BEWARE! Scary Girl Stuff (A Classic)

For the past fifty plus years I’ve been a girl person, during a dizzying period of technological advances that have allowed mankind (oops, I mean human beings without apparent gender) to fly to the moon, dive the Mariana trench, and humiliate me in every conceivable way.

 Cathy Rigby, the first US gymnast to win a medal in the Olympics, introduced me, and a whole host of teenage girls to the wonders of modern feminine hygiene products. Cathy made Stayfree Maxi pads cool, and she made you think the you could be upside down on a four inch balance beam and not have a girl care in the world. I must have gotten stuck trying out the maxi-pad prototypes, because I never could do a handstand on a balance beam, ever, but that’s Madison Avenue for you.  You can find out more about Cathy Rigby, the Maxi pad-wearing gymnast, at the Museum of Menstruation.

 Later, after my first mammogram, a technological marvel that can look inside your boobs—if your boobs are really, really flat, I was told that I would need a needle nosed biopsy and that the incision would be no larger than a grain of rice.

 “Brown or instant?” That’s what I should have asked.

 With the image of a grain of rice emblazoned on my mind, I walked into the biopsy room, wearing a paper washcloth, noticed that there was a great big hole in the surgical table, and had a hideous vision of my future.

 Horrified, I turned to the strange man about to dig around in my mammary gland and asked, “Is that hole in the middle of that table for what I think it’s for?”

 “Yep.”  And it was.

 Once I flopped my slightly used, less than perky bosom into the mammary gland hole in the middle of the table the words “Boob Loogie” came to mind.

 When the highly touted anesthesia refused to deaden my dangling breast, and I complained loudly, the strange man digging around in my boob with a needle, said, “Well, some breasts are more dense than others.”

 “Dude, the end of my boob just hit your shoelace, how dense can it be?”

 Don’t even get me started on four C-sections in six years. For my first baby they shaved me “nipples to knees.” No, seriously that was the official medical expression. By the fourth baby, I was watching the entire surgery in a giant mirror, angled for my viewing pleasure.

 Recently, my daughters were describing the latest in advancements in the way of the latest in gynecological examination chairs.

Apparently, there is a new “exam” chair that mimics the space shuttle in the act of taking off. A girl patient climbs in and with a flick of a switch, stirrups are deployed, the part under your bum disappears, and the chair reclines—until your head is poking down and your girl parts are poking up. When my oldest daughter demonstrated I felt faint and had to put my head between my knees.

 “I cannot do it,” I murmured from between my knees, “I simply cannot risk “The Chair.” I will be making my next appointment with a certified witch doctor of the noble savage variety. As Scarlett O’hara is my witness, I swear it.”

 I love being a girl.  I love the shoes, the clothes, the makeup, and the mystique of it all, but honestly, is it just me or is the modern world out of its technological mind?

 Linda (Girls Just Want to Have Fun) Zern

PS   Have everything checked constantly so you can keep wearing those darling girl shoes.  

SHAME, SHAME

One of the kids in my first grade class took our teacher’s shiny, new magic markers and flushed them down the classroom toilet, causing a massive plumbing crisis. It was a big overflowing deal.

I don’t know why the kid did it. Because he/she was a crumb?  Because there was a toilet and it had a flush handle? Because magic markers are evil?

I never understood it. Not then and not now.

The unfortunate result of the above vandalism is that the principle came into our first grade class and gave us “the talking to.” It was probably the finest speech I’ve ever heard on civic responsibility, the evils of clogged drains, and the importance of feeling guilt for misdeeds. He threatened us with not being allowed to use the classroom potty—ever again, amen.

Halfway through his lecture I broke down weeping uncontrollably, thinking that I should, would, must confess to a crime that I had not committed. I wasn’t guilty. But I felt guilty.

I felt like something you’d flush down the toilet.

To my knowledge the guilty party was never caught, and I know for a fact that the only one who broke during the principle’s big talk was the skinny, little freckled girl in the third row—me.

What I learned that day in first grade is this 1) that a single wicked person can clog the toilet up for everyone 2) that angry officials don’t have much in their quiver except angry words, silly new rules, and finger pointing to get to the bottom of the clog, and 3) the only kids who ever really feel bad about bad stuff happening are the good kids.

I still think about that kid, and it makes me so mad because it was so unfair. And it’s still so unfair that one or two or a handful can create situations that wind up punishing us all. Shame on them. 

Linda (Sad and Mad) Zern      

  

      

RACE FOR THE FRONT GATE

He thought I’d shut the front gate. I thought he’d shut the front gate. Truth be told, the front gate was swinging open like an old man’s zipper at half-mast.

And I had just opened the barn gate, letting the horses romp off to the front pasture where the front gate flapped wide.

My husband looked at me stupefied as his foundation quarter horse, our Morgan posse horse, my Arabian mare, and the kid’s chubby Welsh pony thundered passed him.

“The front gate’s open. Are you nuts?”

He took off, trying to outrun the herd.

Now, I’m not saying my husband has lost a step or two over the years, but dang that man has lost a step or two.

Sherwood Zern used to be the human equivalent of a gazelle-panther-hawk. I remember watching him react to the crack of a softball bat like a hunting panther attacking, cover left field with the ground eating strides of a gazelle, sail through the air—horizontal to the ground like a hawk swooping—catch the softball in the gaping maw of his glove, hit the ground with a forward tumble and roll, and then catapult to his feet, holding the fly ball in triumph over his head—while talking trash about the opposing team.

That man could move.

As I watched him shuffle, skip, dogtrot to the front gate, I couldn’t help but get a little nostalgic and misty eyed. I sure did miss my husband’s ACL, the one that he pretty much snapped off in his right knee when he jumped a fence trying to help our neighbor catch his rampaging bull. That was the same knee that he’d dislocated while playing softball like a gazelle-panther-hawk, and he rounded second that one time, trying to stretch a double into a triple.

That time he wound up in outpatient knee surgery, got juiced up with sodium pentothal, and proceeded to demand that I do unspeakable things to him while in the recovery room.

That man had some brass.

But then I remembered that the horses were trying to make a break for the tasty grass along the front ditch next to the road.

“You’re never going to make it,” I shouted. “Wave your arms.”

I took off at a hopping, skip-walk to help out, but then I realized that trying to run only made me wet my pants. So I stopped.

I sure did/do miss my bladder control.

The arm waving worked. The herd skidded away to the tasty grass along the front fence and the gate was shut. But not without the sad and sobering reminder that our days of racing carefree and wild with the herd were over and that now our place was shuffling along as best we could at the rear of the pack, hoping that we’re not the first one to be picked off by wolves.

FORGET THAT!

I take combat kickboxing at the gym where I practice kicking wolves in their snarly faces on a regular basis, and I can always start wearing Depends. What we’ve lost in speed we more than make up for in arm waving wisdom and sheer tenacious wolf punching meanness.  

Linda (Roundhouse to the Face) Zern