Hacked Off

YOU ARE NOT PRESENTLY CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET – (So quit tapping pointlessly at your keyboard, ‘ya big dummy!)

The Internet repairman waved a six-inch length of cable at me. Four murderous gouges nearly severed its smooth cylindrical surface, leaving exposed wires to dissolve in the hostile atmosphere--also rain.

“Wow! Someone really went at this, probably with a shovel or maybe an ax.” He examined the gouges more closely. “Maybe a butcher knife.”

Slowly, I raised my hand and hung my head.

“I did it. I confess. I killed the cable,” I said, feeling sheepish, chagrined, and goofy all rolled into one. “I thought it was just a really stubborn root when I was planting caladiums. Really, really stubborn! A bad stubborn . . . root.”

“You might want to hang on to this.” He handed me the butchered hunk of Internet cable.

“Please, don’t tell my family. This isn’t the first time I killed the cable. The first time, I wasn’t anywhere near it when I ran over it with the lawnmower.”

He began to inch his way to his repair truck, never taking his eyes off of me.

“Sure, lady, sure! Sounds reasonable!” And then under his breathe, “When Dish Network freezes over.” He ran the last few steps to his truck.

I felt bad for frightening the computer repairman that way.

When I was a girl, technical electronic difficulties were handled with tin foil and rabbit ears. There were three television channels and a lot of fuzzy static. The static came in black and white. Computers came in warehouses.

Now technical electronic difficulties are handled with modem connection adjustments, phone calls bounced off of satellites to help centers in places I can’t spell, and appointments with repairmen apparently carrying submarine sonar equipment.

A week after our Internet connection to the worldwide universe went dark, a repairman showed up at our house with his sonar-cable-finding-wand. He checked connections. He climbed poles. He dug up cable. He waved his sonar-cable-finding-wand about.

The whole process reminded me of a water diviner trying to locate water with a forked stick.

When he asked me if there had been any “digging” in the general area of the buried cable, I felt my stomach flip and then flop. Sure there had been digging.

I am a digger. I am a habitual digger. I own five shovels, which I leave stuck in random spots all over our property, and then forget where I stuck them. That’s why there are five shovels.

And no Internet service—temporarily.

There are days I long for tin foil and completing a conversation with my husband without having him go into an unblinking, unrelated conversation with the tooth in his ear. I think the tooth is blue.

Linda (Dirt Digger) Zern

Bonsai Baby

Reagan, our new grand daughter, doesn’t look real. She looks like my daughter and her husband went and bought her at Toys R Us. She is our seventh grandchild.

When our first grand daughter was born my friends asked if being a grandmother had “hit me” yet. It “hit me” the day the first grandbaby came home from the hospital and my husband and I were in bed that night.

I turned to him and said in reverent tones, “Hey, we’re not going to have to get up tonight—not once. Wow, it’s good to be us.”

We embraced, rolled over, and went fast to sleep—until we had to get up to tinkle.

Or as a friend of mine put it, when you get the phone call from the new mom and she says that grandma should come quick and get this crazy kid or (fill in the blank) and then you, grandmother supreme, swoop in and with your wisdom, experience, and superior night’s sleep save the day. It’s grand to be us.

It’s tough being the grandparent too, because you have to wave goodbye as your perfect, fresh, doll-like, grand child is driven home by its parents, two people that you love beyond adjectives, recognizing that the only living thing the two of them have ever been responsible for was a Bonsai tree. They killed it. They had a palm tree, but it got infested with some kind of leaf hopping spider. They never owned a dog.

So you worry a bit and you catch yourself yelling bits of advice as they drive away. “Don’t over water the baby and check her for spiders.”

To be fair, I’ve had moments of “over watering the baby.”

Like the time my oldest son, Aric, retreated to his bedroom, locked his door, and failed to emerge for an entire two week period during the troubled teen years. I finally identified myself, slid my badge under the door, and then kicked the door in. Having to get the door jam fixed was annoying and not my finest moment, but I didn’t know you could jimmy the door off its hinges with a butter knife back then.

SSG Aric Zern later called me to apologize for being a teenage butt-head; he was teaching new soldiers how to throw hand grenades—into a volcano at the time, some of the recruits may have been butt-heads.

Or the time I wore Adam’s baseball cup around my neck like the Hope diamond. When Adam forgot his baseball cup for the sixty-second time and I had to make the thirty-minute trip back home—again, I took drastic over watering the Bonsai plant steps. I wrestled the cup from behind the dresser, strung the cup on a shoestring, wrote THIS IS ADAM’S CUP on the front with permanent marker, and wore it to the ball field. A few thought me harsh.

Perhaps. Then again Adam never forgot his baseball cup again and is planning to be a lawyer, probably to sue me.

Of course, who can forget the time I spanked Maren for dancing naked with a tube of Chapstick tucked between her butt cheeks. She was four and we had discussed naked Chapstick dancing and how much it upset her siblings—her parents, and society in general. I’m not sure if it’s a spanking offense, but it seemed right at the time.

Maren and her husband just brought baby Reagan, the living doll, home from the hospital. I hope Maren hides the Chapstick.

Then there was the time that Heather (who had been waiting breathlessly for her breasts to grow for about six years) came careening down the stairs yelling, “Mom, Mom, they’ve come. My boobs are here.” And I . . . laughed. LAUGHED! Outloud! I said, “No honey, you’re just cold.” Is it any wonder she over watered her Bonsai tree?

Heather and Phillip have one lovely daughter and three wild and wooly boys and don’t have time to kill Bonsai trees anymore.

So much time, so many mistakes to make, but one of the nicest things about being a mother who has achieved grand status is knowing that it will all work out. Kids are resilient. Parents figure it out, and our Father in Heaven allows for a pretty generous learning curve for most of this stuff we call life.

Linda (Seven Up) Zern

Double Bubble Trouble

In honor of our upcoming thirty-second wedding anniversary I would like to hie back to a simpler time, a time when my husband and I realized we were outnumbered by the children, and we were forced to institute the following rule: the first one to run away had to take the crazy kids—all the crazy, gum chomping, kids. Good times.

When Sherwood and I were young we produced a lot of little kids, a lot of grubby, grimy little kids, who because of their love affair with dirt and grime required a ton of hosing off—also bathing. When these little kids took baths they sometimes chewed huge wads of bubble gum. I didn’t mind it kept them quiet. (For a while they tried to bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with them into the tub, but I put the hoodoo on that right away.)

In the early days and even though we had a lot of filthy children, we had only one bathroom. It had one bathtub. One fine evening, Sherwood decided to take a bath in our one and only bathtub, the very same tub our children had used earlier that evening.

From the bathroom I heard the haunting boom of my husband’s voice.

“Linda, get in here.” His voice was thick with some emotion I found hard to identify. It was repugnance.

Naked and dripping, he stood leaning against the sink, his arms braced against the porcelain, bent slightly forward at the waist. He was not smiling or winking.

“Look at this.” He pointed to his hairy damp butt. He added, “Is that what I think it is?”

Me, I’m a funny girl, I asked, “Is this a test of some kind?” I did not look.

“No, I mean it. Look at my butt.”

Unconvinced and without sympathy I refused.

“I’m not looking at your butt. You can’t make me.”

He pointed harder at his backside, completely devoid of any spirit of good-natured high jinx. There was more back and forth, denial and insistence and such, but I’ll spare you. I finally realized that this might be a serious situation causing real distress for my husband because he’d been standing there leaning against the sink, naked and pointing at himself for, well, longer than was good for either one of us.

I bent down. I looked.

Sure enough, there it was, a wad of Double Bubble chewing gum the size of a hamster’s head nestled in . . . ummm. . . well, just nestled.

I said, “Oops.”

He said, “Get it off.”

I asked, “How?”

It was a good question. I believe I missed the chapter in Home Economics dealing with “butt hair gum removal.”

I’d heard a rumor once—something club soda—stains or something, but I didn’t think club soda was going to apply in this case. I knew you could use ice to freeze gum and then chip it off of stuff, but chipping seemed the wrong sort of action to take. Pulling was right out. Shaving/cutting seemed promising, but it was going to be close work.

I can remember hoping that my hand was going to be steady enough, what with the laughing and all.

The real problem is that there just isn’t any kind of hotline for this. I blame the government.

Let me just report that the operation was a success, and I employed a combination of techniques.

To the children and now grand children I would like to say, “Let this be a lesson to you. Never chew gum in the bathtub. Chewing gum in the bathtub can make your fathers have to have their butts shaved. There are reasons for family rules. Rules are our friends, and YaYa doesn’t make this stuff up. She has experience. She’s lived.”

Linda (Steady Now) Zern