My Husband is a Corporate Hooker (A Classic ZippityZern)

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

The Fires of Mount Doom, Saint Cloud

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.

A Fondness for Butter

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 legs 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