Story Monger

It’s one of our granddaughter’s favorite stories. She begs to hear it again and again. Her dad tells the story—over and over. It’s the tale of how Aric, our oldest son, fashioned a homemade bolo (bolas) out of two wild Florida yams and a hunk of grapevine and attempted to kill our youngest son and their cousin, Daniel, with it.

In the family lexicon, it’s called The Great Wild Yam Bolo Attack of ’93.

Our oldest son enjoyed heavy infusions of adrenalin from a young age; you know, the way some kids enjoyed pizza.

Our youngest son enjoyed pizza.

Aric liked to build tiger pits and Argentinean bolos.

Adam liked to avoid tiger pits and Argentinean bolos.

The way Adam tells it, Aric appeared out of the misty Florida fog one day, carrying a bolo he’d constructed out of two wild yams connected with a length of twisting vine. Note: Wild Florida yams are as hard as rocks and about as useful.

Also Note: No one ever discovered where Aric stumbled upon his homemade bolo making skills, except that he did.

The way Adam tells it, Aric said not a word to either one of them. He simply appeared and began to twirl the homemade bolo around and around over his head.

The way Adam tells it, they began to yell, “No! No! Don’t do it Aric. Please don’t do it.”

All they heard was the searing whir of rock hard yams slicing the humid air.

Then they began to run. Adam swears he outran Daniel, knowing that no mercy would be shown. At least that’s the way he tells it.

Racing for his life, Adam remembered looking over his shoulder to see Daniel thundering along behind him. As he watched, Aric let fly his homemade bolo. It flew true. Daniel went down in a tangle of legs, arms, dirt, humidity, and yams.

Adam knew better than to stop running. He wished Daniel safe passage to Valhalla and kept right on running.

At least that’s how Adam tells it, over and over and over again to Emma, who laughs uproariously every single time.

It’s good to have stories to tell. Good to have stories that make little girls laugh. Good to have survived long enough to be able to tell the stories to our children that eventually become our family histories.

So to Emma and all the other grandchildren, I say, “Let the stories begin.”

Linda (PAX) Zern

IT'S A PARTY!!!

It's a party!!! A book signing for Linda Carter Zern's book Mooncalf. Everyone is invited and you can get the book on Amazon!

FEBRUARY 15TH  

 http://www.amazon.com/Mooncalf-Linda-L-Zern-ebook/dp/B00GRJJPI6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390488474&sr=1-1&keywords=mooncalf

We Can Hear What You're Really Saying

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.”

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 getting the straight story with 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 as nasty and complicated as a knot in the shoelace of a toddler’s tennis shoe—that has been urinated on all day.

Relative?

Relative means that your truth is not my truth or our truth is not their truth unless it’s true on Comedy Central.  I think.

How is truth supposed to work if we can’t agree on whether or not there actually is a knot in that shoelace? Or whether or not the smell wafting up from that shoelace is urine when we have to untie that shoelace knot with our teeth.

Examples of relative truthfullness include:

Hearing politicians call their LIES misspeaking. “I know I said that there would be a chicken in every pot, but what I meant to say is that everyone should smoke some pot, and then you won’t care one way or the other about getting free chicken.”

Hearing politicians caught in their LIES, claiming that they could have said something more “tightly.”  More tightly????? “I know I said that I was born in a log cabin without a pot or a chicken to put in the pot, but what I should have said is that I made all that stuff up.”

Hearing politicians deny their LIES.  “I had no idea that I said that stuff about free chicken. I found out when you found out on the news. And they never get anything wrong. Right?”

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

It is my grandchildren’s “reality” to call me “mean” when I refuse to let them overdose on Otterpops. “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 is, “It’s so hard learning to be self-controlled.”

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

Linda (Doo-Doo Head) Zern

Thank You SCWG

* JANUARY 25, 2014 * COCOA BEACH WRITERS' CONFERENCE *

HIGHLY MODERN CARP

Heather, our oldest daughter was four years old when she started taking ballet classes. It helped her grow up graceful, cultured, and beautiful. We have been watching her recitals, productions, and shows since she was four years old.

She is swanlike. We are swine-like. Of course, her dad is the head swine, and I am the swine queen.

When our daughter danced in a showcase at her college we packed up our pork rinds and ball caps and tromped right down to sit in the front row to watch her. We’re swine, but we’re supportive.

The production included traditional dance numbers, a stunning number choreographed by our daughter, and then . . . a dance piece in the . . . um . . . er . . . highly modern style.

I consulted the program. The highly modern dance was called Viscous (as in, the thickness of liquids, also goo.) During the highly modern dance, dancers (we think they were dancers) were covered head to toe in muck green leotards (we think they were leotards.) The mucky green bunch began the dance piled up in a moldy looking heap. I knew we were in trouble when I realized the title of the piece might mean sludge.

When the moldy pile of dancers began to crawl, creep, and convulse around the floor as the music (we think it was music) moaned, I began to worry. This was not going to be received well by my husband, the computer analyst math geek whose idea of modern dance is standing up and stretching.

The dancers continued to twitch and creep. I tried hard to look contemplative and to think deep thoughts about thick liquids. I prayed that it would end quickly.

Alas, no. On the music moaned. On the dancers rolled and oozed. On and on until, like that kid in that story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” my husband pointed out the glaringly obvious.

“This is crap!”

Or he might have said, “They look like carp.”

I’m not sure. At this point it all gets a little blurry—crap, carp. Who knows what he actually said? But I’m pretty sure he said it right out loud, not yelling out loud, but loud enough. You know? I don’t think he pointed.

However, what he did next is seared into my memory. He laughed.

First it was only a muffled chuckle, trapped behind his hand, but then as the green muck folk quivered closer he laughed through his nose, mouth, and possibly his ears. It was loud. And like an infection, the laughter spread from my husband to the others, row by row. It radiated out like ripples on a weedy pond. Several audience members tried to control their laughing by stuffing their own fists in their mouths. This caused more laughing—a lot more.

I was desperate as the levity rebellion spread, and I snapped, “If you don’t stop laughing right now, I will take you out of this meeting, Mister.”

Later, Heather reported that one of the dancers backstage with really good hearing observed, “Hey, someone out there is laughing.”

Heather said, “That’s not someone. That’s my dad.”

After the show, one anonymous critic was heard to say, “Those dancers looked like those danged slugs in my garden.”

Sherwood had no further comment. We went to Dairy Queen.

Actually, I love the way my math wizard loves to point and say, “Hey, the Emperor has no clothes on. That dude is naked.” Of course, usually, the naked dude is Sherwood. Oh, wait. That was in high school when streaking on motorcycles was all the rage.

What we lack in culture, we make up for in bravado.

Linda (Pass the Pork) Zern

UNINTENDED GOOD THINGS:

 Our local library called to ask me about teaching classes this summer for the kids. One of the librarians read MOONCALF and submitted my name. HOW COOL IS THAT???

JITTERY

Reports of my imagined death are false—also incorrect. I’m not dead.

To recap: I am not dead. I’m just concentrating really hard.

Several years ago, my husband couldn’t instantly get a hold of me via my cell phone, because it was dead, the cell phone. NOT ME. When he couldn’t immediately contact me from Kuala Lumpur or Detroit or Walmart or wherever to let me know he’d forgotten to take out the garbage or something equally informative, he panicked.

So he called our daughter, Heather.

Who called our daughter, Maren.

Who told her friends at school that I’m a hermit and a nut.

Who called my husband, her father.

Who called our daughter, Heather, again.

Who called each other, over and over, whipping each other into a frenzy.

Heather finally broke the cycle of hysteria by calling her friend, Maria, and saying, “I’m at work. Could you drive out to my parent’s house and check on my AGED mother?”

Maria! Marie who lives in a whole other village, Marie, who got in her car, drove to our country home (also our city home) and finding all the doors, window, and portholes open assumed that I had been eaten by cats—also raccoons.

I was in my office—working.

Proving that what we’ve got here is a hefty case of the jitters.

While it is true that I live alone a great deal of time, I am not a complete idiot. I try to wait for when my husband is home to clean the chimney, re-organize the hayloft, chop down trees, or check the crawlspace for expired squirrels.

And as far as being murdered in my sleep by criminal types, I believe that most criminal types are stupid people, the kind of people that get stuck in chimneys. And if I can’t outsmart some nimrod stuck in my chimney then shame on me.

That’s why I sleep with the cat. Plan A is that I will throw the cat at the stupid intruder and make my escape out of the bathroom window. At which point I will run to the ditch out front and hide behind the enormous stump that the county hasn’t carted away from storm damage. It’s the main reason I haven’t called the county about the eyesore stump by the road. That stump is part of my master plan. I have a detailed schematic drawn up.

Please note: That stump has been hauled off since I first reported on the above foolishness, thus changing plan A to plan B.

Unfortunately, plan B has me hiding in my neighbor’s barn in my *scanties. So sometimes I sleep in my bathrobe with my cell phone in the pocket, except that my cell phone is quite often “dead,” thus kicking off jittery meltdowns in the first place. Go figure.

Linda (Chimney Sweep) Zern

*Scanties is a southern word for clothing you don’t want to be caught wearing while hiding in a ditch.

A BIG, BIG THANK YOU . . .

. . . to my readers for their kind words and helpful feedback.  

A Wrinkle in Time

I was forty-six at the time. I needed a haircut. I walked into one of those cut rate chop shops for hair and asked in a youthful, jolly way, “I just walked in for a haircut. Who wants to welcome me?”

The receptionist gave me her best and most practiced smile. She looked twelve.

I flipped my scraggly hair out of my eyes in a hip, child-like way.

“And will you be wanting the fifty-five and over discount?” she said, her hand hovering over the appointment book.

Stunned, shocked, dismayed, and startled, I said, “No, no discount! And I’m not pregnant either.”

There it was, my first brush with death, the dreaded senior citizen’s discount inquiry.

I was forty-six. But some of my wrinkles were ninety.

I blame Botox. It’s hard to find a forehead that isn’t lying about its age. So, in the spirit of honesty and full disclosure I make an accounting of my wrinkles and how they came to roost on my face.

Please note: I have a very expressive face. My face expresses itself a lot. If I paralyzed my wrinkles my mouth would turn to stone, not unlike my heart.

To begin there are four parallel lines across my forehead. They look like wrinkle canyons. These are my shock and awe lines. As in, “What made you think that lowering the cat out of the second story window in a pillowcase was a good idea? Pull that cat back in this window right now.” Or, “Your brother put peanut butter where? Show me.”

These wrinkles are also my “Ask a stupid question wrinkles.” They appeared after having to ask questions like, “Is that Barbie doll smoking a cigarette?” Or better yet, “Please tell me that you are not making Barbie porn with the family video camera?”

Then there is the single SLASHING wrinkle across the very top of my forehead known as the mark of the oldest child. This line appeared the day I found our oldest son dangling upside down by one foot from his grandfather’s motor home. Typing a rope to the railing of the RV, he’d attempted to go “rappelling.” The RV was the tallest thing he could find in Florida. Now, he dangles out of helicopters for the US military. The wrinkle deepens.

The nest of crosshatched lines around my eyes was created by having to watch 1,247 games of Little League baseball without sunglasses in the Sun Shine State.

The marionette lines around my mouth are inherited. I got them from my mother, who got them from her mother, who got them from . . . It’s hard to argue with genetic baggage.

The wrinkles on my cheeks are my very own. They’re dimple wrinkles, and they’re from laughing. They’re from hearing my husband (at public swimming facilities) say things like, “Quick, everyone run for the car, the baby just pooped in the hot tube.” And then running, and then finding out nobody pooped in anything.

Actually, that’s the problem. I don’t have a heart of stone.

Like you, I feel everything, and everything I feel comes pounding out of my heart, surges through the pores of my face, and drips right off the end of my deeply lined chin. It seems odd that the goal of our society is to make our faces look as if they’ve never felt anything or been anywhere.

My face was forty-six years old, and it had seen some stuff.

My face is older now and it has seen a lot more stuff.

And it’s a good face—wrinkles and all.

Linda (Discount Diva) Zern

FELLOW BOOK LOVERS

It doesn't get better than this.  Phoenix (age 6) and her mom and sister, the beautiful Payton, came to visit with me and discuss stories, books, and the love of words. I signed her worn, well loved copy of A Long-Promised Song  . . . and . . . 

she signed my heart. 

January 2014