CLASSIC ZIPPITY: A Burning in the Finger Bones

“Take American Sign Language,” my oldest daughter was happy to suggest. Easy for her to say, her fingers didn’t look like curly cheese puffs.

“I can’t. I fear my window of opportunity on that form of communication has passed.”

I held up my curly cheese puff shaped fingers as evidence.

“My fingers are all used up because of arthritis! See! My knuckles are on fire, my fingers look like they’re tired of being part of my hand, and I’m afraid I’ll get counted down for a poorly formed alphabet.”

“How about Spanish?” She suggested as a default language to satisfy my college foreign language requirements.

“I tried that, and apparently you have to be able to speak Spanish to study Spanish.”

On the first day of attempting to “take” college Spanish, the teacher looked right into my Irish freckles and at my knobby arthritic knuckles and busted into Spanish. I couldn’t even find the page in the book she was referencing, because I DON’T SPEAK SPANISH.

It was distressing to the point of making my knucklebones ache, and I dropped the class as fast as my throbbing fingers could punch the computer keys.

The entire dilemma made me so mad, I wanted to make an obscene gesture by extending my index finger at the computer screen and, in the colloquial, “shoot a bird.” However, I did not “shoot a bird” for the following reasons:

A) I am a lady. Not only am I a lady, I am a southern lady and a southern lady does not make obscene gestures with her hands, feet, or other physical extremities. A southern lady expresses her anger through polite sarcasm and by writing lengthy novels about fictional towns where all the inhabitants are bat stone crazy.

B) My hand looks less than attractive when I extend my index finger in the classic symbol of sexual disdain and/or invitation. I know, because I’ve practiced the middle finger gesture in the mirror, and it’s just not flattering to my hand, probably because of my enlarged knuckles due to arthritis.

C) I have never felt comfortable with the actual meaning of the gesture in question. What does it mean? Is it an order, threat, or an invitation? And if it’s an invitation, how comfortable do I feel extending that invitation to someone I am frothing at the mouth mad at?

I have never in my life made such an unladylike, ugly, ambiguous gesture—not in my entire complete life—and, I’m not prepared to start now. 
Which still leaves me with a quandary; what language of foreign clime should I choose to study to satisfy my college requirement so that I can become a well-rounded human being? 

I’m thinking Italian. I understand it’s a language and culture that requires the enthusiastic and repeated use of one’s hands.

Linda (Look into my Eye) Zern 

There are not many books we read as a family; there are even fewer books we read as a family over and over. The Long-Promised Song is a book my kids love and asks for the most. It is a simply touching story, or as Phoenix puts it, "sometimes, in the end all you need is a friend who believes in you". I have read this book no less than 50 times, and every time it's like the first time. Thank you Linda Carter Zern. (Ms. P. Hart)

www.zippityzerns.com

STING

It’s the season of recitals: baton twirling, piano playing, dance swirling, tambourine thumping, unicycle riding . . . The land resounds with the sound of mommies and daddies applauding their children’s performances—both accomplished and halting. 

Children sweat. Parents yearn. Tiger Moms insist. Grandparents endure and encourage, happy to be off the parental hook for a change. It’s a lot of fun. 

Recitals are the cherry on the yearly parenting cake, representing thousands of miles driven over hard roads through nightmare clouds of whining. I know. 

I did that—drove kids thousands of tiger mom miles: dance, tumbling, synchronized swimming, Boy Scouts, Little League, church activities, school trips, library runs . . .

And once through an actual DEA/FBI/CIA take down . . . 

No, really. An. Actual. Police. Sting.

Schlepping a van full of teenager types back from a library run, I had to slam on my brakes. My Dodge Caravan fishtailed to a stop. It was that or T-bone a white Corolla that had shot out of a hedge of azaleas to our right. The car full of young men bounced across highway 426 close enough to my front bumper to be able to wash it. Teens jounced, bounced, and slammed inside their seatbelts. 

Everyone screamed.

Mid-scream, I took a breath and thought about hitting the gas to proceed. I didn’t.

A black windowless van shot from the azalea hedge after the Corolla. The side door gapped open as three (possibly thirty) men wearing BLACK hoods—WITH GUNS—braced themselves in the opening. 

Everyone screamed.

I took a breath and tried to get the heck out of there.

The white Corolla crisscrossed back in front of my Caravan. I pumped the brakes.

Everyone screamed. 

I hit the gas.

The black van crossed the highway behind us, bouncing after the Corolla. I saw the driver in my rearview mirror waving me on, out of the way of an armed police pursuit. His BLACK hood looked stuffy and hot.

Screaming, I hit the gas. 

The Corolla cut me off again. I slammed on my brakes. Rubber burned. All the young men inside the car screamed soundlessly. The black van, bristling with hooded men, jounced after them in close pursuit. 

The men in the black van were not screaming, that I could tell.

The screaming inside my Dodge Caravan was now continuous. 

I hit the gas and managed to get as far as the Gas-N-Go at the corner. 

Throat raw from screaming, I sailed past the sight of hooded men pouring out of the black van in the Gas-N-Go parking lot, guns drawn, descending on the white Corolla like one of the Biblical plagues of Egypt: boils, lice, flies. Take your pick.

Everyone screamed.

And home we went.

The library books were due on the fifteenth.

Linda (Take-Down) Zern