Quickies:  Postings that are Short and Sweet!

The best grandpa in the entire world, maybe the universe.

Our philosophy is to let sleeping boys sleep.  The John Deere Lawn Tractor is worth every penny it uses in expensive foreign oil. The porch swing uses domestically produced energy:  donuts and Diet Coke.

Barefoot and With Child

My first Mother’s Day was a celebration of sleeping baby atop Poop Mountain.

Sherwood worked graveyard shift. He offered to “watch” the napping baby while I went to church. He didn’t mention that he would be napping while watching.

It’s a little reported but true fact that napping babies wake up.  Napping husbands who work the graveyard shift not so much.

Our eight month old woke up. His father did not. Our eight month old, unable to rouse his father, entertained himself by sketching, smearing, wiping, trailing, painting, and possibly ingesting through his ear-holes—poop, his own. I came home from church to a Mother’s Day tribute of poop-encrusted child, napping—once again—on an artful poop mound. The nursery smelled like a scene from the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

I cried.

Three more children quickly followed. They also tended to poop. I cried a couple more times—off and on. They cried.

Then they laughed and brought me wads of flowers ripped from the ground, trailing roots and dirt. I taught them to read the great books of their people, and sacrifice for the good of others, and dance the dance of duty versus personal fulfillment. Mostly, I raised them not so much to kiss me but to kiss their children.

For this, I am accused by my silly, short-sighted, materialistic society to be a do-nothing, stay-at-home mom. I have nine grandchildren and if each of those children have spouses and produce four children . . . well, you do the math.

That first kid, the poop artist, he grew up and went to the Amazon as a warrior. Then he went to Greece, and Spain, and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Texas as another kind of warrior.

This Mother’s Day he sent me a zombie novel, a rifle, and a note:

"To the greatest survivor I have the honor of knowing. In this text lies a story of great adventure. Happy Mother's Day.

From: Your Son--Stay Alert, Stay Alive!

And I earned every word! By the way, I finished a five hundred page zombie novel in three and a half days and harvested a butt load of green beans from my garden, and pressure washed a chicken coop, and reached the twenty-five thousand word mark on a new book and . . . . try to keep up . . . would ya’.

Linda (Barefoot and With Child) Zern

                                             

 

  

We Can Hear What You Mean

In a heavy southern accent, the DMV examiner asked our seventeen-year old son, Adam, if he had ever been convicted of a DUI?

He said, “Yes.”

Adam didn’t drink. Or drive. Or have a license. What he really meant was I’m a little nervous.

Even so, communication is a tricky, tricky business these days. Political correctness, rampant hypocrisy, personal agendas, and the fact that everyone with fingers has a website and is selling something has put a crimp in being able to communicate with any kind of veracity.

Veracity. Crap. What does that mean? Technically, it means “habitual truthfulness.”

Truth? Oh boy, but I’ve heard that truth is a relative term, because I go to college where simple things become nasty and complicated like a knot in the shoelace of a kid’s tennis shoe that has been peed on all day. How is this going to work if we can’t agree on whether or not there is a knot in the shoelace? Or whether or not the smell wafting up from the shoelace is urine when we try to untie the knot with our teeth.

For example: 

A voter may say, “Boy, a fifteen trillion dollar national debt is a lot and feels like a black hole sucking my lungs out through my ears.”

Compared to the administration saying, “What fifteen trillion dollar national debt?” Which means, “Holy snake spit, now what?

How about the concept of civility? Everyone seems to be for it, sort of.

“It’s so important to be civil to and respectful of the **brave funny man on the comedy show when he or his minions have shoved a ***beloved religious icon between the legs of a chubby naked chick and made sport of it. I sure wish those idiot, moron, knuckle-dragging Catholics understood civility.”

In this case the word “civil” or “civility” means agree with me, or I will call you nasty knuckle-dragging names.

Brave and funny are two words whose meaning have become both loosey and goosey. The word brave now means, “taking cheap shots.” For example Jon Stewart is considered “brave” for his inventive placement of a crèche scene, giving it the snappy name of Vagina Manger.  Really?

I think brave would have been taking a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed and propping it between the legs of a chubby naked chick. Of course, New York would burn down and that would be considered “bold.”

Don’t even get me started on the phrases “cutting edge,” “mean-spirited,” or “stupid do-do head.”

When I refuse to let the grandchildren overdose on Otter Pops, I am often called “mean,” as in “you are a mean old YaYa” for not letting us eat enough frozen sugar water to give a whale diabetes.

But I know that what the children are really saying, “It’s so hard learning to be self-disciplined and in--control grownups who can be the boss of ourselves that we could cry and kick and blame the YaYa.”

Truth. Civility. Semantics. It’s a minefield out there.

Linda (Do-Do Head) Zern

**Jon Stewart

***A Christmas nativity scene of the baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph