Dangerous Place This

As you may know, our oldest son has served three tours of duty in Iraq and one tour in Afghanistan.

Often folks remarked, “Weren’t you worried out of your mind? It’s so dangerous OVER THERE.”

OVER THERE! I wanted to exclaim. The danger over there is nothing compared to the danger right here in my backyard. No offense to our brave soldiers, I would clarify of course, but they have lots and lots of body armor and training and battle savvy and . . .

I’m not kidding. Give me a sincere terrorist, high on opium, any day over the stuff the animal kingdom can throw at you. Or on you. Or into you.

With terrorists there’s a certain pure, clean hate-filled honesty and expectation. You know that they’re trying to kill you.

Not so much with Sonny my husband’s arthritic, cranky first horse. When Sonny decided to kill someone it came from left field, without warning, and with no body armor. One minute you would be riding the old crab apple (Sonny the horse, not Sherwood the husband), thinking that the old grouch had one hoof on a banana peel and another hoof in a pit dug by a backhoe, and the next minute he was tipping over—on top of you—on purpose. 

Riding Sonny was good for Sonny. That’s what his doctor said. In addition, after we rescued Sonny, we started giving the old fool (horse not husband) vitamins, shots, worm medicine, glucosamine chondroitin and, apparently at some point, the old boy secretly started feeling better. He thought he was Trigger posing for a centerfold.

The reality was that Sonny was not Trigger. He was an old horse that fell over—on occasion and occasionally on people—no warning.

One fine day, I watched my husband get on Sonny, when he (horse not man) took offense, and reared back on his arthritic hind legs. Sherwood (a new and inexperienced rider, who had limping and ligament issues of his own) jerked back on the reins, sending the horse farther backwards and back and back and back and . . . over they went . . . horse, rider, swell new saddle, nifty cool cowboy hat, the works.

Sherwood and Sonny hit the ground like a pile of worn out spare parts, and Sherwood’s whole life flashed before my eyes.

Then . . .

Having failed to murder Sherwood, Sonny the horse rolled off of my husband. Sherwood the Poppy rolled off the ground, and the screaming spectators cancelled their calls to 911.

When a screaming someone asked four-year old Zoe what had happened, she calmly said, “Poppy died.”

Indeed he did not.

But it was a close one, and completely unexpected which illustrates that the entire world—here, there, everywhere—can be a dangerous, capricious place. A place full of risk and homicidal horses, and that being one hundred percent safe is something of an illusion promoted by sellers of body armor and air bags.

Linda (Heads Up) Zern

A Program Note:  In honor of my husband being accepted into the training program of the Osceola Volunteer Mounted Posse, I re-tell this story from his humble horse riding beginnings. Congratulations cowboy. Sherwood will be accompanied by his horse, Miss Kitty, and not Sonny; Sonny having gone to that big barn in the sky—still crabby, no doubt.

  

Shopping Cart or Buggy?

“Going down the Amazon?” a complete stranger commenting on one of my more spectacular hauls of groceries from our local mega-mart. It wasn’t a real question. 

Nothing invites intrusive, judgmental comments like a shopping cart full of groceries. It’s public. It’s visible. It’s like a neon sign on malfunctioning wheels for letting the neighbors know that someone at your house has a bladder control problem or various kinds of itches.

Perfect strangers think nothing of peering into a private, personal shopping cart and remarking on a load of fire ant killer and lemonade and saying, “Someone’s got a lot of work to do.”

“Or, I’m planning to kill my husband,” I responded. The conversation waned at that point.

Buying machetes present their own special challenge.

Over the years, I’ve developed strategies for trying to keep my personal grocery buying habits private and, let’s not forget, personal.

When buying large quantities of anything that you’d rather not have comments on, oh say like—lice shampoo—first, place a snazzy little storage ottoman (aisle eleven, next to the candle aisle, $19.99) in your shopping cart and remove the lid. Then, dart down the shampoo aisle, scraping bottles of lice shampoo into the open ottoman. Replace ottoman lid. Continue shopping.

The down side is that you have to buy a lot of storage ottomans for twenty bucks a pop. The up side is that you’ll have a ton of handy, functional storage ottomans all over the house, and you’ll be able to treat the lice epidemic without public outcry or verbal flogging.

Recently, I wrestled my way out of our local mega-mart behind a heap of groceries hidden inside storage ottomans. The heap was large enough to supply an expedition going down the Amazon. I am a smallish person. I tend to procrastinate shopping. Therefore, when I say “heap of groceries” I mean a leaning tower of milk, bread, eggs, ant killer, and machetes. Apparently, I resemble a fire ant carrying a shopping cart.

Folks find the sight amusing. They often comment.

A gallon of milk rolled out from under the cart across the floor.

“Hey, lady, you got that shopping cart under control?” A young man said. He was standing near the icemaker admiring his big arm muscles.

I blew a strand of hair out of my sweaty, straining face and said, “We’d better hope so, or we are all dead men.” I kept pushing, wishing I knew how to make my own printer ink, paper, crab salad, and machetes at home.

“Besides,” I muttered under my breath, “it’s not a shopping cart in the South; it’s a buggy. It’s a buggy.”

Comment on that.

Linda (Shop Much?) Zern

Spin Cycle

The earth turns. The world goes round and round. Spring follows winter follows fall trails summer. Life is a spinning wheel, inside a circle of stars, revolving on a hula-hoop of hormonal booger dirt.

Sorry. It’s day thirteen. Bad. Angry. Phrase. Day.

I know I don’t write about being menopausal much and that a few readers might find this surprising, but honestly there are some subjects that even I don’t find funny:  bubonic plague, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, finger nails, and menopause.

Then I realized that my “change of life” could be documented on a merry-go-round pie chart of hormonal predictability, and while I haven’t felt this out of control since I was a hysterical thirteen-year old, it is all kind of silly in a tragic, life cycle kind of way. I’m just not sure that it’s funny. Then again, fifty percent of the time I’m not sure that I don’t have the Ebola virus, one hundred percent of time, which is a not and a don’t and that equals a double negative. Get it?

Here are the facts on my monthly, revolving, day-by-day “change of life” spin cycle.

Days 1 through 3:  For three days a month, I feel as if I’m breathing liquid cement, and it’s hard to drag my lungs around, also my arms, legs, and hair. I’m really tired.

The Three Days After That (Days 4, 5, 6) or the Mobster Mentality Days:  I feel like I want to encase people in cement and throw them into a deep ditch full of swampy water. I begin to make a list of likely candidates. By day six, I find that I have run out of time and homicidal desire.

Day 7:  There’s a spring in my step, a glow to my skin, and no bloating. I want to live long enough to be interviewed by someone famous.

Days 8 through 11:  I congratulate myself on not being a fifty-three year old pregnant person.

Day 12: My skin dries up. My hair thins. Wrinkles grow more pronounced. I get pimples. What the fudge sickle?

A Vague Number of Days After That, Ranging From A Single Day to Most Days:  Wandering around my home, I shuffle about ranting about the deplorable state of everything from the burning in my finger bones to the potential collapse of the Greek drachma. Or as my granddaughter asked, “Why you talk yourself all time, YaYa?”  “Because, dear,” I tell her. “I’m the only one who’ll listen to me anymore. Besides, I’ve become the smartest person I know. Let’s get ice cream.”

Day  (I lost track):  Be afraid. Be very afraid. There’s a bright light but I don’t go near it. I feel too mean. The light is all shimmery and shivery. The light is quite possibly afraid of me.

Day 28:  On my knees, I raise my clenched knobby knuckles to the sky and shout, “As God is my witness, this sucks.”

Rinse and Repeat.

I know in my heart that I’m not supposed to be at the mercy of my body chemicals. I. Know. That.

In addition, highly educated tenured college professors have informed me that there is no real difference between the sexes. That male and female exist only in our societal heads. That we are simply the result of our  “conditioning” or is it conditioner?

When I hear troubling theories like that, I look down at my too-tender-to-touch mammary glands, the ones that dangle off the front of my unisex chest on day thirty of my “change of life” pie chart, and I whisper, “Who told you that you were girl boobs?”

Linda (Dizzy Dame) Zern  

  

  

 

    

Plunge This

I’m not getting better with age. I’m just older, and I’m tired. I’m tired of not being able to find the toilet bowl plunger.

The plunger is supposed to be under the sink, tucked in the back of the cabinet where the grandbabies can’t “discover” it, drag it out, and suck on it. That’s where it’s supposed to be. I’m fifty plus years old, and I’ve had a few years to work out a system so that I know where that grubby plunger is supposed to be.

I KNOW WHERE THE PLUNGER IS SUPPOSED TO BE . . .

So that when the plunger is not where it is supposed to be and I’m left standing, starring into the rising tide of toilet bowl heartbreak I have nothing left to give in the way of patience and tolerance and . . . did I mention patience? Nothing. Left. To. Give.

All I can hear is fifty plus years of my own voice, echoing down the corridors of time, saying, “Hey who took the plunger? I need it now. Hurry! I mean it. Dark water rising! Arrrrgh!”

And I’m sick of it. And I’m old. And I’m not more patient. And I’m over it. I’m over the thoughtlessness of people who take other people’s stuff and don’t put it back where they found it:  scissors, plungers, hammers, remotes, the twenty bucks in my wallet, car keys, cars, etc.

I’m so over it that I actually heard myself screaming at the top of my lungs today, “Whoever took the toilet bowl plunger had better bring it back or I’ll cut ‘em. I’ll cut ‘em with a knife. I swear it.”

This is not me getting better with age. This is me acting like a candidate for early retirement. 

There’s a lot about getting older that is butterfly beautiful and lovely and of good report, and there’s a lot about getting older that looks and smells like a clogged toilet when some dumb bunny has run off with your plunger. The trick is to try not to let stuff pile up so that you need a plunger in the first place or you may find yourself saying stuff like, “The next person who wears my garden boots and leaves them half full of sand isn’t going to need his or her feet—ever again.”

Can you imagine being as old as that old guy in the Bible? Methuseleh was supposed to be 969 years old. Nine hundred and sixty nine years of trying to get people to put the goats back where they found them. Yuck.

Linda (Live Long and Suffer) Zern