Stalking the Wild Suitcase

I like my husband more than I hate traveling.

It’s a bold statement in this ‘men are dogs’ world of ours—I know. But it’s true. He’s a bunch of fun to be with, except when he isn’t.

And he isn’t fun to be with when he’s waiting at the bottom of the baggage return in the Sidney, Australia airport, because then he’s a hyena, waiting for the lions to gut a water buffalo. Retrieving luggage for him is primal. Waiting. Watching. Tensing. And . . . then the pounce, knocking other hyenas (i.e. passengers) out of his way without regard to their advanced age or bone density. He’s a maniac about “catching” the suitcase before it slips past him.

In the background a person might be able to hear the faint sounds of me yelling, “But, honey, it goes in a circle. The suitcase comes back. It really does.”

And then me apologizing, “I’m so sorry. He doesn’t mean to be a mad dog. It just comes on him in spurts.”

When it comes to nature, I’m an evolutionist, of sorts. I totally believe that creatures adapt and change. I’m just not convinced it takes twenty trillion years. It only took my husband a couple of trips to the Far East to grow a giant backpack hump across his shoulders. It’s filled with all manner of defensive weapons, useful in knocking down competitors at the baggage return. His backpack hump contains two computers, cordage cables, adaptor stuff, plugger things, power jumpers, downloader catchers, our garage door opener, and possibly attack spines. When he swings to the side, his backpack extends thirteen feet into the hyena crowd. The crowd parts or it goes down.

Then it’s me again in the background calling out, “Babe, careful there. You just knocked down that nice old lady with your enormous backpack hump. She has daggers for eyes.”

He says, “Hunh? What? Which?  Er . . . got to go. I’ve spotted our suitcase. It’s getting away.”

Adaptation is a wonderful process. His backpack hump doesn’t slow him down one bit as he leaps over small children and races next to the endless migration of the stampeding luggage. He’s a wonder of evolution and change, single minded in his instinctual need to chase, catch and claim. He is king of the carousel and no suitcase is safe when he is on the hunt.

As his mate, I find that watching him plow through a herd of passengers after a fourteen-hour flight across an endless ocean makes me long for my own evolutionary adaptations. I want a set of wings for early disembarking and chameleon skin that allows me to fade into carpet. With wings I’d be able to jump off the airplane any old time I wanted, and chameleon skin would allow me to fade into the airport carpet after my husband had maimed or injured someone. But I ain’t got twenty trillion years.

So I’ll just stay home and work on pretending that I adore sitting still for fourteen endless flying hours. I have a hard time sitting all the way through church. I must really love that man—hump and all.


Linda (Are we there yet?) Zern

 














      

I Hear What I'm Saying

“YaYa, why you talk you self all time?” Zoe’s four-year old forehead attempted to form wrinkles as she pondered one of the great curiosities of her young life—adult insanity.

“What makes you think I’m by myself?” I said, distracting her with a bright, shiny lollipop. 

Talking to myself is a way of life for me, providing a multitude of benefits and advantages. I cannot help it if society is still suspicious of the diversity that constitutes “talking to one’s own self” in a manner resembling Sally Fields playing Sybil.

Society is a stuck up girl wearing chipped nail polish.

I talk to myself because I’m the best listener I know, and I’m smart enough to understand what I’m saying.

Sometimes when I’m talking to those people who come and eat my poorly prepared hamburger meat on the weekends, I can’t even finish a sentence. I’m not even near the verb in the sentence before they’re jumping all over what I’m saying with both feet and throwing their opinions around like people planning a revolution while standing next to a guillotine. It finally got so nutty I had to institute the Zern family conch shell policy.

It’s simple. If you’re holding the conch shell, you can talk. It’s a kind of “Lord of the Flies” deal. If you’re holding the conch shell everybody else has to zip it and listen. My husband brought the Queen Conch shell back from a diving trip to the Bahamas when he was a teenager, and it was still legal to rape the oceans. That’s how old we are, so talking to myself is probably not as big or weird of a deal as one might think. 

      

Sometimes I give speeches and then give myself a standing ovation. It’s very gratifying.

Sometimes I practice what I would say on David Letterman should I ever go on David Letterman, but don’t tell anybody.

A couple of times I’ve been able to say to myself what I wished I’d said that time, if I’d had a minute to think about what I was saying before I actually said it. You know what I’m saying?

Once, I told the IRS off, but I don’t want to talk about it.

Finally, I got tired of telling myself clever anecdotes, which are short accounts of some interesting or humorous incident, and started to write them down, making me an anecdotist and not some crazy lady who wanders around her house wearing a raggedy jeans vest, rubber barn shoes, and mumbling to herself.

Linda (Vests Have Handy Pockets) Zern

LESSONS I'VE LEARNED IN THE CHICKEN COOP

Don’t Get Fooled By a Slick Talking Rooster Type: 

Chicken sex is part of the ambiance and romance of having a hobby farm. It’s random. It’s funny. It’s constant.

Our Mac daddy Americanus rooster, Roadie, is a gorgeous example of why hens just can’t say no. Mostly because they have brains the size of peas (thus the term pea brained) and really short memories.

Roadie is a lover-boy. His favorite seal-the-deal strategy is to fake finding a juicy worm or chubby grub and then make lovely clucky noises that being interpreted mean, come over hear you darling plump hens and share this lovely chubby grub with me. Cluckity, cluck, bock, bock, yum . . .

And those hens come running—every single time—twenty times a day. While they’ve got their heads down expecting to find a crisp cricket dinner, he jumps them. Twenty. Times. A. Day.

Seriously?  Sometimes I want to yell at my hens, “He’s lying to you. He’s a liar. There’s no grub, worm, or cricket. He just wants in your pants. AGAIN!”

They never learn, but then again they’re chickens with peas for brains.

Side Note: If the fake cricket scam doesn’t work he stretches one wing to the ground and prances like a court jester. The hens dazzled by his magnificence forget what they were doing. Then he jumps them.

When I was a kid we had a pair of roosters that used to tag team the hens. One would pin the poor gal’s head to the ground while the other one well . . . jumped her, and then they would switch. It was like having a pair of serial rapists running amok in the barn. Then there was the hen that was blind in one eye and how they used to sneak up on her bad side. Eagles murdered those nasty roosters, reducing them to two piles of bloody feathers. It was hard to feel bad.

Moral of the story:  Get the cricket up front.

Hens Squabbling With Other Hens Does Not Pay:

Our hens squabble. They want to lay their eggs in the same nest at the same time so they sit on each other. Some pecking may be involved. Or they occasionally argue over a lovely bit of greenery in the yard. Bok. Bok. Cluckity. Step off, you clucking piece of . . . Bok!

Roadie the Mac Daddy Rooster hears them fighting, knows they’re distracted, races over, and then jumps on one or all.

Sigh.

The Moral of the Story:  Folks who want us to believe that we are no different than the animals in my chicken coop should spend some time in my chicken coop.

Here’s the truth of it. I only need one rooster for a whole flock of ditzy hens. Heads up gentlemen.

Linda (Henny Penny) Zern