It's My Funeral and You're Invited

Please Note:  As far as I know, I am in perfect health and any rumors of my impending death are pure gossip and heartless taunting.

My kitchen cabinet knobs do not match, and I love that they do not match, even though it drives Phillip, my son-in-law, batty. 

He has informed me, “As soon as you’re dead, I’m changing out these goofy, eclectic, bohemian knobs.” (That is the official title for my decorating style—eclectic bohemian, which means I’m just this side of a gypsy queen and not adverse to bleached animal skulls as chotchkies.) 

Phillip always looks itchy when he tells me about his de-knobbing of my kitchen on the event of my death. He mumbles about burning my giant gourd that flips open on a hinge, but I think it’s just idle gourd burning talk. It’s those knobs that really bug him.

I love those knobs for giving me a reason to live.

“Hey, Mom, come here and listen to the music we’re going to play at your funeral.” Adam, my teenage son, looked pleased and proud as he played the tune he had picked out for my funeral service.  It was a wonderful, sentimental, joyful choice. I wept. It made me sorry I wouldn’t be there what with the excellent choice in music and my son-in-law in attendance, counting down the minutes until he’ll be free to take the knobs off my kitchen cabinets.

The subject of my death and funeral seems to prove an endless source of amusement for my family; they’ve already decided that in place of a eulogy, they’ll be holding a “Mock-ogy,” which, apparently, is not dissimilar to a “Roast.” First, they’ll play that really cool music and then someone will stand up and announce, “Let the mocking begin.”

Since it’s my funeral, I have a few suggestions for my enthusiastic, smart aleck family. And since I have an irrational fear of being IN something, UNDER something (for example I have an irrational fear of being in a car under the water, or in a New York City subway under New York City, or in a box under the ground) I would like to be buried above the ground. Perhaps I might be buried in a pyramid, assorted safety deposit boxes, catacomb, or eagle’s nest in the back pasture.

My preference is the eagle’s nest, and I would like to be rolled to the nest using the little red wagon with the jittery wheels. An America flag should be flying at half-mast from the back of the wagon.

Crying is right out! Very few people look attractive crying, and I won’t have it. There should be folk dancing, but I’m not sure when to fit it into the schedule, and since Phillip is going to remove them anyway, I’d like to be buried with my knobs and my thesaurus.

Please consider this posting a legal expression of my final wishes.

The advantage of having garnered the reputation for being a little eclectic and a lot bohemian during one’s lifetime is that people expect to see graffiti on the walls inside your house and bowling balls in your garden, and if they show up to your funeral they won’t be surprised by the free coupons to Golden Corral that will be handed out at the door.

 Linda (Gypsy Queen of the Buffet Line) Zern   

IN MEMORY

No one builds memorials like the military. No one. Their monuments to memory are built on the blood and bones of friends and brothers.

When our son returned to Fort Hood, Texas from his first deployment to Iraq, we visited him. He was anxious to show us the place where he lived, relaxed, and worked. More than that he was anxious to show us the 4^th Infantry memorial from their victory in that bloody and broken part of the world.

In gratitude to the fallen soldiers of the 4^th Infantry, the original artist took his bronze bust of Saddam Hussein and recast it. He turned a tyrant’s face into the figure of a grieving soldier as he knelt in the sand before the empty boots, rifle, and helmet of a dead friend.

Behind the soldier a tiny Iraqi girl reaches out to touch his shoulder—in comfort, in gratitude. It is a heart stopping moment of remembrance.

The names of the lost and dead circle the artist’s statue in a curve of glittering stone. Everything about that memorial whispers, “Hush. Hush. Be still. Be quiet. And know that someone died for you.”

We watched a group of teenagers laugh and joke their way across the open field as they came our way. Throwing a Frisbee, they looked what they were—young and happy and alive. Their Frisbee game continued right up to the moment they stepped into the circle of the dead. And then silence—even reverence. One of the girls knelt and lit a candle in front of one of the names on the wall. Her friends stood quietly as she prayed.

When my husband and I got home from Fort Hood we sat in our church’s Sunday meeting. Young men prepared the bread and water for the sacrament, covering it with a clean white cloth. The room around us was filled with chatter and noise. People talked and visited. Church business was done.

I looked again at the sacrament table seeing it for the memorial that it was supposed to represent. I thought of the sacrifice it symbolized, of the blood and bone given for me, of the eternal truth that the price of freedom is blood and always has been.

And I heard a still small voice whisper, “Hush. Hush. Be still. Be quiet. And know that someone died for you.”           

ZOMBIE SQUIRREL APOCALYPSE

It started with a loud transformer pop on Wednesday. The lights flickered, dimmed—went dark. I held my breath. I had emails to check, cable news to yell about.  Then the lights bounced back on. I exhaled and thought about and then rejected the idea of doing laundry in one of my energy sucking major appliances.

Later that same day, granddaughter (age 9) reported her discovery of a dead carcass at the base of the power pole—type and style, squirrel.

No correlation between the first popping incident and the corpse discovery occurred to anyone on our emergency response team. Okay, I am the emergency response team. I didn’t get it. Transformer. Squirrel. Big Boom. Light should have gone on, in a manner of speaking, but no.

At four, in the very dark morning of Thursday, the Zern family power grid was brought down, and I mean all the way down . . . by a single assassin squirrel.

The machine that conditioned our air ground to a halt. The fans that stirred our conditioned air around spun ever more slowly. The lights that blink and wink and twink in the night were gone. Darkness swallowed more of the blackness. I thought I heard a squirrel howl.

I fumbled for a candle, a torch, a hurricane lantern. My son-in-law threw himself behind the wheel of their crappy Jeep, searching the neighborhood for signs of electric. The babies grumbled for fresh water, cool air, clean diapers, warm milk, and sweet nightlights.

Darkness, like smog, settled over our lives. We waited for the morning’s light.

As we waited for the power company to fix us, we looked at the French fried body of the terror squirrel.

Someone observed, “Geez, who needs an EMP attack, a couple million well trained suicide squirrels and America’s back in the stone-age.

I repeated this bit of clever repartee to the power pole guy. He neither laughed nor smiled. He calmly stepped over the body of dead squirrel and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

And he did.

The moral of the story is that although I store water in plastic milk jugs for just such emergencies, the thought of pouring that water into a clean baby bottle and feeding it to an actual baby made me itch. On Friday, I ordered a month’s worth of sterile canned water, good for fifty years or the zombie squirrel apocalypse, whichever comes first.

Linda (Testing, Testing) Zern


  

Q-TIP LOBOTOMY

When I found four gold plated dessertspoons in the toe of my riding boot and pennies stuffed the fingers of my riding gloves, I knew Grandkid World had officially arrived in our lives. My husband and I now have ten grandchildren; please note, I don’t look old enough to have five grandchildren.

I am the YaYa.

Being a Mommy means twenty percent fun and eighty percent worry.

Being the YaYa means eighty percent fun and twenty percent worry, because you know that whatever weirdness the kid is up to he’ll out grow—or he won’t. It’s no skin off the YaYa’s nose.

Being a mom made me gray, and being a grandmother makes me want to learn how to ride a dirt bike. It also means that I have become the Oracle of All Wisdom for my daughters on various matters of the mothering kind, leading to conversations like this:

 “Mom, feel Conner’s head,” Conner’s mom said.

Conner’s head was small, fuzzy, and three weeks old.

I picked up Conner and felt his head. It felt small, fuzzy, and three weeks old.

“What is that?” Heather asked, pointing to his perfect head.

“Where?”

“On the top of his head.”

“You mean his soft spot? Heather, you know babies have soft spots.”

I watched Zoe’s two-year old ponytail as it bobbed its way past me, through the living room—nothing soft about the head under that ponytail. Zoe is Conner’s big sister and official hard head.

“I know it’s his soft spot,” she said, grabbing the baby from me. “But isn’t it deeper?”

“Deeper than what?” I ran my hand over his perfectly normal skull—again.

“You know! Deeper than average!”

I must have looked blank and stupid, because she decided to explain the theory of Conner’s deepening head hole.

“Because, Mom, I caught Zoe poking his head with a Q-tip, and now I think his soft spot is deeper.”

Zoe was building a small fort out of Q-tips under the couch. She was also pouring water over her own head out of a measuring cup from the kitchen.

“Could he be lobotomized now?” My daughter’s frown was deep, pained, and serious.

I recognized this as one of those moments when I could practice my excellent reflective listening skills. (Note: Reflective listening is a technique where you repeat back to a person their very own words, pretty much because you can’t believe someone that intelligent could say something that dopey.)

“Now let me understand you. You think Zoe took a Q-tip, gave Conner a lobotomy through the soft spot on the top of his head, and now his brain is ruined. Is that about it?”

“Yes, yes. Feel his head again.”

 I felt his head again, and then I felt Heather’s.

She’ll relax. She’ll have to, because one of these days she’ll walk into a bedroom and find one of the kids (sound asleep) with his/her pants around their ankles, and a Fisher Price thermometer stuck between his/her knees. And through a little detective work, she’ll uncover the fact that while this kid was taking a nap, the other kids tried to take the sleeping kid’s temperature—rectally.

They failed, but it was a close house call.

It’s what the sports commentator said a couple of weeks ago about cross-country skiing at the Olympics.

“You’ve got to save something for the hills, Christina. You’ve got to save something for the hills.”

Bingo!

As the official YaYa, I would like to say to the young moms out there. “You’ve got to save something for the hills, honey. You’ve got to save something for the hills.”

Because if you think Zoe giving Conner a lobotomy with a Q-tip is the worst of it, you are going to lose this race.

Linda (Been There, Worried About That) Zern

          

Artwork by Linda L. Zern for Mooncalf (coming in summer 2013)

DISCLAIMER # 321: The Herd

I have to pay my children a dollar every time I mention their names or their children’s names in public. It’s why they don’t care if I write about their barbarian kids or highlight the fact that their lives are six kinds of crazy. That’s the secret to writing about embarrassing family life stuff—ready cash payments.

The problem isn’t having fodder for the writing; the problem is what constitutes public?  I mean I only share my family’s most intimate, personal potty problems with a couple dozen strangers OR one to two thousand of my closest most intimate friends. I have no clue how many people are “out there” in cyber world these days.

My blog only has three followers and two of those are the same person, but my statistics have jumped from seven page views per month to eight hundred page views per month. But I’m pretty sure that seven hundred ninety seven of those page views are a Croatian chick that’s been trying to hack me.

So frankly, I think mentioning my children’s names in “public” on Facebook and Blogger.com and then having to pay them a dollar per public mention is a scam.

Doesn’t the word public mean more people than me, and that Croatian chick? The correct answer is yes.

Here’s the disclaimer:  I started sending electronic mail to friends and family nearly fifteen years ago (before blogging had a name) as a way to 1) stay in touch while living in a **hostile, foreign land 2) journal my most important, spiritual moments, but mostly I just write about poop, and 3) practice writing sentences with all the grammar stuff contained therein.

They say writers should write about what they know.

What I know is that getting a two-year old to poop in the appropriate container can be more challenging than finding Waldo.

I know that a dump truck full of sand is better than a warehouse full of video games for keeping kids busy.

I know that watching and listening to children grow is more instructive than most expensive college instruction these days.

Or as Conner (age 7) observed about a new daughter-in-law in the family, “Auntie Lauren is part of our herd now.” 

He paused, considered, and then asked, “What kind of herd are we anyway?”

“We’re a human herd,” his mother told him.

What I know is that life is eighty plus or minus years, depending on how often I drag myself to the gym. Eighty plus or minus years, that’s it, and that trying to have it all is a good way of having nothing much of anything. So I choose. 

I choose family. I choose to laugh. I choose to write about laughing at my family, chickens, horses, rouge ‘possums, hamster infestations and invite you to do the same. Don’t worry about the herd getting its feelings hurt, because it’s mostly a herd of honey badgers, and as everyone knows honey badgers don’t care.

Besides, it’s amazing what the promise of quick cash can do to foster self-deprecating humor and a healthy awareness of the herd’s collective daffiness.

Linda (Round ‘Em Up) Zern

** North Carolina

 

          

   

QUICK QUOTE OF THE WEEK

Looking at his popsicle, Conner (7) asked, "Do we have to pray before we eat this?"

Zoe (9) said, "No! They're just for fun, geez." Then she sailed away in a pink Fisher Price dune buggy, sucking on her popsicle.

WORST DAY EVER

I’m bummed. I found out my grown daughter saw me naked, and I don’t own a Wraptastic. (Disclaimer:  I know. I know. As far as trouble goes these DO NOT MAKE THE CUT. But humor me.)

“Hey,” my husband said. “Maren saw you naked.”

I felt various body parts clench and quiver. I sucked in my rapidly approaching senior citizen discount stomach. It ignored me.

“Completely?”

“Yep,” he said. “The blinds were open, you were wandering around the bedroom—without clothes, and she walked by on her way to get a Coke in the office.”

“It was ten o’clock at night. Who drinks Coke at 10 pm?”

He shrugged and popped the top of a Coke.

I huffed and puffed.

“Stringy!  That’s the word she said came to mind the last time she saw me naked.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be naked so much of the time,” he said.

That was rich coming from a guy whose fondest teenage memory involved motorcycles and riding nude through the Florida underbrush.    Don’t worry, he likes to explain, he had tennis shoes on so that he could shift.

Back in the day, it was called “streaking.”  Now it’s called a misdemeanor.   

“Don’t be naked so much! I was taking a bath! Maybe I shouldn’t let so many people wander around peeking at me—morning, noon, and night—and that includes you.”

That started it—worst day ever. 

And then, thanks to Madison Avenue and the miracle of televised commercialism, I realized that I don’t own a Wraptastic, and I’m not sure how I’ve managed to live without one all these years.

According to the Wraptastic commercial, a Wraptastic is a plastic contraption that can tame those pesky rolls of plastic wrap that cause the world such unending grief by sticking to all the wrong stuff, twisting into hideous knots, and in extreme cases getting tangled around your head suffocating you.

Don’t even mention, the crappy cardboard boxes that plastic wrap are sold in, what with their deadly strips of metallic, tearing teeth. Deadly! Tearing! Teeth!

I know it’s frightening because the actors look completely horrified when they cut parts of their hands off on those deadly, tearing, teeth while trying to wrap up a hoagie.

Enter the Wraptastic:  life changing, happiness inducing, freedom providing, and quick. So quick. It’s a plastic contraption that can change your life, if only you owned one, and I don’t.

First there was the naked thing and then this Wraptastic debacle.

Worst day ever.

If only I had a Wraptastic, I could wrap my nakedness in Saran wrap, put on a white fur hat and boots and call myself a Q-tip.

Note: The Q-tip joke is a Phyllis Diller bit that always lifted my spirits when the going got tough. Thanks, Phyllis.)

Linda (Better Luck Tomorrow) Zern   

 

 

SPRING FUN!

EBOOKS FOR YOU FROM ME AT SMASHWORDS.COM (Click on the link and download away!) 

ZippityZern's Uncommon Nonsense - A Farmer's Almanac
 

by Linda Zern

Price: Free! 5440 words. Published on November 25, 2011. Nonfiction.
There are personal essays. There are creative non-fiction essays which are essays dressed up to go to a party, and then there are ZippityZern's essays, and that's a whole other kind of not-faux story dressed up to go to a party. Subjects covered in the Almanac include: gelding sheath cleaning and feral chicken trouble.

EBOOKS:  www.smashwords.com/profile/view/zippityzern

BLOG:  http://zippityzerns.blogspot.com

WEBSITE:  www.zippityzerns.com

... 

GUZZLE

Our one-year old granddaughter tried drinking water out of a plastic bottle for the first time by wrapping her lips around the opening, throwing her head back like a college student on spring break, and chugging harder then a drunken sailor. Water exploded over her head. Forgetting to un-tip the bottle as she pulled it away from her mouth, water gushed down her chin to cascade like a waterfall over her dress until it soaked her socks.

“Hey, I drink water just like that!”

 It’s always exhilarating when you recognize yourself in the rising generation.

 “I know, and it’s horrible.”  My husband sounded forlorn and a little sad as he stumbled away from our extremely damp granddaughter. Avoiding direct eye contact he seemed less than impressed with my connection to our posterity.

Grabbing a bottle of water that advertised being pumped from the bowels of a fresh water spring located under Mount Olympus and decanted into a plastic bottle designed by a computer, I threw my head back and guzzled, throat convulsing. Water squirted from my nose.

“Linda, do you have to drink water out of a bottle like that?” He grimaced, looking away.

“Like what?”  I swiped the back of my hand across my dripping chin.

“Like you’ll never get another drop of water again for as long as you live—and eternity—like the water bottling industry has just announced that all the water in the world has been teleported to the moon. Seriously, it drives me crazy.”

Tipping the bottle back, I gulped until the sides of the bottle collapsed.

“Like that.  Good grief, woman, take a breath,” he said, clawing at his own throat. “ Why do you throw your head back like that? You drink like you can’t trust gravity to work. Just let the natural elements of the universe help you.”

I let my head drop forward as I gasped for the universal element of oxygen. I had a cramp in my neck.

“I don’t throw my head back.”

 He smirked.  “You throw your head back, wrap your lips around the entire bottle opening, and squeeze the water into your mouth like you’ve just dragged yourself across Death Valley.”  

He picked up a bottle of spring water pumped from the original Fountain of Youth with minerals added for flavor. He prepared to demonstrate.

“Here! Let me show you.”

Then Sherwood Zern, husband, lover, and friend, put his lips daintily to the rim of the bottle, gently flipped his wrist and sipped water while keeping his little finger extended.

I thought he looked like a sissy llama at the watering trough at the zoo, but I had to admit he had a definite flare that I quite possibly—lack.

The problem now is that I’m so self-conscious about the way I drink water from a bottle, I have to hide in the corner at the gym so that all the other sweaty, thirsty water drinkers won’t mock and point. It’s like finding out you can’t dance after a lifetime of dancing in public—a lot—and it makes me wonder what else I can’t do better than a toddler.

Linda (Bottoms All The Way Up) Zern