Light It Up

My youngest son and I were in the checkout line at Kmart. He was confessing.

I was trying to look cool and unfazed, while choking on my own horror spit.

Youngest son was telling me that he and a couple of his buddies had been experimenting with an incendiary device of the low cost, high flammability variety—also illegal—sweet Mother McCrea. 

I won’t bore you with the details, and that way you won’t have to testify at the trial.

“But don’t worry, Mom,” he assured me, “we couldn’t get it to blow up.”

Sweet Mother McCrea.

Beyond shocked, but still trying to play it cool, I looked to the gentleman behind the register and appealed to him for some kind of mature adult support. I was hoping he would roundly condemn the mercenary actions of my son and his gang of four.

The male cashier said, “Ah lady, that ain’t nothing. Me and my buddies burned down a bridge once, a big one.”

The elderly man behind us in line started to chuckle gently. The cashier joined in, giving us a conspiratorial wink and looked wistful.

“They still don’t know who did it, but that was in New York.”

Another man in line sighed—nostalgically.

I am ever puzzled by maleness.

I have never, ever had the overpowering desire to ignite, blowup, or dynamite anything. I do, occasionally, burn some lemon-scented candles when I soak in the tub—but not the same thing—I’m thinking. I have never heard my daughters chortle and exult with triumph because they can (and did) urinate on a fire. I have never had one of my female type friends confess a bridge, barn or hay wagon burning to me.

I have never heard any women of my association rejoice in their penchant for mayhem by saying, “Come on girls, let’s get some rags, stuff them in a bottle with some gasoline, light it up, and see what happens next.”

Let me think . . . nope . . . don’t remember any sleepover stories like that.

Men are such a puzzle. If men aren’t from Mars then where are they from?

They’re from a place a lot farther away and hotter than Mars. That’s where. Burning down bridges. Indeed.

“And if you don’t put that sharpened stick, chunk of rock, or spear down this minute, mister, you’re going to lose an eye, and then how are you going to see to light up all those Molotov cocktail fuses?”

My tips on raising boys include setting up checkpoints for full body searches and always assuming that where there’s smoke, there is fire . . . or there’s going to be fire . . . or urine. Always be ready to remind your boy-child that burning down a bridge may sound like fun now, but does he really want to be working in the garden department at Kmart when he’s fifty-seven.

Pssssst . . . I have no idea how bridge burning and garden department cashiering are inter-related, but that’s one of my strengths—verbal gymnastics and convoluted reasoning. I’m a girl.

Linda (Fire Marshall) Zern 

EXCERPT: FOLLOWING the STRANDLINE [Book #2 in the Strandline Series]

FOLLOWING THE STRANDLINE:  CHAPTER ONE, EXCERPT

"Here was a scene from a tourist brochure. 

Come see Florida’s glorious freshwater springs. Wish you were here.

Remember advertisements, Roy Terry thought, biting back a laugh, scratching the end of his nose.

They were beautiful together, the girl with her mop of honey-gold curls and the young man dark haired and stern. The guy turned his back to the girl when she kicked off her jeans, keeping his eyes on the hedge of blackberry thorns that grew along the edge of the sand. Rifle in hand, he scanned and watched. Young but not foolish. Attracted to each other but not brainless about it. Survivors."

To Conserve and Protect

Liberal arts colleges run to liberal politics and those that embrace liberal ideas. That’s just how it is. When I comment on the phenomenon to my engineer friends, they snort and then scoff. Sometimes they use their words, but that’s not one hundred percent of the time. 

When they do comment, they often say things like, “What did you think, you were studying ‘the hard sciences?’” 

Then they solve for “y.” 

What are hard sciences anyway? Science that is solid like cement? Or is it just a lot of math disguised as fun experiments?

I am a writer. No, strike that. I am an author. No, that’s not quite right either. 

I am a novelist first, then a blogger, then a smart mouth with a lot to say in a soft sciences discipline. 

I am also conservative by today’s liberal art’s standards.

I know that making this admission is tantamount to stripping naked in public and NOT having a Chinese word tattooed on the small of my back—but it is what it is. I also know that I run the risk of being dismissed for the sin of . . . being . . . staid. 

Staid is a word that means tattoo free—also boring.

During one of my college classes we were regaled with the lively tale of our soon-to-be-retired professor’s adventures of smoking pot in an RV during the wild, cool, hippy years of her youth. Everyone laughed. Her hipness had been established. The point made: cool people get stoned, drunk, and experience all of life’s wild, hallucinogenic drama, so they’ll have good stories to tell the other villagers before complaining about drama monsters. 

Staid people remember growing up in a house with a cool parent.

It’s hard to fool me when it comes to the consequences of certain wild, untamed, screw the Ten Commandments behavior. No, strike that. It’s impossible to fool me.

Full disclosure: I have an agenda. I am the grandmother to fourteen [in May] . . . that’s children . . . not hamsters or pot belly pigs. I’d eat a hamster if I got hungry enough, just like they do in South America, but I digress.

I will have fourteen grandchildren and teaching them the right way to live and be happy is part of my job description. It’s a village thing. Sending messages to the young and impressionable that living stoned or drunk in someone’s garage and racing around on a giant human hamster wheel on the Internet is ‘living’ are right out. Can’t risk it. I have a pretty big garage and a barn with a hayloft. My agenda is that cool can get you crabs and staid pays off in the end. 

Hard work, personal responsibility, and being honest with your fellow villagers are the messages around here. It ain’t flashy or hip, but it keeps the baby villagers from having to worry that the Daddy villagers will drive the family station wagon into a gator lake—again.

Fuller disclosure: Smoke, dope, screw, and live a life of fluctuating, sand shifting relative values all you want. It’s your life, but please don’t think that you’re going to live in my hayloft like a giant human hamster when the power goes out.

Liberalism is about change.

Change is dramatic.

Drama is exciting.

Drama is also expensive and exhausting and everyone says that they’ve had enough of it.

Linda (Straight Shot) Zern