Florida is a semi-tropic, sultry, and exotic state where rain is called liquid sunshine, and the Spanish guy who named it fully expected to find a fountain full of botox. Winter is the season where Floridians put on sweaters and walk fast to their cars. Florida is paradise.

Florida is also wormy.

Big worms, little worms, beggar worms, thief worms. Pinworms are a fun little worm that lay eggs in a part of the body usually associated with sitting, booty dancing—also spanking. Pinworms are party worms that come out at night to . . . well . . . booty dance, also to lay their eggs in a place where the sun don’t shine. Pinworm eggs can be found in dirt, air, shady places, warm mud, and toddlers. It is very easy to “get” pinworms.

I have had pinworms—in MY PERSONAL BOOTY.

I got them from my grubby toddler kids, who were not above eating dirt, licking dirt, bathing with dirt, or painting with poop in dirt. It is very easy to “get” pinworms; as far as I can tell, pinworm eggs lurk absolutely everywhere, including the moon. One semi-tropic, sultry, and exotic Florida evening, I remember sitting straight up in bed and gasping.

“Honey, honey!” I shook my husband’s shoulder. He mumbled something about a goose and then rolled over. I shook harder. “Honey! Wake up!” Panic made my voice shrill. “I’ve got them!!!”

“What! Whaaaat . . . is . . . it?” He rumbled awake. “Do I need the baseball bat?” He scratched his ear and admitted, “I don’t know where it is.”

“Sherwood, listen to me.” The hair on the back of my neck began to creep in sympathy with other parts of me that were just plain creeped out and itching. “I’ve got pinworms. I know it.”

“Should I get the baseball bat?”

“No! Pinworms, man, pinworms,” I grabbed him by his shoulders.” I have them!” I lowered my voice to a raspy gag. “I . . . can . . . feel . . . them . . . moving!”

He grimaced, looking confused and a little frightened.

“What should I do?” I said, imagining creeping, crawling, and nefarious inching with the vividness of a creative writer high on inspiration.

“Find a cork?” His suggestion was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.

“Listen, Mister, if you don’t watch out, I’ll make you do the “tape test” for pinworms.” He looked suspicious. “That’s right. The tape test, where you take clear tape and press it to the skin of my . . .”

He moaned faintly, while looking faint. His dismay became contagious.

Hysteria clawed its way through my brain as I lunged for the phone and dialed my gynecologist’s emergency number. While waiting for a call from the mean old nurse they make you talk to when you’ve called with an emergency that isn’t really an emergency, I felt a pathologic need to start running in circles. I ran.

“What are you doing?” My husband had found the baseball bat under the bed and cradled it like a baby. He watched me without blinking. “You know you can’t outrun the pinworms, right? They’re along for the ride.”

The phone rang. I stopped running and answered it.

Explaining in a rational calm scream, I yelped, “HELP ME! I have worms!”

The mean old nurse said, “You realize that pinworms are not considered an emergency or life threatening.”

“Maybe I wasn’t clear. I HAVE WORMS IN MY PERSONAL BODY PARTS!”

“Mrs. Zern you have called your gynecologist’s emergency phone number in the middle of the night because you suspect you might have an infestation of Enterobeus Vermikularis,” she sighed. “I’ll call in a prescription in the morning. You’ll live.” The phone clicked off.

The next morning I had to give a speech in front of approximately two hundred of my peers with pinworms still creeping about my person, and I did, in fact, deliver that speech. And that’s why I’m one tough mom, and it’s very hard to rattle me with threats of global warming, global cooling, global annihilation, or global xenomorph attack. I’ve known true horror—and I lived.


Lind (Cork It!) Zern



 

“Is that guy biting that girl’s thigh?” My son pushed a computer screen with a picture of a guy biting a girl’s thigh in front of my face. I squinted. Not only was it a picture of a young man biting a young women’s thigh, I knew the biter boy.

“Don’t you know that guy?” My son began to scroll down to other pictures of the young man in question biting other questionable girl bits.

“Yeah, I know him,” I sighed.

“Didn’t you . . .”

I cut him off. “Yeah, I wrote him a letter of recommendation for the college of his choice . . . so, apparently, he could go to that institution of higher learning and bite girl’s meaty leg parts.”

“Wow!”

I agreed.

“Do people on social networking sites know that we can see them?” My son looked at me with a puzzled frown.

I closed my eyes with visions of thigh biting dancing in my head. “You know; I think it’s kind of like my theory of why people pick their noses in their cars. Glass feels solid, even if it is see-through, and I always want to yell, ‘We can see you!’ But no one ever hears me. Apparently, it’s also sound proof.”

This incident just highlights why writing letters of recommendation can be so problematic, because the world has become a thigh biting, obscene gesture shooting, booby flashing extravaganza, while I still blush when I fill out the forms in the gynecologist’s waiting room.

The blush is off the world’s rose, that’s for sure.

So I have decided that in all future letters of recommendation that I am asked to write I will include the following disclaimer:


What I know of this candidate, student, or potential employee does not include knowledge of: thigh biting photo’s winging their way across the world wide web; strange or twisted philosophies concerning Marxists mass murderers and their views on day care, first names, or the proper running of a gulag; lying to Israeli officials; or superficial tattoos displayed prominently on bits that can be chewed on by boys whose friends are sober enough to hold the camera steady.

I’m not kidding about the blushing part. My gynecologist once looked at my face and neck, his glasses slipping to the end of his nose, and poked my cheek with his finger.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I knew immediately, but I refused to admit to my old-fashioned red-faced shame.

“Are you blushing?” He looked at my fevered cheeks with squinty eyes. “That’s amazing,” he continued. “Nobody blushes anymore.” He poked me again. “Look at that.” He acted like he’d just discovered an extinct species of pigeon nesting on my head.

Sighing, I shrugged and pulled my exam gown closer to my throat, covering my embarrassed shame with a paper towel, wondering who wrote my doctor his letters of recommendation.

I’ve got nothing against public confessionals of guilt to save the taxpayer the expense of a trial, stocks in the town square where you get to throw old veggies at the town bully, and admitting to your most embarrassing self deprecating moments for their humorous uplifting quality, but don’t cry when you—finally and at long last—realize WE CAN SEE YOU and, boy, do you look silly!

Linda (Once Bitten, Twice Shy) Zern
























 

Looking for Love Under the Merge Sign
(Warning PG – 13 Due to Racy Rooster Talk)

A professor asked the college class, “Who decides if a baby is a boy or a girl?”

One bright young thing piped up and said, “Society.”

After my son related this fascinating tale of modern American education, I walked out to my chicken coop and watched as my thirteen roosters commenced to crow, spur, posture, fight, flap, peck, and gang rape their way through my flock of hens.

“Who told you, you were roosters,” I yelled.

I sold twelve of the thirteen roosters to my next-door neighbor for six dollars and fifty cents a piece. He got a bargain. My hens got some relief, and I learned a lesson about the nature of the species. Roosters do not lay eggs.

According to a recent scientific (so it must be good) study men think about sex 2,072 times every second of every minute of every day—girls, not so much, but this is, of course, because of rigid social conditioning and that poem about snips, snails, and puppy dog tails.

Personally, I’m glad my mother did not socialize me to be a boy so that I would have to think about sex constantly. I occasionally enjoy thinking about—oh I don’t know . . . breakfast or the Civil War.

When my husband was born, his mother, fooled by his resemblance to a rooster, socialized him to be a boy, which means that when he became a teenager he enjoyed riding naked on motorcycles through the Florida back woods, but not to worry; he likes to point out he always wore tennis shoes so that he could shift and to protect his feet.

Now my husband (of thirty-one years) flies away to various locations around the globe on Sunday afternoon and gets home on Thursday nights, and I used to pick him up at the airport, my heart filled with that little frisson of happiness and excitement that accompanied the notion of my man coming home from the sea. I was always glad to see him—for about five minutes, and then he would talk. I make him take a taxi now.

While coming home from the airport, trying to merge into a steady stream of traffic, and not get us crushed under a shuttle bus, I would often say, “I’m so glad you’re home, honey.”

A noise not unlike the sound of pizza being digested would greet this announcement.

“So how was your week? How was your flight? See anyone interesting in the airport like Caesar Milan?”

Silence. Silence. Quiet and then more and a bigger silence and
then . . .

“Let’s get it on,” he would say.

“What?” My hands would clench convulsively on the steering wheel. “Should I pull off the road next to the palm tree or do you want to wait until we pass the merge sign, and please tell me this isn’t your idea of romance?”

The conversation often deteriorated from there.

What I want to know is who told my husband he was a rooster?

I’d like to thank them, because after thirty-one years, four kids, and seven grandchildren he’s still crazy about me. What can I do? We’re just getting to the good part and I, for one, am glad that roosters do not lay eggs.

Linda (Henny Penny) Zern












 

“It could be worse.” It’s what people say when something truly icky happens in your life, and it’s supposed to 1) make you feel better because other people feel worse or 2) make you feel worse because it highlights what a big whiney baby you are. It’s kind of like a game, a game that you never, ever want to win.

When folks show up at the hospital, take one look at you, cross themselves (and they’re not Catholic) and say, “Holy smokes, it could NOT be worse,” then you have lost the game.

For us the “it could be worse” game often involves insect life—often termites.

We put our first house on the market and two weeks later termites flew out of the load-bearing-holding-up-the-ancient-aqueduct wall.

The next house we put on the market the termites waited a month to do their thing. As I remember it, the termites boiled out of our wood frame house in an Egyptian plague cloud while the realtor was parading potential buyers through it.

Okay, it’s not the worst thing that could happen, but it is spooky in a coincidental, paranoid curse of the insect wood eaters kind of way. So, we must conclude it could be worse. And here’s how:

1. The termites could have flown out of the attic of our house after eating their way through the foundation, stairs, television, and picture frames. Instead they flew out of the bottom. It could have been worse.

2. The termites could have been some new, freak industrial clone bugs, capable of eating an average size house in under eight hours, so that when we got home from work we would be greeted by a pile of sawdust and a microwave. (We lived pretty close to the nuclear power plant. It could have happened.)

3. The termites could have been glowing and looking for human orifices to colonize.

4. The termites could have been armed with flame-throwers.

5. The termites could have been followed by a troop of termite eating monkeys, who would now be living in the bushes, hunting termites, throwing poo, and looking for humans to jeer. Monkeys, I am informed, are disgusting.

6. The termites could have been flesh eating.


See how fun and helpful this little exercise can be? Before you know it you’re counting your blessings, calling the exterminator, and toasting your good fortune that the termites are swarming away from your house and towards your neighbor’s house with the really big dog that likes to come to your house looking for monkeys and to take a dump in your driveway.

But it could be worse; your neighbors could own a rhino.

Linda (Big Whiney Baby) Zern

 

A peeve is a vexation. A pet peeve is a vexation that nips at your metaphysical ankles and wets on the sateen pillows of your soul. I hate pet peeves.

One of my most ferocious pets called peeve are toenail clippings. They’re ugly, grubby, and seemingly everywhere. I can take the craziness of reality television (almost), the injustice of modern American tax brackets (with rancor), and the relentless optimism of Madison Avenue marketing tactics (I’m being vaccinated) but I CANNOT take toenails. It’s a pet peeve of mine.

Once I stood on the second floor of my two-story foyer and looked over the banister, only to see a wad of clipped toenails mounded in a tiny pile below me in the front hallway. Those toenails were not mine. As I stared down, I concluded that some unknown toe-groomer had been clipping their toenails on the second floor landing only to send their trimmings cascading down to the hallway below.

I also concluded that I might, quite possibly, be living with Visigoths.

The same week, I began stretching for my Tae Kwon Do class only to come face to face with several detached toenail clippings—less than a micron from my personal face. They were not mine. This meant that someone (probably a Visigoth) thought it a great idea to groom their shaggy toenails while practicing martial arts.

During class, I worked out my horror by punching and kicking the dummy shaped like a white Hun invader extra hard.

Soon after, I spent a few days in a Florida hotel, and you guessed it—toenail clippings—on the carpet, next to the bed. They were not mine. I tried not to black out.

But the worst was what I like to call “The Popeye’s Affair.” Standing in line, to purchase the best and greasiest fast food chicken ever, I glanced down and spotted—someone’s toenail.

Looking at my husband I pointed and choked out, “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yep, that’s a toenail.” He ordered the three-piece chicken dinner, extra grease.

A thousand questions popped into my head: How did the toenail get there? How did it get out of its shoe? Was the toenail running away? What kind of barbarian clips their toenails in line at a fast food joint? Can the second Middle Ages be far off?

Civilization is a fragile agreement between individuals, consisting of written and unwritten rules, one of which is “Thou shalt not discard bits of ones self where others can find those bits—ever!” It’s vile.

Let me conclude by saying, “Keep toenail clippings in their place and out of my sight,” and if you know who is clipping their toenails on the landing in my house, do the right thing, and TURN THEM IN. I’ll have DNA testing done, if I have to. You know I will.

Linda (Vexed and Peevish) Zern

 

For me, life has been about the moon. I was there watching when the rockets sliced through the earth’s gravity into space for the first time. I watched our engineer fathers sitting on the roofs of our row houses with their hands reaching to the sky, in a kind of holy benediction, as they cheered, “Fly, baby, fly!”

Some of them cried. We were racing the Russians to the moon, and we were going to win. I was six.

Then in high school, it was moons of a different sort. Moons that you pressed, displayed, and wagged. They were the kind of moons that got you suspended. Not to mention, the streaking, but streaking is comparable to the action of comets, I suppose. To strip naked and run flailing and flapping through the high school cafeteria could make you a legend when I was seventeen. I’m not saying I ever went streaking or became a legend. I’m just saying that I could testify with some expertise about the phenomenon of streaking—and the mooning, of course.

During the middle years, I watched women go into space for the first time, and thought I would have liked to have been one of them, had I been born in a different time, a different world. Instead, the women I knew were space travelers of a different sort; they traveled to America, which was like the moon compared to The Old Country. That’s what they called where they came from, The Old Country, and they taught me by action more than words that women have always been brave and adventurous and capable—always. It’s society that gets it wrong sometimes.

Now, I don’t look at the moon as much as I used to. I look at my grandchildren looking up into the night sky. With the light of the moon and stars sparkling in their eyes they whisper, “Wow!” and I remember what it was to be six and see magic in the fire of trailing rocket exhaust.

You can cover the whole moon with your thumb; you know. It’s an illusion, a trick. It’s a lesson the universe teaches us about perspective—and magic.

Linda (Moonstruck) Zern



 

When I was a younger woman, I lived on hope and change—and nagging. I used to hope that nagging worked and could change the speed at which the world moved. And when I say “the world,” I mean men; okay, really I mean one man—my man.

It took me a while to figure out that nagging is like all other expulsions of internal body gases—frequent, noisy, and rank, because it can turn the most sympathetic of subjects into an unattractive shrew surrounded by a cloud of toxic methane, not unlike a tent full of Boy Scouts farting the alphabet.

I can nag the alphabet. I’m that good.

I had a lot of raw material to work with in my husband, Sherwood the Great—procrastinator. As a kid, he attended one Boy Scout meeting where they tried to make him pound a nail with a hammer. He never went back. He decided he didn’t have to learn to pound a nail right that minute, not when he could wait and learn to pound a nail, later, when he learned to fix the heater coil in the hot water heater, sometime the last day of how about not right now!

When one of the heating coils burned out in the mechanical unit that kept me in the hot bath water to which I had become both accustomed and addicted, I grew determined to show the world and my critiques (generally people who share my propensity for freckles) that I could make a reasonable request for repair work without a nag in sight.

I could do it. I could live nag free. I could quit anytime.

“Sherwood, I can only fill the bathtub halfway full of hot water, and even if I lay down flat on my back the water does not cover all my girl parts. Some stuff always sticks out. It makes me sad.”

Rubbing his manly jaw he looked intrigued. “One of the heater coil’s probably burned out.”

“Should I call the hot water burned out coil man?” I crossed my arms over my chapped . . . umm . . . er . . . girl parts, hoping against hope that my husband’s grisly-monkey-man-brain had not snapped into stones-as-tools mode.

Too late.

“Nope! Nothing to it.”

“Dear, you should know I have made a solemn oath, covenant, and New Year’s resolution not to mention my desire to not have to struggle to submerge my anatomy in a half-full tub of tepid water to you again, in any way, shape, form, or language—domestic or foreign, and yes I realize I have used a double negative. I will not nag you over this. I will not. I cannot for I have oath-ed an oath.”

“Heater coil . . . got it.”

“No, I mean it. I’m on the nagging wagon.”

He looked skeptical and started making vague motions with his hands. He appeared to be cracking invisible coconuts with an invisible boulder shaped tool.

“I mean it, Sherwood, I will not mention this to you again, and I will not fix it myself or employ anyone else to do so; why you may ask, because I’m a stubborn piece of work. That’s why. Consider it a psychological study in the socio-ramifications of motivating men with repetitive words of infinite negativity to get stuff done. ”

He cracked more invisible coconuts.

“I mean it; this is my last nag on the subject.” And it was.

He appeared to be sharpening his invisible boulder tool.

A month passed.

I tried sponge bathing out of a bucket of steaming hot water. It was messy.

Two months passed.

I gave a method of full body water rotation a try—back, front, side, side, back to back. By the time I got back to my back, I was usually crying.

Three, four, and then seven months swirled away like the soapy water at the end of a luxurious soak, and still I nagged not.

I tried showering with my much taller husband but got smacked in the eye with his elbow so many times, I worried about retina damage, besides he hogged the hot water, and I hate showering.

Nine and then ten months passed away like the dew from Heaven. I remained a goose bumpy nag-less wonder: no request, reminder, or repetitive phrase passed my blue lips.

Time continued to pass.

How long did it take for my stones-as-tools-man to fix the hot water heater coil without the stimulus or benefit of my nagging?

ONE YEAR, one chilled bone aching year, that’s how long, and then while changing out the heater coil, my husband stabbed himself in the knuckle with a screwdriver, exposing the tendon. He tried holding the gaping flesh together with a dinosaur bandage. It took six stitches to finally cover the tendon up—twelve months, six stitches, and the development of an irrational fear of goose flesh that’s how long.

Abandoning my nag free experiment, I have since honed my harping to a fine and delicate art, surpassed only by my liberal use of satiric and scathing one-liners. I can nag in my sleep. I can nag in reverse. Sometimes I nag using only my eyes and a well-timed twitch. I can’t say that my husband moves any faster, but at least I can make my contribution to any given problem feel like a sharp stick of motivating female persuasion.

Linda (Rub a Dub-Dub) Zern
























 

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 not 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 it 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 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

















 

The boycott is on. I refuse to watch anything remotely related to “reality” on television: not crab hunting shows, or shows about people who have tumors that look like crabs, or (and especially) anything depicting women who exist in a permanent state of crabby-ville. Reality is crap and apparently full of crabs! And I say this in the most non-judgmental and inclusive way of which I am capable.

My boycott has resulted in the relentless purchasing and endless viewing of movies with dialog, plots, and (if I’m super lucky) lace jabots. The Young Victoria is my latest addition to a growing collection of movies where the touch of two ungloved hands can make your back teeth itch and the skin of your earlobes sweaty. As I am wont to say, “It ain’t real life, but it should be.”

I make my husband, Sherwood the information technology wizard, watch. He struggles a bit with my BBC, PBS, and Master Piece Theater devotion. Sherwood is a crab man.

As the young Queen Victoria sailed across an elegant dance floor in her voluminous ball gown with the prince of her dreams, I look over to notice my husband’s face has become a puddle of perplexity.

“Why aren’t they speaking Hamletonian?” My own face crumpled and sagged into drooping confusion. My jowls may have hit my chest.

“Speaking . . . what?”

“You know those Hamletonian words.” Sherwood has a habit of assuming I have access to his database, and that I know the password and his username. I began attempting to decode the Sherwood-speak, as the young queen on the screen continued to twirl—her skirt flying out like a standard from a castle tower.

“Hamle . . . tonian . . . do you mean Hamlet, the Danish prince?”

Sherwood looked like a man who would prefer to be watching crab hunting in a room full of crabby women than a movie about England’s longest reigning monarch to date.

“Isn’t this movie about English people?” he asked. “You know, English people that speak that Hamletonian type stuff?”

“Hamlet? Shakespeare’s tragic play about a Danish prince . . . that Hamlet? Are you trying to figure out why the actor’s aren’t speaking Shakespearean English?”

“How can Hamlet be Danish when he always speaks in that Shakespeare talk?” He scratched his earlobe looking perfectly serious, studious, and inquiring. I know my mouth was open. I remember my tongue drying out.

“Are you saying that Shakespeare, the English playwright, cannot write a story about someone not English, oh let’s say, a Danish guy, maybe a prince?”

Tilting his head in thoughtful contemplation, he concluded. “Listen, if the guy’s from Denmark then he should be speaking Denmarkian—not Hamletonian.” He continued to scratch but not his earlobe.

Prince Albert whispered into Victoria’s ear in cultured nineteenth century English.

“Sherwood, my love, if I hadn’t been there when they handed you the faux diploma at your graduation, I would wonder if you actually went to an institution of higher learning. I swear. What did you learn?”

He scoffed. “Oh, I went to college. You try taking Robot Vision sometime and live to tell about it.”

“How could I tell about it? I don’t speak Robotmus Vis-onian.”

“Exactly!”

Mostly, I just watch my wonderful movies alone— appreciating the costumes, the drama, the repressed sexuality, and the crazy people locked in the attics, and when I’m really feeling the bite of reality I pop in Hamlet and watch the Danish prince drive Ophelia to a watery grave—all in classic Hamletonian.

Linda (Speakeasy) Zern














 

“YaYa, why you talk you-self all time?” Zoe’s four-year old forehead attempted to form wrinkles as she pondered one of the great curiosities of life—adult insanity.

“What makes you think I’m by myself?” I distracted her with a bright, shiny lollipop.

Talking to myself is a way of life for me, providing a multitude of benefits and advantages. I cannot help it if society has not embraced the diversity that constitutes “talking to one’s own self” in a manner resembling Sally Fields playing Sybil. Society is a stuck up girl wearing chipped nail polish.

I talk to myself because I’m the best listener I know, and I’m smart enough to understand what I’m saying.

Sometimes when I’m talking to those people who come and eat my poorly prepared hamburger meat on the weekends, I can’t even finish a sentence, before they’re jumping all over what I’m saying with both feet and throwing their opinions around like people planning a revolution while standing next to a guillotine. It finally got so nutty I had to institute the Zern family conch shell policy.

It’s simple. If you’re holding the conch shell, you can talk. It’s a kind of “Lord of the Flies” thing. If you’re holding the conch shell everybody else has to zip it and listen. My husband brought the Queen Conch shell back from a diving trip to the Bahamas when he was a teenager and it was still legal to rape the oceans. That’s how old we are, so talking to myself is probably not as big or weird of a deal as I think.

Often I talk to myself to be able to hear how it’s all going to sound when I finally get an opportunity to talk to real humans or right some great societal wrong. For example I could say, “Listen, Smart Alec, if you put that parking ticket on my truck, I’m going to tear my clothes off and howl at the traffic light,” but that might come off sounding a bit over the top or even insane.

So I practice—out loud—to myself. I say, sometimes while looking in a mirror, “Oh my gracious, Campus Security Officer . . . um . . . (insert shy smile or grimace while looking at name tag) Fink, Officer Fink, I had no idea that this was a faculty parking area. I didn’t realize that sign, way down there behind that bush and around the corner blocked by that massive hump of dirt, applied to this area of the parking lot as well. Color me chagrined.”

Sometimes I give speeches and then give myself a standing ovation. It’s very gratifying.

Sometimes I practice what I would say on David Letterman, but don’t tell anybody.

A couple of times I’ve been able to say to myself what I wished I’d said that time, if I’d had a minute to think about what I was saying before I actually said it. You know what I’m saying?

Once, I told Napoleon off, but I don’t want to talk about it.

Finally, I got tired of telling myself clever anecdotes, which are short accounts of some interesting or humorous incident, and started to write them down, making me an anecdotist and not some crazy lady who wanders around her house wearing a frayed jeans vest and mumbling to herself.

Linda (Vests Have Handy Pockets) Zern