shakespearean English?” “How can Hamlet be Danish when he always speaks in that Shakespeare talk?” He scratched his earlobe looking perfectly serious, studious, and inquiring. I know my mouth was open. I remember my tongue drying out. “Are you saying that Shakespeare, the English playwright, cannot write a story about someone not English, oh let’s say, a Danish guy, maybe a prince?” Tilting his head in thoughtful contemplation, he concluded. “Listen, if the guy’s from Denmark then he should be speaking Denmarkian—not Hamletonian.” He continued to scratch but not his earlobe. Prince Albert whispered into Victoria’s ear in cultured nineteenth century English. “Sherwood, my love, if I hadn’t been there when they handed you the faux diploma at your graduation, I would wonder if you actually went to an institution of higher learning. I swear. What did you learn?” He scoffed. “Oh, I went to college. You try taking Robot Vision sometime and live to tell about it.” “How could I tell about it? I don’t speak Robotmus Vis-onian.” “Exactly!” Mostly, I just watch my wonderful movies alone— appreciating the costumes, the drama, the repressed sexuality, and the crazy people locked in the attics, and when I’m really feeling the bite of reality I pop in Hamlet and watch the Danish prince drive Ophelia to a watery grave—all in classic Hamletonian. Linda (Speakeasy) Zern |
“YaYa, why you talk you-self all time?” Zoe’s four-year old forehead attempted to form wrinkles as she pondered one of the great curiosities of life—adult insanity. “What makes you think I’m by myself?” I distracted her with a bright, shiny lollipop. Talking to myself is a way of life for me, providing a multitude of benefits and advantages. I cannot help it if society has not embraced the diversity that constitutes “talking to one’s own self” in a manner resembling Sally Fields playing Sybil. Society is a stuck up girl wearing chipped nail polish. I talk to myself because I’m the best listener I know, and I’m smart enough to understand what I’m saying. Sometimes when I’m talking to those people who come and eat my poorly prepared hamburger meat on the weekends, I can’t even finish a sentence, before they’re jumping all over what I’m saying with both feet and throwing their opinions around like people planning a revolution while standing next to a guillotine. It finally got so nutty I had to institute the Zern family conch shell policy. It’s simple. If you’re holding the conch shell, you can talk. It’s a kind of “Lord of the Flies” thing. If you’re holding the conch shell everybody else has to zip it and listen. My husband brought the Queen Conch shell back from a diving trip to the Bahamas when he was a teenager and it was still legal to rape the oceans. That’s how old we are, so talking to myself is probably not as big or weird of a deal as I think. Often I talk to myself to be able to hear how it’s all going to sound when I finally get an opportunity to talk to real humans or right some great societal wrong. For example I could say, “Listen, Smart Alec, if you put that parking ticket on my truck, I’m going to tear my clothes off and howl at the traffic light,” but that might come off sounding a bit over the top or even insane. So I practice—out loud—to myself. I say, sometimes while looking in a mirror, “Oh my gracious, Campus Security Officer . . . um . . . (insert shy smile or grimace while looking at name tag) Fink, Officer Fink, I had no idea that this was a faculty parking area. I didn’t realize that sign, way down there behind that bush and around the corner blocked by that massive hump of dirt, applied to this area of the parking lot as well. Color me chagrined.” Sometimes I give speeches and then give myself a standing ovation. It’s very gratifying. Sometimes I practice what I would say on David Letterman, but don’t tell anybody. A couple of times I’ve been able to say to myself what I wished I’d said that time, if I’d had a minute to think about what I was saying before I actually said it. You know what I’m saying? Once, I told Napoleon off, but I don’t want to talk about it. Finally, I got tired of telling myself clever anecdotes, which are short accounts of some interesting or humorous incident, and started to write them down, making me an anecdotist and not some crazy lady who wanders around her house wearing a frayed jeans vest and mumbling to herself. Linda (Vests Have Handy Pockets) Zern |
| Please Note: As far as I know, I am in perfect health and any rumors of my impending death are pure gossip and heartless taunting. My kitchen cabinet knobs do not match, and I love that they do not match, even though it drives my son-in-law, Phillip, batty. He has informed me, “As soon as you’re dead, I’m changing out these goofy, eclectic, bohemian knobs.” (That is the official title for my decorating style—eclectic bohemian, which means I’m just this side of a gypsy queen and not adverse to bleached animal skulls as chotchkies.) Phillip always looks itchy when he tells me about his de-knobbing of my kitchen on the event of my death. He mumbles about burning my giant gourd that flips open on a hinge, but I think it’s just idle gourd burning talk. It’s those knobs that really bug him. I love those knobs for giving me a reason to live. “Hey, Mom, come here and listen to the music we’re going to play at your funeral.” Adam, my teenage son, looked pleased and proud as he played the tune he had picked out for me. It was a wonderful, sentimental, joyful choice. I wept. It made me sorry I wouldn’t be there—at my funeral, with the excellent choice in music, and my son-in-law in attendance, counting down the minutes until he’ll be free to take the knobs off my kitchen cabinets. Because the subject of my death and funeral seems to prove an endless source of amusement for my family (they’ve already decided that in place of a eulogy, they’ll be holding a “Mock-ogy,” which, apparently, is not dissimilar to a “Roast.”) First, they’ll play that really cool music and then someone will stand up and announce, “Let the mocking begin.” Since it’s my funeral, I have a few suggestions for my enthusiastic, smart aleck family. And since I have an irrational fear of being in something, under something—like—in a car under the water, or in a New York City subway under New York City, or in a box under the ground, I would like to be buried above ground in a pyramid, assorted safety deposit boxes, catacomb, or eagle’s nest in the back pasture. My preference is the eagle’s nest, and I would like to be rolled to the nest using the little red wagon with the jittery wheels. An America flag should be flying at half-mast from the back of the wagon. Crying is right out! Very few people look attractive crying, and I won’t have it. There should be folk dancing, but I’m sure when to fit it into the schedule, and since Phillip is going to remove them anyway, I’d like to be buried with my knobs and my thesaurus. The advantage of having garnered the reputation for being a little eclectic and a lot bohemian during one’s lifetime is that people expect to see graffiti on the walls inside your house and bowling balls in your garden, and if they show up to your funeral they won’t be surprised by the free coupons to Golden Corral Buffet handed out at the door. Linda (Gypsy Queen of the Buffet Line) Zern |
| The cell phone in my hand grew dank with hand sweat as I talked to Staff Sergeant Aric Zern who was calling from somewhere, just outside of Kirkuk, Iraq. “. . . so then Conner-boy asked, ‘Zoe, why is the sky blue?’ and then Zoe Baye said, ‘Because, Conner, Heavenly Father knows that blue is your favorite color.’ And then I said . . . oh, wait before that, they did the funniest thing . . . ” Rattling on, I talked happy talk to absolutely no one for approximately three minutes. I did not pause, breathe, or hesitate. I kept right on talking and talking and talking until the black hole of silence on the other end of the line tipped me off—my signal had been dropped off the dark side of some nifty space probe or satellite saucer or something else spacey. “Aric, can you hear me?” I yelled into the phone. “Come in, anyone. Anyone—Roger, Roger.” The phone beeped cheerfully with an incoming call from a war zone in Iraq. It was Aric, laughing. “I always know you’re still talking to absolutely no one when we get cut off, and then I call back, and it’s still busy.” These are the moments, which make me long for the days of tin cans, string, and rotary dials. I understood string. I understood cans. I understood numbers in a circle. Tin cans circling the earth, which get a big kick out of hearing me talk to myself, I don’t get. On the subject of technology, did you know that when you submit a Blog entry online, people can leave comments at the end of your submission? There’s these conveniently placed boxes where people can respond to what you’ve written; I had no idea. I just figured it out. It’s exciting to write words and then have people write words about your words. The possibilities remain endless, as endless as the far reaches of the space circling around our fair planet where large metal cans are waiting to drop your calls. However, I continue to feel a deep shame and unremitting dopiness over my inability to play a movie on the X-box or cheat in school on my cell phone. In response to my complaining loudly about endless struggles with the mysteries of algebra and a looming math test, a young fellow college student (we’ll call him Nimrod) whipped a cell phone from his pants pocket. Nimrod, displaying the lighted panel of his excellent cellular phone said, “I always cheat. It’s easy.” He began to punch a series of numbers resembling a sequence from the Dresden Mayan Codex. I squinted, trying to follow his dancing fingers. He continued to text message mysterious numbers and letters. The phone beeped and then chirped. He waved it overhead. “Just keep your phone in your sock during the test. See?!” I smiled benignly and patted his boney shoulder. “Nimrod, sweetheart, first of all, you’re assuming I know how to text message, and second of all, you probably don’t realize arthritis makes it difficult for me to do anything with a phone while it’s in my sock.” He smiled sadly, his disappointment visible. I added, “Besides the fact, I wouldn’t feel comfortable cheating and thereby selling my soul for a lousy grade in a lousy math class.” I could tell, in Nimrod’s worldview, I had just achieved exotic, extinct animal status not unlike the now defunct Dodo Bird. It’s hard not to feel that the world has passed me by when my fifteen-month old grandson can operate the DVD player better than I, and crib notes are now downloaded to a student’s sock via a satellite orbiting somewhere over Kirkuk, Iraq. I weep with shame. Oh, and don’t tell anyone, but I still use stamps and send real letters—in envelopes, through the mail, via the United States Post Office, after I lick the glue on the flaps, with my tongue. Linda (Happy Talker) Zern |
| When I found four gold plated dessert spoons in the toe of my riding boot and pennies filling the fingers of my riding gloves, I knew Toddler World had officially arrived in our lives. By August of this year I will have seven grand children, and, frankly, I don’t look old enough to have five grand children. I am the Ya-Ya. Being the Ya-Ya means a ton of the fun and a fraction of the worry that plagued my days as the Ma-Ma. Being a mom made me gray, and being a grandmother makes me want to learn to ride a dirt bike. It also means I have become the oracle of all wisdom for my daughters on matters of the mothering kind, leading to conversations like this: “Mom, feel Conner’s head.” Conner’s head is small, fuzzy, and three weeks old. I picked Conner up and felt his head. It felt small, fuzzy, and three weeks old. “What is that?” Heather asked, pointing at the head of her second child. “Where?” “On the top of his head.” “You mean his soft spot? Heather, you know babies have soft spots.” I watched Zoe’s two-year old ponytail bobbing through the living room—nothing soft about that head (Zoe—Conner’s bigger sister and official hard head.) “I know it’s his soft spot,” she grabbed the baby from me. “But isn’t it deeper?” “Deeper than what?” I ran my hand over his perfectly normal skull, again. “You know! Deeper than average!” I must have looked stupid, because she decided to explain the theory of Conner’s deepening head hole. “Because, Mom, I caught Zoe poking his head with a Q-tip, and now I think his soft spot is deeper.” Zoe, I noticed, was building a small fort out of Q-tips under the couch. She was also pouring water over her own head out of a measuring cup from the kitchen. “Could he be lobotomized now?” My daughter’s frown was deep, pained, and serious. I recognized this as one of those moments when I could practice my excellent reflective listening skills. (Note: Reflective listening is a technique where you repeat back to a person their very own words, pretty much because you can’t believe someone that intelligent could say something that dumb.) I said, reflectively, “Now let me understand you. You think Zoe took a Q-tip, gave Conner a lobotomy through the soft spot on the top of his head, and now his brain is ruined. Is that about it?” “Yes, yes. Feel his head again.” I felt his head again, and then I felt Heather’s. She’ll relax. She’ll have to, because one of these days she’ll walk into a bedroom and find one of the kids (sound asleep,) with their pants around their ankles, and a Fisher Price thermometer stuck between his/her knees. And through a little detective work, she’ll realize that while this kid took a nap, the other kids tried to take the sleeping kid’s temperature—rectally. They failed, but it was a close house call. It’s what the sports commentator said a couple of weeks ago about cross-country skiing at the Olympics. “You’ve got to save something for the hills, Christina. You’ve got to save something for the hills.” Bingo! As the official Ya-Ya, I say to the young moms out there. “You’ve got to save something for the hills, honey. You’ve got to save something for the hills.” Because if you think Zoe giving Conner a lobotomy with a Q-tip is the worst of it, you are going to lose this race. Linda (Been There, Worried About That) Zern |
| A Burning in the Finger Bones “Take American Sign Language,” my oldest daughter was happy to suggest. Easy for her to say, her fingers don’t look like curly cheese puffs. “I can’t. I fear my window of opportunity on that form of communication has passed.” I held up my curly cheese puff shaped fingers as evidence. “My fingers are all used up because of arthritis! See! My knuckles are on fire, my fingers look like they’re tired of being part of my hand, and I’m afraid I’ll get counted down for a poorly formed alphabet.” “How about Spanish?” She suggested as a default language to satisfy my college foreign language requirements. “I tried that, and apparently you have to be able to speak Spanish to study Spanish.” On the first day of attempting to “take” college Spanish, the teacher looked right into my Irish freckles and at my knobby arthritic knuckles and busted into Spanish. I couldn’t even find the page in the book she was referencing, because I DON’T SPEAK SPANISH. It was distressing to the point of making my knucklebones ache, and I dropped the class as fast as my stiff aching fingers could punch the computer keys. It made me so mad I wanted to make an obscene gesture by extending my index finger at the computer screen and in the colloquial, “shoot a bird.” However, I did not “shoot a bird” for the following reasons: • I am a lady. Not only am I a lady, I am a southern lady and a southern lady does not make obscene gestures with her hands, feet, or other extremities. A southern lady expresses her anger through polite sarcasm and by writing lengthy novels about fictional towns where all the inhabitants are crazy. • My hand looks less than attractive when I extend my index finger in the classic symbol of sexual disdain. I know, because I’ve practiced the gesture in the mirror, and it’s just not flattering to my hand, probably because of my enlarged knuckles due to arthritis. • I have never felt comfortable with the actual meaning of the gesture in question. What does it mean? Is it an order, threat, or an invitation? And if it’s an invitation, how comfortable do I feel extending that invitation to someone I am frothing at the mouth mad at? • I have never in my life made such an unladylike, ugly, ambiguous gesture--in my entire complete life--and I’m not prepared to start now. Which still leaves me with the quandary; what language of a foreign clime should I choose to study to satisfy my college requirement so that I can become a well-rounded student? I’m thinking Italian. I understand it’s a language and culture that requires the enthusiastic and repeated use of one’s hands. Linda (Look into my Eye) Zern |
| Our one-year old grand daughter tried drinking water out of a plastic bottle for the first time by wrapping her lips around the opening, throwing her head back like a college student on spring break, and chugging harder then a drunken sailor. Water exploded over her head. Forgetting to un-tip the bottle as she pulled it away from her mouth, water gushed down her chin to cascade like a waterfall over her dress until it soaked her socks. “Hey, I drink water just like that!” It’s always exhilarating when you recognize yourself in the rising generation. “I know, and it’s horrible.” My husband sounded forlorn and a little sad as he stumbled away from our extremely damp grand daughter. He avoided eye contact, and seemed less than impressed with my connection to our posterity. Grabbing a bottle of water pumped from the bowels of Olympus and decanted into a plastic bottle designed by a computer, I threw my head back and guzzled, throat convulsing. Water squirted from my nose. “Linda, do you have to drink water out of a bottle like that?” He grimaced, looking away. “Like what?” I swiped the back of my hand across my dripping chin. “Like you’re never going to get another drop of water again for as long as you live and eternity, like the water bottling industry has just announced that all the water in the world has been teleported to the moon. Seriously, it drives me crazy.” Tipping the bottle back I gulped until the sides of the bottle collapsed. “Like that. Good grief, woman, take a breath,” he said, clawing at his own throat. “ Why do you throw your head back like that? You drink like you can’t trust gravity to work. Just let the natural elements of the universe help you.” I let my head drop forward as I gasped for the universal element of oxygen. I had a cramp in my neck. “I don’t throw my head back.” He smirked. “You throw your head back, wrap your lips around the entire bottle opening, and squeeze the water into your mouth like you’ve just dragged yourself across Death Valley.” He picked up a bottle of spring water pumped from the original Fountain of Youth with minerals added for flavor and prepared to demonstrate. “Here! Let me show you.” Then Sherwood, my husband, put his lips daintily to the rim of the bottle, gently flipped his wrist, and sipped water with his little finger extended. I thought he looked like a sissy llama at the watering trough at the zoo, but I had to admit he had a definite flare that I quite possibly--lack. The problem now is that I’m so self-conscious about the way I drink water from a bottle, I have to hide in the corner at the gym so that all the other sweaty, thirsty water drinkers won’t mock and point. It’s like finding out you can’t dance after a lifetime of dancing in public—a lot, and it makes me wonder what else I can’t do better than one-year old toddler. Linda (Bottoms All The Way Up) Zern |
| “He needs to get his blade on the ice.” Looking over at Sherwood, my dearest husband of more than thirty years, I tried to decide if he had one or two chocolate donuts in his mouth. “Get your blade on the ice,” he yelled at the television through chocolate glaze and donut dust. I squinted over my glasses at the Olympic speed skaters gliding around and around in a frenzy of bad posture and arm swinging. “Sherwood, you’ve never speed skated in your entire life.” He ignored this fundamental reality. “Dig, dig, dig!” he yelled. “He’s going to loose if he doesn’t dig.” He punctuated his coaching acumen by pushing a half empty bag of chocolate covered donuts back under the bedspread. It’s possible he thought they would cook better under there. “You mean, “dig” with their skates and not shovels, right?” He gave me the look. Later, as skiers flew down an icy mountainside he offered up this observation. “She’s going to be way off the mark if she keeps coming out of her tuck that way.” He was snacking on Swiss Cake Rolls and Pepsi by this time. I drew the line when he started to coach the curlers on the most advantageous amount of bend to have in their knees to properly push the big-frozen-boulder-thing down the shuffleboard court made of ice. “Sherwood! Stop right now. You must stop. You must. You do not know the first thing about speed skating, alpine skiing, or curling, which, I happen to know, you do not even consider a real sport.” “What?” He look offended and a little hurt. “You! You become the coach of all sports when the Olympics comes on.” He pulled a bag of Doritos from underneath his pillow, shrugged, and said, “You and I ice skated that time in Ottawa, and Adam and I went skiing that time in West Virginia.” “And you pointed, hooted, and laughed your butt off when you were on the ski lift, and you saw some poor kid crash, burn, and roll down the hill underneath you like a bag of spilled marbles,” I reminded him. “So?” “That kid was your kid. It was Adam. That’s it. That’s the sum total of your winter sports expertise.” We looked at the television as music swelled, while they played one of those montages where lithe, athletic young men and women raced, spun, and sailed across the screen into glory and history. I reached for my husband’s grease smeared hand as our national anthem played. “It is inspiring.” I blinked hard to hold back sentimental tears. “You’re right,” Sherwood said, thoughtfully. “So, you know what, I’m thinking that from now on, when I eat Swiss cake rolls I’m only going to drink water.” I patted his hand. “Way to go, coach.” I haven’t actually seen my husband follow through on his training regiment yet, but the year is still young and the summer Olympics are on their way. You should hear him yell advice to those women shot putters. Linda (Finish Line) Zern |
The way a family spends its weekend is the real indicator of just how nuts a family probably is, no matter what they want people to believe about them. My family is an excellent example of this working theory. We would like you to believe we are sophisticated intellectual sorts who spend our leisure hours having deep philosophical discussions, frequenting sights of cultural interest, and engaging in recreational activities. Here’s how the weekend really shakes out. THE DEEP PHILOSOPHIAL DISCUSSION: After watching The Lord of the Rings—again—we began our post-movie, round table discussion by answering the following question, “What would you do if you had a ring that made you invisible?” Contributions to the conversation included: Philip (the son-in-law) - “Go around doing good for all mankind.” Sherwood (my husband of forever) - “I’d sneak into women’s locker rooms.” Philip (when he heard Sherwood’s game plan) - “I’d sneak into women’s locker rooms with Sherwood.” Me (the voice of reason and sanity) - “I’d sneak up behind Sherwood and Philip sneaking around women’s locker rooms and bop them on the head.” But then I added, “Invisibility ring! I’m already invisible. What I need is a VISISBILITY ring.” Adam (Please see my essay, Only A Nimrod Would Think that he could Tip Over a Whole Cow) – “I’d sneak up behind cows and tip them over.” Maren (nineteen at the time) – “Men are dogs.” Heather (after twenty minutes of deep thought) – “Pants People?” THE FEATURED CULTURAL ACTIVITY: Before Disney, before Universal, before civilization there was Gatorland. Gatorland is a semi-tropical ode to tacky tourist traps. We love it. Murky pools of fetid water swirl as Florida alligators and the occasional crocodile glide by. Reptiles, roughly the size of sofas, bask in the shimmering heat. We throw marshmallows at them. Visitors can buy hotdogs to toss to the gators, which bring them to a boiling frenzy, but why? For ninety-nine cents and the thrill of watching Adam smuggle a bag of Jet-puffed marshmallows in his pants you can bring these pre-historic handbags to the point of hysteria. (Please note: It is wrong to do this and you should never, ever smuggle foodstuffs in your pants when visiting Gatorland—ever.) And before anyone complains that we’re probably causing cavities in the alligators with our contraband marshmallows, let me remind you that alligators use their teeth for grabbing you, not chewing you. Alligators eat you—after they death roll you, drown up, stuff you under a submerged log, tenderize you, and then they snack on you. Believe me, those marshmallows never touched their teeth. Culture is 150 alligators lined up and waiting—breathless—for the next Jet-puffed marshmallow. Our working theory is that they’re sick of eating hot-dogs, biting chunks out of each other, or jumping for dangling chickens. (Note: Yes they do jump, no matter what Sherwood and Philip say. They don’t jump great, but they jump.) THE RECREATIONAL ACTIVITY: Once a month, we indulge in Sunday dinner with the Chevrier family. Sometimes the Chevrier’s temporarily adopt one or more of our children and raise them, like in the Middle Ages when you sent your kids to other people’s castles to check out the alligators in their moats. So we have dinner. We eat. We talk. We discuss deep philosophical issues like, “Will marshmallows give alligators high blood pressure?” And if we’re really in a wild and crazy mood we take our own temperatures with Carol’s way cool ear thermometer. Aren’t you glad I didn’t say rectal thermometer? There’s crazy and then there’s weird. There you have it, philosophy, culture, and recreation. One of the things I like best about our family is that we can really laugh at ourselves. I can’t think of people I’d rather be invisible with or get busted smuggling marshmallows in my pants. Linda (Puffy Pants) Zern |
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