Does He Have a Pulse?
such a week!
Even though I kept an Excel sheet of my Rocky Point Substack posts, I can’t find the complete one on my computer. I searched for the file so I wouldn’t repeat a topic. At my age, I tell my friends the same conversational stories (and they do the same to me). I thought about a post this evening and will blurt it out. I don’t want to go through my posts all night while slowly returning to the living. If I’ve covered this topic before, please feel free to leave and search for that missing sock from the laundry you did tonight. That might be a more worthwhile activity.
Last Sunday afternoon, I went with my family to pick up Christmas trees. After holding various candidates up for judgment by family members, we found ours, and my son and his family got their tree. We tied them onto the roof rack and headed to our homes. My son and his family are more industrious and set their tree up right away while we put ours in a bucket of water outside our back door.
We had a lovely time watching our grandchildren enjoying the erection of their tree – a miniature Rockefeller Center tree lighting. A few hours later, we were back home on a cozy Sunday night, and a week of creativity, exercise, mundane shopping tasks, volunteer meetings, and more awaited our Monday morning rising.
A despicable cold crept into the house that Sunday night and tore up all my plans for the week. Just a humbling visit to remind me that I have much less control over my days than I would like to think. By Wednesday afternoon, I was sitting in the waiting room of our health center. With a dribbling nose, itchy eyes, and lungs afloat in oozy glue, I closed my eyes and waited in the company of my Florence Nightingale darling wife.
No COVID. RSV – Negative. No jungle disease from some errant tramp steamer. I just had a bad cold and was given a prescription for some Agent Orange-grade medicine. After swallowing the neon-red pills, I isolated myself in our upstairs guest bedroom and dozed while my wife rested by herself, tiny in the king-size expanse of our downstairs bedroom, hopefully free from the viral detritus her husband was casting into the air.
This week has seen several tractor trailers deliver crates of Kleenex to our door. Despite more bedcovers than used in Arctic ice stations, chills crept into my bed, and the nights turned into droning podcasts soon forgotten, rearrangement of pillows, and the grafting of Kathleen Turner’s voice onto my larynx.
My plans for writing, organizing, helping around the house, babysitting our funny grandchildren, scheduled meetings, and more disappeared. I became a stealthy Nosferatu character, slinking into the kitchen at 1 AM to down my 73rd cup of honeyed tea.
I’m at the stage tonight where I’m a car towed to shore after sitting in a lake. Efforts to start the motor almost work, but the cranking goes on. I pray the plugs will dry out by tomorrow morning, and a strong spark will get me cranking.
All of this boils down to the realization that our feeble bodies are target practice for viral interlopers. You better hope there are friends and family around who will express concern and comfort you in moments of whining and try to convince you that an outside world does exist, and it anxiously awaits your return to LIFE.
Did you find that missing sock?
Congratulations, Jordan, for this vivid and accurate description of the current "bug" taking over the world. My grandson, bless his cute little self, is Patient Zero in our family of sickies. While he, his mom, son-in-law, and husband managed to get through it, I'm still coughing and tantalizing men everywhere with my Lauren Bacall voice. After 50 years of this winter habit, I'm dubbing November through March "The Bronchitis Season." Any little thing will bring it on and like an old friend, stick hard by me until the summer sun bakes it out of my lungs. Tally-Ho, Jordan. I hope you fully recover soon. Loved this piece. I needed the laugh and common ground more than I needed the damned sock.
Needless to say, Get Well Soon