I moved through the martial arts forms like a small but wiry tiger, my punches clean, my kicks elegant. I prided myself on being able to kick as high as the average bully’s pumpkin head. Think Yoda with arthritis.

Having abandoned dignity some years back, I never held back on the martial arts yelling part. I was always the loudest. My goal was to perfect the shouting bit so that I could kill people by yelling at them. Sometimes I yelled so loud I scared the little kids.

Secretly I was pleased when this happened.

Once in a while, I would lose focus and start to think that I was smooth, hot stuff in my white outfit (size – large child) and the great cosmic force in the universe (whom I like to call God) would orchestrate my downfall—also known as my humiliation.

I moved through the martial arts exercise like a small but wiry tiger, my punches clean, my kicks elegant. Finishing, I slapped the sides of my legs, bowed low from the waist, and allowed myself a small but triumphant smile, feeling like a miniature Ninja warrior.

The woman behind me tapped my shoulder.

I whirled, my tiny fists of fury moving to block any aggression or insult. I thought about kicking her in the head. I yelled—loudly.

She raised one eyebrow.

“Excuse me, but I think you should know that there is a dryer sheet stuck to the back of your uniform. It looks generic."

“Of course there is,” I said. And of course it was a generic brand; everyone knows the generic dryer sheets and the brand name dryer sheets are made in the same darn factory. I’m nobody’s fool.

Reaching back over my shoulder I felt for the offending laundry aid, and because I was fairly warmed up from punching and kicking imaginary pumpkin headed bullies, I was able to contort myself sufficiently, first one way and then the other, to peel the dryer sheet from the middle of my back.

The woman watched, offering no help, hints, or assistance.

I considered kicking her in the head. Instead I balled the dryer sheet up in one hand, demonstrated a perfect roundhouse kick, and promptly wet my pants.

And that’s why I never worry about getting too pleased with myself or snooty. The universe has its eye on me and makes sure to dope slap me right back into my proper place and mind set. As soon as I even start thinking I’m cool I wind up having to wipe my butt with a plane ticket (don’t ask.)

I’m taking no chances on having the universe expose the truly embarrassing craziness about me, or as I like to say to my husband, “Think about it; I haven’t even begun to write about the really funny stuff.”

Linda (Punch Drunk) Zern



 

YOU ARE NOT PRESENTLY CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET – (So quit tapping pointlessly at your keyboard, ‘ya big dummy!)



The Internet repairman waved a six-inch length of cable at me. Four murderous gouges nearly severed its smooth cylindrical surface, leaving exposed wires to dissolve in the hostile atmosphere--also rain.

“Wow! Someone really went at this, probably with a shovel or maybe an ax.” He examined the gouges more closely. “Maybe a butcher knife.”

Slowly, I raised my hand and hung my head.

“I did it. I confess. I killed the cable,” I said, feeling sheepish, chagrined, and goofy all rolled into one. “I thought it was just a really stubborn root when I was planting caladiums. Really, really stubborn! A bad stubborn . . . root.”

“You might want to hang on to this.” He handed me the butchered hunk of Internet cable.

“Please, don’t tell my family. This isn’t the first time I killed the cable. The first time, I wasn’t anywhere near it when I ran over it with the lawnmower.”

He began to inch his way to his repair truck, never taking his eyes off of me.

“Sure, lady, sure! Sounds reasonable!” And then under his breath, “When Dish Network freezes over.” He ran the last few steps to his truck.

I felt bad for frightening the computer repairman that way.

When I was a girl, technical electronic difficulties were handled with tin foil and rabbit ears. There were three television channels and a lot of fuzzy static. The static came in black and white. Computers came in warehouses.

Now technical electronic difficulties are handled with modem connection adjustments, phone calls bounced off of satellites to help centers in places I can’t spell, and appointments with repairmen apparently carrying submarine sonar equipment.

A week after our Internet connection to the worldwide universe went dark, a repairman showed up at our house with his sonar-cable-finding-wand. He checked connections. He climbed poles. He dug up cable. He waved his sonar-cable-finding-wand about.

The whole process reminded me of a water diviner trying to locate water with a forked stick.

When he asked me if there had been any “digging” in the general area of the buried cable, I felt my stomach flip and then flop. Sure there had been digging.

I am a digger. I am a habitual digger. I own five shovels, which I leave stuck in random spots all over our property, and then forget where I stuck them. That’s why there are five shovels.

And no Internet service—temporarily.

There are days I long for tin foil and completing a conversation with my husband without having him go into an unblinking, unrelated conversation with the tooth in his ear. I think the tooth is blue.

Linda (Dirt Digger) Zern





 

Reagan, our new grand daughter, doesn’t look real. She looks like my daughter and her husband went and bought her at Toys R Us. She is our seventh grandchild.

When our first grand daughter was born my friends asked if being a grandmother had “hit me” yet. It “hit me” the day the first grandbaby came home from the hospital and my husband and I were in bed that night.

I turned to him and said in reverent tones, “Hey, we’re not going to have to get up tonight—not once. Wow, it’s good to be us.”

We embraced, rolled over, and went fast to sleep—until we had to get up to tinkle.

Or as a friend of mine put it, when you get the phone call from the new mom and she says that grandma should come quick and get this crazy kid or (fill in the blank) and then you, grandmother supreme, swoop in and with your wisdom, experience, and superior night’s sleep save the day. It’s grand to be us.

It’s tough being the grandparent too, because you have to wave goodbye as your perfect, fresh, doll-like, grand child is driven home by its parents, two people that you love beyond adjectives, recognizing that the only living thing the two of them have ever been responsible for was a Bonsai tree. They killed it. They had a palm tree, but it got infested with some kind of leaf hopping spider. They never owned a dog.

So you worry a bit and you catch yourself yelling bits of advice as they drive away. “Don’t over water the baby and check her for spiders.”

To be fair, I’ve had moments of “over watering the baby.”

Like the time my oldest son, Aric, retreated to his bedroom, locked his door, and failed to emerge for an entire two week period during the troubled teen years. I finally identified myself, slid my badge under the door, and then kicked the door in. Having to get the door jam fixed was annoying and not my finest moment, but I didn’t know you could jimmy the door off its hinges with a butter knife back then.

SSG Aric Zern later called me to apologize for being a teenage butt-head; he was teaching new soldiers how to throw hand grenades—into a volcano at the time, some of the recruits may have been butt-heads.

Or the time I wore Adam’s baseball cup around my neck like the Hope diamond. When Adam forgot his baseball cup for the sixty-second time and I had to make the thirty-minute trip back home—again, I took drastic over watering the Bonsai plant steps. I wrestled the cup from behind the dresser, strung the cup on a shoestring, wrote THIS IS ADAM’S CUP on the front with permanent marker, and wore it to the ball field. A few thought me harsh.

Perhaps. Then again Adam never forgot his baseball cup again and is planning to be a lawyer, probably to sue me.

Of course, who can forget the time I spanked Maren for dancing naked with a tube of Chapstick tucked between her butt cheeks. She was four and we had discussed naked Chapstick dancing and how much it upset her siblings—her parents, and society in general. I’m not sure if it’s a spanking offense, but it seemed right at the time.

Maren and her husband just brought baby Reagan, the living doll, home from the hospital. I hope Maren hides the Chapstick.

Then there was the time that Heather (who had been waiting breathlessly for her breasts to grow for about six years) came careening down the stairs yelling, “Mom, Mom, they’ve come. My boobs are here.” And I . . . laughed. LAUGHED! Outloud! I said, “No honey, you’re just cold.” Is it any wonder she over watered her Bonsai tree?

Heather and Phillip have one lovely daughter and three wild and wooly boys and don’t have time to kill Bonsai trees anymore.

So much time, so many mistakes to make, but one of the nicest things about being a mother who has achieved grand status is knowing that it will all work out. Kids are resilient. Parents figure it out, and our Father in Heaven allows for a pretty generous learning curve for most of this stuff we call life.

Linda (Seven Up) Zern





 

In honor of our upcoming thirty-second wedding anniversary I would like to hie back to a simpler time, a time when my husband and I realized we were outnumbered by the children, and we were forced to institute the following rule: the first one to run away had to take the crazy kids—all the crazy, gum chomping, kids. Good times.

When Sherwood and I were young we produced a lot of little kids, a lot of grubby, grimy little kids, who because of their love affair with dirt and grime required a ton of hosing off—also bathing. When these little kids took baths they sometimes chewed huge wads of bubble gum. I didn’t mind; it kept them quiet. (For a while they tried to bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with them into the tub, but I put the hoodoo on that right away.)

In the early days and even though we had a lot of filthy children, we had only one bathroom. It had one bathtub. One fine evening, Sherwood decided to take a bath in our one and only bathtub, the very same tub our children had used earlier that evening.

From the bathroom I heard the haunting boom of my husband’s voice.

“Linda, get in here.” His voice was thick with some emotion I found hard to identify. It was repugnance.

Naked and dripping, he stood leaning against the sink, his arms braced against the porcelain, bent slightly forward at the waist. He was not smiling or winking.

“Look at this.” He pointed to his hairy damp butt. He added, “Is that what I think it is?”

Me, I’m a funny girl, I asked, “Is this a test of some kind?” I did not look.

“No, I mean it. Look at my butt.”

Unconvinced and without sympathy I refused.

“I’m not looking at your butt. You can’t make me.”

He pointed harder at his backside, completely devoid of any spirit of good-natured high jinx. There was more back and forth, denial and insistence and such, but I’ll spare you. I finally realized that this might be a serious situation causing real distress for my husband because he’d been standing there leaning against the sink, naked and pointing at himself for, well, longer than was good for either one of us.

I bent down. I looked.

Sure enough, there it was, a wad of Double Bubble chewing gum the size of a hamster’s head nestled in . . . ummm. . . well, just nestled.

I said, “Oops.”

He said, “Get it off.”

I asked, “How?”

It was a good question. I believe I missed the chapter in Home Economics dealing with “butt hair gum removal.”

I’d heard a rumor once—something club soda—stains or something, but I didn’t think club soda was going to apply in this case. I knew you could use ice to freeze gum and then chip it off of stuff, but chipping seemed the wrong sort of action to take. Pulling was right out. Shaving/cutting seemed promising, but it was going to be close work.

I can remember hoping that my hand was going to be steady enough, what with the laughing and all.

The real problem is that there just isn’t any kind of hotline for this. I blame the government.

Let me just report that the operation was a success, and I employed a combination of techniques.

To the children and now grand children I would like to say, “Let this be a lesson to you. Never chew gum in the bathtub. Chewing gum in the bathtub can make your fathers have to have their butts shaved. There are reasons for family rules. Rules are our friends, and YaYa doesn’t make this stuff up. She has experience. She’s lived.”

Linda (Steady Now) Zern









 

“Stop licking that baby!”

You say it. Then you hear it. And then you wonder how your life has distilled down to this single moment of making bizarre even insane rules that at first blush reflect badly on your religion, culture, heritage, and even mental health.

“No! I mean it! If you don’t stop licking that baby—I’ll lick you!”

And you mean it, because the baby’s siblings are crazy, and if you don’t stop them they’ll lick that baby until it screams, and then you’re really in the soup.

As a young mother I once made a list of ten family commandments. Commandment number one read: Thou shalt not eat PB&J sandwiches with plastic vampire teeth in your mouth. Adorable, right?

Not so adorable when the kids, having tried to eat the—above mentioned—sandwiches, cried because their plastic vampire teeth became so gicky with peanut butter slime as to be rendered disgusting. I pulled the plug on the vampire teeth denture experiment after catching myself brushing peanut butter drool out of plastic tooth crevices with my own personal toothbrush one too many times, or maybe it was one time.

When making family laws, rules, or commandments it is (in my professional opinion) important to be clear and specific. Thou shalt not make mommy want to run away is way too vague—also suggestive and possibly fraught with legal ramifications. The children may in fact, want to make mommy run away and are just calculating the amount of baby licking required to achieve their nefarious goal of trying to make mom look like the one who did the crazy running away stuff. I always check the wall of photos at Walmart to be sure my family hasn’t posted my picture up there—just to make me nuts.

An example of a much more efficaciously worded rule would be, anyone still defecating in his or her pants shall not, will not, or better not be allowed to carry a hammer or torque wrench around.

I’ve actually heard myself yell, “Someone find that little, short kid in the diaper; he’s got a hammer—possibly a torque wrench.”

I have found that as children mature the rules don’t have to be quite so specific and a parent can expect to fall back to the default setting of that great old standby, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.” Simple, clear, concise, and begs the question, “Do I really want other people licking my baby, lollipop, or dog bowl?”

I recently sat through a lecture at my new college covering the honor code rules, as honor is understood and defined in the 21st century. I was shocked. It reminded me of PB&J and vampire teeth and really small children, prone to licking things—not food.

It read (in part) Violations of the Academic Honor Code: PLAGIARISM, CHEATING, UNAUTHORIZED COLLABORATION, SUBMISSION OF WORK PREPARED FOR ANOTHER COURSE, FABRICATION, FACILITATING ACADEMIC DIS-HONESTY, VIOLATION OF TESTING CONDITIONS, LYING, FAILURE TO REPORT AN HONOR CODE VIOLATION.

I wanted to ask the difference between fabrication and lying, but I was too intimidated, and I had plastic vampire teeth in my mouth at the time.

Didn’t we have an honor code, once upon a time? Wasn’t it fairly simple and easily reprinted? Weren’t there like ten basic rules of civilized behavior? I seem to remember hearing something about it—once upon a time in a land far, far away.

Linda (R is for Rules) Zern
 

At first we blamed the smell on our neighbor; it was a chicken pucky, burning bird feathers, vulture spit combo kind of smell. It was bad. Mr. Medina’s funny farm and goat emporium next door is always high on the list of usual odor producing suspects.

Then we blamed the giant, pulsating, black muck wetlands (also known as a bog) out in the back of our property but then it quit raining and that dried up.

Another possibility for the noxious fumes presented itself in the form of our other neighbor’s temporary, quite possibly illegal attempt at creating a personal landfill. We live in the county and not in the city limits; the rules are different out here—a lot of people collect giant piles of rubble for no apparent reason.

However, when standing on our own back porch the smell of rotten eggs seemed so concentrated, so pungent we were forced to form yet another working theory for the nasty smell.

“It’s the propane tank. It’s leaking.” Sherwood, the man and husband, sounded so sure, so crime scene investigator confident, I had to agree.

“I’ll put it out in the yard so it doesn’t kill us.” The propane tank came to rest in the flower garden next to the caladiums. We were saved, except that we weren’t.

Something still stank.

Sooner or later truth rears its ugly head or in this case its stinking tail, and the facts are as follows; our home is surrounded by opossum holes (holes full of opossums): one under the bridge, one under the hedge, one under the back porch, and one under the bush next to the backdoor. We are surrounded.

Opossums live in these holes. Opossums are nocturnal. Opossums, when not hanging from their tails from tree limbs in a charming “mother nature sure is cute” fashion, opossums wander about at night getting themselves murdered. Then they stagger back to their holes, crawl in, die, and then stink in a leaking propane, goat burning, bog festering, landfill rotting kind of way.

The good news is opossums live in holes, eliminating the need to dig holes when they die, unless they decide to die under the chicken coop, and then all bets are off.

The week of the opossum kill, a good friend of mine wrote on a social networking site about her wildly romantic encounter in a NYC subway station (similar to opossum holes but larger) and how the man who bumped into her was gorgeous, with an English accent, wore cuff links, and had a business card—no foul odors were mentioned.

In the meantime, I was throwing dirt on a maggot ridden rotting opossum carcass.

Shaking my boney fist at the Heavens, I snarled, “Great, I’ve been reduced to burying road kill! And still working for free, come to think of it, everything I’ve ever done my whole life, I’ve done for free. I’m like freak’en Ghandi.” I added this last bit under my breath, to no one who cared, under an indifferent sky—alone.

The bad news is there are three more opossums out there waiting to become road kill and not one of them wears cuff links.


Linda (Shovel Ready) Zern






 

When I was a girl—love but mostly S-E-X—remained hidden beneath
an ellipsis of ink. The hero swooped to take the girl in his arms, she forgot
to remember to struggle, long enough to stay, and then . . . dot, dot, dot . . .
It was delicious, tantalizing punctuation—marking dog-eared pages, full of anticipation and imagination.

And now—not so much.

In today’s world romance isn’t for the faint of heart or subtle of gesture; the girls have no clothes on, and the boys don’t wear gloves, which is too bad because once upon a time (according to Jane Austen) when a man touched your naked hand with his naked hand you were engaged. I know it’s true. I watch a lot of Masterpiece Theater.

I’m happy to report that at our cave . . . oops, sorry . . . I mean house, at our house, romance is still something of a mystery, surrounded by subtleties, covered with the gentle breeze of confusion, wrapped up in code words.

Smiling, I walked into my husband’s office recently, only to be greeted with the following invitation (quite possibly threat, the jury is still out.)

Without looking at me, he said, “Careful or I’ll take you over there on that tofu and . . .”

Confused and a little alarmed I scanned our office and saw stuffed bookshelves, filing cabinets, computer junk, and pillows lining a . . .

“Are you trying to say futon? You’ll take me over there on the futon and . . .
Because, I can’t begin to describe to you how disturbed I am by the idea of you doing unspeakable things to my person on tofu. Maybe you’re having word seizures or . . .”

“I’m not having Caesars or . . .”

“Not Caesars, I said . . .”

At this point in the exchange, he removed one glove and stretched out a naked hand towards my person and in the general direction of the futon. I ran and then . . .

Sometimes in dreams I imagine long fingers of mist rolling across the moors behind the swamp in our backyard—out past the horse trailer with the busted tail light—while the moon drifts across a jaundiced sky, and my heart thumps loudly in the silent chambers of my heart, as I hide under the long folding couch resembling a bent bed; into the cloying depths of my dreaming night I can often hear Lord Sherwood hissing, “Let’s get it on.”

Hey, there’s a reason I wear my hair exceedingly short—the better not to be dragged off to some misnamed lair resembling a cave, but that’s romance for you in this modern day and time.

One minute you’re a lady wearing gloves and the next minute he’s got you on tofu and . . . dot, dot, dot . . .

Linda (Lady Lovelorn) Zern


















 

The day the county tells me I can’t have a bonfire or chickens in my yard is the day I pack my bags and relocate to . . . Mount Doom or Cuba or the Florida outback or Alaska. I haven’t decided yet. Country living is three things: poultry, walking outside in the dead of the night in your **scanties, and—of course—fire (brush, trash, and bon.)


Everyone burns stuff in our neighborhood. Mr Medina, next-door neighbor and three-legged animal collector, occasionally lights up a bonfire that smells like a ritual goat sacrifice, and when he’s over there stoking his strange flames of yowling stink I have forbidden the grand children to breathe deeply, but this is the country and so we live and let burn. It’s our way.


The only real fire etiquette rule around here is “Thou shalt not burn down thy neighbor’s anything.”


So when Heather yelled, “Holy smokes! Phillip’s set the giant pile of bone dry sticks on fire,” and I spun around in time to see a fire shooting two stories in the air with flames licking at the brittle edge of a small stand of gasoline filled pine trees next to the chicken coop, I admit to being a bit unprepared. My son-in-law is like that. He’s an Eagle Scout. He has a merit badge for setting things on fire and then putting the fires out with urine.


Running to assess the potential for neighborhood conflagration, I ran to the bonfire only to be driven back by the force of the heat, as a four-year old wandered by to throw a random broom into the fire. Phillip appeared from my barn with a handful of scrap wood used for picture frames and staking tomatoes.


“Hey, Mister, where’re you going with that wooden stuff?”


The Eagle Scout didn’t slow down. “You’ll thank me some day.”


I doubted it.


A six-year old dragged a perfectly decent wooden footstool with only a few spider webs on it towards the fire pit. I started to argue with the six-year old about the value of furniture restoration and refurbishment when I heard Phillip yelp.


“Mr. Randy’s field is on fire.” My other neighbor’s field was, in fact, on fire. I ran for the end of the hose, sensing more than seeing Phillip’s race for the spigot. “Hit it!” I yelled, thinking fire hose; instead I got Cub Scout weeing on a campfire from a garden hose that was nowhere near long enough.


“Seriously Phillip, must have more water! The flames have jumped the property line.” I watched flames nibbling at clumps of newly mown grass, eating their way towards Mr. Randy’s own burn pile, Mr. Randy’s barn, and Mr. Randy’s dirt digger. That’s what the kids call a front-end loader—a dirt digger. Isn’t that cute? Yea, well, we almost set it on fire.


Then Phillip cut my water off entirely. I stared in disbelief at the end of my DRY hose, as Phillip raced from spigot to spigot in a convoluted hose re-distribution plan.


“Phillip! You are a terrible fireman! And I’m not kidding.” Fire continued to spread as Phillip popped out from behind the chicken coop like a cork out of a bottle dragging an auxiliary hose.


“Here. Screw these together.” Phillip flung hose at me and disappeared. I didn’t want to tell him that I had a hard time screwing hoses together even when things weren’t on fire, but panic gave me strength and the threat of being sued for burning down my neighbor gave me dexterity beyond my own.


Luckily we’ve had a wet spring and summer and Mr. Randy’s field was not the tinderbox it could have been, and water flowed eventually in sufficient strength and straightness, and so the dirt digger was saved—and so was our home owner’s insurance deductible.


And the minute the county tells me I can’t burn down the neighbor’s barn—almost, pictures featuring those “unspeakable” ex-husbands, ancient tax records, raggedy scanties, or old algebra homework, I’m out of here—just don’t know where yet.


Linda (Fire Starter) Zern

** Scanties: A southern word meaning clothes traditionally worn under the clothes worn on the top; clothes you can wear in the middle of the night outside in the country because no one can see you unless there’s a fire somewhere.




















 

My husband’s two favorite words in the English language are complimentary and sex, and if he ever sees them used together in a sentence he’s going to stroke out. I exaggerate. Still, I am concerned that his lifestyle is becoming, how shall I say, A GREAT BIG FAT SPOILED PROBLEM.

Sherwood is a computer consultant with the brand new title of Director. (Maybe it means he’s a computer consultant who directs . . . computers? I don’t know what it means.) But here’s his job description: rich “clients” pay him to tell them what they want to hear; they give him large amounts of money to be at their beck and call; these “clients” pay for his food, lodging, and transportation; sometimes they take him to dinner; often they treat him as if they own him, and he is often propositioned and made to feel cheap and used.

My real concern isn’t how Sherwood does business; it’s that he likes it so much.

For the right amount of Marriot “points” (complimentary points given by the hotel chain in some incomprehensible rotating scale that pass as a kind of faux currency to be used in an ivisible Marriot black market) for the right amount of points, my husband will do anything. For the right amount of points he will take cold showers, sleep in dirty beds, stay in hotel rooms without alarm clocks, channel changers, or sheets. He is “saving up” and when the service is deplorable he barters for more points. If he collects enough points he can trade them for cruises, free hotel rooms, and ownership of a small Greek island.

He says when he gets “enough” points we will spend a weekend alone in a Marriot, of my choice. I don’t believe him. I don’t think there are enough points in the world to satisfy the bottomless pit of hunger that “living on the road” has produced in my husband.

At any moment, day or night, he can tell you the exact number of points he now has, how many points he will soon acquire, and how many points he needs to get the good stuff (presumably that Greek Island.)

“Only ten million more to go,” he will say, a savage gleam in his computer-directing eye.

He can even quote you the total number of points he will have accumulated at the exact moment of his death—based on various longevity studies. The rest of the family finds his idiot savant ability somewhat unnerving, but then again, sometimes we take him to parties and show him off.

In addition to the endless pursuit of complimentary points, Sherwood has developed an entire value system based on all things free. If it’s on a plate and looks like it’s not tied down or wax, he will help himself. I watched him come out of an apartment leasing office with his mouth and hands stuffed with complimentary cookies.

“These are great,” he mumbled, cookie crumbs spewing onto his shirt.

A nice young leasing agent stuck his head out of the office as Sherwood left and said, “Hey, Mister, those cookies are for the kids.”

“Run,” Sherwood shouted around chocolate chip dust.

We ran. He turned to me as we leapfrogged over a hedge and asked, “Want one?”

“You’d eat dirt if had the word free on it.” I raked a branch of evergreen from my hair.

Complimentary is a serious business in my husband’s Marriot Rewards Program world-view. Even now, when I travel with Mr. Computer-Director it is customary for him to wake me gently at 6:00am with a sweet whisper. “Come on! There’s a complimentary breakfast bar. Let’s hit it and hit it hard. Oh, and wear your pants with the big pockets.”

Actually it’s become our family motto—Hit it! And hit it hard! No, really, we’ve embroidered it on stuff.

Our family crest is a field of complimentary pillow chocolates with two rampant toothbrushes riding on an ice bucket.

Linda (Complimentary Upon Request) Zern






 

How could I know that butter would be my undoing?

Our days are so often filled with those seemingly inconsequential decisions dictated to us by heritage, DNA, and the chemistry of our own evolution from hagfish, that precipitate the unanticipated cascade of events that taken together form the framework of our lives—roads less traveled and all of that mush. I have no idea what that last sentence means. I blame my mouthy Irish ancestors for its very existence.

What can I say? I like butter on crackers—a lot of butter. I blame my love of oily spreads on my socialistic Danish ancestors and their love affair with lard.

Having been lured to America by wild tales of endless opportunity and vast bottomless vats of cheap, available bacon fat, my fair skinned people left their native fiords and quaint fishing villages in Scandinavia and with little more than two nickels in their pockets and a lot of recipes calling for large amounts of grease, they came. They came, and they settled in Chicago where they immediately went to work, played accordions, and smeared butter on crackers.

Passing their Danish butter-loving heritage down to their children and grand children they taught us to think of butter on crackers as a viable alternative to junk food—junk food not having been invented yet, and so I like great globs of butter on crackers; it comforts me, which horrifies my McDonald’s hamburger swilling children.

Buying butter is in my blood—so to speak.

Which is why I almost died at Walmart in front of the dairy case where they store tubs of, you guessed it, butter, butter substitutes, or vegetable oil spreads.

In a brilliant scheme for sopping up spills, floods, drips, and leaks Walmart now uses sausage shaped bags of absorbent beads about the size of guinea pigs—the bags not the beads; think, baby diapers for puddles. Unfortunately, like baby diapers, these soaker sausages have a carrying capacity and then they explode, forming a beady oil slick capable of launching battleships or dislocating a little old lady’s hip. When I hit the puddle of exploded greased beads and my legs slid to opposite ends of the store, I could feel my hips doing odd and uncomfortable things; I could also feel my throat screaming.

In that slow motion moment I had two thoughts:

1) Thank goodness I take Zumba (a Latin based exercise class requiring the frequent and even excessive use of one’s hips.)

2) Who should I ask about getting the security tape for download on YouTube?

Several people pointed at my screaming dilemma as I clung for my life to the lip of the butter case, straddle legged as a new born foal, and one employee came over to ask me if I was okay—also to blame corporate headquarters for their new policy of using the super soaker sausage beads.

No one thought to get a mop.

Later, as I reflected on that out of control cascade of consequences of having been raised a butter loving Dane, I realized that my whole life had passed before my eyes, and that a majority of said life has been spent buying vegetable oil spreads—also butter substitutes.

Frankly, the entire incident made my blood boil, a reaction I blame on my Native American heritage, a heritage typified by the hunting of large sharp fanged mammals for their grease, which my ancestors proceeded to rub into their own hair.

Linda (Woman Down in Dairy!) Zern