Face the Tale

Family Fairy Tales

Who knows how these stories begin? 

Someone mumbles something under his or her breath at Sunday dinner. Someone else gets bored and kicks the first someone under the table. There is mocking. Insults are traded, and before you can ask, “Is there going to be pudding?” a random mumble has become a favorite family fairy tale shrouded in adjectives and dolled up with frilly adverbs.

These are the stories that become part of the collective family experience or as we like to say,  “Raise your hand if you think dad really saw a monkey sitting on a light pole next to Interstate-4.”

At the curve in the exit from the turnpike onto I-4, near the Millennial Mall, close to The Holy Land Experience, my husband swears he saw “something” sitting on top of one of the thirty-foot tall industrial light poles, looking at him.

“Did you see that?”

I remember he sounded breathless and breathy.

“What? That hopeless snarl of urban petroleum fueled congestion snaking through the labyrinth of cement jungle that resembles a concrete purgatory.”

I am a country girl. Cities make me itch.

“No, on top of that light pole. Something sitting, with a face. Like maybe a squirrel. It looked at me.”

I glanced over at the giant light poles lining the road.

“That would be some squirrel.  Are you sure you saw a squirrel? Why would a squirrel shimmy up a pole like that? I mean, what’s up there that a squirrel would want?”

Traffic ground to a halt. We were on I-4, after all. I tried to imagine a squirrel with the kind of ambition required to sit on a pole, watching backed up traffic on the interstate.

My husband seemed unhappy with my interpretation of events.

“I said,” he began,  “‘Like a squirrel.’ It had a face!”

He was starting to sound miffed.

“Babe, squirrels have faces, not big ones but eyes and stuff, sure. Faces absolutely.”

 “Bigger. It was looking at me. It had a face. A big face.”

I squinted at the poles. They still looked really tall and smooth and hard to climb to the top of.

“Maybe it was a monkey,” I offered.  “Monkey’s have faces. And they’d be able to climb up a pole like that.”

“A monkey! From where?  Monkey town?”

Now, I was getting miffed. Then I pointed.

“From over there, those apartments behind the mall. Someone’s monkey got away. Climbed up a pole . . .”

He made a rude noise. I doubled down on my theory.

“And looked at you, with its face. Maybe it flew up there, because it’s a winged monkey.”

 “People in those apartments cannot afford a monkey. Now you’re just making fun. ”

“No, if I said that I thought it was a chupacabra face looking at you from the top of a thirty foot light pole, that would be making fun. And how do you know those people cannot afford a monkey? Maybe they found a monkey. You’re a snob.”

“It had a face and looked at me.”

I made a rude noise.

At Sunday dinner that week, I said, “So, Dad saw a winged monkey with a chupacabra face, sitting on top of one of the light poles next to I-4. Discuss.”

And that’s how a family fairytale begins and grows and takes on a face of its own.

Linda (Plain and Small) Zern

 

Revenge of the Fallen

"No! Not in my desk chair. Out!"

It was a once in a lifetime, dream-come-true cliché—a hunting trip for the men in our family through the wilds of Texas. It was a rugged, manly exercise in the production of testosterone. There were guns. There were animals sporting massive branching horns on their skulls. There were pop tarts. It was man heaven.

Disclaimer: Unlike a bunch of city folks raised on Disney and PBS, we are country people. We know that ducks don’t wear pants, that ‘possums have the most teeth of any mammal on earth, and that given a chance, a Bald Eagle will carry off your pure bred puppy to feed to its chicks—piece by bloody piece. Mother Nature is a b . . . booger. Hunting is what animals do to animals, and if my biology teachers are right, well, then we’re animals. Right?

Sherwood went hunting with Aric and Adam in Texas and shot a white stage (a kind of elk.) Two hundred pounds of meat came in the mail and went into my freezer. Delicious. Frankly, I’d have eaten the hooves if they’d sent those.

The white stag’s mounted head came in a crate, on a semi—that stopped traffic on our street. The trucker, mumbling something about damage to the crate, insisted on cracking open the box.

“Lady, the last time I saw something like that I was at a ski lodge,” he said.

He wasn’t kidding.

Unfortunately, we don’t own a ski lodge, and it’s been a real challenge finding just the right spot to hang, Attila the White Stag.

“Not there. It’ll poke out the children’s eyes.”

“You cannot hang it there. It’ll breathe down my neck during Sunday dinner.”

“And if you hang it over the fireplace we’ll have to tear down the mantle so the horns don’t hit the roof.”

So now it’s on the wall of our bedroom, staring at me. Or it was.

Until yesterday, when Sherwood stumbling around in the dark looking for his pants, bent down and then stood up, smacking Attila the White Stag right off the wall. 

Attila tumbled down off the wall and stabbed Sherwood in the thumb with his enormous horns.

I heard the unmistakable sounds of white stag violence and husband cussing, and jumped up out of a sound sleep screaming, “Oh no! It’s attacking!”

The screaming escalated—mine!

And that’s how Attila the White Stag continues wreaking revenge, beyond the grave.

Linda (Elk Burgers) Zern

   

 

Quickies:  Postings that are Short and Sweet!

The best grandpa in the entire world, maybe the universe.

Our philosophy is to let sleeping boys sleep.  The John Deere Lawn Tractor is worth every penny it uses in expensive foreign oil. The porch swing uses domestically produced energy:  donuts and Diet Coke.

Barefoot and With Child

My first Mother’s Day was a celebration of sleeping baby atop Poop Mountain.

Sherwood worked graveyard shift. He offered to “watch” the napping baby while I went to church. He didn’t mention that he would be napping while watching.

It’s a little reported but true fact that napping babies wake up.  Napping husbands who work the graveyard shift not so much.

Our eight month old woke up. His father did not. Our eight month old, unable to rouse his father, entertained himself by sketching, smearing, wiping, trailing, painting, and possibly ingesting through his ear-holes—poop, his own. I came home from church to a Mother’s Day tribute of poop-encrusted child, napping—once again—on an artful poop mound. The nursery smelled like a scene from the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

I cried.

Three more children quickly followed. They also tended to poop. I cried a couple more times—off and on. They cried.

Then they laughed and brought me wads of flowers ripped from the ground, trailing roots and dirt. I taught them to read the great books of their people, and sacrifice for the good of others, and dance the dance of duty versus personal fulfillment. Mostly, I raised them not so much to kiss me but to kiss their children.

For this, I am accused by my silly, short-sighted, materialistic society to be a do-nothing, stay-at-home mom. I have nine grandchildren and if each of those children have spouses and produce four children . . . well, you do the math.

That first kid, the poop artist, he grew up and went to the Amazon as a warrior. Then he went to Greece, and Spain, and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Texas as another kind of warrior.

This Mother’s Day he sent me a zombie novel, a rifle, and a note:

"To the greatest survivor I have the honor of knowing. In this text lies a story of great adventure. Happy Mother's Day.

From: Your Son--Stay Alert, Stay Alive!

And I earned every word! By the way, I finished a five hundred page zombie novel in three and a half days and harvested a butt load of green beans from my garden, and pressure washed a chicken coop, and reached the twenty-five thousand word mark on a new book and . . . . try to keep up . . . would ya’.

Linda (Barefoot and With Child) Zern

                                             

 

  

We Can Hear What You Mean

In a heavy southern accent, the DMV examiner asked our seventeen-year old son, Adam, if he had ever been convicted of a DUI?

He said, “Yes.”

Adam didn’t drink. Or drive. Or have a license. What he really meant was I’m a little nervous.

Even so, communication is a tricky, tricky business these days. Political correctness, rampant hypocrisy, personal agendas, and the fact that everyone with fingers has a website and is selling something has put a crimp in being able to communicate with any kind of veracity.

Veracity. Crap. What does that mean? Technically, it means “habitual truthfulness.”

Truth? Oh boy, but I’ve heard that truth is a relative term, because I go to college where simple things become nasty and complicated like a knot in the shoelace of a kid’s tennis shoe that has been peed on all day. How is this going to work if we can’t agree on whether or not there is a knot in the shoelace? Or whether or not the smell wafting up from the shoelace is urine when we try to untie the knot with our teeth.

For example: 

A voter may say, “Boy, a fifteen trillion dollar national debt is a lot and feels like a black hole sucking my lungs out through my ears.”

Compared to the administration saying, “What fifteen trillion dollar national debt?” Which means, “Holy snake spit, now what?

How about the concept of civility? Everyone seems to be for it, sort of.

“It’s so important to be civil to and respectful of the **brave funny man on the comedy show when he or his minions have shoved a ***beloved religious icon between the legs of a chubby naked chick and made sport of it. I sure wish those idiot, moron, knuckle-dragging Catholics understood civility.”

In this case the word “civil” or “civility” means agree with me, or I will call you nasty knuckle-dragging names.

Brave and funny are two words whose meaning have become both loosey and goosey. The word brave now means, “taking cheap shots.” For example Jon Stewart is considered “brave” for his inventive placement of a crèche scene, giving it the snappy name of Vagina Manger.  Really?

I think brave would have been taking a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed and propping it between the legs of a chubby naked chick. Of course, New York would burn down and that would be considered “bold.”

Don’t even get me started on the phrases “cutting edge,” “mean-spirited,” or “stupid do-do head.”

When I refuse to let the grandchildren overdose on Otter Pops, I am often called “mean,” as in “you are a mean old YaYa” for not letting us eat enough frozen sugar water to give a whale diabetes.

But I know that what the children are really saying, “It’s so hard learning to be self-disciplined and in--control grownups who can be the boss of ourselves that we could cry and kick and blame the YaYa.”

Truth. Civility. Semantics. It’s a minefield out there.

Linda (Do-Do Head) Zern

**Jon Stewart

***A Christmas nativity scene of the baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

  

**Grist

Man, sometimes these college creative writing classes make me wish I’d been taken hostage by Somali pirates, raped to within an inch of my life, and saved by Seal Team Six.

That would put the razzle in my creative writing dazzle.

Let’s see; what have I got?  Malignant cancer at twenty-six. Blah. Writing about cancer around here is the equivalent of writing yet another drink-drank-drunk tale of giggly good times and party trouble—mostly party trouble. Cancer is so passé.

Crap, I don’t know how to spell passé. Okay, what else?

When I was twelve we lived in the Bahamas in a two-bedroom duplex next to a croupier, and the woods burned down next to our side of the duplex while the Bahamian firemen watched. The croupier didn’t wake up; he worked nights, slept days. My dad worked as a “manager” at the one and only oil refinery on the island; that’s what he said. I think he was a spy.  We lived in bathing suits. That’s probably where I got cancer.

No murders. No mayhem, other than the fire. No vampires. A few mobsters with huge get-away-homes, but they never bugged us. My brother got poison oak. I stepped on a sea urchin.

Next.

I guess I could write about my dad shooting up crap, when I was a kid. He shot that Blue Heron, shot up the barn trying to kill rats, shot my calico kitten in front of me. That’s pretty poignant stuff. Creative writing classes eat that kind of crap up with a spoon, but I’m not sure what the point would be. He was quite the drinker, my dad. Started young, kept it up. Liked to wet the boar’s ball sack down with water and then shock him in the testicles with an electric cattle prod. Good stuff. Gritty. Raw. Honest. Horror and shock and the worst kind of uncertainty.

Am I ready to take all that on? If I am, I’d better hurry, because I’m halfway to dead.

I can write funny. Sure. But I’m no David Sedaris. Not gay. Chose DNA over New York City. Never did dope and I only use alcohol to clean my glasses. I’ve had to wipe my butt with a plane ticket before and cut bubble gum out of my husband’s bottom hair but nothing hip or cool or stoned. You can tell I’m not hip, because I used the word bottom instead of ass when talking about my husband’s ass.

So, what else?

Let’s see. I’ve only had one sexual partner in my entire life, and sure, he’s Super Man and adores me and we still can’t get enough of each other even after thirty plus years but the cutting edge of sexuality—hardly. No skeletons, no closets, although we have done  “it” in a closet and a hayloft and . . .

Okay, so I watched the Apollo rockets rumble towards the moon from my front yard in Titusville with all the other kids whose dads worked at the Cape, and I went to segregated schools in the South, once upon a bad old time. And I know a Polish woman with a tattoo she got when she was a small girl—at Auschwitz. I wrote a short story about her but the community college kids thought the story was about a woman who got old and saggy and her tattoo got ugly. Sigh.

So I fell into the generation gap and drowned. Well, what did I expect; I have scars older than most of the students I go to school with. It’s not their fault.

Maybe, the war stories?

I could write about getting that phone call from Iraq, the one where my kid is so stoned on synthetic morphine, he can barely speak. But he’s fine he slurs and on his way home—just an accident.  Don’t cry, Mom. The magnesium burns aren’t that bad, he tells me.

And suddenly I’m learning more about magnesium flares than I care to know. Magnesium burns at 3200 degrees Fahrenheit. It can melt engine blocks. It melted his Kevlar body armor.

It takes him five days, flat on his stomach to get home: Bagdad, Germany, D.C., Chicago and the world’s premier burn doctors telling him at every stop that he’s looking at skin graphs, potential infection, potential rejection, and months of hospitalization and therapy.

But all along there have been prayers and fasting that have gone up to our God’s heaven like incense from the tabernacle in the wilderness of our afflictions.

Finally he reaches Brook Medical Center in San Antonio where the doctor’s tell him, “SSG Zern, we can’t explain it, but you’ve begun to heal and healthy skin is growing over the third degree burns. We’re releasing you to the barracks to recuperate.”

Ah, but that smacks of faith and religion and miracles and we all know how that plays in some circles.

Damn.

What I wouldn’t give for a good Somali pirate kidnapping.

Okay, that’s it; I got nothing.

Nothing to write about.

**Grist: Ground grain. Something that can be turned to one’s advantage.