ZippityZerns (My Turn)

It's Free. It's Fun. It's Funny. (Or so I've been told.) It's Electronic.

2012-01-25T04:15:00.000-08:00

ZippityZern's Uncommon Nonsense - A Farmer's Almanac

Ebook Price: Free! 5440 words. Nonfiction by Linda Zern on November 25, 2011

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.

College Daze: Getting Ready for Real

2012-01-22T06:36:00.001-08:00

It’s a recurring criticism of college life and academia thatthey don’t represent “real life.” It’s true. They don’t. The mental ballet ofthe Socratic method of question and answer, the delicate give and take ofknowledge given and received, and the glittering fire of minds forever changedare rarely experienced outside the college classroom . . . at . . . oh say,Target.

College is a rare and civilized moment in life, but it isnot “real life.” It is a utopian fantasy of what we might wish life could be,might be, if only we didn’t have to get into a sub-compact with bad catalyticconverters, pull onto I-4, and commute—anywhere, ever.

However, in defense of the academic experience, I amprepared to discuss in depth what I believe is a little known course of studyin “real life” preparation available on your college campus. It’s called Parking Lot, A “Real Life” Prep Course—110.

Parking Lot, A “RealLife” Prep Course is a comprehensive course of study designed to prepare astudent for every major “real life” scenario. It’s all out there, in theparking lot—injustice, competition, inequities between socio-economic classes,and of course, hit and run crime. The parking lot at your college campus is aPetri dish of “real life,” and before a student cracks the first classroom doorthey are out there in the parking lot exploring, experimenting,navigating—getting tickets.

“Real life” is full of bloody, medieval competition—also hemlock.

Competition, defined by the big red dictionary on my desk,is a “striving or vying with another or others for profit, prize, position, orthe necessities of life; rivalry.”

The necessities of life include: oxygen, water, ketchup,mustard and a decent parking space within a two-mile radius of Orlando Hall.

Therefore, vying for a parking space is like a daily popquiz in “real life.”

Out there in the parking lot, cars circle like a swirlingflock of vultures waiting for the subtle signs of a retreating vehicle—theglint of a taillight, the subtle shift of a bumper, the erupting blare ofthumping music from someone’s trunk, and it’s game on. Seven drivers convergeon a single empty space—striving, vying—flipping each other off.

There’s less profanity in a Tarentino film. I can think offew other courses of study that prepare today’s college student for the “reallife” Machiavellian maneuvering of the corporate boardroom or the gossipycesspool of the water cooler than the competition for an exceptional parkingspace at Rollins College. It’s a student’s best way to get ready for “real.”

Linda (Put Your Blinker On) Zern

QUICKIES: Postings That Are Short And Sweet

2012-01-14T02:29:00.000-08:00

When Phillip reported the spelling error, the woman who'd handed
him his name tag said, "Oh, I'm so glad it's a mistake; I felt so bad for you."

The Legend: When Phillip Stahle (the son-in-law) picked up his name tag at a recent work conference it read - Phillip Stank. And so the legend was born of how the four Stahle boys (Conner, Kip, Zac, and Griffon) became the four "Stank" brothers - Stink, Stank, Stunk, and pretty soon Stump, oh, and of course, Zoe, their long-suffering big sister.

THE BAD NEWS GOOD NEWS

2012-01-13T05:29:00.000-08:00

Ploodle Caligula Zern - The Usual Suspect

THE BAD NEWS: Someone kicked out the kick panel of the screen porch door. THE GOOD NEWS: We have a dog door.

THE BAD NEWS: A red tail hawk tried to eat one of my chickens. THE GOOD NEWS: Ploodle Caligula Zern chased the hawk off.

THE BAD NEWS: Ploodle then tried to kill the very chicken he had just saved. THE GOOD NEWS: He was arrested for attempted murder.

THE BAD NEWS: He's asking for a lawyer. THE GOOD NEWS . . .

2012-01-11T03:22:00.000-08:00

Behind the ligustrum, next to the feed room, on the front of the barn, I found the work of three underground artists. And if I have to explain why I'll never paint over this bit of graffiti for as long as I own this barn, then you probably don't have grandchildren. May your day be filled with happy graffiti!!

"But it's our clubhouse, YaYa!" Zoe explained.

FARMFASHION 101

2012-01-10T07:46:00.000-08:00

The well dressed farmer will always have the latest in up to date footwear--poop resistant shoes made of rubber or titanium.

Granny geezer vests with HUGE pockets are all the rage . . .

. . . for hopefully obvious reasons. HUGE pockets allow the busy farmer to have her hands free for the occasional goat rescue or snake relocation.

On The Trail

2012-01-09T20:13:00.000-08:00

Sherwood is hoping to join the Osceola Volunteer Mounted Posse. It takes a year to get rider and horse trained. They search for the lost and missing, work the county fair, and patrol various local "hot" spots. He heard there was a complementary tee-shirt involved.

I'm hoping that Selena doesn't toss me into a Florida cactus.

My view when my husband and I go trail riding--the back parts!

Miss Kitty - my husband's foundation quarter horse

Miss Selena - my fabulous little anglo/arab endurance mare!

Taking a break - December 2011

Goat Grief!

2012-01-08T01:53:00.000-08:00

I walked onto our back porch, caught a whiff of what surely had to be a molting skunk, and started searching for the offending stink monster.

But something about the smell was strangely familiar, a smell that quite possibly qualified in certain states as a toxic chemical spill under EPA regulations. That was no skunk smell.

That was an odor that came in through your nose but got trapped in your throat, forming a solid lump of stench next to your left tonsil. It was the smell of musk, rut, and lust. It was the smell of the goat next door, a Nubian buck goat with a head like a cinder block and a "come hither" look in his eye, and it was rank.

I could hardly complain, however, because I enjoy comic relief the way some people enjoy the smell of an aftershave called, "Sex Panther." The goat fell in love with a donkey. The donkey objected violently to the prospect of being the object of buck lov'en. Mr. Medina, my neighbor, objected to the donkey trying to bite the head off of the goat. Mr. Medina chased the goat, who chased the donkey, who ran for its sexual purity.

I laughed. Then I coughed. Then I choked. Because there is nothing in this world, like the smell of a big goat in big love.

Linda (Hold Your Breath) Zern

Quickies - Postings That Are Short and Sweet

2012-01-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

Born under the chicken coop, a flood forced their mother (Elsa) to re-locate her kittens to the inside of the coop. And that's where Elsa and her two kittens now live--inside the chicken coop, with the chickens! I like to call these pictures, "Dinnertime on the Serengeti." Elsa, Christian, and "Little" Elsa are having dinner with the chickens!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM ELSA AND HER FAMILY!

Dinnertime on the Serengeti

I can't explain this picture. It's the chicken coop, but that's neither a chicken or a cat. It's Einstein the miniature horse!

He Ain't Heavy; He's My Effigy

2011-12-26T17:34:00.000-08:00

Allentrepreneurs know that the formula for financial success is to “see a need, fillthe need,” and by financial success I mean the making of so much money that youhave to carry the cash around in metal buckets—with two hands. So here’s mybusiness plan for a hot new start up company and don’t try to copy me. I’ll sue. I’m an American. I know lawyers. Well, I know of lawyers.

Okay,I’ve seen lawyers on TV.

Afterwatching Greece, France, England, and large chunks of pretty much everywhereelse riot their way through 2011, I recognized the need for a company that canprovide realistic and anatomically correct effigies for improved publicdisplays of righteous vexation and discontent—through burning.

Note: Effigy is a fancy word for a stuffed dummy constructed primarily of dryer lintfor ease of burning during public displays of righteous vexation.

I’vecalled the new company Burn Big Dummy Burn, Incorporated, and I’m insisting that my family work in the factory, without pay, tokeep costs down and profits high; I prefer to call them “my little dummystuffing monkeys” rather than slaves. The Effigy Engineering Division isalready in full production out in the garage—where all globalmega-conglomerates begin.

Are youas tired as we are of watching a couple thousand of your fellow, globalcitizens whipping each other into a frenzied mob only to realize that theireffigy stuffing committee forgot to bring the effigy? Or worse, the committeeshows up with a dummy that looks like a pair of Granny’s panty hose stuffedwith Kleenex.

Ourcompany motto: “Burn one of our dummies and no one will think that you’retorqued off at your garbage or Billy-Boy’s laundry; they’ll know exactly whoyou just reduced to ash.”

We at Burn Big Dummy Burn are continually shocked by the poor qualityof the effigies we see burning on cable news. Those things don’t look like badscarecrows, let alone recognizable international greed mongering leaders. Wemake it our business to keep poor planning and execution on the part of your“dummy stuffing committee” from putting a damper on your mob’s righteous rage.

We’reoffering (at a reasonable price) effigies with both recognizable features andaccurate cultural attire. You want to burn a government official in effigy, andwe want you to. Just give us a name, and we’ll Google a face.

For afew cents more, your personalized effigy will come pre-soaked in the highestgrade lighter fluid known to mankind for the flashiest, most dramatic flamespossible outside of space exploration. We recognize that there’s nothing worsethan a dummy that refuses to go up like a third rate re-make of “The ToweringInferno.” Don’t let your mob’s murderous hate fizzle.

Inaddition, our gorgeous effigies come with a dozen complimentary sticks, becausewe recognize that a lot of our clients enjoy beating their stuffed dummiessenseless with sticks before they torch ‘em. Here at Burn Big Dummy Burn we know what gets your mob hopping mad and keeps your mobhopping mad.

Ourexpansion plans include the mass production of highly flammable flags, icons,posters, placards, and symbols. Why burn one flag when you can burn thousands?Of course, we’ll have group discounts for our very best repeat rioters. And youknow who you are.

Yourfoaming, spitting, rock tossing protesters can count on us to be discrete,efficient, and prompt. We understand how tricky planning “spontaneousdemonstrations” of anarchy can be, and for our international clientele it’seasy to place your orders 24/7 at our website: <www.WhotheheckisGUYFAWKESanyway.com>

Remember!Our mission statement: You plan the snarling hate filled demonstrations,public conflagrations, and window smashing brick chucking, and we’ll take careof the details.

Complimentarybricks included with your first order!!!!! Act now!!!!!!!

Sincerely,

Linda L.Zern (Entrepreneur, Small Business Owner, President, Whip Cracking Overlord,and CEO of Burn BigDummy Burn, Inc.)

Book of Zern - Chapter Umpteenth

2011-12-19T06:27:00.000-08:00

1 In the year in which common courtesy didstdie and the people didst make much of their “Angry Birds” and their “Farm-Villes" saying, “Just a minute whilst I dost harvest my pumpkins,” I didstcontinue the record of my people.

2 And in that selfsame year, I didstcurse the harvesting of the imaginary pumpkins saying, “All ye that dovirtually that which they do not care to do physically needs must repent or besmitten by the wrath of mine tongue.”

3 And they didst reject all mine words,being much taken with their Apps, and while they were thus engaged with theirfaux pumpkin growing, I didst watch and make note of all that didst happen.

4 Now the year of 2011 was on this wise:Sherwood the Mighty Hunter didst go forth to Detroit to collect the shekelsthat were his due, both for the support of his tribe and the blessing ofothers. And he didst consider himself rich both in flocks and fields andchildren and grandchildren. And he didst prosper in the land of Saint Cloud,wishing neither to covet or be coveted upon.

5 And I, even the Ya Ya, didst continuein that which I did begin, saying, Yea have I not come to be that which alldoth desire to be in our land? Both unemployed and fed like unto Elijah theTishbite when he wast fed by the ravens that were sent forth by the hand ofGod? And I doth make an answer—Yea, Yea, I sayeth, I am most blessed in that Iam fed by ravens—also Sherwood the Mighty Hunter, and all mine needs met byboth he, who is mine husband, and by UPS.

6 And the elder son of our tribe didstreturn once more from the land of the heathen and didst set up camp in thelands round about and didst make his home at Fort Campbell. There he didst workmost earnestly both protecting the Colonel and overseeing the warriors andfinding out that which is to be found out concerning weapons of war. And in allthis didst he pray most earnestly for peace in the lands round about.

7 And Heather, Maren, and Adam (withtheir husbands and wife) didst bring forth much children and didst spend theirdays commencing the work of the Lord, even the work of Eternal Life, in thatthey did teacheth to their children that which the world could notunderstandeth, no, nor comprehendeth! And they did live after the manner ofhappiness,

8 Excepting when the parents wereharvesting of their crops on Farm-Ville. Then they did ignoreth the risinggeneration, excepting to say, “Why doth that kid haveth no pants on?”

9 And all this was done that it might befulfilled which was spoken by the Ya Ya when she sayeth, “Cometh on over. Thereare leftovers yet to eat.”

10 And they didst eat of the fat of theland and laughed oft and didst watch the Heavens diligently for the signs ofthat great and terrible day which was to come when all their children, yea all,were trained, yea trained to go in the potty and not behindeth a tree, in theirpants, or on the dog.

11 And I maketh an end. May the God ofAbraham, Isaac, and Jacob bless thee and keep thee in the lands of thy owninheritance this Christmas season and in all seasons of the years, excepting ifthis year which is to come, even 2012, be the last year then may the God ofAbraham, Isaac, and Jacob buildeth thee a bunker, well stocked with Viennasausage. Amen.

Happy Christmas and Merry New Year

2011-12-18T18:58:00.000-08:00

I am a reindeer. Those are my antlers. It was a holiday moment of gamesmanship and high jinks. Nothing says Christmas like a panty hose crotch on your head stuffed with balloons. Some would question my wisdom in posting pictures of my "antlers gone wild" moment. Let them. I stand by my second place win!

Down on the Hobby Farm - Zoe, Emma, Conner, Kipling, Sadie, Reagan, and Zac (Christmas 2011)

2011-12-13T17:27:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas - May your way be as pleasant!

Sugar Plums Dancing on my Gray Matter: A Christmas Story

2011-12-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

The Christmas Crush

Last year I did not decorate for Christmas. I don’t know; I just wasn’t feeling it. Aric was in Afghanistan. The housing market was in the local landfill. Everyone who had decided to have only one or two kids so that they could “spoil them” had succeeded.

Instead of decorating, I started my spring cleaning—in December. And I heard about the decoration desert at YaYa’s all year long.

This year I decorated. For two days I unpacked, hung, strung, pushed, moved, arranged, draped, rearranged, assembled, located, dusted, displayed, climbed, and hung. (Oh wait, I already said hung; too bad, I’m leaving it. It’s a double hung kind of story.)

Last night in glittering triumph, I prepared to hang the last ornament on the last branch of the most beautiful Christmas tree I have ever personally overseen. In exhausted triumph, I hung that last gold whatever on the tree, stepped back to admire my work, and—the whole silver and gold vision toppled straight over on top of me—shattering about half of my most cherished holiday ornaments and crushing me to death.

In fact, I’m sending this to you from the spirit world. It’s not so bad here. Lots of time. Lots of interesting folks to chat with. In fact, I see Charles Dickens right over there. I think I’m going to go over and ask him a couple of questions about the inspiration for his Christmas story. Shalom from the other side.

Linda (Holly Jolly) Zern

Weirdo Magnet

2011-12-05T04:32:00.000-08:00

Warning: Some of the observations in this essay may appear politically incorrect, boorish, or just plain snobby. My advice is to “roll with it” and take comfort in the knowledge that your judgmental attitude toward my judgmental attitude is superior in every way.

I am a weirdo magnet.

And when I say “weirdo” I mean I attract people who are loonies, goonies, and possibly sand people. These are folks who stray from the norms of normalcy in ways that are hard to predict under normal circumstances and often involve the wearing of tinfoil pantaloons.

My husband, Sherwood (a man with a somewhat unusual name) once tried to help me find the cause of my weirdo magnetism.

“It’s because you make eye contact, listen to what the sand people have to say, and treat them like regular people.”

“Oh, you mean I’m kind.”

“Exactly! Knock it off.”

I try. I really do. But the tinfoil pantaloon people take me by surprise, often at WalMart.

Like Saturday, when the world’s oldest living hippy spotted me, sized me up, and cut me out of the herd. It’s possible that his grizzled ponytail was pulled a bit tight. From under a moustache the color of old lemonade, he informed me that he enjoyed picking up the clothes that shoppers carelessly threw on the ground in the children’s department at our local WalMart.

“Oh no. I hope it wasn’t me,” I said, feeling my hands clench reflexively around the purple velour hoodie I was holding—sized twelve months.

He continued, “But my back hurts now, and I’m done picking up clothes.” His shopping cart effectively cut me off from the shoe department, the dairy section, and electronics—also freedom.

“Would you like to know something?”

Looking the grizzled hippy man straight in the eye, I said, “Of course.” I can’t help it. I’m the curious sort.

He gestured vaguely toward the baby seat of his shopping cart.

“I’m getting a little something for myself for Christmas.”

I can’t help it. I’m a visual person. I did look.

Risking a quick glance, I saw that he had two packages of women’s underwear in his cart. White. Polyester. Not thongs. Hopefully. I looked away as quickly as my eyeballs could swivel in my eye sockets.

With a flourish and a wink, he said, “I’ve got two honeys, but they’re different sizes; I’d better not get the panties mixed up. Hee, hee, hee.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture his “honeys,” plural. I couldn’t.

“Wow, no, I wouldn’t mix up their sizes. That might be big trouble, and you wouldn’t want that, especially at Christmas time. Hee, hee, hee. Well, good luck with that.”

Growing irrationally more concerned that he was about to ask me my panty size I began to inch away and look for my grown daughter, a daughter who had managed to completely disappear into a rack of little girl’s pajama bottoms during the conversation. See above.

I know. I know. It was a harsh, biased, judgmental response to the perfectly nice overtures of a perfectly nice panty-loving, weirdo.

I can’t help it. I’m a weirdo magnet.

Linda (Two-For-One) Zern

Knees Like Knuckles

2011-11-25T17:11:00.000-08:00

By the year 2099 (if we survive 2012, 2013, and the year that asteroid comes back with Bruce Willis riding on it) the world will be covered with old people. Some will be older than others.

I am anticipating that oldness will be very hip in the coming years and some oldness hipper than others, depending on the condition of people’s knees—also hips, real or faux. My husband and I will be on the tail end of the baby booming retirement craze, having been born on the tail end of the baby boom. Actually, we were born on the fizzle at the end of the baby boom, which means that our hips still work (last check) but our knees talk more than they used to. Okay, our knees don’t really “talk” they cuss, and in my husband’s case, they swear up a blue streak.

The following is actual pillow talk between two fifty-somethings contemplating the end of their functioning kneecaps, okay, it’s a conversation between me and my boyfriend of thirty-three years (Sherwood the Knuckle-Knee Zern):

“Sherwood, I’m giving you the two minute warning. Brace yourself; I’m going to roll over and give you a hug and a goodnight kiss.”

I heard him rearranging himself next to me, amid the sounds of his shoulder popping, his knee mourning the loss of its ACL, and his spine snapping shut.

I rolled toward him and puckered up; his shoulder popped like a breakfast circle made by elves.

He moaned and clutched his shoulder, which brought his knee in contact with a particularly rough fold of bed linen. He thrashed around on our pillow top mattress. I watched.

“Babe, have you been doing those exercises with that big rubber band thingy the doctor gave you.”

“Which one?” he gasped out.

“Hunh, which what? Which exercise, rubber band thingy, or body part? Is that what you mean?” He continued to thrash, concentrating on not answering me. “Okay, have you been doing your shoulder exercises with the blue rubber band thingy the doctor gave you?”

He paused in his thrashing.

“I always pack the rubber band thingy the doctor gives me when I travel.”

“You know, you have to actually do the exercises with the rubber band thingy to keep your body parts from falling off with old age and mildew.” I started in on my (the-couple-who-exercises-together-stays-out-of-the-orthopedic-surgeon’s-office-together) speech, finishing with, “How many of those exercise rubber bands from the doctor do you have anyway?”

He considered.

“I have enough of those exercise rubber bands that if I sewed them all together I’d have a hell of a slingshot.”

“A slingshot might be a good thing to have when the zombie apocalypse gets here, ‘cuz you sure aren’t going to be outrunning those zombies anymore,” I said and gave him a goodnight kiss. “And what’s with the cussing? You never cuss.”

“That wasn’t me; that was my knee back talking.”

I got up to take some Advil PM for the burning in my lumpy finger bones—also known as arthritis, which in my case is caused by meanness—also mildew. Bring on the zombie baby booming apocalypse.

Linda (Got Fit Hips?) Zern

Pooping in Your Pants Never was Happiness

2011-11-18T04:50:00.000-08:00

Potty training is a real **pisser.

Just ask Sadie, my three-year old granddaughter, who at any given moment breaks into hysterical weeping when she has a potty training malfunction or thinks that she MIGHT have had a potty training malfunction or SUSPECTS that she might have a potty training malfunction sometime in the future—near or far.

Just ask Kipling, my three-year grandson, who breaks into hysterical weeping when someone mentions to him that it might be time to change his diaper, a diaper hanging approximately to his ankles and filled with “the usual” byproducts—also an action figure or two and random chunks of cement. We have a fun family nickname for a diaper that has seen dryer better days; we call it the venom sack.

Just ask Sherwood, my husband, who is sensitive (apparently) to something used at restaurants to create meals—like food, and who loves to regale the family at Sunday dinner with the tale of his famous potty malfunction in a public bathroom. In the lobby! Of a Marrott! At a sink! Don’t ask! Note: For the full story you have to come to Sunday dinner. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you’ll be required to change Kip’s diaper.

Just ask Heather, Kip’s mother, who has Irritable Bowl Syndrome and a Gastroenterologist. Heather says that when she goes to the doctor, it’s a waiting room full of eighty year olds and her, but it’s worth it to get the good pills. Heather’s doctor says that IBS is often caused by internalized stress, probably from trying to potty train a kid with random chunks of cement in his disposable pants.

Actually, several members of my family seem to have trouble with their gastroenterology and it’s not just the toddlers, which makes family outings exciting. Receptacles that members of my family have considered using as an emergency potty include: trashcans, hastily dug holes, a hedge on the National Mall in DC when the public bathroom was closed for cleaning, and my handbag.

And that’s why I don’t believe in “the dignity of man,” because there’s no such beast and even if there were such a beast as a dignified man, he’d still have to poop somewhere. Trust me on this.

Linda (Regular Jane) Zern

**Pisser – a crude ancient Greek word meaning a pain in the diaper.

College Age: Education that is Higher

2011-11-10T09:01:00.000-08:00

I go to night school. I go to night school to pursue higher education, which is education that is higher or taller than lower, shorter education. You can tell if education is higher because the people are taller—also sleepier. Presently, I am studying Major English Writings I. These are major writings like Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, but they are not in English. Another way to tell if higher education is higher than lower education is that the class titles will be wildly misleading.

In lower, shorter education there are classes called “Reading Time” where you sit in a circle and read stuff. In higher, taller education there are classes where you sit in a circle and you read stuff, but the stuff you are reading will be incomprehensible. The stuff you read in the taller education will make you long for a Star Trek Universal Language Translator or the Swedish Chef from the Muppets, because at least the Swedish Chef makes you laugh.

After you have read the incomprehensible stuff that sounds like the Swedish Chef making meatballs, you will be asked to write stuff about the stuff you have read. There are a few rules:

1) Incomprehensibility will be punished.

2) Wild theories, outlandish speculation, and big words are rewarded.

3) Whatever you write, there can always be more or less of it.

4) Nothing means what you think—a flea is never a flea.

I was excited to see that we would be reading a poem about a flea in major English writings. I thought, I can always use a few good tips about flea control and outbreak prevention here on the farm. Alas (that’s a word I learned in higher, taller education) alas, I had not embraced rule number four, see above. I was not alone.

At the big circle table where we sit, the student on my right shifted in her seat.

“I’m going to say that the flea is a fetus,” she said.

Another skill I have acquired in higher education is the ability to speak out of the side of my mouth, under my breath, so that my identity is concealed in a group setting.

“I like it. Flea starts with F, fetus starts with F. The teacher will love it.”

My friend was encouraged.

The girl on my left leaned over and in a conspiratorial tone whispered, “I don’t think you can go wrong if you mention the word ‘penis.’ I think the flea is a penis.”

“Nice.” I reassured her.

“How about the flea being the embodiment of the church’s inability to establish a system of semi-institutional ways to castrate the male dominated society’s need to express its infantile sexuality, or the flea is a pregnant alien with a penis.”

I’m not sure I actually heard this or just hallucinated it.

Somebody asked, “Linda, what’cha got?”

“Fleas suck?” No one laughed. “Nothing. I got nothing.”

My problem is that I’m a writer. I write about fleas and peas and creaky knees, and I have a hard time not thinking like a writer or about the writer. My sympathy is with the guy who wrote about the fleas and what he was thinking about when he wrote The Flea and whether or not he’d been having a hard pest control week, or if the flea situation at his house was just totally whacked out . . . and brother, I feel you. I really do.

Here’s to higher education that is taller and smarter and deeper—don’t forget deeper.

Linda (Smarty Pants) Zern

The Droopy Truth

2011-10-31T04:24:00.000-07:00

My husband (Sherwood Kevin—and they called him Sherwood not Kevin) and I have racked up a fairly impressive list of most embarrassing moments over the past thirty-three years of marriage.

There was the time Sherwood ran out of gas in the drive-through of McDonald’s where he had to push the car up to the “pick-up” window. Then there was the knee surgery/Sodium Pentothal fiasco when Sherwood had a little trouble coming “out of it” and told the Nazis’ (i.e. nurses) in the recovery room that he had four wives and thirty-seven children and a really HUGE . . . um . . . REASON for all those wives. Talk about Big Love. Then there was the bubble gum on the hairy buttocks incident—also Sherwood.

He’s racked up a fairly impressive list of embarrassing moments. But remember I haven’t even begun to discuss the reams of charming, noxious, embarrassing moments involving various body fluids erupting in public places from our children during the “four kids, six and under” years.

The mistake is to assume that once the children are potty trained and the hubby’s knee rehab is over, that it’s finally over—the embarrassment of being alive and breathing various gases which produce—when mixed with, oh say—a Coney Island hotdog other chemical reactions. If anything, the relentless march of age just makes for a lot of fun opportunities to be total bags of gas and droopy body parts. Now, “most embarrassing” is almost a competition, and I’m thinking I’ve taken the lead.

From a recent phone call confessional:

“Boy, did I have an embarrassing moment today at work.”

Not shocked, I asked, “Now what?”

“Well, I got up from my desk to greet some co-workers, and when I stood up I just let fly with a giant . . .”

Cutting him off, I yelped, “What!?”

“You know.”

“No, what? You let fly with a groan, moan, sigh . . . what?” I paused and embraced the dawning truth. With slow drip horror, I said, “You. Did. Not!”

“Yep! Right there in my cubicle.”

“Did anyone say anything?”

“Nope. But their faces said it all; it was so embarrassing.”

Silence descended over our conversation like a helium balloon filled with methane.

“Well,” I said, “I think I’ve got you beat.”

“I don’t know; that was pretty embarrassing. I’d never met those people before.” Skepticism mixed with humiliation in his voice.

“I’m telling you; I’ve got you beat.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“You know how on Mondays I clean house in my big old sweatshirt, and I don’t wear . . . you know, anything . . .”

“Rubber gloves?”

“No! I don’t wear, you know . . . foundation.” (Foundation is a Southern word for bra. It’s a cultural thing.)

“And you’re not talking about makeup.”

“Right.”

“So, I had some stuff I needed to put in one of those plastic snap Rubbermaid totes, you know those plastic storage buck-ity things with the lids that I buy by the truckload from WalMart?”

“Yes.” It was a worried “yes.”

“Okay, so after I shoved the junk into the plastic thing and I went to snap the lid closed,” I said, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, “I snapped the end of my . . . self in the lid.”

Silence.

“You mean, the part not wearing foundation,” he said.

“Roger that,” I sighed. “But the worst part is that the plastic lid was closer to my waist than my chin when I snapped my . . . self into it.”

“Wow, bummer. Okay, you win. You now hold the most embarrassing moment prize.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Mother Nature.”

And so it droops; I mean goes, and so it goes. I’ve never been one to herald “the dignity of man” much, because I’ve never found any part of living to be very dignified. Mostly it’s just people pretending that nothing disgusting ever comes out of their noses or other orifices—ever. But it does, and we all know it. Not only does disgusting stuff come out of us all the time, sometimes it lingers in the air and wafts over into the cubicle next to you. So here’s hoping that this week finds you downwind and your droopy bits safe from snappy plastic lids.

Note: If you find these references too obscure please email me, and I’ll be happy to tell you that Sherwood farted in front of some clients he had never met, and I snapped my nipple into a Rubbermaid storage container.

Linda (Flopsy) Zern

Defaced

2011-10-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

One of my professors is trying to establish and encourage a charming collegiate tradition on my college campus. He wants folks to rub the head of the Benjamin Franklin statue when they walk, jog, saunter, scurry, or skulk by it.

I could not be more horrified.

The bronze Benjamin Franklin statue sits on a park bench near Orlando Hall in a posture of casual relaxation. He’s all sprawled out like my Uncle Morris lounging on the couch when his flatulence is kicking up; I said it was casual.

At the beginning of the semester, I wandered over to wish Old Ben a grand goodnight on my way to the parking garage when I realized that someone had defaced Benjamin Franklin’s crotch with what appeared to be a mixture of chocolate milkshake and shellac. Defaced? De-frocked? De-crotched? (I’m an English major, and that’s why this last bit of wordplay is ironic.)

My first thought upon seeing Mr. Franklin’s crotch . . . coated with faux muck stuff was performance art or political statement?

My second thought was I’m frightened.

My primary physical reaction was to stumble backwards away from the defacement and yell, “Oh what in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is that?” And then I scurried by, continuing on my way to the parking garage, in the foggy humid semi-tropical darkness—alone. I tried not to speculate where a person would mix up a batch of chocolate-milk-shake-shellac-crotch-bomb: a lab, a dorm, a bathtub in a dorm, or that shaggy hedge next to the parking garage.

With all due respect to my professor, I’d like an alternative assignment. I’d like to know if it would be okay if when I walk by the statue of Benjamin Franklin near Orlando Hall that I just rub my own head and maybe skip a jaunty step or two?

Linda (Statues are People Too) Zern

Stink Bug Acid Attack!

2011-10-13T11:16:00.000-07:00

Emergency Meeting of the Zern Family Emergency Response Team -

Zern Family Emergency Response Team Mission Statement: To form and coordinate a coherent, agile, and capable response to emergency situations up to and including, alien body snatching, wandering zombie hordes, mule invasions, water moose infestations, and exploding maggot migrations (anywhere, anytime, for any reason.)

Also, it would be nice if someone could find out why that kid is screaming her guts out!!

“Referring to Emergency Situation # 3127-12, StarDate – sometime just the other day,” I paused, referring to notes scrawled on my forearm.

“Would someone like to explain why, when there were children screaming bloody murder in the chicken coop on Sunday, no one got up out of their lawn chairs and physically moved to assess the threat level?”

One team member pretended to sit up straighter and another practiced nodding, boney shoulder shrugging, out numbered faux nods—four to one.

“Okay, let me ask it this way.” I folded my lumpy finger bones in front of me, resting them on the picnic table.

“What exactly did you think was happening when you heard,” I glanced down and read the inside of my wrist, “‘It sprayed Zoe in the eye. She’s blinded; she’s blinded!’ followed by horrified screaming and shrieking?”

My husband considered his official answer from behind closed eyelids.

“I thought that a chicken had pecked her,” he said, opening one eye.

“You heard, ‘It sprayed Zoe; she’s blinded’ and you thought, chicken pecking attack.”

“Or maybe a drive by chicken spitting. They spit you know?”

Several members of the team shifted uncomfortably in their lawn chairs.

“I told you that,” I reminded him. “I told you chickens spit.”

And I had told him about chicken spitting, a painful truth that I had learned while working at my first job. I was an egg picker at an egg farm. At least I hoped those chickens had been spitting at me.

“Okay Team, new rule. When you hear screaming, coupled with the words sprayed and blinded, feel free to assume STINK BUG ACID ATTACK. The proper response being visible physical MOVEMENT toward the actual screaming.”

Sherwood raised his hand.

“Was it necessary to blow Zoe’s eyes out with the garden hose?”

“Listen, Hero, is Zoe blind? Did stink bug acid scar her for life? Does she still smell like the butt-end of a stink bug?”

I handed out a fact sheet concerning the procedures to follow when a Tree Stink Bug shoots acid into your seven-year old granddaughter’s eyes. Step 1) Fire hose kid in face with water.

I concluded the meeting by informing the emergency response team that I was promoting Conner (age 5) to Captain Supreme.

At the time of the attack, Conner had calmly informed me, “I stomped that stupid stink bug to deff.”

“Excellent job, Conner; you’re the only one who knows how to stomp stuff. I’m making you the boss.”

As for the rest of them there’ll be a series of drills and training exercises this Saturday, and I’ll be selling the lawn furniture at a garage sale.

Linda (Stay Frosty) Zern

BUTTER: It's My Class Project

2011-10-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

Linda L. Zern

Class Project Proposal /

Major English Writings I

October 2011

Children Sampling 300 Year Old Bog Butter in Ireland--For Fun?

Butter: A Bigger Deal Than One Might Think

The Beginning: “After the zombie apocalypse, when the Wal-Mart burns down, falls over, and sinks into the swamp, what food would you miss most?” This question is typical of the kind often posed at my house during Sunday family dinner. I looked at my five-year-old grandson, Conner, and he looked at me, and together we said, “Butter!” Since that moment I have been on a vision quest in search of a way to make butter using home grown sources in spite of zombies, cataclysm, and grid collapse.

The Search for Facts: Butter is easy; I have learned. Any nomad with an animal hide and time on their hands can jiggle enough raw milk (goat, sheep, cow) to produce a lumpy emulsification of fat. Animal skin bags on the back of a bouncy horse, barrels on a bumpy cart, churns with a dasher, and a jar with a marble can suffice.

The History: Without refrigeration, butter lasts longer than a glass of milk. Without refrigeration, cheese lasts longer than a glass of milk. Butter and cheese are tasty and a method of food preservation, more common in colder climates anciently than in southern climates.

The Ultimate Goal: To be able to produce the raw materials on site (our six acres in Saint Cloud) to make our own butter because Conner and I will die without it. I’ve settled on Nubian milk goats as a source for the raw milk (although cow’s milk has larger fat molecules and separates more easily than goat’s milk, cows are gi-normous and can tip over automobiles when annoyed. Goats are smaller, smarter, and rarely snap people’s spines.) I already grow the herbs (garlic, etc.) for flavoring. Note: Milking goats for butter and cheese is a twice a day, time consuming process that requires planning and forethought—a lot. I’m not there yet.

The Class Project: A brief, hands-on (class involvement required) demonstration of butter churning (with baby food jars, a marble, and heavy cream,) clashing, and the sampling of homemade butters traditionally enjoyed in the days before the Kraft Corporation, while discussing the strange tale of butter as a tool of social and religious oppression.

The Crazy Truth About Butter in History: I have discovered that butter was one of the points of contention for Martin Luther in his break with the Catholic Church. Butter was produced and used extensively in the northern, colder climates (England, Scandinavia, Germany.) Oil was commonly used in the southern countries (Italy, the Mediterranean, Spain.) Rome and the Vatican (in warm sunny Italy) prohibited the use of butter during Lent. No worries. Businessmen and the church offered to sell oil to the north. No worries. The church offered a pay-for-play-scheme to allow the northern countries to use butter during lent if they paid a butter tax—nice fundraiser for the butter tower of Rouen.

Weird Problems I’ve Encountered, And Of Which I Was Completely Ignorant: I wanted to bring in an example of “raw” or unprocessed milk to show the class how unprocessed milk naturally separates. Shock. It is illegal to sell raw milk in Florida. It is not illegal to drink it—just sell it. Anyone selling raw milk must mark it “for animal consumption only.” The government regulations have therefore driven raw milk sources underground and jacked the price of raw milk up to $15.00/gallon in Florida. Whole Foods just pulled raw milk from its shelves. Like Lisa Ling, I’ll be forced to go undercover and underground to investigate the sordid underbelly of the black market of the organic/raw food movement. I’m actively seeking a raw milk pusher.

The Chemistry: Any number of factors can keep milk from becoming butter: too cold, too hot, too little fat, poor diet of the producing animal, too slow of churning, a curse, the witches next door.

Things I’ve Found Fascinating So Far: The amount of physical energy and know-how required in feeding a family in days gone by. How recently our modern conveniences were invented and how completely dependent the developed world is on them, and how much knowledge is always being lost and how quickly. Goat’s milk butter is harder to make than cow’s milk butter but better for you. Goats are browsers not grazers and will eat my weeds. How much of the world still lives like it’s the 13^th century (I learned this from my son, a combat soldier in the 101^st Airborne, who recently returned from a yearlong deployment on the Afghan/Pakistan boarder.) Goats and donkeys, that’s how the world still lives. And I find fascinating how many thousands of years worth of human beings managed to drink unregulated, un-FDA approved milk and still survived long enough to make babies.

PS Can I dress up as a butter churning peasant woman in the middle ages, for my demonstration, in lieu of bringing a live goat to class? It would have been my neighbor’s goat; I don’t have goats yet. I do have an outfit. DON’T MAKE ME BRING IN 300 YEAR OLD BOG BUTTER! (I’M KIDDING) IT’S ALL GONE. WE ATE IT.

2011-09-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

QUICKIES: Postings that are short and sweet!

A stray cat decided our chicken coop was the right spot for her two newborn kittens. So far, she does mommy cat things, and the chickens do chicken things, and I haven't seen or heard a rat since she moved in. It's WIN-WIN-WIN!!

Halfway to Techno Dead

2011-09-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

Last night in my English Literature course, the girl next to me pulled one of those amazing I-gadgets out of her book bag. She began to tap away on her high tech marvel while simultaneously checking in on Kim Kardasian’s Twitter update and downloading a sales flyer for knock-off designer shoes.

I looked down at my workspace. Out of my ten-year old book bag, I had pulled a clipboard with a legal pad and an assortment of pens, highlighters, and a Sharpie marker (I love them.). I might as well have pulled out a dried piece of animal hide and an inkpot. I stacked my textbooks in a pleasing configuration while simultaneously counting my writing instruments.

Several young folks flipped open their amazing computering machines while simultaneously looking for an outlet. Power cords began to creep and crawl over every available surface seeking the mother ship of power sources. A scuffle broke out over the last plug. A couple of the students posted an update on Facebook about the viscous lack of cheap, available electricity created by magic solar panels, attached to windmills, powered by Keebler elves.

On the way to school, I was informed via my car radio that studies show that Facebook users over fifty years old have a harder time adjusting to changes on the social networking site than the average two-year old. I scoffed. Then I scorned. Then I yelled at the radio.

“It isn’t that I can’t figure out the new face of Facebook. It’s that I don’t want to. I don’t have time to figure out the new Facebook, because I’m halfway to dead. My time is precious.” I balled up my fist and shook it at the invisible radio waves floating around in space.

In the car next to me, a teenager type flipped open a cell phone with her chin, punched in a series of numbers with her nose, and then weaved into my lane of traffic.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Go kill someone your own age. I’m ALREADY halfway to dead.”

Later, in my Major English Writings night class our professor informed us that in her day classes it was becoming harder and harder for her to find students who had heard of the book of Genesis in the Bible, let alone anyone who had read it. For a minute I felt smug. Then I felt sad. Then I wondered if for all our technological advances we are becoming a people without a culture or a past or an identity.

And here I sit halfway to dead and me without an I-phone or I-pod or I-chip in my brain . . . and my husband stole my Kindle. All I have is fifty years worth of everything I’ve read, experienced, lived, learned, touched, done, and loved—way too much to Tweet.

Linda (No-Tweet) Zern

Hubris (In the Third Person--Mostly)

2011-09-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

The woman, all one hundred and six pounds of her, balled up her lumpy-knuckled fist, raised it to the sky and declared, “I’m so sick of making ‘A’s. They don’t mean anything. If I make one more ‘A’ I’ll scream.”

Sherwood—oops, I mean, her husband. Her husband (who just so happened to be named Sherwood like my husband) looked at his wife and grunted. He was used to her dramatic gestures of cosmic defiance.

“You know God has ears and can hear you, right?” he said.

I didn’t care, and the woman didn’t care either.

Heaven’s angels, well known for their writing of the Book of Life and use of sticky notes, wrote down the goofy declaration word for word. Served me right. Served that lumpy-knuckled woman right too. Heaven, always on the lookout for kooky talk and hubris, got right on the case.

Not two weeks later in Major English Writings I, a college class of her own choosing, the woman with the big knuckles and bigger mouth took my first quiz for me. I wish.

Well, whoever took the quiz, she stunk at it, and the woman (who could be me) made her first ‘C’ since I was a sophomore in high school. And I made that ‘C’ in Algebra, which is a subject that should be counted as a foreign language. The only way I can see Algebra being helpful in my day-to-day life is if I, or that other woman, got teleported back to ancient Egypt, the Nile flooded, and my back yard disappeared under a ton of mud and hippopotami. Then I might use Algebra to calculate where the chain link fence used to be.

So I—strike that—she. So she got a ‘C.’

Her children were shocked.

Her husband grunted.

Her dogs demanded to go on a walk.

Heaven smiled and a couple of angels high-fived.

And the Canterbury Tales written in Middle English continued to give her a big, fat headache and make my eyes cross.

So let this be a lesson to us all; if you’re going to shoot your big mouth off, make sure you whisper and that other person, who could be you, does too.

Linda (Just Kidding) Zern

Caution! Lumpy Land Bumps

2011-09-09T04:54:00.000-07:00

Welcome Home 101st Airborne -
Currahee Nation

Driving our son’s 2004 Jeep Wrangler Sport to Tennessee for his 101^st Airborne homecoming was like traveling to the space station in a zip lock sandwich bag, shot out of a potato gun. There was a lot of flapping.

Don’t get me wrong; I love that Jeep. I looked absolutely adorable driving that little red Jeep around Saint Cloud blow-drying my hair. My hair never looked better then after driving to the gym with my top off; I mean the Jeep’s top, not my personal top. If I’d been driving around with my personal top off, well then I would have been arrested for “indecent stringiness,” that according to one of my daughters who walked in on me taking a bath.

She was happy to tell me, “Geez, Mom, the only word I can think of is stringy.”

I wanted to buy that Jeep from Aric; I looked so adorable in it, but because of inspired governmental programs such as Cash for Clunkers, his Jeep is now worth approximately $200,000. So back it went.

It was a loud trip, fun—but loud; what with all the flapping plastic and the sound of tires exploding on highway 24-West. A semi in front of us had a tire blow and a mini-van next to us had a tire dissolve into strips of rubber road trash. And then we hit the lumpy land formations called mountains. Okay, maybe they were hills, but for a native Floridian any pointy dirt where the rain runs off and doesn’t form frog swamps is a mountain. I hate mountains.

My husband, also a native Floridian, seems indifferent to mountains. He drives the same speed, once the cruise control is set, regardless of the changing terrain, car trunks we get close enough to reach out and touch, or number of tire bits flying past the windshield.

At the sight of the sign reading “Caution – 5% Grade” my heart started beating harder, while my hands convulsed around available, exposed metal Jeep parts.

“Honey, you know that I hate stupid mountains. Slow down.” My stomach tried to crawl up through my throat.

“My Dad used to tell us kids that there was nothing on the other side of those stupid mountains in West Virginia when we drove straight up the stupid side, and you couldn’t see anything but stupid sky. Stupid mountains. Stupid vacation.”

My fingers started to cramp and sweat around the noise of snapping knuckle bones, while the sound of my childish screaming banged around in my memory.

“My Dad could be such a jackass.”

The highway swirled and curled. My ears popped. I made note of the guardrail in front of us that resembled twisted tornado rubble.

“Hey? You see that metal railing that is all smooshed down right there?” I would have pointed but my fingers had fused with the atoms in the sissy bar.

“Yeah.” He cruised on, speed unchanged.

“Yeah! It’s smooshed down because some jackass went through it. Slow down! Or one of us is going to die and it ain’t going to be me.”

It was a loud trip, fun—but loud, what with the flapping, snapping, exploding, and screaming.

Linda (String Cheese) Zern

Staff Sergeant Aric S. Zern and Sherwood K. Zern
Fort Campbell Kentucky

Amnesia Anyone?

2011-08-27T05:54:00.000-07:00

I have a smallpox scar. I have a smallpox scar from having smallpox stuffed into me with a needle by the government. I was five when the government gave me smallpox. Okay, they gave me a teeny, tiny speck of smallpox, but the scar is still ugly.

Since then I’ve been inoculated, biopsied, C-sectioned, extracted, stapled, stitched, sliced and diced. And now I’m crazy. When I go to the doctor my CO2 levels go way up, because I hyperventilate, and when I go to the dentist my blood pressure sky rockets. Oddly enough, getting sharp objects jammed into body parts does not get easier with time.

Now, I have to be drugged out of my mind when I have to have sharp objects jammed into body parts.

I am a cancer-surviving pansy.

For my latest dental torture session on Thursday, my dentist and his gang gave me a sedative-hypnotic. It made me go to sleep for Thursday—the whole day—and I didn’t read the “medication guide” until AFTER the procedure.

What a hoot. Those medicine-warning labels are the funniest reading on earth, in my opinion. Who writes those things?

Apparently, a side effect of taking a sedative-hypnotic can be something called “traveler’s amnesia.” This is side effect that can cause someone to be (and I quote) “NOT fully awake and do an activity that they will NOT remember doing. Reported activities include: driving a car (sleep driving), making and eating food, talking on the phone, having sex, and sleep-walking.” Since Thursday has disappeared from my memory, I have developed a vague sense of unease about the “travel amnesia” possibilities.

What if, at some point during my Thursday—all day—nap, I put on a gypsy outfit, drove to the lakefront, and played a tambourine for loose change? What if I went horseback riding—naked? What if I drove my John Deere lawn tractor to the Florida Mall, so I could buy a pretzel, with salt? What if I killed somebody?

Traveler’s amnesia. Yikes.

What if I joined a motorcycle gang, got a tattoo of a giant butterfly on my right butt cheek, and promised to be a drug mule?

What if . . . oh . . .wait a minute . . . there’s something here under the bedcovers. Hey . . . what the . . . it’s a tambourine, and there’s a buck twenty-three in it.

I can’t seem to find the gypsy outfit.

So, was I naked while playing the tambourine? Amnesia is so annoying.

Linda (No More Cavities) Zern

The Accident Monger

2011-08-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

My husband hasn’t worn a wedding ring since the emergency room folks had to hacksaw it off. He was wrestling with some teenagers in a swimming pool. They broke his ring finger.

“You boys better settle down before someone gets hurt,” I remembered saying.

My husband hasn’t had the full use of his right knee since he hopped over a fence trying to help our neighbor catch his escaping bull. His ACL detached, causing his leg to dangle loosely—my husband’s ACL, not the bull’s.

“Sherwood, maybe you should try opening the gate first?” I remembered yelling.

My husband ‘s knuckle is scarred where he rammed a loose prong of field fence into his hand. He was loading a roll of field fence onto our truck at Tractor Supply. When he showed me his gushing wound and asked me if he thought he should get stitches I said, “It has been my experience that when you can see the stuff that’s supposed to be on the inside of your skin from the outside, you’re going to need stitches.”

“Babe, you should probably put your work gloves on,” I remembered warning.

A couple weeks ago, my husband slunk out of our bedroom into the foggy morning to play racquetball with several younger, sprier men.

I said, “Don’t go. But if you go, don’t fling yourself around like a twenty year old. If you do fling yourself around like a twenty year old, make sure you have someone to drive you to the emergency room, because I’m not doing it. I have things to do today.” He scoffed at my scorn.

Later that day my husband came home from racquetball and worked on the duck pen, fed the animals, and mowed the front pasture—with a potentially BROKEN wrist. He refused to tell me he had fallen while flinging himself around like a twenty year old.

I trimmed the hedge and watched him mowing the pasture. He had to keep his left arm bent across his chest. Every time he crossed in front of me he hit a bump, which caused him to double over the lawn mower steering wheel in agony; he continued to pretend his hand didn’t feel like it had been partially severed.

Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. Back and forth, he rode by, like one of those rabbits you shoot at in a shooting gallery. Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. It was like watching the Shoot the Sherwood Off the Lawnmower Arcade Game. At one point my vision blurred, and I thought if I had a gun I’d shoot him off that lawnmower.

Our son, Adam, drove my husband to the emergency room later that day. The bone was only “compressed” not broken. He was supposed to wear a wrist brace for three weeks. He didn’t.

My husband is an accident monger. A monger is a person promoting something undesirable (hatemonger, warmonger, bad judgment monger.) On the other hand, I am a cynic monger or a prophetess.

Linda (Butterfly Bandage) Zern

Mow Hard, Mow Fast

2011-08-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

I have bad rug mowing luck!

“Hi, my name is Linda.”

“Hi, Linda.”

“And I’m a, uh . . . an abuser.”

“Tell it to us, sister. Get it out!”

All Jammed Up!

I don’t abuse drugs, drink, porn, husband (much) or pre-natal vitamins. I abuse my lawnmower—not overtly. I mean I don’t pummel it with a tire iron or anything. I abuse our John Deere riding lawn tractor (because nothing runs like a deer) through my addictive, hateful indifference to it.

I’m so ashamed—also a little ticked off.

“This machine has been abused.” Those were the lawnmower fixer guy’s exact words, as he smeared grease around his hands with a green bandana. “We’ve got machines that are twenty years old that look better than your machine.”

Our lawnmower was three years old.

That’s the stinking excuse they used to reject our stinking extended warranty request to weld the stinking busted strut back to the part where all the whirly parts are; you know, the stinking whirly parts, the parts that do the actual cutting of grass.

My husband fixed an accusatory eye on me when he related the diagnosis—warranty, null and void—due to lawnmower abuse. Like all abusers, I attempted denial first.

“Sherwood, Babe, you know I always park that dumb lawnmower in the barn. It has never been outside when the tornados kick up.”

“Listen you! It’s not rain they’re talking about. It’s the stumps, tree roots, barbed wire, water faucets, welcome mats, hoses, bird carcasses, cement blocks, and three inch saplings that you’ve managed to run over.”

I tried anger next, of course.

“Well, anytime you want to climb aboard mister and mow in perfect, symmetrical rows exactly the width mentioned in the owner’s manual, you just get a running start and jump in the driver’s seat, because I don’t plan on slowing down long enough to switch out drivers; there’s a ton a grass out there. And it’s growing, always growing, even when I’m sleeping—growing.” I stopped talking and tipped my head toward the grass. “Can’t you hear it? Growing. Pushing up, always up. Growing . . . up . . .”

He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, a little bit.

“Linda, you need help.”

“Darn right, I need help. I could use a full time lawn man guy. You know, driving Miss Linda.” I snapped this last bit out with more bravado than I felt.

“No, not that kind of help. I mean a support group, so you can work through some of this anger you have toward our lawn maintenance equipment,” he said.

I started to whine, which is the third phase in a lawnmower abuser’s cycle.

At that moment, the children filed into the room along with Cheryl and Mr. Medina, my neighbors, and the girl from the dry cleaners. I gasped. It was an intervention. I bowed my head and wept and not for the last time.

I liked to say that I have been clean and sober since the intervention, but not so much. Last weekend, due to bad luck and high weeds, I ran over the corner of a worn out rug I’d tossed on the family burn pile. The rug dissolved into a yarn rope, twisting around the lawnmower blade like a noose. The blade jammed. Grass cutting ceased. Cussing ensued. The cycle continued.

Linda (Blade Jammer) Zern

Life Lived in Silhouette

2011-07-29T04:42:00.000-07:00

Unjamming the Lawn Mower Blade - Again!

When they print the new owner’s manual for the John Deere Turbo Grass Master 6000 Series, I will be one of the silhouette people in it with a thick, black line slashed across my silhouette face. The caption will read: Danger, Warning, Caution! Stupidity Alert.

I will be the international symbol for people who ride over a pine tree root and get the lawn mower blade jammed so tightly into that massive hunk of root that seven strong men on steroids could not lift me off.

The black silhouette person with the black line through it will be a representation of me sitting next to my wedged, stalled, jammed, trapped, lawn mower. It will show me leaning against a forty-foot pine tree, my cell phone to my ear—crying, me not the cell phone. The caption will read: Don’t Let This Happen To Your Silhouette!

I called my husband in Virginia. We live in Florida. He travels. I like to think that it’s because he has to for work, or he’s a spy.

“Honey,” I wailed. “I’m stuck.”

“What? Where? How? Who is this?”

“I got the new lawn mower stuck inside a pine tree . . . and I can’t move it.”

There was a pause. It was one of his long, slow, deliberate pauses, which being interpreted means: Why did I marry this woman?

“Inside? What? Never mind. Well . . . put the mower in reverse.”

Sob. Gasp. Wail. “I can’t. The mower blade is stuck INSIDE the pine tree root. I had bad luck. The mower took a bad hop and the root was hiding.”

“Stuck INSIDE the pine tree root! Bad hop!” Which being interpreted means: You crazy woman, you ran our brand new, four thousand dollar riding lawn mower into a TREE.

“Can you push it off the root?” Which being interpreted means: You crazy woman, what do you expect me to do her in Virginia where I must travel to earn money to pay for lawn mowers that you run into trees or roots?

I wailed, “I can’t lift the lawn mower. I’m too little.”

I sounded five years old. I felt four years old.

For the next two hours I cried while digging a trench around the trapped lawn mower. I cried while scooping dirt from around the point of direct pine tree root and blade contact. I cried while hack sawing through the pine tree root.

I cried because pine trees are so tall. I cried because pine tree roots are so thick. I cried because I’m not strong enough to lift a riding lawn mower. I cried because grass grows and needs mowing. I cried because all my children are grown now and aren’t around to mow the grass. I cried because time passes. I cried because I said a bad word. I cried because the Bald Eagle in our backyard was staring at me from another pine tree waiting for to die. I cried for the sadness of being alive. I cried and I cried and I cried.

And that’s how I knew I’m menopausal.

When my son-in-law showed up to push me off the root that I had already hack sawed into two big hunks, he said, “I can’t believe you used a hacksaw on wood.”

I said, “Huh.”

“You should only use hacksaws on metal.”

I snapped back, “Why, because we have so many metal tree roots in the world?”

And that smart aleck comment was how I knew I was feeling better.

What I learned that week was how it’s not the trees that are the problem. The trees you can see. It’s the roots. They lurk. You never know when you’re going to get totally jammed up because of them.

Linda (Hacksaw) Zern

Death by Owner's Manual

2011-07-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

The Author Clearing a Rug Jam From the Blade of Her Lawn Tractor
( No One Was Maimed in the Taking of this Picture!)

Note: In honor of our upcoming anniversary, I will be re-posting a series of anniversary/celebratory gift related essays. I don’t ask for diamonds. I don’t covet dangling loops of gold for around my turkey skin neck. I don’t ask for spa days or massages. I ask for and get John Deere lawn tractors and accessories from my soul mate. It’s our way. It’s our culture. It’s how we say, “I love you.” He buys the Deere. I mow stuff.

DANGER: ROTATING BLADES CUT OFF ARMS AND LEGS; WARNING: AVOID SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH; DANGER-CAUTION : POISON; DANGER: ROTATING BLADE – THROWN OBJECTS; DANGER: ROTATING BLADE; DEATH, DYING, DEAD!!!

This was on page one of my John Deere lawn tractor user manual.

This was on page one of my Valentine’s Day gift that I received from my sweetheart of thirty-two years.

My husband bought me a riding lawn mower, because nothing says romance like the smell of fresh cut grass, and the above warning was just the introduction of the owner’s manual. The next twenty pages explained the warning list in gruesome, gory detail—with pictures. Not real pictures of people poisoned because they drank riding lawn mower related fluids, but those black and white silhouette pictures that look like they were drawn by ancient (grass mowing) Egyptians in a real big hurry.

For twenty pages I was forced to look at silhouette people getting their silhouette toes, heels, arms, legs, heads, and fingers cut off. In addition to that there were tragic, gory silhouette drawings of stick people being crushed, maimed, poisoned, exploded, blinded, dragged, and burned to cinders by my Valentine’s Day gift.

There was even a silhouette picture of some anonymous soul slipping in a puddle of silhouette oil that might, maybe, could possibly leak out of the bottom of my new shiny lawn tractor. I don’t think the silhouette man made it.

All I was trying to figure out was how to start the stupid beast. By the time I found the information I needed, I was too afraid to turn the key.

I haven’t left the house since the John Deere man dropped off my John Deere lawn tractor with headlight action (for mowing in the dark—if you dare.) I want to call a lawyer and sue for pain and suffering caused by reading the owner’s manual, but I’m afraid if I pick up the phone my lawn tractor will have tapped into the main phone line to my house so that it can send a killing jolt of electricity into my inner ear wax. I’m afraid I’ll get ear tasered.

It’s out there, right now, in the garage leaking an enormous pool of deadly oil, hoping I will either lick it or slip in it. I know it. I feel it. Its malevolence grows. It’s like having The Bride of Chucky parked next to the Nissan Titan.

And just this minute, I noticed that on the cover of the owner’s manual under the leaping deer silhouette logo are these words: WARNING: THE ENGINE EXHAUST FROM THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER, BIRTH DEFECTS OR OTHER REPRODUCTIVE HARM. (CALIFORNIA PROPOSITION 65 WARNING)

What if it gets me pregnant?

Well that cinches it, next Valentine’s Day I’m going to ask my husband for something really romantic—like a suicide bomber vest. Honestly.

Linda (Mow Fast, Mow Hard) Zern

Ease Dropping vs. Eavesdropping

2011-07-16T04:17:00.000-07:00

Eavesdropping is rude. It’s one of my favorite hobbies. I like gardening, kickboxing, and eavesdropping.

I used to think that it was ease dropping. Like you got to sit around taking it easy and lean gently in the direction of the strange guys sitting at the food bar at the Target. And when I say strange, I mean one of the guys resembled a poorly groomed bear and the other one, a taller version of a poorly groomed bear with a wolverine living on his face, but those guys never really said anything to overhear. They just stared a hole through me and growled under their breath.

Trying to overhear what those two guys were growling was not my finest eavesdropping moment.

At some point, I was informed that it’s really eavesdropping and not ease dropping; it’s eavesdropping like hanging from the eaves of a house like a mud dauber or a bat and listening in on other people’s conversations—ease, eaves, okay whatever. It’s fun.

I reassure myself that because I’m a writer and therefore an artist (pronounced ar’TEEST) it’s okay for me to hang from the eaves, mud dauber-like. It’s also okay for me to construct nests made out of mud and spit. It’s not just okay for me to behave this way; it’s part of my job description. I am a serious observer of the human condition.

Note: Gossip is the wicked stepsister of eavesdropping, and I will probably burn in a fiery pit of bottomless spitty mud when I die, but man oh man, will I have some great stories to tell.

Until then, here’s a sample of a few gems that I’ve collected over the years while hanging upside down from the eaves.

“No, really it’s true. You can pull down six figures a year doing weaves,” a young man said.

“Wow, can you do a weave for me, right now?” the young woman asked.

“No, weave classes cost extra at beauty school and I haven’t enrolled yet.”

(A conversation overheard of two recent public school graduates chatting about the potential earning power of the average hair weaver. They both had shiny, luxurious hair.)

“Lunatic scrap-bookers. Who knew?” (A comment made by a traveler on an airplane after being knocked over by two excited, disembarking scrapbook conventioneers. The man was not harmed.)

“When was the last time you saw survivors clinging to their seat cushions after a plane crash?” (Sarcastic comment made after the requisite safety video on board a commercial airplane. Oh wait; I said that.)

“I’d like to get my husband involved [in scrapbooking], but his idea of being involved is getting his hands all over me.” (Overhead after a scrapbooking convention in Orlando, Florida)

“Mommy, are you still there?” The little girl asked from inside the bathroom stall.

Holding the stall door closed for her daughter, her mom said, “Yes.”

“Will you be waiting for me?”

“Yes; why?” The mom asked sounding a little surprised by the question.

“Because I like it when you’re standing right next to me.”

(Conversation overheard in a bathroom between a little girl and her mommy. One of my favorites.)

Writing is a solitary activity. There’s only room for one person to type on my laptop at a time, but the collection of characters, words, thoughts, ideas, behaviors, descriptions, and responses that make up a story, blog, or poem is OUT THERE, sitting at the food bar at the local Target, growling, for no apparent reason.

Linda Zern’s Writing Tip # 57: Get out there and pick a good spot away from drain spouts and bug zappers. Hang quietly. Listen carefully. Bring a notebook. And hear the stories happening all around you.

Linda (Big Ears) Zern

The Neighbor Dog Blues

2011-07-08T05:31:00.000-07:00

A pit bull puppy/dog loped around our yard wagging his tail, wee-weeing on blades of grass, and sniffing random butts.

“Oh great, someone’s dumped off another dog,” my husband said.

Note: It’s a problem for folks “out in the country.” People figure that the kindly country folks will take in random kittens, cats, parrots, and pit bulls and let them live in their barns where the abandoned animals will write best selling books about their travails and adventures. Then these people (presumably) lie to their children claiming, “Hitler ran away.”

The suspect puppy/dog continued to frolic about. His enormous boy-dog parts bouncing wildly.

“Nope,” I said. “That’s the neighbor’s dog.” The young, happy-go-lucky puppy/dog sniffed my butt. “I don’t see this ending well.”

The pit bull squeezed under our fence into our neighbor’s pasture. A pasture stuffed with baby goats and baby sheep. Our horses stamped nervously. The duck peeked over the rim of his three hundred and fifty gallon water tank.

A week later in the dark of night, I came home from school and walked onto our back porch and gagged. The smell made me start speculating as only a writer can.

To no one in particular I huffed, “Good grief, someone’s been murdered on my back porch and everything that should be on the inside of a body is now on the outside of the body.”

I stepped lightly. I didn’t want to mess up the DNA evidence. Snapping the back porch lights on I realized we had been dog slimmed. Our neighbor’s happy-go-lucky puppy/dog had punched through the porch screen, jumped onto a private porch, and pooped once, twice, and then—for good measure—three times. I lost count of the puddles of happy-go-lucky puppy/dog pee. There was a steaming pile of dog stuff on a couch pillow.

Our dogs stared at me from behind window glass. Ploodle, the Yorkshire terrier, rolled his eyes and shrugged.

“Oh man, this is not going to end well.”

While chatting with our neighbor about the neighborhood dog trouble, which was really not a dog issue but an owner issue, happy-go-lucky pit bull puppy/dog hopped into our duck pool and grabbed our duck by its skinny duck neck. His tail never stopped wagging—the dog’s tail not the duck’s. I screamed and ran for the phone and a leash.

The duck survived. The dog was arrested. And the dog’s owner spent the Fourth of July shooting his gun at . . . something. He practiced all day long.

“Do you think that guy knows I ratted out his dog?” I asked my husband. “How big do you think his gun is? Do you think he’s a better shot than me? How much do you think bulletproof vests are? Do you think a bulletproof vest would make me look fat? Should I invest in a Gatling gun for the roof of the house? How soon so you think you’ll remarry?”

I ran out of breath. He considered.

“He suspects. It’s a forty-five. Probably. They ain’t cheap. They make everyone look thick. No. I’ll probably bring a date to the funeral.”

“Smart guy, statistics show that the sooner a man remarries after becoming a widower indicates how happy he was in his marriage. You must be delirious with happiness.”

“You know it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t remarry. I’m just going to sit around and wait for someone to drop off a parrot or a monkey for companionship.”

He smiled. When night fell, our neighbor put his gun away and pulled out a grenade launcher. I started to stack sand bags around the duck pool.

Linda (Cop Out) Zern

For the Tinfoil Generation

2011-07-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

My brother learned to cuss because of the invention of television. Not that people ON television cussed; they didn’t, because it was against the rules (standards of behavior that once upon a time were used to illustrate an ideal of human behavior.) It was people (moms and dads) who were WATCHING television who cussed, at the television, a lot.

My brother’s first complete sentence was, “Dodtamnson’ovenditch.” My brother was three. When the Sony (made in America) television started to roll or “snow” my little brother knew to practice his cussing. Later, we knew to run for the tinfoil to wrap around the rabbit ears (an antennae system on top of the television resembling runaway coat hangers.)

If you had tinfoil you had power over your television.

That’s how I grew up. Now when I wrap tinfoil around my computer cord I am mocked, ridiculed, and held in low esteem by my society. It makes me cuss.

For the tinfoil generation, I have compiled a list of discoveries I have made in the high definition/computer age.

1. Tinfoil use will date you.

2. Machines get to ask all the questions. When a computer, phone, or pad asks, “Do you want to proceed?” there will not be a “how bad will I regret this?” option.

3. Machines don’t care how you are feeling. Your chest pain and shortness of breath upon loosing two years worth of work on your great American novel will have no effect on your computer machine or your husband the computer analyst.

4. User manuals for machine usage are written by geeks, for geeks, in geekage, under the influence of geek wranglers wearing their geekdom on their sleeve like tinfoil wrapped around rabbit ears.

5. In the sixties, movies, books, short stories and Ray Bradbury predicted that the machines would take over the world and enslave mankind. We were warned.

6. In 2011, the machines have won. I can prove it.

7. The proof: Just last Saturday, I watched small children wander aimlessly in diapers resembling venom sacks, while their parents stared helplessly into tiny machine screens playing “Angry Birds” or “Solitaire.” The children were chewing on rocks.

8. I refuse to learn to text message until I evolve retractable spins on my fingertips so that I can tap on those tee tiny keys without pain or typo embarrassment.

9. Tinfoil is still an amazing human invention, second only to duct tape, oh and the machines, of course.

There’s no conclusion. I don’t know what it all means. Or where we go from here. I only know where we were before, fiddling with rabbit ears, trying to get the screen to quit rolling, so we could watch popcorn make the tinfoil poof up like metal balloon or a Jiffy Pop pimple. Here’s to the Jiffy Pop generation. What next?

Linda (Text-less) Zern

She Speaks With Calloused Tongue

2011-06-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

Crazy things you hear, think, say, and wish you could say while having a tongue growth removed. The official diagnosis was tongue callous.

Minimal nitrous oxide exposure –

“How are you feeling?” the nurse asked.

“Like I’m about to have someone hack a chunk out of my tongue.”

Medium nitrous oxide exposure –

“How are you feeling?” the dentist asked.

“I feel like I’m being held captive by cannibals with a tongue hankering.”

“Oh, you and your imagination.”

Heavy nitrous oxide exposure that should have made me feel relaxed, detached, and unconcerned –

Because my tongue was now in a vice of some sort I was unable to explain that the nitrous oxide (lauded for its kicking good drug fun) was making me feel like there was a fat leprechaun eating a sandwich on my chest and that I wasn’t detached enough not to care that I was 1) having a needle bounced into my jaw 2) smelling my own tongue burning 3) having a chunk chopped out, and 4) getting tongue stitches which I didn’t even know were possible.

Note: I’ve never wanted to be able to speak sign language so badly in my life; I would have spelled out W.T.F.

When the nurse told me that I was “doing great,” I had several things I might have said if I could have. They include:

“Thanks, I’ve been practicing by putting my tongue in my desk drawer and slamming it shut.”

“I owe it all to clean living and hypnotism.”

“It’s because of the Leprechaun on my chest.”

Post nitrous oxide – My first declarative sentence following surgery!

“Next time I want the good pills and a driver!!” And then I cried. And that’s how I got free nitrous oxide, which has no apparent effect on me except to make me the opposite of all the things it’s supposed to make me.

Linda (Old Callous Tongue) Zern

Walking a Mile in an Old Lady's Shoes

2011-06-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

Being old is about shoes.

A lovely woman came up to me at our local shoe kiosk the other day (they’re having a snappy shoe sale) and informed me, “You know you’re old when the latest styles are too dangerous to wear because you may fall and break a hip.”

She was a delightful woman. Never met her before in my life.

“True,” I agreed, and then added. “I know I’m old because all the latest styles remind me of Viet Nam. Everything my daughters put on their feet look like the Viet Cong cut them out of bicycle tires on the Ho Chi Men trail.

“That’s because everything IS made by the Viet Cong these days, also the Koreans, but mostly the Chinese.”

She laughed sweetly and hobbled off atop pale pink platform sandals.

Lovely woman. Excellent shoes.

Aren’t shoe shoppers the friendliest people and so well informed on the current import-export situation? I believe it has something to do with squashing your feet into the very same pair of shoes that the lady next to you just finished squashing her feet into. It gives you a sense of sisterhood. That’s why bowlers are so warm and friendly, because everyone wears everyone else’s shoes. Nice and cozy.

My shoe wearing philosophy: I’m short. I always wear heels. I’ve told my daughters that the day they see me in flats is the day they should throw dirt on me, because I’m done.

Best shoe related quote: “Those shoes are just too Cha-Cha for words.” (From Steel Magnolias)

Best reason to be a girl: The assortment of shoe choices, of course. I couldn’t be a man because their shoes are so plain, not to mention blah—also boring.

Why shoes are magic: Because you can tap them together three times and cool stuff happens.

The smartest reason to have lots of shoes: So you can justify having lots of clothes to make “outfits” inspired by all the shoes you own.

Shoes that had the most influence on me: Those white Go-Go boots from the sixties that were the coolest, hippest fashion statement ever created by the hand of fashion designers in any time period, and I’m including those saber tooth tiger boots that every one was into in the ice age.

Why I never feel guilty buying shoes: Think of all the jobs I’m providing all those ex-Viet Cong, Koreans, and Chinese. I’m feeding the peoples of the world and looking too Cha-Cha for words all at the same time. It’s win-win.

Linda (Peep-Toe) Zern

Tribal Tell All - The Disclaimer

2011-06-14T09:06:00.001-07:00

Every once upon a time, I feel it’s important to clarify my position on a couple of crucial issues lest the reading public jump to, if not leap to the wrong conclusions.

A lot of what I write is fiction, except when it’s not. It’s also for the promoting of light heartedness and high jinks, concepts that have sadly gone out of fashion in some naval gazing circles. So here’s how it works . . .

It was the spring of ’98, and we had just sold our first herd of chinchillas . . . ugh! See? There I go again. It’s like a compulsion.

Okay, here goes. Maren, our youngest daughter, who was reading one of my latest Internet postings, remarked, “But I wasn’t even there.”

I said, “I know. And you never said what I said you said either.”

She wailed, possibly flailed.

“But people will think things.”

“No they won’t. People get it. This stuff is just for fun, mostly. You know, like playing Trivial Pursuit until your brain bleeds,” I said, trying to look confident, literate, and all knowing. You know, like a mom. “And besides, people don’t think things unless they absolutely have to. I know I don’t.”

“But, Mom!”

“Here’s your dollar.” I find that objections to media exposure can be lessened wildly by the re-distribution of my dollars to the other actors in this little play of mine.

Here’s the playbook:

The Husband (played by Sherwood K. Zern) – A bad boy who became a good guy and is on his way to becoming a great man with a nickname that bears closer examination.

Oldest Child (played by Aric S. Zern) – A great guy to have on your side if you’re in a firefight or if you need to speak fluent Portuguese, a man for all seasons and adventures and challenges, who as a child brought out the drill instructor in me.

Oldest Daughter (played by Heather Zern Stahle) – Who makes being the mother of four look stylish and fashionable, whose children will one day rise up and call her blessed, if she doesn’t sell them to the gypsies first.

Youngest Daughter (played by Maren Zern Lorance) - A woman who believes in her family, her country, her political party and in her power to make a difference and in the ability of a great stiletto to establish dominance.

Youngest Son (played by Adam C. Zern) - A born leader of men, women, and group projects. Who always required the best from himself and others, except his daughter, Sadie, whom he indulged to the point of embarrassment when she was a baby, and now he’s sorry because she’s two and riding a very high horse.

The Tribe (played by Zoe Baye, Conner Phillip, Kipling Sherwood, Zachary Jon, Reagan Love, Sadie JoLee, Emma Sarah and their co-creators Sarah, TJ, and Phillip) Stay tuned for coming attractions of all shapes, sorts, sizes and political persuasions—mostly anarchists.

Now you know—sort of.

Linda (Queen and Tribal Drill Instructor) Zern

Cannibal Town, USA

2011-06-08T03:28:00.000-07:00

I blame Disney and that “Bambi” movie for convincing an entire generation of folks that animals are born knowing how to sing and dance and are okay with wearing Santa hats.

They aren’t and they’re not.

I mean has anybody watched the Discovery channel lately?

Lions eat lions. Lions eat hyenas. Killer whales eat more politically correct whale babies, or bits of them. Hyenas eat lions, and if hyenas could swim they’d eat whales. And then they’d eat the Santa hats.

Daddy lions do not hold baby lions up to the sky while all the savannah animals sing, worshipfully. Savannah wildebeests kick baby lions in the head when the mommy lions are trying to disembowel the wildebeests.

I also blame air conditioning. It’s separated human types from actual air and the real animals that live out in the actual air of the savannah.

Recently a visitor to our farm, no doubt raised on Disney and weaned on Captain Planet, was taking pictures of the throbbing world of nature that surrounds us out here—trying to eat us. My husband, Sherwood, always helpful with the suggestion making, suggested the photographer come back on a day when the American bald eagles were in town doing their raptor thing.

“You should be here and take pictures when the eagles carry off our neighbor’s ducks.” He pointed. “They swoop out of those pine trees over there and snatch the ducks right off the top of the pond. It’s wild kingdom. Now those would be some action shots.”

The photographer’s face registered horror and shock.

Plowing ahead like a bald eagle looking for duck soup, he continued, “Around here, when somebody yells, ‘Bald eagles! Incoming!’ we all run out to the porch to watch. It’s better than TV, no commercials.”

The photographer turned to my husband like he was holding an axe and wearing a black hood with eye slits and said, “But isn’t that cannibalism?”

Nope! It’s life and death and Animal Planet. It’s only cannibalism if the ducks are wearing Santa hats.

I blame Disney and air conditioning.

The invitation is open. Come on out to the country sometime, and we’ll watch the bald eagles fist fight the vultures in my front yard over raccoon corpses, and then I’ll show you where the bobcats and coyotes rumble over territory and baby goat nuggets. Then we’ll have lunch at The Catfish Place where we can eat alligator and soft-shelled turtle.

Ignore my daughter when she sees turtle on the menu and moans, “But turtles are so slow.”

Linda (Eat or Be Eaten) Zern

Warning: Short Story of Make Believe (Flash Fiction)

2011-06-06T03:58:00.000-07:00

Fixture

“Remember one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Daddy said when they got to the garage sale and handed her a one dollar bill. It’s what he always said.

Mia hated the way the wrinkled dollar smelled, but she loved the way it made her feel and what it meant—time with Daddy.

“Daddy, doesn’t it make you think of the beach?” Mia pointed at the sheets, stretching over the lawn and covered with candy dishes and yellowed Tupperware. The breeze tickled at the frayed edges of the sheets and tangled her ponytail.

His crooked smile made her think of a question mark.

She tried again.

“You know . . . that raggedy line of seaweed after the water goes out? That’s all mixed up with broken shells but if you walk slow and look hard you can find a whole sand dollar that’s not all broken to bits—sometimes. It’s like that to me here.”

Daddy held her hand as they wandered through card tables piled with blouses and winter sweaters. He always wore his work coveralls streaked with grease on the pockets when they went treasure hunting together; his name stitched in blue and black on his chest.

“Like finding a great deal.”

“Like sea treasure,” she said. He left her in front of a table with books and puzzles and games. Sometimes he looked at her like she was a sand dollar hidden under a pile of torn chip bags and barnacles. She thought he looked tired and rumpled like the money.

“You’re a funny girl, Mia.”

It made Mia feel itchy when grownups said things like that to her, not sure if it was a good thing to be a funny girl who saw seaweed in the flutter of sheets on the grass at a yard sale.

He left to look for sensible treasures like torque wrenches and channel-lock pliers. She picked up a book and was disappointed to see that she’d read it and was rejecting the puzzles as too easy when the glitter of sun on glass caught her eye. Maybe it was glass or crystal or even diamonds?

Piled next to her were jars, dishes, mismatched pots and pans, and somewhere in all that jumble the tantalizing sparkle of magic. She felt it. Mia walked to the edge of a paisley blanket and saw it—a glowing facade of crystal arching away into an elegant curve. It was a crystal ball, a real one, half hidden and tipped on its edge against a chipped bowl. She froze when the sun hit the crystal ball and splintered into a hundred shards of glittering fire.

The sign read, Everything One Dollar.

Mia could hardly breathe. She looked at her daddy and flipped a hand at him, not wanting to give it away, but tempted to yell at him to hurry. Hurry, hurry before someone else discovered their crystal ball and scooped it up. She waved harder.

“Daddy,” she said, tugging at his shirtsleeve. “Daddy, do you see it?” She didn’t want to take the chance and point, so she dipped her head towards the blanket, whispering, “Daddy, there. Look! Next to that broken bowl. Can you believe it? And it’s only a dollar. It’s magic for only one dollar.”

“Mia, what do you want me to see?” He squinted.

“There daddy.” She bent down, desperate enough now to pick the crystal ball up, to hold it in front of her like a chalice. He looked at it and then looked at her, puzzled.

“What do you think it is?” He pulled the magical globe out of her hands.

“Shhh, daddy, they’ll hear you.” How could he not know? “Daddy, it’s a crystal ball! Look . . . just look!”

“But honey,” he said, turning the ball of glass over in his chapped hands. He shook it. Tipping it back over, he watched as a shower of dried up mosquitoes fell out of its hollow-center. “We have one just like it in the bathroom.”

He held up a dusty glass covering for a bathroom light fixture.

“Oh,” she said, softer than a breath. “But I thought . . .”

She covered her mouth with her hand to hide the way she needed to bite her lip—hard. Her hand smelled like the money—sweaty skin and fingernail dirt.

He tossed the light fixture back into the heap and patted her on the head.

“Next time, funny Mia. Next time you’ll find treasure.”

For My Brother (The Reformed Teaser-Slash-Terrorist)

2011-05-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

Colic, that’s what causes terrorism.

My brother (as a small boy) was the biggest terrorist I have ever known. In addition, his early colic is legendary. My mother describes falling asleep while standing up, holding my crying brother as his baby bottle nipples melted in a saucepan. When he finally quit being colicky, he started to tease and terrorize.

Therefore, colic causes terrorism.

My theory is that in retaliation for having suffered indigestion for the first six months of his life my brother became a militant, extremist teaser-slash-terrorist or he’s one of those people that finds a calm, safe, peaceful existence boring. People who are born drinking adrenalin like its orange juice.

That’s my second theory.

As a dedicated teaser-slash-terrorist, my brother was relentless, inventive and unstoppable. Some of his favorite methods of inflicting torture-slash-terror were to flick my ear or jab my ribs until I wanted to perfect my water boarding techniques. A lot of times he liked to knock things down; you know, like sand castles, stacks of blocks, doll houses—me.

Often the ear flicking attacks were without warning or pattern. Once, when I was trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich he popped up and started flicking on my ear in a random teasing-slash-terrorist assault.

I told him to stop and began drafting a UN resolution for sanctions against the little pest.

He kept flicking.

I brushed his hand away and threatened drone air strikes.

He came back flicking—harder.

I tried to ignore him while I scooped a giant glob of peanut butter out of the jar with a butter knife.

He flicked away. My ear started to throb. The peanut butter shifted on the knife—slipping and sliding.

Flick. Pause. Flick. Pause. Flick. Flick. Flick. Flickety, flickey, flickey, flick-flick-flick.

I knocked his hand away and thought about sending in some special forces with a kill order.

He came back flicking.

And on it went, the teasing-slash-terrorism . . . until I whirled on him like a snarling wolverine with opposable thumbs capable of holding a knife. I fully intended to stab him in the stomach. My only hesitation was that I hadn’t upgraded my butter knife to a machete or a bunker buster bomb.

“Stop touching me,” I screamed, “or I’ll stab . . .”

I looked down at the knife blade. It was naked. There was no giant glob of peanut butter. There was nothing but a grease stain where the peanut butter used to be.

“Where did the peanut butter go?”

He shrugged and made a move to flick my ear. Mom walked through the door. My brother retreated from the field of battle to re-group and look for bomb parts for IED’s.

Over the next few months, I searched the kitchen quietly (strictly black ops) for the missing glob of peanut butter. Flick-boy laid low.

One morning my mother said, “What is that up there?”

“Hurlick?” I mumbled through milk and cereal.

“That, up there, on the wall. What is that?”

I glanced up. High over our heads, in the shadows of the kitchen’s “open beam” ceilings was a streak of oily grease and a petrified wad of peanut butter frozen to the paneled wall.

Dragging a stepladder over to the wall, my mother had finally located the missing peanut butter evidence.

Flick-boy said, “Linda did it.”

I reached for a knife.

The United States Army recognized in my brother a raw talent and made him the boss of all kinds of other folks who, as kids, grew up tormenting their brothers and sisters half to death, and who were addicted to adrenalin. He became a big dog in the army and he got to flick the ears of some really bad boys who deserved it.

And in a great twist of universal teasing, I have a son just like him. God must be a boy.

Linda (It’s not nice to tease the writer sister) Zern

Memorial Day

2011-05-30T04:16:00.000-07:00

To Staff Sergent Zern and all those who fight, who have fought, and who will yet have to fight for us we say, "Thank you for standing between us and the wolves in the dark."

Traveling Light With Sherwood (the Jackal) Zern

2011-05-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

Everyone I can think of wants to survive the mediocrity of their present lives long enough so that they can “be able to travel and see the world.” I can’t figure it out. My husband flies thousands of miles every year as part of his livelihood and when people ask him if he plans to travel when he retires he says, “Only if I’m evading INTERPOL,” which he might have to do if he doesn’t smarten up about travel packing.

Traveling with Sherwood (the Jackal) Zern is enough to make me quite content to keep myself to myself, on my porch, in my rocking chair, watching the neighbor’s cows try to sneak out of their pasture and into another neighbor’s pasture—also I have a fabulous mattress, unmatched by any hotel, hostel, or inn I’ve ever stayed at.

Sherwood is searched at the airport weekly. He is profiled regularly. He is frequently targeted for a “fat deposit anomaly” on his leg. The TSA finds him questionable and for good reason. He packs like the Uni-bomber on vacation.

On a trip to Boston via Logan airport, I stood next to my husband as his luggage went into the x-ray vision machine but never came out. We’d lost the airport luggage lottery—again.

The conveyor belt went forward and backwards. Various frowning TSA folks gathered behind the screen. A few pointed. Frowns deepened. A couple of them peeked at us over the machine with narrowed eyes. It could only mean one thing. Sherwood’s backpack for work was about to have its privacy violated, and we were going to have to watch.

A chatty federal employee, I secretly dubbed Eye-Spy TSA Guy, pulled out of the Jackal’s backpack, and I’m not kidding: a mouse; two, not one, TWO power packs; an external hard drive; one USB cable; other miscellaneous cables, wires, and connectors; a wallet; sunglasses; a cell phone; a cell phone charger; an extra cell phone battery; keys; pens and pencils; books; folders; loose change; and two, not one, TWO laptops.

I’m pretty sure I spotted the remote to our television in the pile, but I couldn’t swear to it.

The Eye-Spy TSA Guy exclaimed in exasperation, “Do you know what all this [word that means poop] looks like?”

We shook our Middle American heads.

“It looks like a crazy ass’d bomb; that’s what it looks like. You should try putting this [word that means poop] in plastic containers, so we can tell what all this junk is.”

“Would Tupperware be best or maybe Rubbermaid?” I said, trying to look cooperative and compliant.

“What’s this? A damn detonator,” he said, holding up a damn detonator looking device.

“Our garage door opener. I think.” I shot Sherwood with visual detonators and evil eye bombs.

Eye-Spy TSA Guy called over his cronies.

“Look at all this crazy ass’d [word that means poop]; he’s got Staples electronic department in here.”

The cronies observed, “Wow, he’s mobile man.”

Sherwood and I laughed nervously. Under my breath I hissed out warnings and dire predictions.

“I ain’t taking the rap for this buddy boy. I’m already wording my statement to turn state’s evidence and ‘cut a deal.’”

Sherwood laughed nervously.

That’s it. Until Sherwood gets that backpack of his under some kind of control, I’m flying solo—in my dreams.

Travel Tip of the Week: Always pack mix-and-match separates and keep your bomb [word that means poop] in Tupperware.

Peace out,

Mrs. Sherwood (the Jackal) Zern

Outfits I Could be Wearing at the Time of my Kidnapping

2011-05-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

MY FAVORITE MULTI-PURPOSE OUTFIT

I'm alone quite a bit and worry I'll be carried off by near-sighted sex slavers, so I feel strongly the need to document the outfits I might be wearing at the time of my abduction.

Rubber boots (flower motif) for wading through shite . . . umm . . . stuff, pith helmet to repel diving eagle attack, raggedy vest with large pockets for egg collection and tomato harvesting, comfortable pants that used to be my skinny pants, and gloves for everything.

College Conspiracy

2011-05-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

“He’s not there.” Sarah, my daughter-in-law, said.

Strains of the processional music continued to pound through the Harold & Ted Sports Center as the Rollins College graduates tromped by in their dignified acetate gowns. The relief on their faces bordered on spiritual delirium.

“There are only two hundred and fifty graduates. It’s not like we could have missed him. Good grief. Did anybody see Adam?” I prompted.

The blank looks on the faces of our family bordered on stupefying.

“He’s not there; I looked.” Sarah swayed like a blue orchid in the breeze one hand on her camera, one hand at her throat. She peeled her hand off her throat and stared at the palm of her hand. “The palms of my hands are getting sweaty. Where could he be?”

We all stared at the, now sitting, graduates in their identical, dignified acetate gowns.

“Look for a skinny neck,” I advised, “and slumpy shoulders.”

Several people squinted. No. Nope. Nada. Nothing. No Adam skinny neck sightings. I’d like to say we waited for several minutes to concoct impossible conspiracy theories, built on implausible bits of logic, mixed with low levels of radioactive cynicism, but I can’t. The goofy theories were immediate.

“I hope he didn’t get kidnapped.” (His wife) “Or robbed, or raped.”

“He’s at the wrong graduation ceremony.” (His sister)

“Or we’re at the wrong graduation ceremony.” (His other sister)

“Oh man, he’s speaking, and it’s a trick so that we have to listen to him give a speech.” (The sister who thought Adam had wandered into the wrong graduation ceremony)

“I know; he’s getting an award, and it’s a surprise.” (His mother)

“The whole thing has been a ruse; he’s only been pretending to go to college at night for years and years, and it’s all coming undone. He never graduated.” (His father with a moan)

“Don’t be ridiculous. He’s getting a prize.” (His mother again)

“I’ve never heard so much bad Intel, and I work in Afghanistan.” (His brother)

“Do you think he’s fainted, fallen, or broken something?” (His wife again)

“Daddy?” (One of his daughters)

I looked harder at the fidgeting group of graduates in their seats and there under the 1971 banner was a neck, ears, and shoulders I recognized, because I’d washed behind those ears, kissed that baby neck, and patted those shoulders more than once, back when he was just a sunny little boy who loved baseball and Ninja Turtles—back when he brought me fists full of crushed wildflowers with the roots still attached, back when he belonged to me and only me, back when he was mine.

“There he is.”

A collective sigh of relief went up from the group as Adam Carter Zern graduated Summa Cum Laude from Rollins College.

MORAL OF THE STORY: I like to think we are a reasonably intelligent family. Several of us have college degrees of our very own and the United States government trusts one of us with expensive weapons systems, but sometimes we can be full on dopey.

Linda L. Zern (Mother of the Graduate)

2011-05-03T06:38:00.000-07:00

QUICKIES: Postings that are Short and Sweet

Florida Love-Bugs rode into Florida on the backs of fire ants from South America--not really, but wouldn't that be funny. Love-Bugs are flies. Love-Bugs are harmless. Love-Bugs fly around while copulating. Love-Bugs are embarrassing. Squashed Love-Bug juice, if left unwashed on the front of your car, will eat the paint off. Love-Bugs were not created in a lab at the University of Florida--despite urban myths and conspiracy theories.

"They're all over me. They must think I am their queen," said Zoe, who lives to become the queen of some (any) animal species.

Raise the Roof

2011-05-03T02:59:00.000-07:00

FACT: The average human female (domesticus raise the rooficus) can lift approximately 77, 000 times her own body weight.

I know because I, myself, have been known to lift small automobiles. Why? Because I was rearranging, of course, and the car looked bad where it was—also for purposes of spring-cleaning.

During the period of time when we moved—from Florida (the motherland) to North Carolina (not the Motherland) and then moved back to Florida (now the blessed motherland) and house sat for six months in Winter Springs (Mildew Palace-there’s a story there) and then moved to an Oviedo apartment (underneath the apartment of some frat boys and their blowup doll) and then we moved to a condo in Celebration (Dr. Suess world)—we managed to drag our stuff from Hither-Town to Yon-ville—also two fledgling kids and one cat.

For two hundred and fifty dollars a month, our stuff lived in luxury and ease in a climate controlled storage unit on Aloma Avenue, until I decided our stuff needed rearranging—also moving—again.

One minute I’m looking at our stuff, not liking the way it looks all jumbled in that storage unit for two hundred and fifty bucks a month, and the next minute I’m hauling boxes roughly the size of dumpsters around and trying to shove them into the trunk of a Grand Am, by myself.

How did I do it? I am domesticus raise the rooficus. I employed the scoot, tip, walk, creep, tilt, tip, swing, drag, and counter balance method of moving asteroid sized objects. If I can budge it, I can move it.

Take for example, a wardrobe box (taller than my five foot, one inch head) I became determined to move. I immediately recognized that the wardrobe box would be easy to tip over.

FACT: For the domesticus raise the rooficus this is not a learned knowledge; it is purely instinctive. Tall boxes fall over like dominoes set up by a drunk.

I began by jamming myself between the wall and the wardrobe box, and I pushed it over. Once the box was on its side, I attempted to employ the dragging method. But this was one tall mother . . . of a box (also heavy,) and it did not respond to the dragging method.

Never one to say, “You’re going to rupture something.”

I next attempted the walking method. This method consists of wedging oneself between the wall and the tall (also heavy) box and kicking it from one side, moving it three inches to the right. I repeated this action on the other side, moving it three inches to the left and a fraction of an inch forward. This is called “walking” the box.

Forty-seven years, I mean minutes, later, the tall (also heavy) box was in the parking lot, and I was trying to decide which method to employ to lift the sucker into the trunk of my car. Let me put it this way. I know how they built the pyramids with only croc dung and sticks.

I continued to move mountains all weekend.

On Monday, I was afraid I’d given myself a do-it-yourself hysterectomy, so I begged my teenage son to help me. He could tuck multiple boxes under each hairy armpit and slouch with them to the car. I remain envious.

“See son, I’ve been lifting boxes roughly the size of bunk beds. Can you help me?”

“Mother,” he began, while grazing from a bag of dusty Doritos and sitting on a couch I had carried in on my back, “you know how I feel about the entire cycle of packing and moving and packing and moving, again and again, in an endless spiral of cascading doom brought on by our overdependence on material items used to define and validate ourselves in a corrupt society. You know I want to be an intenerate soapbox lecturer without purse or script.” He grazed on.

“I think my hysterectomy is flaring up.”

Raising a disdainful eyebrow, he said, “Hummmph!”

“Did you know that I can life approximately 77, 000 times my own body weight?”

“Then what do you need me for?” he said.

“Get up and help me, or I’ll tip you over and use the tilt-kick-drag moving method on you.”

“Let me get my shoes,” he said.

FACT: A drone is just a teenager without a couch.

Oh, by the way, do you want to know what was in the wardrobe box (taller than my own head)? There were two tons of teenage son’s Star Wars memorabilia including light saber and pose able action figures—overdependence, my eye.

Have a great week and don’t lift anything heavier than a hamster wheel.

Linda (Queen of the Drone People) Zern

EMP - Envy Mother Preening, Each Monkey Picking, End Moon Ponging, Era Made for Pimples

2011-04-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse. It can be used as a bomb. It’s a bomb that’s heck on microwaves and such. I am an electromagnetic pulse bomb. It’s not my fault. I was born with extra electromagnets—also extra pulses.

The evidence:

Example #1 of my EMP capabilities -

I bought a Kindle, which is a nifty machine that uses electric to suck up all the words in the world at the cost of $7.98 per book. The power cord of my kindle disintegrated like a cracker in a mud puddle. Holding the crumbling power cord in my hands, I tried to show it to my husband.

“Is this normal?” Bits of plastic power cord coating rained down like . . . like . . . well, rain.

Sherwood, my darling husband, did not look up from his electronic machine masters of which there are three.

“Did the dog chew it?”

Exposed wires bulged like worms from the dissolving plastic along the entire length of the power cord. Plastic sawdust coated my hands.

“It was plugged into the wall socket, behind the bookcase,” I said, squinting at the bare wires. “I mean, Ploodle did eat a couple of my computer cords, but unless Ploodle has become a wire eating beaver who can burrow under a bookshelf . . . seriously, look at this.”

Note: Ploodle is our five-pound Yorkshire terrier who has a history of chewing computer power cords, chicken throats, and brassieres.

He raised his bleary eyes from the glare of artificial computer lights—Sherwood, not Ploodle. I held the cord up. It continued to dissolve in my electromagnetic pulse bomb hands.

He gave me a professional diagnosis.

“That’s weird,” he said, turning back to his computer, also known as the mother ship.

“There’s a scientific explanation,” I mumbled. “There has to be.”

Example # 2

When I bought the computer before this computer and the computer before that one, the nice people at the Apple store gave me a free I-POD. It seemed a fun little gadget, and a lot of people tried to take it from me. (You know who you are, you thieving yetis.)

But I said, “No!”

The thieves narrowed their thieving yeti eyes at me.

I said, “It’s mine.”

And then I said, “What does it do?”

There was an involved demonstration in which various of my offspring punched mysteriously at the surface of the silvery gadget and then flashed the results of their strange finger movements to me and said loudly, “See!” and “Hear!” Then they handed it to me.

I put the gadget my overall’s pocket and went out to garden while listening to Freddy Mercury sing about plump people riding on bicycles and living forever with rhapsodic bohemians. Every time I bent over to pull weeds it fell out of my pocket into the dirt and worms.

The I-POD no longer works, BECAUSE I AM AN ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE BOMB—Duh!!

Example # 3:

I haven’t had a normal conversation on the telephone since we got rid of the “tele” part of the name in phone and changed it to “cell.” I have a bubble around my head of electromagnetic pulses that sucks up all the cells out of the cell phone the way some people can suck all the fun out of a Facebook status. The bubble also interferes with satellite transmissions, or I have a bubblehead.

Example # 4:

I can shoot static electric lightning bolts from my fingertips, but that’s only any good if you want to set dryer lint on fire.

Conclusion:

I hate being an EMP bomb. I want to be a bombshell or a super hero.

Linda (Outgoing) Zern

Bomb Shelter

2011-04-20T10:44:00.000-07:00

When I was four years old, going on five, the world teetered on the crumbling edge of nuclear annihilation. It was really annoying.

The possible end of human existence meant that there was nothing to watch on our black and white television set, because the man I thought of as someone’s grandpa had been talking and talking and talking--forever.

It meant that none of us kids were allowed outside to play hopscotch or stickball because of where we lived and where all our dads worked. Rose Marie Drive was too close to Cape Canaveral to take a chance on hopscotch. When the moon rockets roared into the sky the ground shook and sliding glass doors rattled. We were in the radius.

It meant that instead of being at work writing technical manuals, my father was sitting at our kitchen dinette, his fingers fluttering and thumping against the Formica. When he turned to watch the flicker of the television, he looked like a man who’d forgotten where he’d put his glasses when they were on the top of his head all along. When the picture got fuzzy he mumbled bad words.

The rabbit ears on the top of the TV probably needed someone to crumple the tinfoil up better, but who cared; it was just old people talking.

Based on the latest low-level reconnaissance mission . . .[Redacted] Guanajay Intermediate-range Ballistic Missile Site #1 will probably be fully operational on 1 December . . . [Redacted]

--CIA Daily Report, "The Crisis USSR/Cuba," October 27, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University)

When my father wasn't watching the television, he scribbled on a piece of notebook paper, drawing heavy thick lines. My mother hovered. She complained that her eye was twitching; she pushed her finger against one eyelid while my father scribbled and talked.

"It's true, what they're reporting. A-1-A is a parking lot, everyone trying to get out of the Keys. The police are trying to keep the intersections clear. No one going the other way, just Army trucks . . . troops. We couldn't get out if we wanted to. We've waited too . . ."

"Late," my mother said. "The Christensens left yesterday." I should have listened more carefully to the way she was saying what she said, but I was only four. I hadn't perfected the art of low-level reconnaissance, yet.

Still, I watched and listened and colored while sitting on a bar stool at the breakfast bar in our new house on Rose Marie Drive in Titusville, Florida.

That breakfast bar was one of the big selling features for those cookie cutter row houses, a stretch of crisp, white Formica, jutting out from the kitchen countertop in a seamless length of modern design. It was where all the neighborhood kids lived when we were inside, to eat our TV dinners and be out of our parent's way. It was where we sat and eavesdropped on the exotic customs and culture of an alien adult world.

I loved sitting there with our dog, a stuffed sausage of a Chihuahua, panting at my feet, waiting for me to sneak him all my supper. I would swing my dangling legs back and forth, like a quiet satellite on the fringe of my parent's universe. The space under the breakfast bar was another kind of place--a snug, close, hide-and-seek spot tucked away from grown-up worries, a handy choice for emergencies and pretending, a handy choice for disappearing. Between the garbage pail and the end of the counter, the breakfast bar was a child-sized refuge and retreat, like a card table with a blanket thrown over it, it felt safe under there.

The strangeness of my father sitting in the kitchen, drawing on notebook paper when he should have been at work made me uneasy, in a vague, ants-in-the-pants kind of way. My father didn't draw. He didn't come home early. When my father did come home from Cape Canaveral, he flopped into an E-Z-Boy lounger and made me rub his feet. They smelled terrible.

Home early, he drew lines and circles and scribbled important looking words. Curiosity pulled me down from the barstool. The glyphs on his paper drew me like a treasure map. The dog trailed behind me his nails tick, ticking against the linoleum.

I pointed to the notebook paper.

"What's that say?" My father kept writing and my mother made her fingers into a hard teepee. They ignored me.

I tried sounding out the strangest of the words by myself, bit by bit, the way I'd figured out by learning to read "Constantinople and Timbuktu" at the end of Hop on Pop.

"G-en-er-aaaaa-t-or, gen-er-a-tor." I made the G soft and the A short.

"Long A. G like J. Gen-er-A-tor," my mother corrected. "Is a generator part of the package? It looks very complicated," she said, "and expensive."

"Butch says that all we need is a rough sketch and this buddy of his can come and dig a hole in a day or two. It's like a pre-fab deal. Dig a hole, dump it in, and then you add stuff. Shelves and shit, any way you want it."

"But isn't it too late? The Christensens left yesterday. They're probably to Tennessee by now." She sounded like the only kid in class not to get an invitation to the best birthday party of the year. "There's nothing left at the store, worse than a hurricane."

My father wrote the words B-O-M-B and S-H-E-L-T-E-R in fat important letters across the top of the paper. He pressed so hard the pencil lead snapped.

"Shit. Get me another goddamn pencil."

My mother hustled to the junk drawer still muttering about empty shelves and too little time and things worse than hurricanes. My father drew tiny circles on a straight line, inside a rectangle.

"Are those rocks?" I asked, pointing to the circles, inching closer to my father's side.

"Food. Cans. Canned goods. Peas. Tuna. Beans." I got too close. He pushed me back with his elbow. "Go eat something. Make her eat something for Christ's sake."

The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war.

-- President John F. Kennedy, Address to the Nation, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 22 1962 (from the American Rhetoric.com website)

A tiny worm of worry twitched behind my bellybutton.

My mother and father started to argue. This was back and forth talk I recognized, the cadence of verbal warfare as familiar as any Dr. Seuss book. It started over my criminal, selfish waste of food. It drove my mother crazy that I didn't eat. It made my father crazy when my mother got crazy over me not eating. I watched my father carefully for signs that he might want to teach me a lesson tonight, making me sit in front of a plate of ice cold fish sticks or mashed potatoes for the longest time, because people were starving, somewhere or everywhere. I couldn't remember.

Then their anger became a tug of war of words over canned goods and ways to hide from bombs and our neighbors leaving yesterday and something called fallout. My mother wanted to drive away from the fallout. My father wanted to pretend that there was time to build a place to hide away from the fallout by digging a hole in the ground, in our backyard, behind the new chain link fence.

I knew about bombs from the big kids who went to school and how you had to practice hiding under your desk so the terrible bombs couldn't find you. It was the Russians. Those Russians weren't starving, but they were making missile-bombs to drop on our friends at school and our house and daddy's work and the Spooner family with their seven children and my best friend Teresa and the monkey bars and . . .

I looked over at the dog, waiting under my barstool for fish sticks to come raining down from the sky.

"What will our doggy eat when we hide from the bad bombs?"

"No dog food. No dog. Just people. Tell her."

That's when the worm of worry started to crawl around looking for a way out, trying to find someplace to hide. I started to worry about how the dog would know to get under a desk if I didn't help him.

"Don't be like that. It's not like we're actually going to build this silly thing. Let her pretend to bring the stupid dog."

At some point, I started to cry.

"I'm not doing this for my health. You can't put a dog in a bomb shelter. Where's a dog going to shit?" He looked at me, and I knew I looked booger-crying-ugly because of the way he stared at me, disgusted. "Shut up that noise. You can't have dog shit in a bomb shelter."

My mother laughed. "Do you know how stupid that sounds?"

Then, my father's face started coming apart like a broken coffee cup, all his face lines became sharp points and stone edges.

United Press reports eruption of violent rioting and terror bombing in more than half dozen Latin American capitals. It states that La Paz, Bolivia, was the scene of street fighting near the United States Embassy involving 3,000 anti-American labor union members, pro-American demonstrators, and police reports five killed and twenty-six injured.

--CIA Daily Report, "The Crisis USSR/Cuba," October 27, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University)

"You're blaming me for the goddamn Cuban Missile Crisis? What have you done? There's nothing here."

He marched to the kitchen cabinets and started flinging doors open, some of them banging closed again, and one door ripping loose from its hinges. It dangled from the one remaining hinge.

It was always like that with my father and mother, missed cues, vague hints of disapproval, the low burn of rising tension and paranoia, and then the inexplicable blowup.

Grabbing boxes of noodles, he threw them over his shoulder, an open box of spaghetti skittered across the kitchen floor. He dropped a jelly jar. It shattered into glittery grape-smeared dust. A bottle of ketchup exploded, splashing across the linoleum. My mother started to back away from the pick-up-sticks of loose noodles, the grape jelly full of glass, and the angry words that were not going to stop, not for a while.

The dog licked ketchup off of the floor.

I remembered to shove my fist against my teeth, so I could make the crying stop when I jumped down from the barstool. Scooting on my bottom, I wedged myself next to the garbage can under the ultra modern, Formica covered breakfast bar. Globs of food dripped and drabbed down the side of the cabinet under the bar where I would sneak food into the garbage or the dog. My mother couldn't see underneath the counter to clean the spills. Stuff got stuck under here. I pulled the bar stools in tight, trying to protect myself with a toothpick barricade against an explosion of condiments and pasta. I glued my chin to my knees, listening to my father empty out our kitchen cabinets, listening to the sky falling.

The dog yelped. He scurried under the breakfast bar and pressed himself against my leg.

"Bill, stop!"

The barrage ended. The cabinets emptied. He stomped away to listen to the president explain about the end of the world.

Kneeling, my mother started putting little pieces of jelly jar into bigger pieces of jelly jar. When she saw me jammed under the breakfast bar she started crying but not louder than President Kennedy talking in the living room.

I stayed under there for a long time even when my mother had finished picking through shattered glass and sweeping ruined noodles into a dirty pile. I knew to stay put until the all clear sounded or bedtime. I stayed until our fat dog licked my face, making me laugh, because his breath smelled like ketchup. He smelled like dinner, the dinner no one was going to remember to make me eat.

The Cuban crisis, we hope, marked an end and a beginning--an end to violent adventures designed to overturn the equilibrium of world power, and a beginning of fresh initiatives for peace, including a new attack on nuclear testing, disarmament, overseas bases, and on world social and economic problems.

--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Memorandum For the President- "Post Mortem on Cuba," October 29, 1962 (The National Security Archive, George Washington University)

When I was four years old, going on five, the world teetered on the crumbling edge of nuclear annihilation. It wasn't the scariest part of my childhood.

The Tale of the Faux Toupee

2011-04-19T12:57:00.000-07:00

Our five-pound Yorkshire terrier, Ploodle, does not go to a dog groomer. His mother puts a bowl on his head and cuts his hair with loving hands at home. I am Ploodle's stylist.

I also own the bowl.

When Ploodle looks like a possessed oven mitt, I know it is time to "trim him up." When I'm done he often looks idiotic. Sometimes, for a bit of whimsy, I leave the hair on his legs longish so that he looks like he's wearing UGG boots. People laugh at him, but he's a very secure fellow and has a fine self-deprecating sense of humor.

After giving Ploodle a crew cut in honor of crew cut awareness week, I ended up with a tiny haystack of fuzzy Yorkie hair that I wrapped in a towel (for immediate disposal in the garbage), but then I forgot and stuffed the towel with the whole hairy mess in the wash machine, which got washed on the "Heavy" cycle, probably more than once, and then got stuffed into the dryer and dried on "High Heat-Cottons."

The haystack of Ploodle hair turned into a toupee--a bad one.

I called my husband.

"Honey, I can't find it."

He's used to getting phone calls from me, in the middle of the day, that contain little or no context, information--or sense. He's used to not knowing what the heck is going on.

"What? What can't you find?"

"The toupee."

There was a pause. It might have been beyond pregnant.

"Remember?" I said, frustrated anew at my husband's lack of mind reading talent. "Remember? That wad of Ploodle hair I showed you; the wad of hair that kind of got cooked in the dryer into a giant placemat and that ended up looking like it was made of Yeti armpit fur? Remember?"

The memory came back with a thud. I know; I heard a thud sound.

"Oh right, it was disgusting."

"Okay, so I put it in the bathroom garbage, but now I can't find it."

"Well I don't have it." Sherwood is working in Detroit. He flies home on the weekends so I can keep him up to date on important stuff.

I wandered through the house trying to decide if I had dreamed the whole dog hair toupee incident.

"I can't find it anywhere." I noticed another one of the dogs wearing what looked like a mustache. "Wait a minute. Either Coco is trying out a disguise, or I think I'm onto the location of the missing toupee." I followed a breadcrumb trail made out of dog hair toupee bits.

Still talking to Sherwood, I walked into our bedroom. Ginger, our soldier son's English Bull-dog, looked up, her mouth full of either the butt end of a molting moose or the missing hairpiece.

"Never mind. I found it."

"Thank goodness. For a minute there I was afraid that you were going to accuse me of having packed the darned thing." He clicked off.

Ploodle stood by, looking embarrassed.

"What are you embarrassed about? It's just hair. I got all the way to the gym with a piece of that white sticky tape from a lint roller stuck in my waistband, trailing out like a castle banner. And some woman walked by, saw it, made a face AND DIDN'T BOTHER TO SAY ANYTHING."

Ploodle had the good grace to blink.

"That's right; just about the time I think I'm looking hip, fit, and cool, it's a safe bet that something ridiculous is going to be stuck in or on the back of my pants."

Ploodle wagged his nubby little tail. I sighed.

"I'm just glad it wasn't your dog hair toupee stuck to my pants. Wouldn't that have been hard to explain?"

Ploodle, Ginger, Coco and I decided to go play jump over the horse poop piles until dinner.

Linda (Close Shave) Zern

Bucolic Bird Brain

2011-04-12T13:32:00.000-07:00

I recognized that look as I stared at vacant eyes, gaping mouth and body language that screamed, "Feed me!" I remembered that look, sitting on my couch. I knew a hungry teenager when I saw one.

The problem was that this "teenager" was a bird--A BIRD--a half grown scruffy-feathered, gap-beaked blue jay bird, and it wanted to be fed. Typical. I had just scratched up an earthworm with my garden rake. What could it hurt? I fed the earthworm to the scraggly blue jay teenager bird. It was a bucolic, earthy gardener's moment. Charming.

It was also summertime. Our air conditioner was broken. Typical. So, I called the AC man, a nice congenial man with interesting tattoos on his large muscles. He looked like he could tunnel out of a prison or had. He arrived and got to work puttering around the air conditioning unit. I puttered around my garden.

The entire time I had that strange, eerie feeling that someone was watching me . . . and yelling at me. Typical.

There it was, plopped on a mulch pile--slouching, staring, and yelling--the blue jay teenager bird. Not only was the pimply bird slouching, it looked like it needed a shave and some deodorant. Typical.

I walked closer. Its mouth gaped open. I attempted to shoo it away. Its mouth gaped wider. I talked to it and said, "What's your deal?" Its mouth almost unhinged at the jaw. I recognized that look. It wanted to be fed--again.

Get a job, I thought.

The AC man finished his puttering and brought me the bad AC news. We stood shoulder to shoulder, the invoice on his clipboard a history of AC neglect. He gave me the total. I sighed. I wrote a check.

Blue jay teenager bird, its tiny brain firing on all 1.5 cylinders, recognized "worm-getting-lady." It sailed, erratically, from the top of the mulch pile, past my face, to land on AC man's shoulder. I screamed. AC man used his large muscles to toss his clipboard. AC man screamed. The teenager bird's mouth gaped open. It didn't budge from its shoulder perch.

I thought I should explain why I had collapsed onto the ground.

"I'm so sorry. The baby bird thinks that I'm its mother. I fed it a worm. It startled me."

AC man tried to dislodge the blue jay teenager bird from his shoulder. It reluctantly flew away to a nearby tree branch.

"Wow, how amazing was that?" I said, trying to sound like Snow White, who had the power to sing birds out of trees and was used to them landing on various body parts.

"Lady, you shouldn't scream like that." He took my check and retreated to his work van.

I took my rake and retreated to my garden just as the blue jay teenager bird (once again recognizing "worm-getting-lady") dove at my head from the tree branch. It crash-landed onto my hair. I screamed the scream of the banshee and began running blindly, flailing wildly, and sobbing hysterically. The blue jay teenager bird's mouth gaped open as it clung to my wildly bobbing head.

AC man's van, its window tinted, never moved even though the engine was running. I streaked across the yard, back and forth, in front of the work van. The bird rode on my head like it was waiting for the eight- second count in a bull riding competition. I thought I detected the soft lilt of laughter, but seeing as how my screaming went on for while, I could be mistaken about that.

Finally, blue jay teenager bird noticed a fat grub on the ground and flew off in an attempt to feed itself. And that's how I became an empty nester.

I promise; this story is true, mostly. It is an example of creative non-fiction, which is the truth dressed up to go to a party. For example, I could have been wearing a hat, but it's funnier if the bird landed in my hair.

Happy spring,

Linda (worm-getting-lady) Zern

"Feed me!"

On My Own, Pretending Todd Gives a Crap

2011-03-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

Feral pigs rampaged through the yard, dangerously close to my leaf lettuce and loofah gourds. They were followed closely by bobcats, looking for take-out for their kittens. Coyotes howled in the distance.

Not to worry I thought. There are county agencies, programs, divisions, organizations, and entire tasks forces dedicated to solving all my troubles. Right? My local government would help I thought. Someone is out there waiting for my phone call, sitting eagerly behind a government-issue metal desk in quiet anticipation of being of service—to me.

Okay, sometimes I’m a giant nitwit.

“Hello, this is Osceola County Animal Control. My name is Todd. How can I help you?”

Trying to win friends and influence Todd, I went for lighthearted.

“Hey there, Todd. I need to talk to your Feral Pig, Bobcat, Coyote Division.”

Todd was a dud and not easily influenced.

“Lady, it’s just me.” Another phone rang in the background. “Hang on,” he said. When he returned he was still not up for silliness or joshing about.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I just need some info on the rampaging wildlife around here. I don’t want to get in any trouble, trying to do the right thing, be responsible, educated myself—that kind of thing. So, what’s the scoop on feral pigs? I just put in my spring gar . . . ”

“Not our responsibility, the federal government is supposed to be taking care of the feral pig population.” He did not sound like a true believer of anything.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine somewhere in the bowels of a stately federal government building all the way up there in Washington DC, a kindly government worker, shoulders hunched, glasses fogged, heart contracting and expanding with worry over the approximately five to 12,000 feral pigs threatening Linda L. Zern’s newly sprouted Golden Queen Corn crop. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make myself see it, no matter how hard I squished my eyes shut.

“In other words, no one cares. So, what if I shoot the suckers?”

Todd began to chant.

“You cannot discharge a firearm within . . .”

“Not a problem. I live out.” Todd continued to chant city regulations. “Out, Todd, out not in. Out. I have to call state troopers if I’m attacked by roving bands of man eating men—out, way out.” The chant grew fainter.

He finally paused and said, “You can call a trapper and trap the pigs.”

“What? Like a big game hunter? Or somebody who digs a big pit and fills it with giant mousetraps? What?”

Finding out that I lived outside the city limits changed Todd’s attitude toward me. He softened. He warmed up; he came clean.

“Well, I’ll tell you, lady. We tried trapping pigs once out Poinciana way. There were thirty or forty pigs tearing up the place. We trapped one, and then somebody came and shot the pig in the trap and stole the meat,” he paused and then spoke slowly and distinctly. “There’s no hunting season on pigs.”

He sighed and then had to take another phone call.

“What about bobcats?”

“We don’t catch those, but if you trap them we’ll come pick them up, and there’s a hunting season on bobcat.”

All I could picture was a box, a stick, a string, and a hotdog—also claw marks—lots and many claw marks.

“What about the coyotes? I just don’t want to shoot first and ask questions later; you know?”

“Nobody’s in charge of those things, and you ain’t going to trap them either. No way,” he paused and spoke very very slowly and distinctly, “and there’s no hunting season on coyotes.”

I realized that “no hunting season” was code for “fire at will.”

“Okay, then Todd, pretty much what I’m hearing here is ‘Lady, you’re on your own.’”

He made a non-committal snort noise and hung up.

I had more questions. Like, exactly what does Animal Control control? If I report a giant panda attack will I get more action? If I shoot a giant panda, will I go to jail forever? If I’m attacked and eaten by a giant panda will you, Todd, be a pallbearer at my funeral?

Overall, it was good to have clarification on the bureaucratic process, because lady, trust me, you are on your own. Just ask Todd.

Linda (Stonewall) Zern

To Tell the Truth With Your Elbows

2011-03-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

According to a special documentary on “body language” over ninety percent of all human communication is non-verbal. (As I type this, my shoulders are very pinched and close to my ears.)

Everyone lies. I am told that this is true, because people have seen it on a t-shirt and a fictional character on television repeats it a lot. (At this point, my lips are pursed, emphasizing the fine lines and fissures into which my lipstick tends to pour.)

Therefore, if everyone lies and ninety percent of communication is non-verbal then forget about what’s coming out of people’s lips and concentrate on what’s happening between their eyes. (A wrinkle shaped like a cavern just deepened near my left eye.)

I hate lying. I love liars. (My right eye is twitching so hard I can hear it.)

That is a lie. I don’t love liars. I try to love liars in the “love the sinner, hate the sin” way, but it’s hard, because liars tend to lie, and they can’t be trusted with your automobiles, wallet, lawn mower, good name, daughters, or your female cat, and she’s been spayed. I continue to try to love liars, but it’s a struggle.

No, it’s not a struggle; that’s a lie. It’s more like a wrestle—Greco/Roman style.

Liars are exhausting, because you have to listen to them lying and “read” their body language all at the same time. Or if you’re not around when the liar is lying then you have to hire someone to watch the liar lie, and if you live in a particularly dishonest society, eventually you will run out of people, to watch the people, who are supposed to be watching the people—in case the people are lying or plagiarizing or faking important governmental reports. (See? It’s exhausting.) So, if it’s true that everyone lies then we’re screwed.

My favorite story about liars is a story my husband likes to tell. (I use it here with permission—no, not really. I totally stole his story.)

At a father/son campout, my husband and others continually warned one young boy to cease and desist putting a sharp, pointy stick in the campfire, igniting the end of the sharp, pointy stick, and then wandering about the campground while waving the now flaming, sharp, pointy stick in the air. He agreed to stop—verbally. (The body language test results have been misplaced.) “Put that stick out,” they demanded. He put it out.

Sherwood retired to his tent, only to emerge later to see the young boy standing in the middle of the campground holding the flaming, sharp, pointy stick aloft—apparently in tribute to the pointy stick fire gods.

“Son!” My husband calls all boys son; it doesn’t necessarily mean a blood relation. “Son! Did you put that stick back in the fire?”

The young boy said, “Nope.”

We have boys. Sherwood knew what he was up against.

“Are you holding a stick?”

“Maybe.”

“Is your hand in a curved position around a former tree branch?”

The phrase “former tree branch” tripped the kid up.

“Yes,” the boy said.

“Is that stick on fire?”

“I don’t know.” A shower of sparks made the boy flinch. His body language gave him away.

I know it’s old fashioned. I know it’s considered a simple fix for a simple mind, but I like the Ten Commandments. They were written on stone, thus saving paper. They’re short. They’re numbered. They’re to the point.

I especially like the one that read: Thou shalt not force me to have to learn body language to be able to tell if you’re a big, fat liar when I ask, “Who busted the loveseat?” and you tell me, “I don’t know.” And then six months later, I find broken bits of loveseat hidden behind our wedding picture and all over the house—Sherwood Kevin Zern! And all the grandkids were in on it, including Reagan and she doesn’t have teeth. (I am now leaning toward the computer screen in a combative, aggressive posture.)

Yep. That’s my favorite commandment. Nah, I’m lying. Actually, I believe that there are really only two commandments and they’re my favorites.

Thou shalt love God and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself . . . because people who love their neighbors don’t lie to, steal from, lust for, cheat over, shoot at, curse up, or covet their neighbor’s good looking donkeys. Nice people only need two rules, in my opinion.

Read This!

Linda (Read My Lips) Zern

Operation Enduring Rat Trap

2011-03-16T02:05:00.000-07:00

Suggestions for eradicating rats in the Zern family chicken coop have included:

Misc. People’s Question: “Can’t you just poison the rats with poisoned apples?”

My Response: “Nope, because we’re fresh out of wizened old witches and chickens eat poisoned apples too.”

Son-In-Law Threat: “If it were me, my rats, and my chicken coop, I’d burn it down. In fact, it’s the second thing I’m going to do after you die; right after I change out all the mismatched cabinet knobs in your kitchen.”

My Come Back and Counter Threat: “That’s your answer to everything, Phillip, and I’m having my mismatched cabinet knobs buried with me. So there.”

Friend’s Suggestion: “Grenade?”

My Shocked Answer: “No!”

Another Suggestion: “Flame Thrower?”

My Shocked Answer: “NO!”

Son-In-Law: “If it were me, I’d just throw a tarp over the hole mess and gas ‘em.”

Me: “Chickens too?”

Him: “Yes.”

Me: “Good grief, Phillip, you sound like a Nazi.”

My Question: “Are the spelunker lights on your heads really necessary?”

Official Statement from the Rodent Squad (Consisting of Sherwood and Adam): “Yes, we need the lights. It’s not as easy as it looks on TV to shoot at stuff and carry a flashlight. Who knew?”

SSG Aric Zern: “Why did Dad get a shotgun to shoot rats?”

The Truth: “So he could nickname it ‘Shock and Awe.’”

The Real Truth: “Because I wouldn’t let him put rat-shot in my target pistol.”

Best Rat Killing Tip from Uncle Rick: “Flood their tunnels and then stomp them when they run out.”

My Horrified Worry: “What kind of shoes are rat stomping shoes? Stilettos? Golf cleats? Rubber boots?”

My Follow Up: “Where do you even buy rat stomping footwear?”

My Husband’s Claim to the Most Excitement He’s had at Night in Years: “I have to confess I was so pumped after shooting those rats I couldn’t sleep, even though I had to get up and leave for the airport at 4 am.”

Me: “You caveman!”

Lessons Learned About Farming: “It’s hard and there’s a ton of rats.”

Best Movie Line Quoted in the Conflict: “I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

This completes the weekly briefing for Operation Enduring Rat Trap here on the front lines of country living, organic egg growing, and chicken picking.

Linda (Neck of Red) Zern

A Less Than Serious Look at Zeitgeist--Also Broccoli

2011-03-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

Zeitgeist is a fancy German word, no doubt invented by a fancy German. He invented the word while thinking about what made folks, born at different spots on a timeline, chop broccoli the way they do—or history; he might have been thinking about history. Technically, the Zeit part means time and the Geist part means ghost, but the English word timeghost looked silly, so everyone stuck with the fancy German word.

It’s one of those made up words that can make you sound smart when you say it, or it can be a fun name for two dogs—Zeit and Geist. Either way, it’s a real stinker to translate.

In addition, zeitgeist is a word that comes in handy when you’re trying to explain why people do the strange, curious things they do or think the convoluted, murky things they think or want the bewildering things they want. It also helps explain why my grandfather was never embarrassed to play his accordion while dancing the polka.

It is “the spirit of the age,” or “the spirit of the times.” Simply put, zeitgeist is the influence of the place and time in which a person lives on how that person puts on their pants—if they wear pants, of course. For my family the idea of zeitgeist is best illustrated by the chopping of broccoli, while wearing pants—or not.

Let me tell you, my grandmother could chop a stalk of broccoli. Her skill with a paring knife was to be envied and studied. Every floret was cut precisely and surgically. Once she finished with the frilly head of the broccoli, she continued cutting the stalk into perfect cubes, and when the stalk got tough and woody she’d whip out a potato peeler and peel that sucker right down to the end and then cut the peeled part of the stalk into sugar cube shapes.

The peels went into the coffee can under the sink and then into the flower garden to fertilize the azaleas and camellias. She never wasted one speck of broccoli, and it wasn’t because she liked it. She didn’t have teeth. She couldn’t even chew the stuff when it was cooked. Her broccoli chopping was evidence of zeitgeist, a tangible clue to “the [ghosts] of her age,” ghosts that never stopped haunting her.

My grandparents lived in Chicago, Illinois during the worst financial disaster this country had endured. Before the depression, my grandmother had been a proofreader for a publishing house, and my grandfather a musician. They became junk dealers. They scrounged for junk, refurbished junk, and sold junk to survive. They saved everything from string to stoves. The spirit of their time was fear and hoarding.

They never risked throwing anything away ever again, including the hard ends of a broccoli stalk.

With a little less flare, my mother chopped her broccoli, not as carefully as my grandmother or as precisely. My mother was concerned about waste and want, because her parents had been concerned but not as concerned. She flailed away at the top of the broccoli and the tender part of the stalk. She never peeled.

During World War II, my mother remembered being spanked, when her mom and dad caught her playing with the ration cards. She was a little girl and didn’t understand that those cards represented a week’s worth of milk, sugar, flour, and coffee. America was feeding her soldiers first, her citizens second. If you wanted broccoli you grew your own, in a “Victory Garden” in your backyard; it was a garden grown as part of the war effort, a blitzkrieg of beets and radishes to beat back fascism.

For my mother and father, scrounging through city dumps or starving in the Smokey Mountains during the depression were old, fading ghosts when they married, but their zeitgeist brought its own haunting. Its ghost carried a hammer and sickle, shipped missiles to Cuba, and made their kids have to practice the proper way to huddle under desks at school, waiting for a cold war to get hot.

Still, dads had jobs. Moms had cash. The Piggly Wiggly had broccoli, and a clown named McDonald built his first hamburger joint in Orlando. The Russians went down in a hail of Levi’s Jeans and French fries and everybody relaxed enough to chuck the hard part of the broccoli stalk into their new trash compacters.

I paused over the garbage can in my kitchen, my hands full of damp, ragged broccoli bits. My mother’s timing was without flaw when it came to being awkward.

“Are you going to throw all that away?”

“Yeah, sure. The tree part is the only part the kids will eat and only if it’s dripping in ranch dip. At least I’m trying to get some kind of green stuff in them.”

I flopped two fistfuls of garbage into the can. My mother placed a hand over her heart in a practiced, elegant gesture of long-suffering.

“You’re grandmother would turn over in her grave.”

“Gramma is still alive. She can’t turn over in her grave. She could dance a Polka on it, but that’s about it.”

“Someday, we’ll all regret this,” she sighed, cryptically. “Who knows what those Russians are up to?”

I looked at the lump of vegetable mush and thought that the geopolitical ramifications of Soviet re-ascendancy and global KGB conspiracy theory a lot to put on a stalk of broccoli.

I shrugged, confident of my place in the eternal cycle of supply and demand.

“Don’t worry, Mom; Wal-Mart will make more.”

I believed that, because from the spirit of my times has evolved the expectation that what I needed I got—mostly. What I wanted would be under the Christmas tree—pretty much, and what I desired was out there, somewhere—probably on Ebay.

My six-year old granddaughter, Emma, asked me for a piece of chicken, recently. I placed a lovely hunk of homemade Southern fried chicken on a paper plate made out of plastic for her. My fried chicken was a crispy brown tribute to a culture dedicated to deep fat and smelled like a picnic on a humid day next to a pond with turtles sunning on a log.

She looked. She sniffed. She wilted like old broccoli.

“No, YaYa, not this chicken. I want chicken that is orange.”

“But sweetheart, chicken isn’t orange. What kind of chicken is . . ?”

I let the question trail away, realizing that Emma was not asking me for a lovely hunk of my Southern fried chicken. Emma was asking me for a nugget—a strangely shaped, artificially colored, chunk of mystery meat—possibly poultry. She refused to eat any of the non-orange chicken. I suspected it would not be the last time.

I like to imagine that someday, from the sacred confines of my antique rocking chair, I will lean forward and take Emma’s hand in mine; the other grandchildren will scoot closer, fascinated and intrigued.

“Emma, have I ever told you the Zern family fable called ‘The Chopping of the Broccoli?’”

She will shake her head. Several of the little ones will blink their big lemur eyes at me.

“Well, once upon a time there was a strange, wonderful vegetable that looked a lot like a tiny green tree. It was grown from seeds, in the dirt, in people’s backyards next to a stack of rubber bicycle tires waiting for the rubber drive . . .”

It’s not Emma’s fault. It’s zeitgeist, the spirit of her times: fast food, fast cash, fast gratification, and chicken the color of traffic cones. The wheel turns. The timeline gets longer. The ghosts fade in and out, and the children learn to chop broccoli with a style all their own, or not.

Random Rat Facts Learned the Hard Way

2011-03-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

Rats have excellent hearing.

“Honey, our son the weapons expert in Afghanistan, says that we should use a pellet gun,” I said.

“What for?” He was trying to decide on the proper firepower for a night skirmish in our rat infested chicken coop.

“So that the fourteen thousand or more rats living in, under, and around our chicken coop will not be scared off by gun shots when we blow the first one to bits,” I said.

“Maybe I can just buy a silencer on the black market.”

“Like a murderer? How about we use a plastic diet Pepsi bottle over the end of the gun like on CSI? You know, a poor man’s silencer. I can’t remember if we’re supposed to leave the Pepsi in the bottle or not. Dang it.”

“Shush! They can hear you,” he cautioned.

Norway rats are bigger than roof rats, and their droppings are ¾ inches long and capsule-shaped.

“Are these droppings capsule-shaped?” I asked, trying to pretend I was doing a segment on Norway rats for Animal Planet. My husband and I were inspecting rat pucky.

“You mean capsule-shaped like Tylenol PM or capsule-shaped like the Apollo moon rockets?”

“Dang it. I don’t remember.”

Hey, where are you going?”

“Back to the house to look at pictures of rat poop on the Internet.”

“Well, as long as it’s not porn or shoes.”

Rats can carry ten different kinds of diseases including bubonic plague, murine typhus, spirochetal jaundice, Leptospirosis, rabies, rat-bite fever, and bacterial food poisoning.

“Honey, I think I have rat-bite fever.”

“Do you want rat-bite fever?”

I felt snarkiness boil up like sap in the spring. “Yes, Sherwood, I want rat-bite fever. I’m starting a collection.”

He sighed. “Do you have a rat bite?”

“No, but I have a zit.”

He started to look interested.

“Is it on your . . .”

“Careful, I could be a carrier.”

Rats are crazy smart.

“The rats have adapted, and I think they could be plotting.”

“What do you mean they’ve adapted?”

“I mean they’re avoiding the La Brea Tar Pit sticky traps like they can talk to each other about paleontology. They don’t run around the rafters anymore. And they’ve written graffiti on the bait boxes full of poison.”

“What did they write?” He knows better than to question my version of any story.

“It says, ‘We’re out here, and we’re crazy smart.’”

Norway rats are burrowers and can undermine foundations of buildings.

“Hey, Babe, where do you think the chicken coop got to?”

Our rats may be vampire rats.

No comment.

Linda (Knowledge is Power) Zern

Operation Rat Fink

2011-03-01T11:30:00.000-08:00

“Get in there, Linda,” My husband, Sherwood (Trigger Finger) Zern, gestured for me to precede him into the chicken coop.

He was holding a gun.

“I don’t want to go in there; there’s rats in there.” The miscellaneous sounds of thumping mixed with strange weepy gasps bounced around inside the chicken coop like ball bearings. (Oh man, I realized the strange weepy noises were coming from me.)

“Linda, you’re the one with the flashlight.” He sounded exasperated as he waved the gun around.

“But you’re the one with bullets.”

“I can’t see to shoot anything if you don’t shine the flashlight at the rats.”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck try to crawl off my neck at his use of the word “anything.” The sounds of a massive rat exodus pounded from the dark corners of the chicken coop as the rats heard our voices, and I was having a hard time holding the flashlight level, due to excessive neck hair crawling.

“Too late. They’ve all run away.” I peeked into the coop at my beloved rooster and his eight lovely ladies. They continued to sleep like dead chickens on their perch, oblivious to the rats, the gun, the flashlight, or the launch of our five-prong selective rat reduction program called Operation Rat Fink.

A rat ran along the front of the coop.

“Quick Babe, shoot it!” I yelled.

He closed one eye. He aimed. He squeezed. He fired. He missed. Rats high fived each other.

“There’s another one,” I shouted, shining the unforgiving beam of light on the bloated rat body with its scaly rat-tail dragging behind.

(Trigger Finger) Zern closed one eye, aimed, squeezed, fired, and missed again. Rats applauded.

I mentioned our rat situation to our exterminator, as I signed the You-Have-Termites-Pay-Up-Or-Live-In-A-Tent contract. He suggested getting “bait boxes” like the ones that McDonald uses.

“You know like the ones you see all around the McDonalds and the Wendy’s.”

There was a sudden ringing in my ears, but I made a note to include bait boxes in our five-prong plan.

Prong One: Locate a flashlight. Put batteries on the shopping list.

Prong Two: Saturday morning trip to Tractor Supply Company to acquire $6,000.00 dollars worth of weapons of mass rat destruction, including rectangle strips of sticky stuff, so sticky that rats are trapped in it like dinosaurs in the Le Brea Tar Pits.

Prong Three: Secure the Boarders – “They can’t get their heads through this.” Sherwood held up some chicken wire.

“It’s not their heads. It’s their teeth. They chew through that.” I pointed to galvanized chain link designed to restrain Orcs and forged in the fires of Mount Doom. “That should do it.”

Prong Four: Borrow money from a loan shark to finance prongs one through three.

Prong Five: Wander around in the dark, trying to determine effectiveness of rat traps, baits, and tar pits—also to take pot shots at fleeing rats.

“So here’s what I think we should do this weekend about the rats,” Sherwood said, calling from a business trip to San Francisco. “I think we should go with the hose in the rat hole flooding scenario, and then when they run out, we shoot them, and if that fails, we stomp them.”

“Good idea, ‘Dead Eye’ I’ll mark it on the calendar; it’s a date.”

“Wear something slinky.”

So, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out a slinky rat stomping outfit for my Saturday night date. Rat Finks beware.

Linda (Saturday Night Fever) Zern