"Have Passport, Can Travel"

By Jerry Zezima

In case I am run out of the country, which is probably inevitable but would give me a great reason to have my own travel show, I just renewed my passport.

“Now I can visit my mother,” I told Jenn, a very nice postal employee who helped me and my wife, Sue, with our renewals at a post office branch on Long Island, New York.

“Where does your mother live?” asked Jenn.

“In Connecticut,” I replied.

“You don’t need a passport for that,” she said. “At least, not yet.”

“I can’t afford to go anywhere else,” I said. “But if I had a TV series, I would get paid to travel the world. If Stanley Tucci, Eugene Levy and Conan O’Brien can do it, so can I.”

“I’m on my third passport,” Jenn told me, “and I haven’t been anywhere farther than Epcot in Florida.”

Sue and I got our passports in 2008, when we went to Barbados for our 30th anniversary. We also used them when we went to France in 2011 for our younger daughter’s wedding. But the passports expired in 2018. And even though we have no plans — or money — to go anywhere exotic, we wanted to renew them.

“You never know when I’ll need to make a quick getaway,” I told Jenn, who wore gloves while she handled our paperwork. “Is that so you won’t leave fingerprints on my application and be guilty by association?” I asked.

“It’s because the stickers I use are too sticky and can split my fingers,” she answered. “But I won’t tell the authorities I saw you.”

Jenn agreed when I said that the worst part of traveling is packing.

“Unless you go overnight, as I do when I visit my mother, it takes forever to pick the right clothes and stuff them into your suitcase,” I said. “If you go somewhere for a week, you have to check the weather forecast and decide what to bring. And you always end up overpacking.”

“My husband has a packing list,” Jenn said. “He’s very organized. I’m not.”

“That’s like me and Sue, except the opposite,” I said. “She’s very organized. I’m not.”

“He’s right,” Sue said.

“I bet he isn’t most of the time,” Jenn said with a smile.

Sue smiled, too, and said, “You’re right.”

Jenn took our expired passports, made copies of our driver’s licenses and checked our applications to be sure we filled them out correctly.

“Are you going to take our pictures?” I asked.

“Yes,” Jenn responded. “And you can’t use a disguise.”

“You can’t replace my mug shot with a photo of Brad Pitt?” I wanted to know.

“You can’t even use a Groucho Marx disguise,” Jenn said.

“I already look like him,” I noted. “If he weren’t dead, he could sue me for stealing his identity.”

“When my husband saw my passport photo, he said, ‘When did you get arrested?’ ” Jenn recalled.

She took Sue’s photo, which came out great. When she took mine, she said, “I have to shoot you again.”

“A lot of people would like to shoot me,” I said.

“No, I mean I have to take another picture,” said Jenn.

“Why, because the first one looks like me?” I wondered.

“Because you were smiling,” Jenn explained. “You’re not supposed to show teeth.”

“When mine fall out, there won’t be a problem,” I said just before Jenn snapped the second shot, which came out all right.

“You can expect your new passports in six to eight weeks,” Jenn told me and Sue as we were leaving.

“What if I have to flee the country before then?” I asked. “Can I use you as a reference?”

“No,” Jenn said. “But if you get your own travel show, you can send me on a nice vacation.”

Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima

"Fowl Play"

By Jerry Zezima

I have a bone to pick with the slobs who have been dumping chicken bones and other garbage on our front lawn. But make no bones about it, I will catch these birdbrains because my wife, Sue, and I recently installed a home security system to capture their fowl deeds.

This is the latest poultry problem I have had to cackle — sorry, I mean tackle — because it brings up the eternal question: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

The yolk was on me after Sue found a chicken egg in our backyard last year and I scrambled to find the hen that laid it. Some unknown humans in our neighborhood have chickens, one of which apparently flew the coop and used our lawn as a shell station.

I never did track down the fine feathered fiend. Nor do I know who owns the rooster that goes “cock-a-doodle-do!” at all hours of the day and night.

But I do know that some greasy-fingered individuals who have a taste for chicken keep tossing their bones on the same patch of grass out front.

The latest batch contained a clue: In a pile of used napkins and, yes, chicken bones was a receipt from a nearby grocery store.

Playing both detective and investigative reporter — I can see myself starring in my own TV show, “CSI: Chicken Scene Investigation” — I drove to the store, showed the crumpled receipt to assistant manager Danielle Hayes and asked if the store has cameras.

“Yes,” replied Danielle, “but we can’t show you the tape of the people who bought chicken here. We can only show it to the police.”

So I went to the local cop shop and spoke with Officer Quilty — she declined to tell me her first name — who said, “If you want to catch these people, get a camera.”

That’s when Sue called our alarm company and arranged for a technician to install a security system that not only would catch the sloppy scofflaws red-handed (or red-winged) but would also show the license plates of the vehicular maniacs who routinely blow through the stop sign in front of our house.

“We also want to catch the squirrels and rabbits that have been pilfering the flowers and veggies in my wife’s garden,” I told Dean Cameron, who came over to set up the cameras. “Maybe we can have them arrested, too.”

“My parents have groundhogs in their yard,” Dean said.

“Do they have security cameras?” I asked.

“No,” Dean replied. “They’re too stubborn.”

“How about you?” I wondered.

“I live in a third-floor apartment,” he said. “Unless someone has a 35-foot ladder to get in, I don’t need cameras. If I had them, they would catch my dog either sleeping or bullying my cat.”

Dean’s dog, a 7-year-old Corgi named Clementine, would eat clementines or even chicken.

“She’ll eat anything,” he said. “My sister got me high-security garbage cans because she used to turn over the garbage and eat everything in it.”

“Your sister?” I said.

“Clementine,” answered Dean, who installed four cameras on the outside of the house, including a doorbell camera at the front door.

“We used to have a doorbell, but it never worked,” I told him.

Dean also put cameras above the garage door (to catch chicken-bone dumpers), on the side of the house (to catch hungry squirrels and bunnies) and in the back (to catch any pregnant poultry that may want to lay another egg).

“You’re all set,” Dean said when he was finished.

“Thanks,” said Sue. “Now we can catch the jerks who blow through the stop sign. I just saw one. We can give the tape to the cops and get a piece of the fines. That way, the cameras will pay for themselves.”

“And if we catch those slobs who dump chicken bones in the yard,” I added, “it will be a feather in our cap.”

Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima

"No Fly Zone"

By Jerry Zezima

Most people would say — especially in the winter, when insects are vacationing in Florida — that they wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not my wife.

Sue wouldn’t hurt anything else, including me, even though I’m the biggest pest in the house, but she doesn’t like flies.

Or ants. Or spiders. Or any other winged invaders or creepy crawlers that bug the hell out of us once the weather gets warm.

That’s why we have had not one, not two but three visits from an exterminator.

The first one was Sam, which is short for Samantha.

“I’m the only woman exterminator in our company,” Sam told me. “I broke the glass ceiling.”

“Can’t bugs get in through the broken glass?” I wondered.

“Yes,” Sam answered. “That’s why I’m here.”

“My wife is the only woman exterminator in our family,” I said. “She’s always prowling the house with a flyswatter.”

“People don’t like bugs,” Sam stated. “The best way to get rid of them is by putting traps around the house. The bugs will get stuck in them and die. It also prevents them from laying eggs that produce more bugs.”

Sam put traps in the kitchen and the garage. She also sprayed the outside of the house, including windows, and spritzed the shed.

“What bugs do people hate the most?” I asked Sam.

“Ants,” she said.

“Not uncles?” I inquired.

Sam looked like she was about to spray me.

“Check the traps,” she said. “And call if you see any more bugs.”

Sue, who has better antennae for bugs than they have for us, spotted a spider in the kitchen not long afterward.

“I’m calling the exterminator,” she said.

I didn’t tell her this, but I saw another spider in the bathroom. It gave me the willies because I was afraid I would encounter it in the shower. I imagined being bitten in a sensitive area, being rushed to the hospital and having the following exchange with the attending physician.

Doctor: “It’s pretty small.”

Me: “Listen, doc, I didn’t come here to be insulted!”

Doctor: “No, I mean the bite.”

Me: “Oh.”

I also conjured images of the famous scene in the 1957 sci-fi classic “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” where a guy who has shrunk to the size, ironically, of a bug is attacked by a huge, hairy, hungry spider twice as big as he is.

The first time I saw this scene, as a kid, I couldn’t sleep for a week.

I related the story to the next exterminator, Ron.

“Spiders are actually good because they eat other bugs,” he said. “I’d say the worst ones are cave crickets and German cockroaches.”

“There are no caves around here, but whenever I make a stupid wisecrack to my wife, there are crickets,” I said. “And I didn’t know cockroaches could speak German.”

“They can’t,” said Ron. “But they cause humans to use bad language.”

Ron did the requisite spraying and left.

A week or two later, I saw a housefly in the kitchen. I smashed it with a flyswatter but made the mistake of telling Sue, who I thought would be proud of me.

Instead, she called the bug company.

Our next exterminator, Steve, said the third time should be the charm.

Like Sam and Ron, he sprayed the perimeter of the house as well as the windows.

“I bet there are no bugs in your house,” I said.

“I live with my parents,” said Steve. “And I have a 3-year-old daughter. If she’s with her mother, she’ll scream at the sight of a bug. If she’s with me, she’ll squash it and say, ‘Look, Daddy, I killed a bug!’ She wants to make me proud of her.”

“I kill bugs in our house so my wife will be proud of me,” I said.

“I’m sure she is,” Steve said. “But you shouldn’t have any more after this.”

“Even if we do,” I said, “I’ll still be the biggest pest in the house.”

Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima