SWINGERS

It’s a tire swing: rubber, rope, and physics. Okay, it’s a tire swing cleverly designed to look like a rubbery horse swinging from a tree branch. It’s cute. It’s clever. It’s intended to suck in credit card wielding grandmothers like a snake swallowing frogs. It works.

I bought one.

I made the Poppy hang it in the big tree out back. He did. We waited for grandchildren to arrive and be dazzled.

They’re dazzled all right, but mostly, the toddler-aged swingers just throw themselves in the dirt and scream their guts out while waiting their turn because of two fatal flaws. 

The rubber horse swing only fits one chubby toddler at a time. You can jam two of them on if you squish them in tight, and they’re feeling magnanimous, but it swings higher and faster if THEY TAKE TURNS.

The other fatal flaw? A collection of exhausted parents who tend to collapse into lawn chairs, slipping into partial comas—in my backyard, under the live oak, assembled in a circle, on the weekends. They’re a real sedentary bunch.

Not long ago . . .

Parents vegetated. Children demanded. The horse swing sat idle. Parents ignored. Children grew shriller. The horse swing beckoned. Someone cursed. Children lined up. The horse swing twirled. Parents pushed. Kid shrieked with joy—one, single kid shrieked with joy. Many others screamed with impatient rage, thrashing in the dirt and worms.

Lazy adult shouted, “I’m cutting that swing down. Somebody give me a knife. Anybody.”

“The swing stays,” I shouted back.

The swing swayed back and forth.

“But that devil swing is the epicenter of all things temper tantrum. I hate that horrible thing. Let’s burn it down.”

“The swing stays,” I insisted.

Toddlers rolled and kicked and moaned, while the lucky swinger giggled. 

Other parental types picked up pitchforks and torches and howled, “Let’s get it.”

I threw myself into the path of the rampaging villagers.

“Chop the tree down,” they foamed. “Dig up the stump. Kill all its roots. Sow the acres with salt. Arrrrrggg.”

“It’s not the horse swing’s fault, you dolts, or the tree or the stump or the acorn that made the tree. TEACH YOUR CHILDREN HOW TO WAIT THEIR TURN AND SHARE. THE SWING STAYS.”

It was a good speech. No one argued. 

The swing stayed.

Sooner or later they’ll learn, I thought. The parents, I mean; they’ll learn. 

Swing now. Naps later. And before you can blink that swing will hang lonely and forgotten, and we’ll want the babies back. 

Linda (Charge It) Zern 

C IS FOR CHUMP

Top Definition. Chump. Someone who does not understand the basics of life on earth. Confused easily.

I married my high school sweetheart. My husband married his high school sweetheart. Which means that we married each other. It also means that we went to high school together. He followed me around for all of my sophomore year. I had no idea. Back then it was called ‘kind of cute.’ Today it’s called stalking. After the stalking phase, we actually took a class together—some kind of writing class, I can’t remember what it was called—"Word Mongering 101", Essays Anyone Can Understand 234", "How to BS Your Way Through the Rest of your Life 300," something.  The first thing our public school teacher told us was that no one in that class, not one of us, was college material. I believed her. I’m not sure if Sherwood cared enough to believe her. I think he was still mildly stalking me at this point. The second thing our public school teacher said left most of us shocked and shaken. “I can smell plagiarism. And I mean smell it, not to mention recognize it when I see it,” she said, fixing her plagiarism-detecting eyes on us as she looked down her plagiarism-sniffing nose at us. She repeated her plagiarism spotting abilities, many times. We trembled.  Okay, I trembled. Sherwood was checking out my Sweet Honesty t-shirt.  I went home and sweated over our first writing assignment, two pages of ‘something that interests you,’ every word mine, every thought from me, every sentence coming out of my head. What was my paper about? I have no idea. But I know one thing, IT WAS MY ORIGINAL WORK.  Sherwood went home cracked open the Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia and copied one of the articles—WORD FOR WORD—straight out of the book. I remember what his TOTALLY FAKE essay was about—The Boston Freaking Marathon. We handed in our papers to the fake paper-sniffing teacher. Okay, let’s recap. I wrote a totally original essay. Sherwood cheated like a guy selling fake Gucci’s in New York City.  Sherwood the Cheater made . . . wait for it . . . an A, with “Very Interesting!” written across the top of that fake paper like a going out of business banner. My paper? I made . . . wait for it . . . a C . . . for chump. Later, he had the effrontery—how’s that word for a C for chump writer—to claim that he didn’t copy the article word for word. He left out words like written by and see reference. I admit; it was a little discouraging, but I got over it and had the effrontery to finally go to college and keep right on writing. I also married the boy, but I encouraged him to pursue a career in computers rather than wordsmithing.  Linda (Tattle Tale) Zern

War Footing

In these uncertain times, our family has discussed various family responses to probable or imagined emergencies. We have a war room—with maps and little plastic army men. It’s a wooly booger to dust.

After a recent run-in with a Florida reptile of the highly toxic persuasion, I have concluded that our emergency response team is largely inefficient and possibly pointless.

When my husband and our two dogs (a lab/boarder collie mix and a Yorkshire terrier) burst through the bedroom door breathing heavy and wagging their tails—well, the dogs were wagging—my husband was just breathing heavy, I knew that something was up.

“Where’s the shotgun?” my husband asked. 

Looking up from my computer, I peered at him over the rim of my glasses and said, “I thought we’d talked through our budget issues.”

“No, it’s not about that. There’s a huge cotton-mouthed moccasin behind the barn.”

“Shotgun—closet.” I tipped my head toward the closet. He bent and unhooked the dogs leashes and wandered to the closet. The dogs padded after him. With the shotgun in hand, he wandered out of the closet, and out of the bedroom. I heard him stomp down the hallway, through the living room, down another hallway, and into the guest bedroom. Several minutes later, he wandered back into the bedroom, dogs in tow.

“Where are the shells?” 

“Well, they’re not where you were. Check in the black drawstring bag in the closet where you got the shotgun.”

He disappeared into the closet. The dogs followed. Shuffle, rustle, rustle, bump, shuffle boomed from the closet.

“I can’t find them.” He yelled.

I pushed back from my desk and went to play find the shotgun shells. The drawstring bag was brown, not black. My husband and I emerged from the closet, dogs under foot.

Sherwood dropped the key for the gun-lock once and then twice. The dogs sat watching my husband trying to unlock the shotgun.

Approximately 23.78 minutes had passed since the danger was first spotted.

I took a hard look at our emergency response team: Coco Channel, the lab/collie mix with an irrational fear of dump trucks, Ploodle, the Yorkshire terrier who weighs five pounds, and Sherwood, a guy with no ACL in his left knee. 

I sighed and then said, “You realize, of course, that in the time it has taken you to lock and load we would have been raped, murdered, dismembered, and raped again.”

Sighing harder than I had sighed, he said, “Come on dogs.” Out the door they went, the daring emergency response team to face whatever danger might still be lurking in the high grass behind the barn.

The snake got away.

We were planning to run emergency response drills this weekend, but we’ll probably take naps instead. 

Linda (Snake Oil) Zern