It swept in like a summer thunderstorm — fast, ferocious and relentless — knocking me on my back. Some 24-hour bug — I swear it wasn’t swine flu — that has been going around. Left me feeling achy, nauseous, grumpy and with a pounding head like a woodpecker was trying to make a home in there.
And then it was gone, as suddenly as it arrived. Strange. But it had sure taken its toll. I normally weather things pretty well. I don’t like to slow down, no matter what the circumstances. My leg fell off? Hmmm. Well, I’ll worry about that later.
I was sick enough that I didn’t go into work the next day. It felt like a mean hangover. Like one of those evenings when you say to yourself, “maybe tequila shooters wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”
As I went about my “sick day,” tired and bored, longing to go do something … anything … I wondered why there was always such an appeal to being sick as a kid.
Remember that? You always wanted to be sick. It got you out of school, that awful, wretched prison your parents would send you to where there was no TV, uniforms and (yech!) learning.
I don’t know about you, but as a kid I would have lit myself on fire to get out of school. “Oh, I sure hope that scratch goes gangrene by the morning so I don’t have to go,” I remember thinking on more than one occasion. On others, I pondered whether throwing myself from the high branches of an oak tree would land me a couple days at home.
And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why? Why would I wish all kinds of horrid things on myself just to get out of a few classes? “Was the black plague really all that bad, and does anyone know where I can get some?”
Especially considering the fact that being home was horribly boring. Take for instance right now: nothing on TV (despite the 480 channels I have) no music I feel like listening to, it’s beautiful outside, but I don’t care to go out, and nothing to eat. I’d just as soon be at work, infecting co-workers and spreading my bad mood.
It wasn’t as if you got to do fun stuff when you were sick — “Zoo day! Awesome!” You got to mope around the house, sore and achy. I always remember my mother would clean the house on days I was sick, the vacuum cleaner grinding away at my sanity and drowning out the soap operas. I would throw myself upon the sofa like a glob of wilting Jell-O and resign myself to an eternity of soaps all day. “Boy, this is awesome,” I would think to myself. “The boredom is consuming my soul.”
How was that awesome? It was excruciating. If I was really lucky, I would get to go on errands, waiting in my mother’s 1978 Ford Thunderbird (T-tops off) while she ran into this place or that. It was hot — soak-your-underwear-in-sweat hot — and I would get impatient, cursing why it would take so long to buy eggs or make a deposit.
And yet, it beat school.
But did it? No recess. No snacks. No friends or girls. No goofin’ off or playin’ sports.
I remember days when we would go to pick up my brother from school, and as we drove up I would think to myself, “look at all the poor saps playing football and having a good time while I’m sick and sweating, here in the car … with my mother. They don’t know what they’re missing!”
There must have been something to it, but as I mope around the house trying to find something to do, I can’t figure out what it could have been.
I’m done with being sick. Send me back to work, mom, quick. I want playtime and snacks. I’m sick of soap operas and errands. I’m fine, really. Just send me back … quick … before the boredom rots my brain and eats my soul.