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The Newsletter >
The Way of the Zern or Zapped
June 10, 2008
"THEY" SAID I SHOULD START A BLOG. "THEY" SAID THAT IT'S
ALL THE RAGE. "THEY" WERE KIND OF NAGGY ABOUT IT. SO, I
DID. THE BEST PART OF THIS BLOG BUSINESS IS THAT IT'S EASY
TO MAKE COMMENTS, ESPECIALLY WHEN I USE THE WORD THROUGH
FOR THROW. SO, TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT AT . . .
ZIPPITYZERNS.BLOGSPOT.COM
My friends,
When we were young and newly hatched—also young and in
love—my husband and I lived with our four young children on
the Space Coast of Florida. The massive propulsion of
rocket and shuttle launches from Cape Kennedy often rocked
the windows and doors of our little love cottage. We were
always properly respectful and impressed by the reach of
mankind’s achievements.
It was a point of pride to stop whatever we were doing
(dishes, dinner, dancing, sleeping, fist fighting, etc.) to
watch the eastern horizon—hands on hearts, tears in eyes—as
the United States of America raced into the frontier of
space.
One deep, dark morning (about 2:00 am) I shook my
husband awake to watch yet another triumph of human
advancement.
“Get up,” I mumbled to Sherwood, “the shuttle’s going
up. We gotta’ watch.”
Sherwood moaned, “The garbage is out all ready. Let me
die.” He did not open his eyes.
“Come on. We should watch. Night launches are amazing.”
He dragged himself upright and clung to the window
ledge behind our bed. We knelt, with our chins braced on
the ledge, our bleary eyes fixed on a blazing light in the
eastern sky. We watched. The light did not appear to move.
We stared some more. The light remain fixed. We struggled
to focus. The light blazed away.
We waited for the light to fade into the blackness of
space. It did not. We watched and watched and watched. The
light stubbornly refused to move.
At last, collapsing back into my pillow I said, “Honey,
go back to sleep.”
Sounding confused, miffed, and a little whiney Sherwood
asked, “Why?”
“Because for the last eight to ten minutes we’ve been
staring at our next door neighbor’s bug zapper.”
He went back to sleep. And I lived to worship at the
altar of space exploration another day.
This story pretty much sums up who we are, and how we
got this way—excessive staring at bug zappers. And this is
my blog, a space-age way of recording one’s thoughts,
ideas, embarrassments, and foibles for the entire known
world. Once upon a time, I would have made this record on
papyrus, rolled it up, stuffed it into a ceramic jar, and
asked to have the whole thing buried with me in my
sarcophagus. I still might.
Disclaimer: Some of the stuff you will read here is
true. Some of it is not. Some of it is the result of
wishful thinking. Some of it is the result of too much
thinking, and some of it is the result of too little
thinking. But all of it will be written with joy and
laughter, because the alternative is despair and weeping,
and isn’t there more than enough of that stuff out there?
Thank you for your support,
Linda (Zippity the Zapped) Zern
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