Bonsai Baby

Reagan, our new grand daughter, doesn’t look real. She looks like my daughter and her husband went and bought her at Toys R Us. She is our seventh grandchild.

When our first grand daughter was born my friends asked if being a grandmother had “hit me” yet. It “hit me” the day the first grandbaby came home from the hospital and my husband and I were in bed that night.

I turned to him and said in reverent tones, “Hey, we’re not going to have to get up tonight—not once. Wow, it’s good to be us.”

We embraced, rolled over, and went fast to sleep—until we had to get up to tinkle.

Or as a friend of mine put it, when you get the phone call from the new mom and she says that grandma should come quick and get this crazy kid or (fill in the blank) and then you, grandmother supreme, swoop in and with your wisdom, experience, and superior night’s sleep save the day. It’s grand to be us.

It’s tough being the grandparent too, because you have to wave goodbye as your perfect, fresh, doll-like, grand child is driven home by its parents, two people that you love beyond adjectives, recognizing that the only living thing the two of them have ever been responsible for was a Bonsai tree. They killed it. They had a palm tree, but it got infested with some kind of leaf hopping spider. They never owned a dog.

So you worry a bit and you catch yourself yelling bits of advice as they drive away. “Don’t over water the baby and check her for spiders.”

To be fair, I’ve had moments of “over watering the baby.”

Like the time my oldest son, Aric, retreated to his bedroom, locked his door, and failed to emerge for an entire two week period during the troubled teen years. I finally identified myself, slid my badge under the door, and then kicked the door in. Having to get the door jam fixed was annoying and not my finest moment, but I didn’t know you could jimmy the door off its hinges with a butter knife back then.

SSG Aric Zern later called me to apologize for being a teenage butt-head; he was teaching new soldiers how to throw hand grenades—into a volcano at the time, some of the recruits may have been butt-heads.

Or the time I wore Adam’s baseball cup around my neck like the Hope diamond. When Adam forgot his baseball cup for the sixty-second time and I had to make the thirty-minute trip back home—again, I took drastic over watering the Bonsai plant steps. I wrestled the cup from behind the dresser, strung the cup on a shoestring, wrote THIS IS ADAM’S CUP on the front with permanent marker, and wore it to the ball field. A few thought me harsh.

Perhaps. Then again Adam never forgot his baseball cup again and is planning to be a lawyer, probably to sue me.

Of course, who can forget the time I spanked Maren for dancing naked with a tube of Chapstick tucked between her butt cheeks. She was four and we had discussed naked Chapstick dancing and how much it upset her siblings—her parents, and society in general. I’m not sure if it’s a spanking offense, but it seemed right at the time.

Maren and her husband just brought baby Reagan, the living doll, home from the hospital. I hope Maren hides the Chapstick.

Then there was the time that Heather (who had been waiting breathlessly for her breasts to grow for about six years) came careening down the stairs yelling, “Mom, Mom, they’ve come. My boobs are here.” And I . . . laughed. LAUGHED! Outloud! I said, “No honey, you’re just cold.” Is it any wonder she over watered her Bonsai tree?

Heather and Phillip have one lovely daughter and three wild and wooly boys and don’t have time to kill Bonsai trees anymore.

So much time, so many mistakes to make, but one of the nicest things about being a mother who has achieved grand status is knowing that it will all work out. Kids are resilient. Parents figure it out, and our Father in Heaven allows for a pretty generous learning curve for most of this stuff we call life.

Linda (Seven Up) Zern

Double Bubble Trouble

In honor of our upcoming thirty-second wedding anniversary I would like to hie back to a simpler time, a time when my husband and I realized we were outnumbered by the children, and we were forced to institute the following rule: the first one to run away had to take the crazy kids—all the crazy, gum chomping, kids. Good times.

When Sherwood and I were young we produced a lot of little kids, a lot of grubby, grimy little kids, who because of their love affair with dirt and grime required a ton of hosing off—also bathing. When these little kids took baths they sometimes chewed huge wads of bubble gum. I didn’t mind it kept them quiet. (For a while they tried to bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with them into the tub, but I put the hoodoo on that right away.)

In the early days and even though we had a lot of filthy children, we had only one bathroom. It had one bathtub. One fine evening, Sherwood decided to take a bath in our one and only bathtub, the very same tub our children had used earlier that evening.

From the bathroom I heard the haunting boom of my husband’s voice.

“Linda, get in here.” His voice was thick with some emotion I found hard to identify. It was repugnance.

Naked and dripping, he stood leaning against the sink, his arms braced against the porcelain, bent slightly forward at the waist. He was not smiling or winking.

“Look at this.” He pointed to his hairy damp butt. He added, “Is that what I think it is?”

Me, I’m a funny girl, I asked, “Is this a test of some kind?” I did not look.

“No, I mean it. Look at my butt.”

Unconvinced and without sympathy I refused.

“I’m not looking at your butt. You can’t make me.”

He pointed harder at his backside, completely devoid of any spirit of good-natured high jinx. There was more back and forth, denial and insistence and such, but I’ll spare you. I finally realized that this might be a serious situation causing real distress for my husband because he’d been standing there leaning against the sink, naked and pointing at himself for, well, longer than was good for either one of us.

I bent down. I looked.

Sure enough, there it was, a wad of Double Bubble chewing gum the size of a hamster’s head nestled in . . . ummm. . . well, just nestled.

I said, “Oops.”

He said, “Get it off.”

I asked, “How?”

It was a good question. I believe I missed the chapter in Home Economics dealing with “butt hair gum removal.”

I’d heard a rumor once—something club soda—stains or something, but I didn’t think club soda was going to apply in this case. I knew you could use ice to freeze gum and then chip it off of stuff, but chipping seemed the wrong sort of action to take. Pulling was right out. Shaving/cutting seemed promising, but it was going to be close work.

I can remember hoping that my hand was going to be steady enough, what with the laughing and all.

The real problem is that there just isn’t any kind of hotline for this. I blame the government.

Let me just report that the operation was a success, and I employed a combination of techniques.

To the children and now grand children I would like to say, “Let this be a lesson to you. Never chew gum in the bathtub. Chewing gum in the bathtub can make your fathers have to have their butts shaved. There are reasons for family rules. Rules are our friends, and YaYa doesn’t make this stuff up. She has experience. She’s lived.”

Linda (Steady Now) Zern

Rules for the Rest of Us

“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 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

Road Kill, Ahoy

At first we blamed the smell on our neighbor; it was a chicken pucky, burning bird feathers, vulture spit combo kind of smell. It was bad. Mr. Medina’s funny farm and goat emporium next door is always high on the list of usual odor producing suspects.

Then we blamed the giant, pulsating, black muck wetlands (also known as a bog) out in the back of our property but then it quit raining and that dried up.

Another possibility for the noxious fumes presented itself in the form of our other neighbor’s temporary, quite possibly illegal attempt at creating a personal landfill. We live in the county and not in the city limits; the rules are different out here—a lot of people collect giant piles of rubble for no apparent reason.

However, when standing on our own back porch the smell of rotten eggs seemed so concentrated, so pungent we were forced to form yet another working theory for the nasty smell.

“It’s the propane tank. It’s leaking.” Sherwood, the man and husband, sounded so sure, so crime scene investigator confident, I had to agree.

“I’ll put it out in the yard so it doesn’t kill us.”

The propane tank came to rest in the flower garden next to the caladiums. We were saved, except that we weren’t.

Something still stank.

Sooner or later truth rears its ugly head or in this case its stinking tail, and the facts are as follows; our home is surrounded by opossum holes (holes full of opossums): one under the bridge, one under the hedge, one under the back porch, and one under the bush next to the backdoor. We are surrounded.

Opossums live in these holes. Opossums are nocturnal. Opossums, when not hanging from their tails from tree limbs in a charming “mother nature sure is cute” fashion, opossums wander about at night getting themselves murdered. Then they stagger back to their holes, crawl in, die, and then stink in a leaking propane, goat burning, bog festering, landfill rotting kind of way.

The good news is opossums live in holes, eliminating the need to dig holes when they die, unless they decide to die under the chicken coop, and then all bets are off.

The week of the opossum kill, a good friend of mine wrote on a social networking site about her wildly romantic encounter in a NYC subway station (similar to opossum holes but larger) and how the man who bumped into her was gorgeous, with an English accent, wore cuff links, and had a business card—no foul odors were mentioned.

In the meantime, I was throwing dirt on a maggot ridden rotting opossum carcass.

Shaking my boney fist at the Heavens, I snarled, “Great, I’ve been reduced to burying road kill! And still working for free, come to think of it, everything I’ve ever done my whole life, I’ve done for free. I’m like freak’en Ghandi.” I added this last bit under my breath, to no one who cared, under an indifferent sky—alone.

The bad news is there are three more opossums out there waiting to become road kill and not one of them wears cuff links.

Linda (Shovel Ready) Zern

Under the Ellipsis

When I was a girl—love but mostly S-E-X—remained hidden beneath an ellipsis of ink. The hero swooped to take the girl in his arms, she forgot to remember to struggle, long enough to stay, and then . . . dot, dot, dot . . . It was

delicious, tantalizing punctuation—marking dog-eared pages, full of anticipation and imagination.

And now—not so much.

In today’s world romance isn’t for the faint of heart or subtle of gesture; the girls have no clothes on, and the boys don’t wear gloves, which is too bad because once upon a time (according to Jane Austen) when a man touched your naked hand with his naked hand you were engaged. I know it’s true. I watch a lot of Masterpiece Theater.

I’m happy to report that at our cave . . . oops, sorry . . . I mean house, at our house, romance is still something of a mystery, surrounded by subtleties, covered with the gentle breeze of confusion, wrapped up in code words.

Smiling, I walked into my husband’s office recently, only to be greeted with the following invitation (quite possibly threat, the jury is still out.)

Without looking at me, he said, “Careful or I’ll take you over there on that tofu and . . .”

Confused and a little alarmed I scanned our office and saw stuffed bookshelves, filing cabinets, computer junk, and pillows lining a . . .

“Are you trying to say futon? You’ll take me over there on the futon and . . .Because, I can’t begin to describe to you how disturbed I am by the idea of you doing unspeakable things to my person on tofu. Maybe you’re having word seizures or . . .”

“I’m not having Caesars or . . .”

“Not Caesars, I said . . .”

At this point in the exchange, he removed one glove and stretched out a naked hand towards my person and in the general direction of the futon. I ran and then . . .

Sometimes in dreams I imagine long fingers of mist rolling across the moors behind the swamp in our backyard—out past the horse trailer with the busted tail light—while the moon drifts across a jaundiced sky, and my heart thumps loudly in the silent chambers of my heart, as I hide under the long folding couch resembling a bent bed; into the cloying depths of my dreaming night I can often hear Lord Sherwood hissing, “Let’s get it on.”

Hey, there’s a reason I wear my hair exceedingly short—the better not to be dragged off to some misnamed lair resembling a cave, but that’s romance for you in this modern day and time.

One minute you’re a lady wearing gloves and the next minute he’s got you on tofu and . . . dot, dot, dot . . .

Linda (Lady Lovelorn) Zern