Worm Wars

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

That's a Shame!

“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

It's Written All Over You

“You’ve got success written all over you,” my anthropology teacher said as she pulled my final exam from my cramping, clenched, nerveless fingers. I keep thinking I’ll get a t-shirt with my anthropology teacher’s last words to me on it.

I love college. Nobody complains when you use hefty pretentious words, and think deep thoughts—out loud and in front of people.

Then I go home and the person with whom I have mixed DNA in the blender of love says, “You gonna fire up that stove any time soon?”

And I say, “I did. Last week. You remember.”

So, I’m going to get another t-shirt that says, “I’m too short to cook,” because I am too short to cook, and my face is way too close to the fire, and I get sparks and grease in my eyes, not to mention all the knives that are involved.

I just wish I had success written all over me, all of the time.

Unfortunately, sometimes I have “Help me! I’m boiling!” written all over me; usually in the middle of the night when I’m sneaking around the house to turn the thermostat down to a temperature approximating permafrost to combat the effects of flashes that are hotter than Mercury.

“Linda, we’ve just chosen you the person most likely to be burned at the stake.” I would rather not discuss the individuals who thought I had this sentiment written all over me. I’ll just call them the grand inquisitors in pointy hats crowd.

Once, in a Tae Kwon Do class, and about the time I was feeling swift, strong, and capable, my body an instrument of confident danger in the face of my enemies—also mean people, the lady behind me tapped me on the shoulder. Randomly, I executed a roundhouse kick at the danger fraught empty air next to her face—sort of.

Eyes narrowing at what she might have mistaken for pointless leg flailing, she said, “I’m not sure if you know this or not but you have a dryer sheet stuck to your back.”

She plucked a dryer sheet from the back of my martial arts uniform and handed it to me. I tucked it into my lovely purple belt and practiced more artful flailing at mean people.

So basically, I had “Hey, dork, you have a dryer sheet on your shoulder!” written all over me. I vetoed the t-shirt.

People in my Zumba class have told me that I should get the “Having the most fun” award, and that’s a t-shirt I’m going to invest in, only it’s going to say, “Getting my money’s worth.” When they say bump, I bump. When they say grind, I grind, and sometimes I throw in a poorly executed martial arts kick for old times sake and to see if my hip socket still rotates that far.

Here’s hoping that whatever’s written all over you is inspiring, noble, grand, and true—most of the time.

Linda (Write On!) Zern

Looking for Love Under the Merge Sign

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

Worser and Worser

“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 a nuclear power plant at the time. 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 now 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