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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 |
| 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 plus 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 stuff like, “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 plus years, four kids, and ten 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 |
| Having inadvertently become a world traveler via my husband’s obscene amount of free air miles, I have herein jotted down a few travel tips for the modern adventurer. PS: Yes, I am aware that the trips I have been on would have taken months and months and months to accomplish long ago, and that at certain points in those trips, when the horses starting dropping dead from heat and boredom, the crew would have to toss the dead horse bodies into the ocean—thus the horse latitudes. I don’t care. It’s not my fault I got myself born after the Spanish discovered long distance cruises—also maize and stuffing galleons full of other people's gold. Linda Z’s Travel Tips: 1. Wear clothes you’d wear when nine months pregnant, ninety three percent stretch and seven percent Lycra. Don’t be shocked when the thin black line that stands between you and exploding underwear (aka the TSA,) thinks that you are wearing a belt. Or as I said to the last TSA sweetie who patted me down looking for IED’s in my pants, “Sweetie, if that machine thinks I’m wearing a belt it’s defective, and you should contact the manufacturer.” Sweetie thought about having me arrested. 2. Never wear bras with under wires. But don’t be surprised when the TSA says the machine indicates that you have an IED in your sports bra. 3. Carry a purse the size of luggage. If it makes you tip over when fully loaded with nose tissues, cough drops, lip-gloss, and chocolate covered raisins it’s perfect. 4. Carry multiple packs of nose tissues. They come in handy when trying to remove the boulder-sized boogers that spontaneously form in your nostrils from breathing bird flu infested airplane air. 5. Never read the bird flu informational posters upon landing. 6. Stay the size and shape of a shoehorn. The better to curl up in an airplane seat like a squirrel—a shoehorn squirrel. 7. If checking luggage, purchase and use the largest suitcase sold on Amazon. It will make you feel better when you see the forlorn looks on anyone who has to carry it. It’s petty I know but oddly satisfying. 8. Wear shoes made of duct tape. They scan well. But don’t be surprised if the TSA says that the machine indicates that there are Somali pirates hiding in them. 9. Never eat the tiny airplane food. It’s not real. 10. Carry a security blanket with dog, cat, and goat hair on it. With any luck your seatmates will notice and be horrified, asking to be moved to another flight. 11. Have a contingency plan in case the world folds like a cheap greeting card while you’re flying over the Pacific Ocean. Ask yourself, “Can I survive on ‘the desert island’ with one bottle of Tylenol PM or should I double up?” 12. And finally . . . never, and I mean never look the pilot in the eye when he butts in front of you in the line for the tiny potty. It’s the law. If pilots look their passengers in the eye they will turn to salt, the passengers not the pilot. If passengers don’t turn to salt then the pilots are allowed to treat the passengers like Somali pirates armed with IED underwire bras. The best thing about traveling is making sure other people see you seeing things. Once, you had to invite your friends and acquaintances over for dinner and feed them and then force them to see your vacation home movies; now you can taunt them with updates on Facebook. No refreshments necessary. And you hardly ever have to toss dead horses over the rail into the ocean. Linda (Turn Back Now) Zern |
| Traveling is a strange status symbol. If you ask the average college student what they want to do with their lives they will say, “Cure cancer via a liberal arts degree and travel.” To me it equates to, “See me, seeing things.” I hate traveling. It’s stressful and filled with turbulence. Literally. But I love my husband and he has to travel for his work—a lot. So . . . I travel . . . not as much as a lot, but once in a while. His latest assignment has brought him to Korea and me too because I like him. Korea is one of the three kingdoms; it’s China, Japan, and Korea. Folks in Korea will be the first to let you know that those other two kingdoms have been, on occasion, pains in their Korean backside, but still they are a unique, feisty, independent bunch, and it ain’t been easy. Especially when half of the country is divided from the other half by a big hefty line called the demilitarized zone or DMZ or 38th parallel or Land of the Many Gift Shops. A weekend trip to the DMZ left me having to process what I had seen for days. I have learned that North Korea is a mystery of totalitarian silence and myth. Who knows what’s really going on over there? It’s locked down like a teenager on lifetime restriction. One of the tangible clues are the infiltration tunnels carved through solid granite, some big enough to drive jeeps through, heading from the communist north into the democratic south, built on the very ground that’s supposed to be off limits to all that sneaky monkey business. The North Koreans painted the walls of the tunnels with coal dust so they could claim that the tunnel wasn’t really a highway for invasion. It was really an abandoned coalmine. Oops. Our bad. I know this because the South Koreans turned the “Third Tunnel” into a DISNEY RIDE. It’s true. I went on it. You put on a hard hat (blue) and you get on a rocket train (silver) and they roll you down into the tunnel (tight) where you then walk to the halfway point. Here you can look through a small window at the North Korean’s steel barrier which blocks off their half of the tunnel. I WENT ON A RIDE! Our tour included an overlook where you can peek at North Korea and a train station to nowhere that the South Koreans have built, hoping one day to re-connect to their North Korean friends and family. And at every stop on the tour there were GIFT SHOPS--also a memorial park, carnival rides for the kids, statuary, guides, buses, restrooms, fields of pinwheels, hikes, lectures, fountains, picnic areas, refreshments and GIFT SHOPS, many and much GIFT SHOPS. I was boggled. I was so boggled I had to take a nap, but then I started to puzzle on it, and came to realize some important stuff. The South Korean people face the confirmed possibility of nuclear catastrophe every day of their lives, living in the center of an unstable bull’s eye. Their beloved country remains slashed by division and uncertainty. They are at war, even now, as I type this. Yet they continue to fight back. They continue to buy and sell and make and create. They continue to hope and wish and dream of something better. They go to church and worship, as they believe. And they fight back with GIFT SHOPS. I don’t know when I’ve been so impressed with a group of people in my life and with their friends who stand on the line next to them, keeping watch in the night. A lot of folks would be on their knees mewling about, bemoaning every day of their sad little lives and their tragic past and the tragic past of their daddy’s tragic past, and no doubt if you want to bad enough you’ll find that aspect of human nature here. But still. They’ve turned bitter war and nuclear stalemate into a tourist attraction with gift shops! There were Three Musketeer’s bars and Pepsi and Kim Chi. I bought a hat. It was the least I could do. Linda (Buy, Sell, Trade) Zern |
| P is for Pullet, Predator, and Politician “Chicken wire is designed to keep chickens in, not politicians . . . ur . . . um . . . I mean . . . predators out.” It’s good information. Also true. Also a conundrum. I raise assorted chickens. I buy them teeny-tiny, fluffy, and assorted from somewhere up north and have them sent to me through the mail. They come in a box. When the box arrives at my hobby farm in Florida it is cheeping. It’s about the cutest mail you can receive via the United States Postal Service—chicks in a box that resemble puff balls—the chicks not the box. From the box they go into my shower. I put a light on them to simulate their mother’s fluffy butt, also her love and concern. I feed them, water them, and watch them grow. Putting them in the shower is handy, because I can wash the shower out when it becomes DISGUSTING. Cute does not mean clean. When the chicks resemble teenager chickens: pimply, scruffy, half grown, awkward, loud, and obnoxious, they go into the chicken coop. Then for the next couple of months I stuff them full of food, starter mash, cracked corn (on special occasions), table scraps, and then laying mash for their big egg laying debut. It takes about seven months and a trillion dollars. Hobby does not mean cheap. It’s kind of like the way the politicians run Washington—more goes in than comes out and the money pit gets deeper and deeper, and if you figured it all out you’d realize that your eggs cost about a hundred dollars a piece and your bridges to no where a zillion dollars a piece. In fact, politicians run the federal government a lot like it’s their hobby. In my case, it’s fun. I don’t know why politicians do it. Around seven months, the assorted eggs start rolling in, beautiful eggs, green, blue, brown, and white eggs. It’s illegal for me to sell my farm fresh eggs on the open market in Florida. I haven’t located the black market yet. So, I stay one step ahead of the politicians in my state, I give my eggs away FOR FREE. Regulate that! It makes me happy to have eggs to give away. It makes my friends happy to get eggs. It makes my chickens happy to lay eggs for me. (I don’t know that; I just feel it.) And, unfortunately it makes the raccoons in the woods across the street happy to figure out new and better ways of eating my beloved, hobby farm raised hens. Come to think of it, raccoons are a lot like politicians. They wait until your stuff is fully raised and juicy and then they come for it with razor sharp canines that can chomp through chicken wire. If you’re lucky they’ll leave a pile of feathers in the yard to let you know who got eaten and where. Hobby farming is not for the faint of heart or the easily discouraged or the politically naïve. In fact, in the month of July we’ve gone from twelve mature hens and one adorable rooster, to two frightened, scraggly hens, shaking in their feathers. They’ve started roosting on my back porch on the kid’s frog aquarium. I remain undaunted. In September, I’m putting in my order for tougher chicken coop wire, a bigger live animal trap, and a new batch of air mailed boxes with assorted cheeping. The raccoons are still out there, but I refuse to let them scare me into roosting on the back porch on the frog aquarium. I’ll continue to keep fighting for tougher chicken coops, better predator disposal, and smaller government. Not necessarily in that order. Linda (Coop Master) Zern |
| “Stop licking that baby!” You say it. Then you hear it. And then you wonder how your life has distilled down to this single moment of making bizarre even insane rules that at first blush reflect badly on your religion, culture, heritage, and even mental health. “No! I mean it! If you don’t stop licking that baby—I’ll lick you!” And you mean it, because the baby’s siblings are crazy, and if you don’t stop them they’ll lick that baby until it screams, and then you’re really in the soup. As a young mother I once made a list of ten family commandments. Commandment number one read: Thou shalt not eat PB&J sandwiches with plastic vampire teeth in your mouth. Adorable, right? Not so adorable when the kids, having tried to eat the—above mentioned—sandwiches, cried because their plastic vampire teeth became so gicky with peanut butter slime as to be rendered disgusting. I pulled the plug on the vampire teeth denture experiment after catching myself brushing peanut butter drool out of plastic tooth crevices with my own personal toothbrush one too many times, or maybe it was one time. When making family laws, rules, or commandments it is (in my professional opinion) important to be clear and specific.Thou shalt not make mommy want to run away is way too vague—also suggestive and possibly fraught with legal ramifications. The children may in fact, want to make mommy run away and are just calculating the amount of baby licking required to achieve their nefarious goal of trying to make mom look like the one who did the crazy running away stuff. I always check the wall of photos at Walmart to be sure my family hasn’t posted my picture up there—just to make me nuts. An example of a much more efficaciously worded rule would be, anyone still defecating in his or her pants shall not, will not, or better not be allowed to carry a hammer or torque wrench around. I’ve actually heard myself yell, “Someone find that little, short kid in the diaper; he’s got a hammer—possibly a torque wrench.” I have found that as children mature the rules don’t have to be quite so specific and a parent can expect to fall back to the default setting of that great old standby, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” Simple, clear, concise, and begs the question, “Do I really want other people licking my baby, lollipop, or dog bowl?” I recently sat through a lecture at my new college covering the honor code rules, as honor is understood and defined in the 21st century. I was shocked. It reminded me of PB&J and vampire teeth and really small children, prone to licking things—not food. It read (in part) Violations of the Academic Honor Code: PLAGIARISM, CHEATING, UNAUTHORIZED COLLABORATION, SUBMISSION OF WORK PREPARED FOR ANOTHER COURSE, FABRICATION, FACILITATING ACADEMIC DIS-HONESTY, VIOLATION OF TESTING CONDITIONS, LYING, FAILURE TO REPORT AN HONOR CODE VIOLATION. I wanted to ask the difference between fabrication and lying, but I was too intimidated, and I had plastic vampire teeth in my mouth at the time. Didn’t we have an honor code, once upon a time? Wasn’t it fairly simple and easily reprinted? Weren’t there like ten basic rules of civilized behavior? I seem to remember hearing something about it—once upon a time in a land far, far away. Linda (R is for Rules) Zern |
| Florida is a semi-tropic, sultry, 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 invertebrate that lay eggs in a part of the body usually associated with sitting, booty dancing, and 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, toddlers, and the moon. It is very easy to “get” pinworms. I’m a gardener; I’m pretty sure I have them 75% of the time. One semi-tropic, sultry, exotic Florida evening, I remember sitting straight up in bed, gasping or maybe gagging. “Honey, honey!” I shook my husband’s shoulder. He mumbled something about a goose and then rolled over.I shook him harder. “Honey! Wake up!” Panic made my voice shrill. “I think 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 possilby itching. “I’ve got pinworms. I just know it. Sort of.” “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 shout. “I. CAN. FEEL. THEM. MOVING! I think. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.” He grimaced, looking confused and a little frightened. “What should I do?” I said. “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.” Suspicion replaced fear in his face. “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 doctor’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 anemergency, 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. Besides you don’t know that you really have them.” The phone rang. I stopped running and answered it. I yelped, “HELP ME! I have worms! Maybe!” The mean old nurse said, “You realize that pinworms are not considered an emergency or life threatening.” “Maybe I wasn’t clear. I THINK I MIGHT HAVE WORMS IN MY PERSONAL BODY PARTS! MAYBE!” “Mrs. Zern you have called your doctor’s emergency phone number in the middle of the night because you suspect you might, possibly, 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 was supposed to give a speech in front of approximately two hundred of my peers with possible pinworms still possibly creeping about my person, and I did, in fact, deliver that speech. And that’s why I’m one tough Mama-Jama, 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 (possibly) and lived. Linda (Cork It!) Zern |
| Naked and Afraid is a show. It’s a television show that attempts to demonstrate that human beings when nude are hopelessly hopeless. The show’s creators strip the clothes off of one man and one woman, drop them in some remote hostile location, and then film the resulting chaos—also starvation. The producers try to get folks on the show with skills that might come in handy while nude. They search high and low for survivalist types. It doesn’t matter. Everyone starves to death in twenty-one days. Everyone. Even if the couple survives, everyone has to buy a whole new wardrobe from K-Mart when they get back to civilization. Everyone. After having watched several episodes, I have come to several conclusions about evolution, survival, starvation, and pasties. 1) You can never be too fat when you’re naked and afraid. Watching the bare-bottomed couples drop eighteen, twenty-seven, forty thousand pounds in twenty-one days makes me want to pack on the weight. Eating dirt, mud, mosquitoes, and sea urchins does not keep a sufficient amount of flesh on your body, and if you’re fashionably svelte to start with you might as well dig your own grave and crawl into it, because you’ll be a skeleton at the end—if you make it that far. 2) Evolution is bogus. There is no way the human body evolved so many dangly bits voluntarily. No way. Because when you are naked and afraid in the middle of a thorn torn savannah, people with the most and biggest dangly bits would be the first ones snagged to death on . . . well . . . everything: thorns, cacti, brambles, sandspurs, and all the other spiked splintery stuff. If evolution were true we would all be shaped like torpedoes or dolphins and snag proof. 3) Water will kill you. If a naked person drinks water raw it will kill them. If the water doesn’t stop falling out of the sky it will kill a naked person by dissolving their skin or freezing their bones. If a naked person swims in the water there’s a chance that person’s dangly bits will snag on corral, thus killing them. 4) Clothes are not one of the top three survival priorities. Believe it or not. 5) I’m too afraid to get naked. If I am ever on the show, I told my daughter that after finding water, building a fire, and grubbing up some food, my next order of business would be to make myself some pasties. “Why?” she wanted to know. “Because I would be constantly worried about snagging myself on something—also unbearable sunburn since I’m not shaped like a dolphin.” “How do you intend to make pasties?” “Wild honey and mud.” “That doesn’t sound like clothes.” “I know, but how else am I going to get the grass to stick?” Thankfully, in our civilized world, we do not have to be naked and afraid. We can be fully clothed and mildly insecure. Color me civilized. Linda (Honey Do) Zern |
| A lot of folks think that when (not if) the world goes into the apocalypse dumper they are going to be able to walk outside, throw some lettuce and tomato seeds on the ground and grow a salad with croutons. A lot of people are going to die hungry and sad. I am a gardener. I grow things in dirt. I crawl around on my boney knees, scrabbling around among the grubs and weeds, trying to grow stuff in dirt. Once in a while, I succeed but not always. Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being next to the dirt. DIRT IS NEVER ENOUGH: Most dirt is a sad excuse for potting soil from Home Depot. Most dirt requires big help to be useful in the growing of anything more than weeds and blisters. In Florida dirt is mostly sand mixed with heartbreak. POOP IS GOLD: The stuff that falls out of the back end of animals is better than cash when it comes to fixing the heartbreak of sand. When other people see nasty rabbit pucky, a gardener sees ambrosia for squash. MOTHER NATURE IS A WITCH (WITH A B): The natural world is one of two things, too much or not enough. Not enough rain and the harvest looks like pretend vegetables for a doll house. Too much rain and the harvest looks like the mushy stuff that comes out of the back end of animals. Perfect is not a state known in nature. Quit waiting for perfect. Adapt. Adjust. Anticipate. THERE’S A LEARNING CURVE TO EVERYTHING: A lot of people in cities think they like nature, natural stuff, and organic as long as their apples don’t have wormholes in them. News flash! Organic means wormholes! When bugs have been chewing on a cucumber, that’s because the cucumber wasn’t raised in a waterfall of bug poison. Think about it! LADYBUGS ARE NOT THE DELTA FORCE: Organic gardeners like to tout the benefits of buying ladybugs from the ladybug store and unleashing them on the ravaging hordes of “bad” insects poised to eat my garden right down to the sand. I garden in Florida. Ravaging hordes of “bad” insects in my state are like Visigoths mixed with Nazis. Unless ladybugs come armed with flamethrowers they’re going to lose the bug wars. I tend to crop dust. BE PREPARED TO WEEP: I have learned over the years that I can do everything right. Right plants. Right soil. Right time. Everything seems to be growing along fine, and my vegetable garden looks like the rosy cheek of a newborn baby, full of promise and life and hope and joy, and then . . . flood, fire, famine, cricket swarm, cutworm pirates, rabbit herd, deer swarm, the neighbor’s goats or chickens or don’t ask . . . and it’s back to sand and heartbreak. BE PREPARED TO REJOICE: But when it works . . . Watching my grandchildren pick green beans, that they have helped me plant, makes me hopeful. They have watched and waited and weeded and worried. By watching they learned to look beyond themselves. By waiting they learned patience. By weeding they learned to work. And with worry came the ultimate relief of success. GARDENING IS ABOUT MORE THAN DIRT. MAKE MINE A GARDEN. Linda (Growing My Own) Zern |
| My husband dropped me off at the Melbourne City library, after running up on the curb in our mammoth, politically incorrect pickup truck. The truck looked a little tipsy when he pulled away. I laughed lightly, waved vaguely at the retreating truck, and quipped, “I thought he was going to drive right up to the circulation desk.” The woman waiting outside the library for her ride laughed with me. Then she stopped, looked me over, and said, “Your hair looks amazing.” I was delighted, pleased, and flattered. I flipped my newly streaked and layered haircut. “My son-in-law is a hair dresser. He’s a genius. How lucky am I?” “Not lucky. Blessed. It makes you look so young.” “Thank you so much. You’ve made my day.” Laughing again, we waved and she left. It was a pleasant, civil moment on a rainy Florida day. Did I mention that the woman that complimented me so graciously was African American? Or that I’m as white as white can get? I didn’t? I guess it didn’t matter. |
| My son pushed a laptop computer screen with a Facebook picture of a college 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. “Is that guy biting that girl’s thigh?” he asked, and then added. “Hey, 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 and mugging for the camera. See me bite thighs he seemed to be trying to communicate. “Yeah, I know him,” I sighed. “Didn’t you write that guy a letter of . . .” I cut him off. “Yes, yes, I wrote him a letter of recommendation for the college of his choice. Apparently, so he could go to that institution of higher learning and study up on preferable methods of biting 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 while visions of thigh biting danced in my head. “You know; I think it’s like my theory of why people pick their noses in their cars. Glass feels solid, even if it is see-through, so people feel safe and private when they dig around in their nostrils. I always want to yell, ‘We can see you digging for gold!!’ But no one ever hears me. Apparently, glass is also sound proof.” The thigh biting Facebook montage just highlighted, for me, why writing letters of recommendation can be so problematic, because the world has become a leg biting, obscene gesture flipping, booby flashing extravaganza, while I still tend to blush when I fill out those 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 personal knowledge of: thigh, boob, or booty 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 boarder 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 then he poked my heated cheek with his finger. “What’s that,” he asked, “on your face?” I knew immediately, but I refused to admit to my old-fashioned red-faced shame. “Are you blushing?” He examined 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 what amounted to a paper towel. I looked at his various diplomas and acknowledgements and wondered who wrote my gynecologist his letters of recommendation. I’ve got nothing against public confessions 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, or admitting to your most embarrassing self deprecating moments on social networking sites for their humorous uplifting quality. But don’t you dare cry when you, biter boy, finally and at long last realize that WE CAN SEE YOU and, boy of boy, do you look stupid silly biting on a thigh the approximate size and shape of a pork shoulder ham and not in a good way. Linda (Once Bitten, Twice Shy) Zern |
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