TICKS AHOY

In Byron Kerns Survival School, Granddaughter Zoe (age 11) and I (age creaky) learned a thing or two about surviving: collecting water, making fire, constructing shelter and, of course, learning the meaning of STOP.

STOP:  Sit, Think, Observe, and Plan. It’s what you do when you’ve lost your mind in the wilderness or . . . Walmart.

We collected. We made. We constructed. We learned. That was the first day. Then we collapsed in our tent to sleep, surrounded by a cloud of fireflies, the rustling of Mother Nature, and the soft cloak of night.  Zoe needed both pillows. I flip-flopped on my brand new self-inflating air mattress. We said a little pray that should rain fall, it fall straight and gentle.

Click. We turned off our headlamps.

Instantly, I felt the scurry of tiny legs up my arm. Panic threatened to suck the oxygen out of my lungs, and I felt an overwhelming urge to run screaming into the underbrush—in my scanties. But I’m a trained junior survivalist. I knew what to do. I needed to STOP.

I needed to SIT, but I was already lying down, so I had to adapt. I bolted to an upright position.

“Zoe, Zoe, get a flashlight. I THINK there’s a tick on my arm.”

I was way ahead of my training; I was already THINKing.

Zoe flipped on the flashlight. It was time to OBSERVE.

“Shoot! I can’t see a thing. Help me find my glasses.”  The black blot on my arm appeared to jiggle in the wavering light of the flashlight. My heart trip hammered.

Zoe, as steady a trail buddy as anyone can ask for, handed me the glasses, steadied the flashlight, and joined me in OBSERVING.

“Yep. That’s a tick,” she said.

“Okay, here’s the PLAN,” I sputtered. “I’m going to kill this sucker with a knife.”

She handed me her pocketknife.

It wasn’t the best plan, but it was sincere.

I continued to feel creepy-crawly for the rest of our survival course, on the ride home, and later at my in-law’s sixtieth anniversary party. I had lobster ravioli. At the end of dinner I whispered to my husband that I really needed to get home; I was pretty tired and still a little creepy-crawly.

 Sherwood, ever the engineer, cut straight to the heart of the matter and announced, “Well, we need to get going. I need to check Linda for ticks.”

Smiling, I added, “He’ll probably need to use a headlamp.”

And that’s why we’ll be married for sixty years. Who else would have us?

Linda (Ticked Off) Zern

     

FUN WITH FLU SHOTS

The sound of crayons being digested slowly crackled in the background, and the smell of rubber nipples was tangible through the phone.

“You have to come with me,” the voice said. 

“Yeah, okay sure.” I made a wild guess and assumed I was speaking to my oldest daughter, Heather, who needed me to go somewhere with her to do something. “Where, when, and why?”

“The Doctor’s. Monday. Because I took the kids with me to vote and people kept glaring at me and mumbling the word ‘babysitter’ like a voodoo curse.”

“How’d the kids do?”

“Great, I threatened them with death and told them if they were loud they’d get thrown out. They wanted to know if we were going to the library.”

“Okay then, a trip to the doctor’s office on Monday, you and the gang.”

“And Mom, we’re all getting flu shots . . .”

Click.

By the time we barreled the double stroller past the elevators and into the doctor’s office, the only kid not suspicious was Zachary (aged three months.) Zachary was busy doing his baby lemur impression.

Conner (aged four) was the first to formulate a theory.

“I hate shots. I will try [cry].”

Zoe (aged six) smelled a rat with a hypodermic. Zoe had dressed herself in an orange ball cap, rainbow knee socks, purple striped skirt and matching shirt, fuzzy boots, and green messenger bag. It’s hard to get one over on Zoe.

“Are we getting a shot today, Mom?”

Heather wrestled Kip (aged two) out of his clothes for his physical and said, “Yep!”

And the plotting began.

Conner talked me into taking him to the potty, which he claimed was not the “right” potty and that he needed another potty, presumably by the elevators or Atlanta.

I stood in the hallway arguing with a four-year old. “Conner I’m pretty sure that is a potty; I recognize a toilet when I see one.”

Conner’s doctor walked by and said, “That’s the restroom, lady. Careful, you may have a runner; I predict he’s going for a high speed escape.”

“What’s escape mean?” Conner asked.

“It means to run away.”

“Let’s try that, YaYa.”

Zoe suggested we turn the lights out and stay really quiet. Conner crawled into the diaper bag compartment of the stroller and started to eat pretzels and babble. Zoe climbed under a chair and attached herself to it like a limpet. Kip spun himself in circles until he fell over. The baby drifted off to sleep in the middle of flu shot hysteria.

“See why you needed to come with us?”

Yep.

We talked Conner into being brave by telling him that Uncle Aric, who is a soldier, gets shots all the time. In fact, he’s had so many shots he’s going to be the only one in our family who survives the influenza zombie apocalypse. True fact. We did not tell Conner that bit.

Heather tried to pry Zoe out from under the chair, but she’d already started to secrete a hard coral shell. I went in for the capture, but Zoe kicked me with her fuzzy boots and sent me rolling across the floor like a brittle marble. It took two large bodied nurses, one YaYa, and her mom to get her flu free. She screamed her head off and acted like an idiot.

Conner got to play computer games with Poppy for being brave.

When Zoe wanted to know why she didn’t get to go play video games too, her mother said, “Because you screamed your head off, acted like an idiot, and you kicked people with your fuzzy boots.”

Zoe countered with, “I was screaming for my life.”

Man oh man, there’s a lot of that going around. I hope it’s not catching.

Linda (Flu Shot Approved) Zern

BREAKING SPRING

Nudity. Wild demonstrations of testosterone fueled rooster crowing. Uncontrolled eating, drinking, and merry making. Occasional incontinence. Unadvised physical feats of leaping about, followed by crying, screaming and a high probability of projectile vomiting. Episodes of naked gyrating.

Spring break?

You’d think so but no. It’s a weekend with the grandkids.

Many in society look on the nude, naked, uncontrolled, incontinent merry making of spring break as a right of passage for college types and a few convicted felons—incognito. They look back on their own nude/naked incontinent merry making with fondness, when they can remember it; sometimes it’s just flashbacks.

Which is confusing to me.

When you’re a twenty-year-old frat boy, it’s cool to poop your pants.

When you’re a two-year-old baby boy, it’s disgusting.

It makes no sense.

I watch the wild, raucous spring breakers on television, and think that if I saw my nearly adult kid swilling alcohol through a tube, I would stop payment on the checks immediately. Let them pay for their own emergency room bill and penicillin.

Then I watch the endless, tireless efforts of my grandchildren learning to walk, and think to myself, “Now that deserves our investment.”  They cling to furniture, fingers, and their own hands. It gives them courage. They teeter on uncertain legs. They totter trying to manage wobbly first steps. Then they fall. And fall. And fall. They are under no influence but their own, dogged persistence.

Over and over and over and again . . . they fall . . . and get back up.

And then they GET BACK UP and try it all over again until they can walk. It’s quite inspiring to watch. They never quit. Never. Over and over and over again . . . until they can walk.

Of course, our society calls having children “a punishment” or a “twenty year life sentence” or says of them that “they ruin a women’s body” or “they keep you from doing stuff” like traveling to Panama City for spring break where you wind up unconscious on someone else’s beach covered in starfish. 

I guess. 

Of course, when those children, who’ve ruined your body and punished you with their presence, are twenty you can send them to poop on someone else’s beach.

Irony.  It’s everywhere.

Linda (Spring Fling) Zern