WHEN IN DOUBT GIFT SHOP

Fighting Nuclear War With Pinwheels
 the DMZ -South Korea . . . oh, and fifty thousand US troops

The Third Tunnel - Courtesy of North Korea

Traveling is a strange status symbol.  If you ask the average college student what they want to do with their lives they will say, “Cure cancer via a liberal arts degree and travel.”

To me it equates to, “See me, seeing things.” 

I hate traveling. It’s stressful and filled with turbulence. Literally. But I love my husband and he has to travel for his work—a lot. So . . . I travel . . . not as much as a lot, but once in a while.

His latest assignment has brought him to Korea and me too because I like him. 

Korea is one of the three kingdoms; it’s China, Japan, and Korea. Folks in Korea will be the first to let you know that those other two kingdoms have been, on occasion, pains in their Korean backside, but still they are a unique, feisty, independent bunch, and it ain’t been easy.

Especially when half of the country is divided from the other half by a big hefty line called the demilitarized zone or DMZ or 38th parallel or Land of the Many Gift Shops.

A weekend trip to the DMZ left me having to process what I had seen for days. I have learned that North Korea is a mystery of totalitarian silence and myth. Who knows what’s really going on over there? It’s locked down like a teenager on lifetime restriction. 

One of the tangible clues are the infiltration tunnels carved through solid granite, some big enough to drive jeeps through, heading from the communist north into the democratic south, built on the very ground that’s supposed to be off limits to all that sneaky monkey business. The North Koreans painted the walls of the tunnels with coal dust so they could claim that the tunnel wasn’t really a highway for invasion. It was really, really an abandoned coalmine. Oops. Our bad.

I know this because the South Koreans turned the “Third Tunnel” into a DISNEY RIDE.  It’s true.  I went on it. You put on a hard hat (blue) and you get on a rocket train (silver) and they roll you down into the tunnel (tight) where you then walk to the halfway point. Here you can look through a small window at the North Korean’s steel barrier which blocks off their half of the tunnel. I WENT ON A DMZ RIDE!

Our tour included an overlook where you can peek at North Korea and a train station to nowhere that the South Koreans have built, hoping one day to re-connect to their North Korean friends and family.

And at every stop on the tour there were GIFT SHOPS--also a memorial park, carnival rides for the kids, statuary, guides, buses, restrooms, fields of pinwheels, hikes, lectures, fountains, picnic areas, refreshments and GIFT SHOPS, many and much GIFT SHOPS.

I was boggled. I was so boggled I had to take a nap, but then I started to puzzle on it, and came to realize some important stuff. 

The South Korean people face the confirmed possibility of nuclear catastrophe every day of their lives, living in the center of an unstable bull’s eye. Their beloved country remains slashed by division and uncertainty. They are at war, even now, as I type this. 

Yet they continue to fight back. They continue to buy and sell and make and create. They continue to hope and wish and dream of something better. They go to church and worship, as they believe. And they fight back with GIFT SHOPS.

I don’t know when I’ve been so impressed with a group of people in my life and with their friends who stand on the line next to them, keeping watch in the night.

A lot of folks would be on their knees mewling about, bemoaning every day of their sad little lives and their tragic past and the tragic past of their daddy’s tragic past, and no doubt if you want to bad enough you’ll find that aspect of human nature here. But still.

They’ve turned bitter war and nuclear stalemate into a tourist attraction with gift shops! There were Three Musketeer’s bars and Pepsi and Kim Chi. 

I bought a hat.

It was the least I could do.  

Linda (Buy, Sell, Trade) Zern 

P is for Poultry, Predator, and Politician

TYPICAL TEENAGER CHICKEN

“Chicken wire is designed to keep chickens in, not politicians . . . ur . . .  um . . . I mean . . . predators out.” 

It’s good information. Also true.  Also a conundrum.

I raise assorted chickens. I buy them teeny-tiny, fluffy, and assorted from somewhere up north and have them sent to me through the mail. They come in a box.  When the box arrives at my hobby farm in Florida it is cheeping.

It’s about the cutest mail you can receive via the United States Postal Service—chicks in a box that resemble puff balls—the chicks not the box.

From the box they go into my shower. I put a light on them to simulate their mother’s fluffy butt, also her love and concern. I feed them, water them, and watch them grow. Putting them in the shower is handy, because I can wash the shower out when it becomes DISGUSTING.

Cute does not mean clean.

When the chicks resemble teenager chickens: pimply, scruffy, half grown, awkward, loud, and obnoxious, they go into the chicken coop.

Then for the next couple of months I stuff them full of food, starter mash, cracked corn (on special occasions), table scraps, and then laying mash for their big egg laying debut. It takes about seven months and a trillion dollars.

Hobby does not mean cheap.

It’s kind of like the way the politicians run Washington—more goes in than comes out and the money pit gets deeper and deeper, and if you figured it all out you’d realize that your eggs cost about a hundred dollars a piece and your bridges to no where a zillion dollars a piece. In fact, politicians run the federal government a lot like it’s their hobby. In my case, it’s fun.  I don’t know why politicians do it.

Around seven months, the assorted eggs start rolling in, beautiful eggs, green, blue, brown, and white eggs.

It’s illegal for me to sell my farm fresh eggs on the open market in Florida. I haven’t located the black market yet. So, I stay one step ahead of the politicians in my state, I give my eggs away FOR FREE.

Regulate that!

It makes me happy to have eggs to give away. It makes my friends happy to get eggs. It makes my chickens happy to lay eggs for me. (I don’t know that; I just feel it.) And, unfortunately it makes the raccoons in the woods across the street happy to figure out new and better ways of eating my beloved, hobby farm raised hens.

Come to think of it, raccoons are a lot like politicians. They wait until your stuff is fully raised and juicy and then they come for it with razor sharp canines that can chomp through chicken wire. If you’re lucky they’ll leave a pile of feathers in the yard to let you know who got eaten and where.

Hobby farming is not for the faint of heart or the easily discouraged or the politically naïve.

In fact, in the month of July we’ve gone from twelve mature hens and one adorable rooster, to two frightened, scraggly hens, shaking in their feathers.  They’ve started roosting on my back porch on the kid’s frog aquarium.

I remain undaunted. In September, I’m putting in my order for tougher chicken coop wire, a bigger live animal trap, and a new batch of air mailed boxes with assorted cheeping. The raccoons are still out there, but I refuse to let them scare me into roosting on the back porch on the frog aquarium. I’ll continue to keep fighting for tougher chicken coops, better predator disposal, and smaller government. Not necessarily in that order.

Linda (Coop Master) Zern          

 

        

Rules for the Rest of Us

“Stop licking that baby!”

You say it. Then you hear it. And then you wonder how your life has distilled down to this single moment of making bizarre even insane rules that at first blush reflect badly on your religion, culture, heritage, and even mental health.

“No! I mean it! If you don’t stop licking that baby—I’ll lick you!”

And you mean it, because the baby’s siblings are crazy, and if you don’t stop them they’ll lick that baby until it screams, and then you’re really in the soup.

As a young mother I once made a list of ten family commandments. Commandment number one read: Thou shalt not eat PB&J sandwiches with plastic vampire teeth in your mouth. Adorable, right?

Not so adorable when the kids, having tried to eat the—above mentioned—sandwiches, cried because their plastic vampire teeth became so gicky with peanut butter slime as to be rendered disgusting. I pulled the plug on the vampire teeth denture experiment after catching myself brushing peanut butter drool out of plastic tooth crevices with my own personal toothbrush one too many times, or maybe it was one time.

When making family laws, rules, or commandments it is (in my professional opinion) important to be clear and specific.Thou shalt not make mommy want to run away is way too vague—also suggestive and possibly fraught with legal ramifications. The children may in fact, want to make mommy run away and are just calculating the amount of baby licking required to achieve their nefarious goal of trying to make mom look like the one who did the crazy running away stuff. I always check the wall of photos at Walmart to be sure my family hasn’t posted my picture up there—just to make me nuts.

An example of a much more efficaciously worded rule would be, anyone still defecating in his or her pants shall not, will not, or better not be allowed to carry a hammer or torque wrench around.

I’ve actually heard myself yell, “Someone find that little, short kid in the diaper; he’s got a hammer—possibly a torque wrench.”

I have found that as children mature the rules don’t have to be quite so specific and a parent can expect to fall back to the default setting of that great old standby, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” Simple, clear, concise, and begs the question, “Do I really want other people licking my baby, lollipop, or dog bowl?”

I recently sat through a lecture at my new college covering the honor code rules, as honor is understood and defined in the 21st century. I was shocked. It reminded me of PB&J and vampire teeth and really small children, prone to licking things—not food.

It read (in part) Violations of the Academic Honor Code: PLAGIARISM, CHEATING, UNAUTHORIZED COLLABORATION, SUBMISSION OF WORK PREPARED FOR ANOTHER COURSE, FABRICATION, FACILITATING ACADEMIC DIS-HONESTY, VIOLATION OF TESTING CONDITIONS, LYING, FAILURE TO REPORT AN HONOR CODE VIOLATION.

I wanted to ask the difference between fabrication and lying, but I was too intimidated, and I had plastic vampire teeth in my mouth at the time.

Didn’t we have an honor code, once upon a time? Wasn’t it fairly simple and easily reprinted? Weren’t there like ten basic rules of civilized behavior? I seem to remember hearing something about it—once upon a time in a land far, far away.

Linda (R is for Rules) Zern

WORMS! MAYBE!

Florida is a semi-tropic, sultry, exotic state where rain is called liquid sunshine, and the Spanish guy who named it fully expected to find a fountain full of Botox. Winter is the season where Floridians put on sweaters and walk fast to their cars. Florida is paradise.

Florida is also wormy.

Big worms, little worms, beggar worms, thief worms.

Pinworms are a fun little invertebrate that lay eggs in a part of the body usually associated with sitting, booty dancing, and spanking. Pinworms are party worms that come out at night to . . . well . . . booty dance, also to lay their eggs in a place where the sun don’t shine. Pinworm eggs can be found in dirt, air, shady places, warm mud, toddlers, and the moon. It is very easy to “get” pinworms. I’m a gardener; I’m pretty sure I have them 75% of the time.

One semi-tropic, sultry, exotic Florida evening, I remember sitting straight up in bed, gasping or maybe gagging.

“Honey, honey!” I shook my husband’s shoulder. He mumbled something about a goose and then rolled over.I shook him harder.

“Honey! Wake up!” Panic made my voice shrill. “I think I’ve got them!!!”

“What! Whaaaat. . . is . . . it?” He rumbled awake. “Do I need the baseball bat?” He scratched his ear and admitted, “I don’t know where it is.”

“Sherwood, listen to me.”  The hair on the back of my neck began to creep in sympathy with other parts of me that were just plain creeped out and possilby itching. “I’ve got pinworms. I just know it. Sort of.”

“Should I get the baseball bat?”

“No! Pinworms, man, pinworms,” I grabbed him by his shoulders.” I have them!” I lowered my voice to a raspy shout.  “I. CAN. FEEL. THEM. MOVING! I think. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”

He grimaced, looking confused and a little frightened.

“What should I do?” I said.

“Find a cork?” His suggestion was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.

“Listen, Mister, if you don’t watch out, I’ll make you do the “tape test” for pinworms.”

Suspicion replaced fear in his face.

“That’s right. The tape test, where you take clear tape and press it to the skin of my. . ."

He moaned faintly, while looking faint. His dismay became contagious.

Hysteria clawed its way through my brain as I lunged for the phone and dialed my doctor’s emergency number. While waiting for a call from the mean old nurse they make you talk to when you’ve called with an emergency that isn’t really anemergency, I felt a pathologic need to start running in circles.  I ran.

“What are you doing?” My husband had found the baseball bat under the bed and cradled it like a baby. He watched me without blinking. “You know you can’t outrun the pinworms, right? They’re along for the ride. Besides you don’t know that you really have them.”

The phone rang. I stopped running and answered it.

I yelped, “HELP ME! I have worms! Maybe!”

The mean old nurse said, “You realize that pinworms are not considered an emergency or life threatening.”

“Maybe I wasn’t clear.  I THINK I MIGHT HAVE WORMS IN MY PERSONAL BODY PARTS! MAYBE!”

“Mrs. Zern you have called your doctor’s emergency phone number in the middle of the night because you suspect you might, possibly, have an infestation of Enterobeus Vermikularis,” she sighed. “I’ll call in a prescription in the morning. You’ll live.”  The phone clicked off.

The next morning I was supposed to give a speech in front of approximately two hundred of my peers with possible pinworms still possibly creeping about my person, and I did, in fact, deliver that speech. And that’s why I’m one tough Mama-Jama, and it’s very hard to rattle me with threats of global warming, global cooling, global annihilation, or global Xenomorph attack.

I’ve known true horror (possibly) and lived.

Linda (Cork It!) Zern