Caution! Lumpy Land Bumps

Welcome Home 101st Airborne -
 Currahee Nation

Driving our son’s 2004 Jeep Wrangler Sport to Tennessee for his 101^st Airborne homecoming was like traveling to the space station in a zip lock sandwich bag, shot out of a potato gun. There was a lot of flapping.

Don’t get me wrong; I love that Jeep. I looked absolutely adorable driving that little red Jeep around Saint Cloud blow-drying my hair. My hair never looked better then after driving to the gym with my top off; I mean the Jeep’s top, not my personal top. If I’d been driving around with my personal top off, well then I would have been arrested for “indecent stringiness,” that according to one of my daughters who walked in on me taking a bath.

She was happy to tell me, “Geez, Mom, the only word I can think of is stringy.”

I wanted to buy that Jeep from Aric; I looked so adorable in it, but because of inspired governmental programs such as Cash for Clunkers, his Jeep is now worth approximately $200,000. So back it went.

It was a loud trip, fun—but loud; what with all the flapping plastic and the sound of tires exploding on highway 24-West. A semi in front of us had a tire blow and a mini-van next to us had a tire dissolve into strips of rubber road trash. And then we hit the lumpy land formations called mountains. Okay, maybe they were hills, but for a native Floridian any pointy dirt where the rain runs off and doesn’t form frog swamps is a mountain. I hate mountains.

My husband, also a native Floridian, seems indifferent to mountains. He drives the same speed, once the cruise control is set, regardless of the changing terrain, car trunks we get close enough to reach out and touch, or number of tire bits flying past the windshield.

At the sight of the sign reading “Caution – 5% Grade” my heart started beating harder, while my hands convulsed around available, exposed metal Jeep parts.

“Honey, you know that I hate stupid mountains. Slow down.” My stomach tried to crawl up through my throat.

“My Dad used to tell us kids that there was nothing on the other side of those stupid mountains in West Virginia when we drove straight up the stupid side, and you couldn’t see anything but stupid sky. Stupid mountains. Stupid vacation.”

My fingers started to cramp and sweat around the noise of snapping knuckle bones, while the sound of my childish screaming banged around in my memory.

“My Dad could be such a jackass.”

The highway swirled and curled. My ears popped. I made note of the guardrail in front of us that resembled twisted tornado rubble.

“Hey? You see that metal railing that is all smooshed down right there?” I would have pointed but my fingers had fused with the atoms in the sissy bar.

“Yeah.” He cruised on, speed unchanged.

“Yeah! It’s smooshed down because some jackass went through it. Slow down! Or one of us is going to die and it ain’t going to be me.”

It was a loud trip, fun—but loud, what with the flapping, snapping, exploding, and screaming.

Linda (String Cheese) Zern

Staff Sergeant Aric S. Zern and Sherwood K. Zern
Fort Campbell Kentucky

Amnesia Anyone?

I have a smallpox scar. I have a smallpox scar from having smallpox stuffed into me with a needle by the government. I was five when the government gave me smallpox. Okay, they gave me a teeny, tiny speck of smallpox, but the scar is still ugly.

Since then I’ve been inoculated, biopsied, C-sectioned, extracted, stapled, stitched, sliced and diced. And now I’m crazy. When I go to the doctor my CO2 levels go way up, because I hyperventilate, and when I go to the dentist my blood pressure sky rockets. Oddly enough, getting sharp objects jammed into body parts does not get easier with time.

Now, I have to be drugged out of my mind when I have to have sharp objects jammed into body parts.

I am a cancer-surviving pansy.

For my latest dental torture session on Thursday, my dentist and his gang gave me a sedative-hypnotic. It made me go to sleep for Thursday—the whole day—and I didn’t read the “medication guide” until AFTER the procedure.

 What a hoot. Those medicine-warning labels are the funniest reading on earth, in my opinion. Who writes those things?

Apparently, a side effect of taking a sedative-hypnotic can be something called “traveler’s amnesia.” This is side effect that can cause someone to be (and I quote) “NOT fully awake and do an activity that they will NOT remember doing. Reported activities include: driving a car (sleep driving), making and eating food, talking on the phone, having sex, and sleep-walking.” Since Thursday has disappeared from my memory, I have developed a vague sense of unease about the “travel amnesia” possibilities.

What if, at some point during my Thursday—all day—nap, I put on a gypsy outfit, drove to the lakefront, and played a tambourine for loose change? What if I went horseback riding—naked? What if I drove my John Deere lawn tractor to the Florida Mall, so I could buy a pretzel, with salt? What if I killed somebody?

Traveler’s amnesia. Yikes.

What if I joined a motorcycle gang, got a tattoo of a giant butterfly on my right butt cheek, and promised to be a drug mule?

What if . . . oh . . .wait a minute . . . there’s something here under the bedcovers. Hey . . . what the . . . it’s a tambourine, and there’s a buck twenty-three in it.

I can’t seem to find the gypsy outfit.

So, was I naked while playing the tambourine? Amnesia is so annoying.

Linda (No More Cavities) Zern 

The Accident Monger

My husband hasn’t worn a wedding ring since the emergency room folks had to hacksaw it off. He was wrestling with some teenagers in a swimming pool. They broke his ring finger.

“You boys better settle down before someone gets hurt,” I remembered saying.

My husband hasn’t had the full use of his right knee since he hopped over a fence trying to help our neighbor catch his escaping bull.  His ACL detached, causing his leg to dangle loosely—my husband’s ACL, not the bull’s.

“Sherwood, maybe you should try opening the gate first?” I remembered yelling.

My husband ‘s knuckle is scarred where he rammed a loose prong of field fence into his hand. He was loading a roll of field fence onto our truck at Tractor Supply. When he showed me his gushing wound and asked me if he thought he should get stitches I said, “It has been my experience that when you can see the stuff that’s supposed to be on the inside of your skin from the outside, you’re going to need stitches.”

“Babe, you should probably put your work gloves on,” I remembered warning.

A couple weeks ago, my husband slunk out of our bedroom into the foggy morning to play racquetball with several younger, sprier men.

I said, “Don’t go. But if you go, don’t fling yourself around like a twenty year old. If you do fling yourself around like a twenty year old, make sure you have someone to drive you to the emergency room, because I’m not doing it. I have things to do today.” He scoffed at my scorn.

Later that day my husband came home from racquetball and worked on the duck pen, fed the animals, and mowed the front pasture—with a potentially BROKEN wrist. He refused to tell me he had fallen while flinging himself around like a twenty year old.

I trimmed the hedge and watched him mowing the pasture. He had to keep his left arm bent across his chest.  Every time he crossed in front of me he hit a bump, which caused him to double over the lawn mower steering wheel in agony; he continued to pretend his hand didn’t feel like it had been partially severed.

Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. Back and forth, he rode by, like one of those rabbits you shoot at in a shooting gallery. Back and forth, hit the bump and collapse. It was like watching the Shoot the Sherwood Off the Lawnmower Arcade Game.  At one point my vision blurred, and I thought if I had a gun I’d shoot him off that lawnmower.

Our son, Adam, drove my husband to the emergency room later that day. The bone was only  “compressed” not broken. He was supposed to wear a wrist brace for three weeks. He didn’t.

My husband is an accident monger. A monger is a person promoting something undesirable (hatemonger, warmonger, bad judgment monger.) On the other hand, I am a cynic monger or a prophetess.

Linda (Butterfly Bandage) Zern