Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Death By Spit

It’s possible to choke to death. It’s possible to choke to death—on your own spit. It’s possible to choke to death on your own spit—at Target. I know. I almost did.

Right there in front of Brian, the checkout boy, who, by the way, was the only person even mildly concerned when I clutched my throat and made the international sign for, “Help! I’m choking to death on my own spit. Get help!”

Heather and Maren, my adult daughters, barely looked up from the magazine rack. Only Brian cared. I think he was worried he was going to have to clean up my spittle-racked remains, should I die right there in front of his register.

My fatal error was in trying to talk, breathe, swallow, and locate my debit card all at the same time. Cannot be done. But that’s me, performing without a net as usual.

As I struggled for life giving oxygen, acid tears melting the makeup from my “T” zone, Maren read a People magazine expressing concern over Gywneth’s alien looking hair. Heather fretted over whether or not her credit card was going to work in the new machines at Target.

I clawed at my neck wildly, flinging my head back and forth and side to side in a primal and elemental need to breathe.

“Boy, that marriage will never last,” Maren said, turning the slick magazine pages.

“Boy, I sure hope this card works this time. It never works in these new machines,” Heather said, digging through the black hole of a purse, hanging on her arm.

When I started smacking my head against the debit card machine, eyes bulging from their sockets, Heather FINALLY glanced up.

“Mom, you’re not doing it right. That’s not how you make the international signal for choking.”

“She’s right. You’re supposed to grab your throat with one hand and open and close your other hand in the air. Like this.”  Maren demonstrated.

“That’s it. That’s how you do it,” Heather said, pointing to her sister. “Hey, what do you think of this shade of lip-gloss? It isn’t the color I wanted; they’re out of all the good colors.  What is this Russia?” They began to discuss the deplorable state of lip-gloss availability. 

My left nostril collapsed.   

“Are you okay, lady?” Brian asked.

“Gurgle, gurgle, gick, nawn.” It was the best I could do at the time.

When I finally managed to clear my own airway by performing the Heimlich maneuver on myself by pulling the handle of the shopping cart sharply into my own sternum, I confronted my daughters.

“Would Brian have had to give me a tracheotomy with an ink pen and a box cutter to get your attention?”

The line of shoppers behind me broke into a rousing cheer.

One nice lady said, “Don’t worry. Someday they’ll have children of their own who will stand idly by while they choke to death on their own spit at Target.”

I raised my handbag in a triumphant, if weak, salute. The line cheered again. Brian grinned.

I paid for my lip-gloss and body shaper, congratulating myself on finding the perfect color of lip coverage—also for surviving—to shop another day. Heather’s card worked in the new machines. Maren did not purchase the magazine.

Linda (Mouth Breather) Zern



 


Tuesday, February 15, 2011

A Reminder Potato Race

In a fit of desperation, I commanded my children to place a potato in the middle of my bed when someone called on the phone and in a burst of wild enthusiastic optimism tried to leave me a message, via the children. I even had a demonstration, showing them how to select, place, and display the reminder potato properly. It worked, until it didn’t.

It worked when I walked into my room and seeing a potato in the middle of my bed, I would yell, “Hey, who called? What did they want? Who took the call? Who put the potato on the bed? What happened just before you put the potato on the bed? Think hard. Are you thinking?”

After said child stared at the potato for a while and got over the perplexed phase (indicated by the lowering of the eyebrows, narrowing of the eyes, and biting of the lips) the light of awareness would flush their cheeks and they’d say, “Oh . . . ummm . . . ya’ some man called about something. He sounded mad or rad. I can’t remember.”

Okay, the potato program had its flaws.

For as long as mankind has dug tubers out of the muck, we have struggled over how to get our messages in a timely way.

In the beginning, human beings did not pass on messages like “Hey gang, I just found some potatoes over here in this muck.” Instead, beginning humans grabbed the potatoes, disappeared behind a clump of bushes, and ate thme as fast of they could coordinate their jaw muscles.

Soon, the rules of civilization dictated that it was important to let the rest of the tribe know a vicious tribe of potato thieves was on its way to sack and burn—well, everything, except the potatoes, of course.

Then the messages became clear but annoying like “Let them eat potatoes, made into potato cakes.” We hated those messages so much we cut off people’s heads over it.

America became the land of innovative message delivery systems, starting with lanterns swinging from church towers (one potato, two potato, three potato—Brits knocking on the door.)

We’ve kept on improving message delivery systems to the point that at any given moment you can now receive more messages than you can either stand or interpret while waiting in the check-out line, speaking to living humans, or sitting on the toilet. (LMAOOTF, mom will you make OMG ‘tato surprise? K-Dot. M.)
I still don’t know who called or why.

The Zern family potato program did not work when the reminder potato would roll off and then under the bed, and start to grow—in the dark, on carpet, like a giant potato pimple. When I discovered one too many reminder potatoes under my bed doing their darnedest to become potato bushes, I knew the program had failed.

Pulling one potato into the light, its trailing roots almost translucent, I called out, “Hey, who called?  What did they want? Who took the call?”

Sorry I’m not available right now, I’m spring cleaning—under my bed. Leave a message.
Linda (Sweet Potato Pie) Zern

Serious Alert (Big Words, Deep Thoughts, Possible Poetry) To Write the Hard Stories

Twisting in her seat, Beverly faced us. She looked at the class, but she wasn’t seeing any anyone.  She had that foggy look people get when they’ve flown away into old memories only they can see. I could tell she had gone away, remembering the day of her mother’s funeral. When she spoke, she sounded clinical and matter-of-fact.

“I don’t know what I expected. I thought maybe it would be like cigarette ash, but it wasn’t, and the urn was really heavy. I had to carry it against my chest, so I wouldn’t drop it.”

She paused and tipped her head. Maybe it was so she could see herself better as she remembered, as she remembered carrying her mother’s funeral urn or better to hear the water lapping against the wooden posts of the dock at the lake.

“It wasn’t like cigarette ash at all. I mean her ashes were coarse and kind of gritty, and there was stuff in it.”

I heard a few of the other students gasp as the question rolled through the class like a shock wave. What?  What was in your mother’s ashes? But they were too polite, too civilized to ask out-loud.  For all their pierced and tattooed bravado, they were just kids at the beginning of living. And this was, after all, a story about the mechanics of death at the end of living.

Beverly blinked and her eyes focused. She came back to us in that moment as if she sensed our curiosity and chagrin. She answered our unspoken question.

“Bits of bone and teeth, my mother’s partial, there were actual slivers of bone.”

The Brittany or Jessica or Ella girl that sat next to me pulled her long bare legs up into her body like a stork folding up for a nap. She hunched her shoulders. Several of the boys dropped their eyes to their notebooks or played at checking their watches—uncomfortable and squirmy. Young.

“You picture your mom’s memorial service as something out of movie, with music and touching slow motion moments.” She thought a minute and gave us a lopsided smile. “You sure don’t expect to get your mother’s ashes blown back in your face when you try to grant her last wish, you know? But the wind was blowing against us and when I went to pour her ashes into the water, the wind kicked up, like it does sometimes, like a mini-tornado. And bam, a cloud of my mother’s cremated ashes blew right back into our faces. I had them in my teeth, in my eyes. It stung like crazy.”

In Mr. McGuinnes’ creative writing class, Beverly was like me—one of those student clichés, an older woman with teenagers and enough trouble, real or imagined, to salt-n-pepper her thinning hair. Like me, she had enough unfamiliar lines on her face to make her wonder about the stranger she was becoming, about the girl who was disappearing.

To be fair, Beverly’s troubles were more immediate than mine. Her clichéd story had more chapters. Her desperation was a little more dire. Divorced and abandoned, she found herself back at school, trying to fill a schedule and a life fundamentally changed.

While I was trying to find a way out of the land of cliché and foregone conclusion, to have people see me as more than a cardboard cutout. To be fair, maybe I was trying to see myself as more than a cardboard cutout.

They say a college degree can do that for you.  So, Beverly and I had landed in creative writing class to brainstorm our lives, trying to turn our wrinkles and middle-aged gray into poetry.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Beverly said. “But it was terrible. And I wanted it to be so right . . . even though my mother is . . .” she stumbled over the change in verb tense that death requires, present becoming past. “I mean was, my mother was, or had
been . . .”

A drunk. A slovenly selfish drunk. It was a cold reality; a fact she had shared with the class before.

As the oldest daughter, it had fallen to Beverly to clean up, mop up, and sop up, after a mother who had lived her life never washing a dish until they were all dirty—every last dish—the everyday dishes, the stoneware, the yard sale finds, the heirloom china, the paper plates, the empty butter tubs and cottage cheese containers. All of them crusted with food and heaped in the sink until they toppled onto the kitchen counters or smashed onto the floor. Beverly would go and wash dishes for hours so that her mother could use them up all over again—her own version of Prometheus’s hell.

When her mother died, it fell to Beverly to wash all those dishes one last time and to try to bury her mother with some kind of respectful ceremony.

When Beverly told the story of her mother’s ashes in class, she made us see it. She brought an unruly wind into our classroom, blowing human ashes into our eyes.  She made us feel the burn of blinded eyes. She described how slowly human ash disappears, how it floats for the longest time. We could feel that unruly wind and taste the dust of death in our mouths.

The story she related was mesmerizing and messy, and before she was done, she cried—gently, almost under her breath. Her crying made a few of the students uncomfortable. I heard the nervous titter of embarrassment and tension. 

I recognized Beverly’s tears, however. I understood her story and it’s strange mix of love and hate. She was describing a dance I had grown up dancing. It was a fearful dance macabre that I knew all the steps to, where a child must perform all the parts—daughter, parent, enemy, but always child. For me it was a father, who expected tributes after spending his life smashing ketchup bottles against kitchen walls. I knew what it was to be chained to a rock and lose bits of myself—endlessly.

“There’s a poem in there, Beverly. You heard it. Right? The poem you should write; it’s all there,” I said. “And more than that, your heart was in what you told us.”

She nodded, seeming to agree and made a few notes on a piece of paper.

“Write your heart; I can’t wait to see it.”

Then she wrote a poem to fulfill an assignment.

It was a lovely generic ode, to some pastel mother who had never existed. There was nothing of what Beverly had shared in class, nothing of what had made us squirm in our seats, drop our flushed faces, or swallow hot tears. It was as if the women who had spoken of bones and teeth had disappeared, along with the mother who had burned holes in the arms of her lazy boy when she fell into a drunken stupor, cigarette still smoldering between stained fingers.

The story we had heard was gone as well, a victim of self-censorship and maybe wishful dreaming. The class clapped when she finished reading her poem. There were polite critiques. A few of the students rolled their eyes surreptitiously. No one cried, and no one felt uncomfortable.

Disappointed, I thought I understood Beverly’s wishful dreaming. Good daughters don’t shine lights on the burn marks, good daughters wash the dishes and pretend they are always stacked neatly—just so.  Good daughters make all A’s on every report card. They do not complain that ashes in their eyes, sting.

Disappointed and a little bit sad, I wanted to believe I understood, and eventually, I wrote a poem about the poem that Beverly could not write. Hoping, when my turn came to tell the hard stories of my own life, I would be able to find the poetry beneath the ashes.




   
Bones and Teeth

When the poet scattered her mother across the unsettled lake,
she expected cigarette ash—a light clean burning. We expected a poem
cobbled out of  rough wood—the salt and burn of splintered tears.
Instead, she gave us a poem about golden glass under a sun-kissed sky,
a hallmark poem, with words that floated just on the surface of the wet.

In class, when she talked it, she spoke of bones and teeth,
and finding mother’s partial in the dust of cremation,
how hard it was to throw mother away—into the wind.
She made us see, the way ash clung to clothes and hands,
how the wind brought mother back into nostrils and eyes—
how slowly mother disappeared beneath churning water
on a day of wind and nagging shadows.

When the poet wrote it, there was the softness of nothing,
pretty words on pastel paper, but when the poet spoke it,
she got down to the bones and teeth and tears, down to the bottom
of the lake where the muck congeals and the fish eggs wait.
The poet could not hear that in the telling was the poem,
and in the writing was the child—made to throw her mother
away beneath heaven’s seemingly indifferent sky.    

 



       



      

  

    

Saturday, February 12, 2011

This is how we roll in the county of Osceola before fair day.

All renaissance women can fight with swords, ride horses, dance the polka, and wash chickens.


Fancy the Silver Laced Wyandotte chicken getting pretty for the Osceola County fair.

Some chickens wind up as nuggets and some chickens get bubble baths.

Monday, February 7, 2011

College Age – Follow the Leader

College Age:  A journal entry (required) for a group project (required) that I was part of in my twenty-fourth year of community college (voluntary).



Follow the Leader

It had to happen. It was a matter of time and a cliche. Somebody was going to crack. Wednesday someone did. Suzy Q. Student made a suggestion during a meeting of the student editorial board, got shot down, lost her temper, resigned her position, turned her laptop on, and started to shop for tongue studs online.  

            I believe that all group work follows a predictable algebraic equation which can be depicted in this way:  72xy + (- 8/3pdq) (666xyz666) – whothehellcares X upyours = TWO.

            Another way that this paradigm can be understood is in the following outline: 

 1) Let’s Re-Write the Dictionary—Backwards (Irrational Optimism Phase)
 2) But I Wanted to be Queen (The Power Struggle Phase)
 3) The Horse Latitudes (The Dead Horse Corpse Phase)
 4) ACTUAL WORK (Where two people will do all the work, three people will watch the work being done, one person will pout, and one group member will disappear but their photograph will be posted on the wall of the missing at Walmart)
5) Didn’t I tell you that everything would be pretty close to okay phase?

            In my opinion, the editorial staff of this year’s literary magazine “The Alchemist” has reached the horse latitudes of the group work experience. In the early days of exploration, the horse latitudes were those areas of the great oceans, near the equator, known for killing heat and little to no wind. When the horses, brought by the early Spanish explorers to help them loot entire continents, died because of the oppressive heat the animal’s bodies were dumped overboard into the ocean for chum—thus the horse latitudes.

 I believe we have reached the horse latitudes phase of group work. Our destination is still in front of us, but we don’t seem to be getting there fast enough and we’re hot and sweaty. It is at this point that someone always breaks and may feel dumped cruelly over the ship’s railing into an uncaring ocean.

In fact, considering the challenges the editorial board has faced this semester (health concerns and family challenges) we are still on schedule. We’re in the doldrums; that’s all.

            My contributions to the group project consist of the actual heaving of the dead horse corpses over the side of the ship and useless suggestions that no one listens to.

             My plan for accomplishing my portion of “the group project” include: editing the creative non-fiction selections for Monday over the weekend; purchasing a sketch pad for the mock-up of the magazine; working on additional artwork; washing Ploodle (my wee dog); not cooking anything for anyone; working on several novels (all at the same time); writing a sample mission statement; going off on verbal tangents and rants while scrubbing toilets; spreading mulch; wishing I had an extra set of eyes that could read twenty-four hours a day even when I’m asleep; and studying for another yucky algebra test.

            And that’s why I deserve an ‘A.’

Linda (Heave-Ho) Zern

         

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Quickies (Postings That Are Short and Sweet):

Conner stared at me for a little while and then observed, "Poppy is very tall (he used his arms to show me how tall), but you are like a very little troll (he used his thumb and finger to show me how small)."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

What An Animal!



Once, when we lost our TV remote control our grown son opted to sit two feet away from the television, so that he could change the television channels with his feet. Is this an argument for or against evolution?

I can see it both ways.

“What are you doing?” I asked, watching oldest son deftly scroll through a hundred cable channels with his big toe.

“Seeing what’s on.”

“Ever think of standing up and walking to the television?”

“Why? I have toes.”

Channel-changing-feet-skills might be considered a sign that in some distant past our kind surfed the primordial foliage using, for the most part, toes. Or, it could be taken as evidence that no one and nothing evolves—ever—not in a million, cabillion years.

According to the essays I’m reading in college, we are all animals with toes—made up of evolutionary itches, created by quixotic chemicals, prompted by migratory messages, driven by seasonal tidal fluxes and the nagging need to keep our DNA from drying out. We are animals with feet and toes and evolutionary baggage, just like sea cucumbers. Oh wait, that doesn’t quite work.

Of course, we could all be vampires, but that is another theory entirely.

I want to go on record.  I don’t want to be an animal. I know about animals. I live on a farm. I grew up in the country. I’ve seen things. Some animals will hump your leg, peck your head, sniff your crotch and hump other animals (not necessarily of their own species) all before you’ve walked halfway to the mailbox—and in front of company.

When our Chow puppy discovered he was a boy, he became a one-dog hump fest. It was horrifying. Teddy would lurk under the porch, waiting to “sandbag” the first leg he spotted.
Horrifying.

Especially, when our five-year old daughter started opening the back door, screaming, “Teddy, don’t have sex with me,” before she went out to play.

We once had a turkey that was so mean it chased me through a sandspur patch trying to peck my face off. I’m short. Turkeys are big. I could have wound up with no eyes, and I was barefoot.

I’ve seen vultures and bald eagles fist fighting over raccoon road kill, arguing over who was going to get to wear the coon skin cap, no doubt.

Rabbits are fluffy, adorable cannibals.

My parents owned two roosters that had worked out a tag team system for rape. One rooster would grab a hen by the neck, push her head down in the dirt, and wait while his buddy went about ensuring survival of the fittest. Then they’d switch.

Our next-door neighbor owned two huge white mules—a matched set. They were murderers. When the goats wandered up to nibble out of their feed box, the mules would chomp them with their gigantic yellow mule teeth, give them a good hard shake, snap their necks, and then toss those goats over their shoulder as a warning to the others.

The same neighbor owned a donkey I named Porno Pete.  Pete considered himself quite the well-endowed catch and fancied himself in love with my mares. Porno Pete spent his days standing at the fence line displaying his . . . boy stuff. I had to forbid the grandchildren to look at him. I had to forbid myself from looking at him.

I once saw a baby lamb pull a cross bow out and shoot a vampire. Okay, maybe not.

But hermit crabs, they’re the worst.

Don’t misunderstand. I love animals. I have my vet on speed dial. I am dedicated to the fantasy that my dog could drive my truck if she had opposable thumbs, but I don’t want to be her.

My dog licks herself. She eats . . . unspeakable things. She has an irrational fear of dump trucks, and she lets our Yorkshire terrier dominate her backside on a regular basis.

What are we? A bunch of five-toed channel changing hermit crabs scrabbling around looking for the perfect remote control.

Where were you raised?  A nest made of dryer lint? In a den, dug under the garden gnome?  Snap out of it and get your feet off the furniture. Evolution does not give you the excuse to act like a primordial slug with bad posture.

Of course, it’s a divine design, set in motion by—as the Greeks like to call him—the “unmoved mover.” The Greeks reasoned if all the universe is moving then someone had to be standing in a firm place to set it all in motion, probably while sitting in a big easy chair and by using his big toe to poke at the stars.

Linda (Opposable Thumbs) Zern 

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