College Age – The Final Frontier


For thirty years I’ve avoided taking college algebra, by taking every other college class offered under the academic sun: Mythology, Geology, Psychology, Film-ology, and any class remotely connected with the assemblage of letters into words to form sentences, that when arranged into paragraphs line up to create academic papers called, “I Love to Hear Myself Sound Smart—a Lot.” You know essays. Me likey the word thingys.

In the end, however, people started to notice that I have approximately 2,016 credits but no diploma, and boy have they gotten surly.

“Graduate already,” a grouchy twenty-something youngish adult demanded of me.

The youngish adult would have been easier to ignore except that it belonged to me, and I agree with it. It’s true. If I were my own kid, I would kick my own butt and say, “Graduate already, you bum.”

Except that I’m having a bundle of fun—kind of. It’s fun to sit behind Johnny Whooten in a 7:00 am class and have him turn around and ask me about my mysterious Voodoo study habits.

“How do you do it?” he asked.

I noticed that my friend, Johnny Whooten, smelled of Wild Turkey and depravity at 7 am in the morning.

“What’s that?”

“The good grades, how do you do it?” I also noticed that Johnny Whooten’s right hand trembled as he held his pen. A spider eating a bird was tattooed on his wrist. The pen leaked ink.

“I never skip class, read my assignments, do all my homework, take really good notes and then before the test, I re-copy my notes onto index cards which I commit to memory,” I said, pausing, trying to decide if I’d skipped anything.

Johnny Whooten looked at me as if I had just picked HIS nose—in public.

“Okay,” I said, trying again. “I sacrifice small children to a pagan idol that I keep in a shed in my backyard.”

“Lucky,” he mumbled.

Then Johnny Whooten nodded sagely, turned back to the front of the class, put his head down on his desk, and went into a Wild Turkey induced coma. I believe he was on scholarship.

I would hurry up and graduate, except that I love the learning of new things, and listening to the young and parrot-like repeat, “ George Bush and conservatives are (insert expletive here.)”

I would hurry up and graduate, except that I love bringing true diversity to my college campus and when teachers begin the semester by poling the students with, “Raise your hand if you’re a Republican,” then I get to raise my hand and say, “Is being a Republican going to be a problem for you?”

And when those teachers ask, “Are you a Republican?”

I get to say, “Why that’s none of your business, dearest professor o’ mine.”

I would hurry up and graduate, except that I love making a perfect score on my college algebra test—which is a real, live college math and not sad math for sillies—and giving a little victory cheer when I see the smiley face under the one hundred percent mark.

I got one of those today—a smiley face. My paper is on the refrigerator already. Don’t get me wrong. The day I finish with my college algebra class, I will be burning my overpriced, poorly designed algebra book on a pyre created from yellow legal pads filled with abstract mathematical scribbling and yard clippings—dancing pagan visitor’s welcome.

When someone asked me how I managed to make an ‘A’ on my algebra test, knowing my tragic math history, I said, “I study parts of my anatomy off.”

A girl next to me translated.

When she finished describing which bits of anatomy were required in the studying off process and she continued to be met with blank stares, I said, “Okay, actually, I sacrifice small children to a pagan idol.”

Several people nodded and one young man made a note.

Gosh it’s going to be hard to graduate.

Linda (Major-Minor) Zern




 

“Kip’s eating something,” my daughter yelled, pointing at her just turned one-year old. “I think it’s a dead frog.”

Swooping down from above, I pulled my grandson onto my lap and with a swish of my right pointer finger, I swiped his mouth and out popped a desiccated, mummified tree frog. Only later would I realize how practiced my actions had been—bend, reach, pull, swipe, empty oral cavity.

“Well?” my daughter wanted to know.

“Yep,” I said, “Dead frog.” I flipped the dead frog onto the coffee table in front of me.

“Ba-scussting,” observed the frog eater’s sister.

“No! Disgusting is the fact that the frog was almost re-animated into a zombie frog because of your brother’s magic baby spit.”

She stared at the now slimy dead frog looking for signs of zombie life. The one-year old howled for more dead frog.

Except ye . . . become as a little child.

My youngest son, Adam, waxed eloquent on the subject of Ayn Rand’s theories of the importance of individualism in opposition to the abstraction of the collective mentality by saying, “You know of course what Ayn Rand said about individualism in opposition to the abstraction of the collective mentality . . .”

My son had just raised his hand to punctuate a particularly salient point, when his four-year old stepdaughter turned away from her lunch plate to spit a chewed up noodle in a gooey wad at his feet.

He lost his train of thought. I lost my train of thought.

Then, with eyebrows raised and totally mystified, he asked the two questions we all want to ask everyone, “Why did you do that? Why would anyone want to do that?”


Suffer little children . . . and forbid them not.

“Grab that kid. He’s got no pants on,” someone shouted as a random two-year old streaked through the kitchen. Various people yelled. A few parental-types took off in hot pursuit.

Someone yelled, “Why won’t that kid keep his pants on?”

“Somebody find his pants,” someone else shouted. Pants hunters were dispatched.

The pants-less wonder jumped onto the couch and began a pants-less dance. Several people pointed and laughed—mostly kids and one grandfather. Eventually, the nudist was soon wrestled to the ground and re-pants.

Rumor has it that, of our two-year old grandson, a tiny girl from our church told her mother. “That’s Conner-Boy. He’s so funny. He takes his pants off in the nursery.”

. . . for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

My observations of the young and restless leads me to believe that heaven will be a very exciting place—full of fun and unexpected surprises. Then I watch Kip and Sadie learning to walk, and realize that no matter how many times they fall down—they ALWAYS get up--ALWAYS, and how full of hugs and kisses my grand daughters (Emma and Zoe) are, and how clearly Conner sees the world—mean people are bad and nice people are good. He sees no silly gray ambiguities the way we adults need to. My grandchildren teach me about tenacity, and kindness, and clarity—and heaven,

and I do believe.

Linda (Cup Runneth Over) Zern







 

“This butterfly net won’t hurt you, little chick! Here little, chick, chick. Come here.”

When you hear yourself saying something like this audibly, you will soon begin wondering exactly when—day, hour, minute—you crossed that strange, invisible line between “nice lady” and “the nut.”

One minute you’re being born, feet first or breech, just like those babies they left under a bush on some primal savannah for the hyenas to eat, because everyone knows that proper babies come head first, and it’s the contrary ones that come feet first, so it was tradition to get rid of those feet-first-babies under a bush before they could start real trouble—one minute you’re being born—wrong, and the next minute you’re chasing chickens with a butterfly net.

It’s then that you ask yourself, “How did this happen? Why did the dignity train leave without me? When did it leave? How come Hollywood can’t make movies that don’t preach up a storm about everything? Why is that last sentence a double negative?”

Then the chicken you’re chasing with a butterfly net darts right, but you were set to dodge left, and the five-pound Yorkshire Terrier that Santa brought to your grand daughter, but somehow he dropped off at your house by accident, joins in the chase and darts both right and left arriving at the screaming, fleeing chicken first, and bites it on the head, making you wonder why chicken retrieval and recovery has somehow fallen under your job description.

Before you can say, “Leave that baby under that bush over there,” you’ve caught Ploodle, the terrier, in your butterfly net. His wet little nose presses against the green netting. The chicken’s head is in his mouth. The chicken’s screaming beak pokes through the netting—screaming at you. You drag Ploodle off the chicken’s bony little head, and toss the dog by his scruffy scruff onto the back porch. The chicken lives—and escapes.

With renewed determination, you jump back into the chicken-chasing fray. Noticing that there are now, two chickens running wild in the yard. They’ve escaped from the dog crate you keep them in during the day, because you pulled the plastic poop tray out so that the chickens could peck at the ground and learn to be real chickens, before you move them from the office shower where they are now living, at night, to the chicken coop you finished roofing last summer.

These are special chickens you remember because they came in the mail, in a box that cheeped, which you found charming, so you dodge left with your butterfly net while the chickens dart right. In the end, you catch both pure bred, special mail order chickens from Minnesota and return them to the dog crate with their eight crate mates.

Ploodle, who believes with all his heart that all chickens are evil and are plotting to invade your home, take your women, and steal your precious metals, has not stopped barking throughout the entire butterfly net, chicken chasing scene. You pray that he will not be called to testify at the mental competency hearing.

These are the moments in a person’s life that I like to call the flaming cascade of unintended consequences: if I hadn’t ordered chickens, I would never have had to chase them around with a butterfly net, which sent Ploodle into a chicken killing frenzy, that made me crazy enough to yell strange things to chickens, which might have been overheard by a psychiatrist who might have been strolling by the backyard of our “farm,” where there’s a chicken coop, built by Jack or somebody.

Just think, once upon a time, I would have been one of those kids that you left under a bush for the hyenas and then I would have never ordered those idiot chickens.

Linda (Chicken Chaser) Zern