QUICKIES: Postings that are short and sweet!

A stray cat decided our chicken coop was the right spot for her two newborn kittens. So far, she does mommy cat things, and the chickens do chicken things, and I haven't seen or heard a rat since she moved in. It's WIN-WIN-WIN!!

Halfway to Techno Dead

Last night in my English Literature course, the girl next to me pulled one of those amazing I-gadgets out of her book bag. She began to tap away on her high tech marvel while simultaneously checking in on Kim Kardasian’s Twitter update and downloading a sales flyer for knock-off designer shoes.   

I looked down at my workspace. Out of my ten-year old book bag, I had pulled a clipboard with a legal pad and an assortment of pens, highlighters, and a Sharpie marker (I love them.). I might as well have pulled out a dried piece of animal hide and an inkpot. I stacked my textbooks in a pleasing configuration while simultaneously counting my writing instruments.

Several young folks flipped open their amazing computering machines while simultaneously looking for an outlet. Power cords began to creep and crawl over every available surface seeking the mother ship of power sources. A scuffle broke out over the last plug. A couple of the students posted an update on Facebook about the viscous lack of cheap, available electricity created by magic solar panels, attached to windmills, powered by Keebler elves.

On the way to school, I was informed via my car radio that studies show that Facebook users over fifty years old have a harder time adjusting to changes on the social networking site than the average two-year old. I scoffed. Then I scorned. Then I yelled at the radio.

“It isn’t that I can’t figure out the new face of Facebook. It’s that I don’t want to. I don’t have time to figure out the new Facebook, because I’m halfway to dead. My time is precious.” I balled up my fist and shook it at the invisible radio waves floating around in space.

In the car next to me, a teenager type flipped open a cell phone with her chin, punched in a series of numbers with her nose, and then weaved into my lane of traffic.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Go kill someone your own age. I’m ALREADY halfway to dead.”

Later, in my Major English Writings night class our professor informed us that in her day classes it was becoming harder and harder for her to find students who had heard of the book of Genesis in the Bible, let alone anyone who had read it. For a minute I felt smug. Then I felt sad. Then I wondered if for all our technological advances we are becoming a people without a culture or a past or an identity.

And here I sit halfway to dead and me without an I-phone or I-pod or I-chip in my brain . . . and my husband stole my Kindle. All I have is fifty years worth of everything I’ve read, experienced, lived, learned, touched, done, and loved—way too much to Tweet.

Linda (No-Tweet) Zern 

Hubris (In the Third Person--Mostly)

The woman, all one hundred and six pounds of her, balled up her lumpy-knuckled fist, raised it to the sky and declared, “I’m so sick of making ‘A’s. They don’t mean anything. If I make one more ‘A’ I’ll scream.”

Sherwood—oops, I mean, her husband. Her husband (who just so happened to be named Sherwood like my husband) looked at his wife and grunted. He was used to her dramatic gestures of cosmic defiance.

“You know God has ears and can hear you, right?” he said.

I didn’t care, and the woman didn’t care either.

Heaven’s angels, well known for their writing of the Book of Life and use of sticky notes, wrote down the goofy declaration word for word. Served me right. Served that lumpy-knuckled woman right too. Heaven, always on the lookout for kooky talk and hubris, got right on the case.

Not two weeks later in Major English Writings I, a college class of her own choosing, the woman with the big knuckles and bigger mouth took my first quiz for me. I wish.

 

Well, whoever took the quiz, she stunk at it, and the woman (who could be me) made her first ‘C’ since I was a sophomore in high school. And I made that ‘C’ in Algebra, which is a subject that should be counted as a foreign language. The only way I can see Algebra being helpful in my day-to-day life is if I, or that other woman, got teleported back to ancient Egypt, the Nile flooded, and my back yard disappeared under a ton of mud and hippopotami. Then I might use Algebra to calculate where the chain link fence used to be.

So I—strike that—she. So she got a ‘C.’

Her children were shocked.

Her husband grunted.

Her dogs demanded to go on a walk.

Heaven smiled and a couple of angels high-fived.

And the Canterbury Tales written in Middle English continued to give her a big, fat headache and make my eyes cross.

So let this be a lesson to us all; if you’re going to shoot your big mouth off, make sure you whisper and that other person, who could be you, does too.

Linda (Just Kidding) Zern

        

Caution! Lumpy Land Bumps

Welcome Home 101st Airborne -
 Currahee Nation

Driving our son’s 2004 Jeep Wrangler Sport to Tennessee for his 101^st Airborne homecoming was like traveling to the space station in a zip lock sandwich bag, shot out of a potato gun. There was a lot of flapping.

Don’t get me wrong; I love that Jeep. I looked absolutely adorable driving that little red Jeep around Saint Cloud blow-drying my hair. My hair never looked better then after driving to the gym with my top off; I mean the Jeep’s top, not my personal top. If I’d been driving around with my personal top off, well then I would have been arrested for “indecent stringiness,” that according to one of my daughters who walked in on me taking a bath.

She was happy to tell me, “Geez, Mom, the only word I can think of is stringy.”

I wanted to buy that Jeep from Aric; I looked so adorable in it, but because of inspired governmental programs such as Cash for Clunkers, his Jeep is now worth approximately $200,000. So back it went.

It was a loud trip, fun—but loud; what with all the flapping plastic and the sound of tires exploding on highway 24-West. A semi in front of us had a tire blow and a mini-van next to us had a tire dissolve into strips of rubber road trash. And then we hit the lumpy land formations called mountains. Okay, maybe they were hills, but for a native Floridian any pointy dirt where the rain runs off and doesn’t form frog swamps is a mountain. I hate mountains.

My husband, also a native Floridian, seems indifferent to mountains. He drives the same speed, once the cruise control is set, regardless of the changing terrain, car trunks we get close enough to reach out and touch, or number of tire bits flying past the windshield.

At the sight of the sign reading “Caution – 5% Grade” my heart started beating harder, while my hands convulsed around available, exposed metal Jeep parts.

“Honey, you know that I hate stupid mountains. Slow down.” My stomach tried to crawl up through my throat.

“My Dad used to tell us kids that there was nothing on the other side of those stupid mountains in West Virginia when we drove straight up the stupid side, and you couldn’t see anything but stupid sky. Stupid mountains. Stupid vacation.”

My fingers started to cramp and sweat around the noise of snapping knuckle bones, while the sound of my childish screaming banged around in my memory.

“My Dad could be such a jackass.”

The highway swirled and curled. My ears popped. I made note of the guardrail in front of us that resembled twisted tornado rubble.

“Hey? You see that metal railing that is all smooshed down right there?” I would have pointed but my fingers had fused with the atoms in the sissy bar.

“Yeah.” He cruised on, speed unchanged.

“Yeah! It’s smooshed down because some jackass went through it. Slow down! Or one of us is going to die and it ain’t going to be me.”

It was a loud trip, fun—but loud, what with the flapping, snapping, exploding, and screaming.

Linda (String Cheese) Zern

Staff Sergeant Aric S. Zern and Sherwood K. Zern
Fort Campbell Kentucky