My Fixer Upper

Islands in the Stream

My husband and I were high school sweethearts. For our first date, he asked me to the homecoming dance. Before he asked me to homecoming, several of my peers told me that Sherwood Zern would be asking me to homecoming. Remember this was high school, so there was a lot of pre-homecoming date warnings and alerts. 

My peers were like the oracles of doom.

“Watch out, that Sherwood Zern is going to ask you to the homecoming dance, and he’s handy,” they intoned.

I thought “handy” meant he knew his way around the business end of a hammer. It didn’t.

Turns out handy meant something else entirely. We worked it out. He joined my church, and I didn’t slap his jaw off.

What we never figured out was why my husband was not so great while using the business end of a hammer, screwdriver, wrench, nail, or duct tape. It’s like he lost some fix-it genetic lottery. Some boys can fix connectery thing-a-ma-nots in the wall socketersocks and some can’t.

My boy can’t. Now don’t get me wrong. My boy is smart—way smart. People call him from the far corners of the earth to figure out why they can’t download the universe straight to their decoder rings. Smart.

He tries to be hammer handy, but he doesn’t have that “fix-it” gene. He has the “stab-yourself-in-the-knuckle-with-a-screwdriver-exposing-ligaments” gene. It’s wildly frustrating, not to mention a strain on our insurance deductible.

I’m pretty good at fixing stuff, if it’s low to the ground and not screwed on too tight. I’m short and arthritic.

Over the years, I’ve learned to be patient waiting for things to get fixed at our house. I’ve also learned to improvise.

Recently the stopper in my bathtub gave up the ghost. Stomp. Push. Stomp. Stomp. Smash. Nothing. Comforting bath water continued to drain away through the worn out tub plug. I looked at my husband. He was taking a steamy hot shower.

It’s important to note that I don’t like baths. I require them. Without hot baths taken in large garden tubs, I will turn into a pile of calcified toothpicks. True story. 

“Want to join me?” he said, leering at me from the shower steaminess. That’s my boy. Still handy in his own way.

“Nope! You hog the hot water and tend to give me black eyes with your elbows.”

Wrapped in a towel I padded out to the yard, scrabbled several ham-sized stones from the garden, dragged them back into the bathroom, and started stacking them onto the defective tub plug.

“What are you doing? I can fix that.”

“I know,” I said, “Because you’re a big, strong, manly fix-it man fixer. I just need to take a bath tonight and for the foreseeable future. It’s nothing personal.” The rocks started to take on the appearance of a tiny but functional pyramid. Water pooled around the stone formation. I took a bath with bubbles and river rocks. As good as fixed.

We have two sons. One can ‘make the shot’ at one thousand, two hundred yards and the other one married Sarah, a woman who’s pretty handy with a hammer.

Good to know. When things get too ridiculous, like when the handle on the shower enclosure stays busted for five years which forces me to have to pry open the shower door with the end of a nail clippers, because I’m too short to reach over the top of the shower door and push it open from the inside, I’ll call Sarah. She’ll fix it.

Linda (Busted Flush) Zern    

        

Low Hanging Fruit - A Classic ZippityZern

One of my personal favorites. Happy Year that is New . . . 

Girls want their ears pierced because we dress them in pink as soon as they can breathe and burp; that’s what my women college professors taught me in the post-apocalyptic world following the bra-less sixties.  Boys become boys because we tended to hold them by one leg and dangle them over toy fire trucks. Girls become girls because we didn’t toss them in the air high enough or let them bounce when we dropped them. That was the theory—sort of.

 After thirty years of being married to a boy, thirty years of raising two boys and a gaggle of grand boys, and about a thousand years of interacting with boys and girls of all ages in my society, I would like to go on record.  The theory that boys and girls are exactly alike is craziness brought on by pre-menstrual cramping.

 When I was still newly hatched, recently married, and without personal offspring, I continued to cling to echoes of my college discipleship; I was very young. I was idealistic. I was a bright light of feminist idealism. My boys were going to cuddle dolls and reject catapults. I believed that—right up ‘till the boy/girl twelve-year old canoe trip.

 My worldview flip-flopped when I went on a church canoe trip with twelve-year old boys and twelve-year old girls—true, whatever gender identification damage caused by pink and blue booties had already been done, but they were a fairly typical bunch of human offspring. I was in charge of the pink bootie crowd.

 What I learned about twelve-year old girls at the time included:  they cannot canoe; they can bounce off of things while in a canoe (the bank, the other bank, and the giant felled tree in the middle of the river); they worry about snakes, alligators, bears, goats, and humidity’s effect on ponytails; they tire easily.

 What I learned about twelve-year old boys still haunts me.

 As I piloted my little ship-load of chirping girls up the river and back to base camp, I noticed one of the boys seemed to be dangling like a piece of loose fruit from a gnarled tree branch stretching out over the river. He also seemed to have no pants on. The reason he seemed to have no pants on is because he didn’t.

 The dangling tree branch boy was . . . hmmm, how to be delicate when discussing the antics of twelve-year old boys? The mind staggers, but I make the attempt. One of those boys, the dangling one, was in the middle of producing a certain organic by-product by hanging his bottom over a tree branch and allowing the organic by-product to drop into the water—just ahead of us, near a bend in the river.

 Please note: This organic product is produced when enormous amounts of Papa John’s pizza are consumed around a campfire and . . . oh, forget it.

 He was pooping in the river. This idiot kid was hanging his butt over a tree branch and pooping in the river.

 Twenty-two seconds later, coming toward our canoe was a nightmare torpedo of slow moving, softly bobbing, and horror evoking—poop.

 One of the more highly emotional, hysteria prone, sharp eyed girls in my canoe screamed, “It’s coming straight for us.” Then she pointed.

 The pointing was not necessary.

 Then they all began to scream—to a woman. I confess I may have yelped.

 As the leader, I attempted to steady the crew.  “Stea . . . dy. Steady. Steady on, ladies.” The poop torpedo bobbed closer, and ever so slowly—closer.

 Now the point of all this is to simply say that I have never, ever, in my life heard of any female of my acquaintance say, “Hey, Emily, climb up in that tree yonder, take a dump in the river, and then we’ll hang around in the bushes to see what happens.”

That’s what those blue bootie-wearing boys did; instead of hiding their faces in masculine shame, they hid in the bushes to see “what would happen.”

 I’ll tell you what happened. I dug my paddle into the water once the danger had drifted passed after bumping our hull once or twice, and yelled, “Paddle harder girls! We’re going to kill us some boys!”

 So when my daughters have come to me over the years to complain about some inexplicable quality of incomprehensible maleness, I simply make sure they understand some basics.

 “Boys are disgusting and they have poor potty manners.”

 Then I look my daughters, square in the eye, and sigh, “And yet we still want one.”

It has ever been thus . . .

 Linda (Run Silent, Run Deep) Zern

HAIR OF THE DOG

HAPPY DOG FACE

My husband and I got rid of our kids the old fashioned way. We swaddled them, wiped them, smothered them, adored them, bossed them, and then firmly and finally kicked them out. They went. It was too late. We were addicted to the swaddling, wiping, smothering, adoring, and bossing. We were addicted to the caring.

The dog arrived just as the kids escaped. That dog, and the fur coat she came wrapped in, was proof positive that my husband and I had lost what little equilibrium we had left. Just as our home became clean, comfortable, and hypoallergenic, we filled it with a mammal that sheds the equivalent of six angora sweaters per lunar cycle. She’s hairy. We have adapted.

We buy lint rollers in case lots from a start-up company in Indonesia. We qualify for the large quantity discount and the company Christmas card. Our account rep’s name is Omja; it’s a name that means, “born of cosmic unity.”

Last night as my husband pointed out that we were closing in on our thirty plus year wedding anniversary I was distracted by a tumbleweed of dog hair drifting languidly through the air. Waving a lint roller like a road flare, I expertly whipped floating dog hair from the air.

“Hold still,” he said, and with a flick of a wrist, he ran a lint roller over the back of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas. I trembled and jumped a bit.

He said, “Sorry, I thought—you know—dog hair. There was dog hair on your . . . back parts.” He gave me a half grin and a shrug. I thought I saw dog hair drift onto his head.  

I nodded and rolled his head.

Climbing into bed, my husband lint-rolled his pillow and then mine, while I ran a lint roller across the part of the bedspread that catches our chin drool. In tandem, we ripped fur clogged sticky strips free from matching lint rollers, wadded them into clingy balls, and tossed the wads over our shoulders.

“Honey, have I told you that the last thirty plus years have been,” I said, pausing, as an errant dog hair floated by, “a thousand kinds of fun.”

He smiled his special smile, and ran a lint roller down the front of my Winnie the Pooh pajamas. I giggled. A dog hair stuck in my lip balm, making my lip itch.

I smiled my special smile.

Just as he leaned in to kiss me goodnight, our sixty-pound canine hair factory vaulted onto the bed and shook. Dog hair showered down like dandelion seeds in May. We lint rolled our own faces. Pushing in between us the dog flipped onto her back, burped a burped that smelled vaguely of plastic, shoved her four hairy legs skyward, and fell asleep in a puddle of her own fur.

“A thousand kinds of fun,” I repeated, quietly.

We tapped our lint rollers together. They stuck. We left them that way all night. Now that’s love born of cosmic unity.

Linda (Fur Ball) Zern