Rules for the Rest of Us

“Stop licking that baby!”

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

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

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

As a young mother I once made a list of ten family commandments. 

Commandment number one read: Thou shalt not eat PB&J sandwiches with plastic vampire teeth in your mouth. Adorable, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linda (R is for Rules) Zern

Road Kill, Ahoy

At first we blamed the smell on our neighbor; it was a chicken pucky, burning bird feathers, vulture spit combo kind of smell. It was bad. Mr. Medina’s funny farm and goat emporium next door is always high on the list of usual odor producing suspects.

Then we blamed the giant, pulsating, black muck wetlands (also known as a bog) out in the back of our property but then it quit raining and that dried up.

Another possibility for the noxious fumes presented itself in the form of our other neighbor’s temporary, quite possibly illegal attempt at creating a personal landfill. We live in the county and not in the city limits; the rules are different out here—a lot of people collect giant piles of rubble for no apparent reason.

However, when standing on our own back porch the smell of rotten eggs seemed so concentrated, so pungent we were forced to form yet another working theory for the nasty smell.

“It’s the propane tank. It’s leaking.” Sherwood, the man and husband, sounded so sure, so crime scene investigator confident, I had to agree.

“I’ll put it out in the yard so it doesn’t kill us.”

The propane tank came to rest in the flower garden next to the caladiums. We were saved, except that we weren’t.

Something still stank.

Sooner or later truth rears its ugly head or in this case its stinking tail, and the facts are as follows; our home is surrounded by opossum holes (holes full of opossums): one under the bridge, one under the hedge, one under the back porch, and one under the bush next to the backdoor. We are surrounded.

Opossums live in these holes. Opossums are nocturnal. Opossums, when not hanging from their tails from tree limbs in a charming “mother nature sure is cute” fashion, opossums wander about at night getting themselves murdered. Then they stagger back to their holes, crawl in, die, and then stink in a leaking propane, goat burning, bog festering, landfill rotting kind of way.

The good news is opossums live in holes, eliminating the need to dig holes when they die, unless they decide to die under the chicken coop, and then all bets are off.

The week of the opossum kill, a good friend of mine wrote on a social networking site about her wildly romantic encounter in a NYC subway station (similar to opossum holes but larger) and how the man who bumped into her was gorgeous, with an English accent, wore cuff links, and had a business card—no foul odors were mentioned.

In the meantime, I was throwing dirt on a maggot ridden rotting opossum carcass.

Shaking my boney fist at the Heavens, I snarled, “Great, I’ve been reduced to burying road kill! And still working for free, come to think of it, everything I’ve ever done my whole life, I’ve done for free. I’m like freak’en Ghandi.” I added this last bit under my breath, to no one who cared, under an indifferent sky—alone.

The bad news is there are three more opossums out there waiting to become road kill and not one of them wears cuff links.

Linda (Shovel Ready) Zern

Under the Ellipsis

When I was a girl—love but mostly S-E-X—remained hidden beneath an ellipsis of ink. The hero swooped to take the girl in his arms, she forgot to remember to struggle, long enough to stay, and then . . . dot, dot, dot . . . It was

delicious, tantalizing punctuation—marking dog-eared pages, full of anticipation and imagination.

And now—not so much.

In today’s world romance isn’t for the faint of heart or subtle of gesture; the girls have no clothes on, and the boys don’t wear gloves, which is too bad because once upon a time (according to Jane Austen) when a man touched your naked hand with his naked hand you were engaged. I know it’s true. I watch a lot of Masterpiece Theater.

I’m happy to report that at our cave . . . oops, sorry . . . I mean house, at our house, romance is still something of a mystery, surrounded by subtleties, covered with the gentle breeze of confusion, wrapped up in code words.

Smiling, I walked into my husband’s office recently, only to be greeted with the following invitation (quite possibly threat, the jury is still out.)

Without looking at me, he said, “Careful or I’ll take you over there on that tofu and . . .”

Confused and a little alarmed I scanned our office and saw stuffed bookshelves, filing cabinets, computer junk, and pillows lining a . . .

“Are you trying to say futon? You’ll take me over there on the futon and . . .Because, I can’t begin to describe to you how disturbed I am by the idea of you doing unspeakable things to my person on tofu. Maybe you’re having word seizures or . . .”

“I’m not having Caesars or . . .”

“Not Caesars, I said . . .”

At this point in the exchange, he removed one glove and stretched out a naked hand towards my person and in the general direction of the futon. I ran and then . . .

Sometimes in dreams I imagine long fingers of mist rolling across the moors behind the swamp in our backyard—out past the horse trailer with the busted tail light—while the moon drifts across a jaundiced sky, and my heart thumps loudly in the silent chambers of my heart, as I hide under the long folding couch resembling a bent bed; into the cloying depths of my dreaming night I can often hear Lord Sherwood hissing, “Let’s get it on.”

Hey, there’s a reason I wear my hair exceedingly short—the better not to be dragged off to some misnamed lair resembling a cave, but that’s romance for you in this modern day and time.

One minute you’re a lady wearing gloves and the next minute he’s got you on tofu and . . . dot, dot, dot . . .

Linda (Lady Lovelorn) Zern