Zern Family Policy on Kidnapping and Other Acts of Piracy

In a great big modern world where travel is supersonic and tweets are faster than lightning that is greased, it’s important to be savvy about the kidnap policies of modern Barbary Pirates, the ransom demands of Somali warlords, and the acceptable amount of time that the terribly young and wildly attractive widow should wait before cashing the life insurance checks. 

What!? 

Listen, the Malaysian government lost an entire, complete, gigantic 747 airliner. My husband has been known to fly on these planes. Big plane goes bye, bye. Husband goes bye, bye. We have to have a ransom/kidnapping/disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth policy!

In the days of Queen Victoria pirates sailed around looking for loot and according to a guy named Wiki: The main purpose of their [pirates called Barbary] attacks was to capture Christian slaves for the Ottoman slave trade as well as the general Muslim market in North Africa and the Middle East.

Today, pirates are still looking for loot and cash and slaves, but those are mostly for sex. Ransom is big. Kidnapping is a career choice. And when my husband flies off to the ends of the earth to help foreign companies figure out their software knots and tangles, I occasionally contemplate the pirate possibilities. 

So here’s the discussion behind the policy:

“So the Malaysians lost a whole airplane,” I observed. “Don’t you fly on that jetliner loosing Malasian airline?”

“Yep.” My husband said. He never complicates our conversations with excessive word use.

“So, what’s the policy? How long should I wait before I cash the life insurance check?”

He looked up from his laptop. He was intrigued. I could tell.

“Okay, here’s the deal. All the desk dwellers are probably going to dither around if they can’t find any floating seat cushions or Skymall catalogs, but Oracle is still going to have to pay me until they declare me dead. CASH THE CHECKS FAST.”

“Got it.”

We both went back to tap, tap, tapping on assorted keyboards.

“Okay, so what if you’re taken captive by angry maroons posing as pirates looking for the pin number to our checking account? What’s our policy? To negotiate or not to negotiate.”

“No negotiations.”

“What if they grab you, torture you, record it, and send me the hideous Youtube video.”

“No negotiations and no second mortgages.”

“Okay, but you have to promise me that you’ll be so obnoxious they’ll kill you all the way dead right off, so I won’t have to worry about you wasting away in a flea infested hut.”

“Got it.”

“But what if they sell you as a sex slave?”

He pondered. “I’ll do my best to make my escape.” He re-pondered. “Or not.”

“And who should I sue?”

“Everyone.”

“Got it.”

So that’s our policy. Cash the checks fast. No negotiations. No second mortgages. And sue everyone.

When I tell people our family policy on kidnapping they tend to be shocked by our cavalier attitude toward tragedy and piracy in general. Then I tell them how rich I’ll be when I cash the checks, and they’re mollified—also a little jealous.

Because money fixes everything, just ask a Barbary pirate.

Linda (Can’t Buy Me Love) Zern 

A CLASSIC ZIPPITYZERN: A Dog's Tail

The Author as Dog Walker!

When you hear yourself screaming, “Sherwood, grab the hose; the dog is on fire!” you know that you are—once again—the butt of some giant cosmic joke, not to mention the dog.

We are country folk. We sit outside a lot. We make fires. We own dogs. We sit outside around fires with our dogs. It’s a lifestyle. You have to respect it. (If we sat outside naked, beating tom-toms while reciting cowboy poetry with our dogs you’d have to respect that too—if it’s a lifestyle. That’s what I have learned in college.)

I am a lazy fire pit builder. I like to hearken back to my Native American heritage by slapping a random length of wood onto the fire, letting the ends hang over the sides. When the log burns in half, you shove the ends in. Easy, peasy. Others in my family would rather court hernias by slapping logs against trees, whacking branches on the ground, or slamming hunks of solid wood over their knees to try to produce the “correct” size. Mostly, they just look like learning-disabled Sasquatches. It’s fun to watch.

The downside to my method of fire building is that blazing hunks of junk sometimes fall out of the fire pit, raining down like space junk reentering the atmosphere.

Sometimes blazing hunks of junk fall into the dog’s tail. No, not sometimes—once, it happened once.

What I learned when the dog’s tail caught on fire: I have the reaction time of a Navy SEAL, Sarah, my daughter-in-law who is very pregnant, does not have the reaction time of a Navy SEAL, and my husband is . . . a learning-disabled Sasquatch. 





CoCo, my very hairy collie/retriever mix, had cuddled up to the fire pit when a blazing bit of junk fell out of the fire into her very hairy tail bits. Her tail fluff began to smoke. She was oblivious. I leapt out of my chair and screamed, “The dog is on fire!” 

Sarah screamed and tried not to wet her pants. Sherwood continued playing Angry Birds on his machine. The dog’s tail blazed up.

Reacting like a ninja taking vitamin B-12, I started kicking sand onto the dog’s tail. I continued screaming, “Sherwood, get the hose—the dog is on fire!”

CoCo remained oblivious. She may have been playing Angry Birds in her head.

A smell straight from Dante’s Inferno rolled over me. Coughing bitter coughs, I started to stomp on the dog’s tail. She lifted her head, confused. 

Sarah continued screaming and doing Kegel exercises.

I stomped on the dog until a giant chunk of frizzled, singed tail fuzz fell out of her tail. She got up, walked to the opposite side of the fire pit, flopped into the sand, and fell asleep—probably wondering when I’d had my stroke.

Sherwood looked up from his machine, annoyed that I was yelling at him.

“What did you want me to do about it?” he said.

I thought about becoming an angry bird and pecking him to death. I threw more wood into the fire pit instead. CoCo snored. Sarah tried to catch her breath. Our lifestyle continued.

And you have to respect that or be labeled a judgmental, diversity-hating, cowboy poetry bigot.

Linda (Fire Retardant) Zern

A Caribbean Vacation Story by Linda L. Zern

A CARIBBEAN VACATION STORY: Walked to the ocean. It rained. Everyone walked back inside. Took a nap. The end.