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 Damn
head cold. We discovered it upon
being awoken from our afternoon nap on Friday, just in time to make dinner
with the Cyber-Mom and Executive Brother, as well as three nieces and
a step-Dad at the Japanese steak house attached like a gastronomic cyst
to the side of the Sheraton 4 Points Hotel at Logan Airport.
The Dowbrigade doesn’t often catch colds, but this one
is a doozy. It wasn’t too bad at dinner, just a nagging sore throat and
anticipatory aches. Mom, a regular reader of the Dowbrigade, has
just decided that she wants her own blog, a development we thoroughly
endorse. The world needs more 72-year old retired businesswomen
and master chefs to start blogs! We will read it for the recipes alone
(Mom has published 5 cookbooks), not to mention the fact that we get
whatever literary skill we can muster from the maternal side of the family.
But that night the cold really took hold, with chills,
cough, congestion and that all-over, shitty feeling that even soaking
in a hot tub won’t cure. The mind becomes completely pedestrian, content
to trudge from one obligation to the next without looking down any side
streets or exploring interesting tangents. And the timing is perfect;
in the
middle of a major house move(cardboard boxes everywhere), preparing for
a prolonged foreign expedition (suitcases, too) and days away from an
important presentation at an
international
conference (still working on the paper).
This too will pass.
Back in the day, we would treat a head cold with massive
doses of LSD. Our theory was that we, our integrated normal mental and
physical being, was much more able and ready to handle the acid than
the inexperienced invading cold germs, which would pretty much pack up
and head for greener pastures in the face of such savage chemical warfare.
Whether this worked or not is open to question, as we never
got as far as double blind clinical studies, but we don’t remember suffering
too much from colds back in those days. Come to think of it, we don’t
remember too much at ALL about those days, and maybe that’s for the best.
So today, which according to our personal historical cold
trajectory should be the worst day, we hauled ourself out of bed exactly
twice. The first time was to stagger down to the MIT Tennis Bubble
for doubles with Jon the Architect with whom we have been playing weekly
for 35 years, as well as Polite Bill, who apologizes when he makes a
good shot, and apologizes when he makes a bad shot, and Max the Mad
Russian. We played real good the first set, and then ran out of gas. Hit
the wall. Slunk home and back to bed until about an hour ago, when we
dragged out sorry carcass down to the local Super Stop and Shop for
what passes in this puritanical society for self-medication.
After wandering the aisles in a daze for a while, we got
in empty checkout line 13, interrupting an intense conversation between
the cashier and her bag boy. She was a stunner, coffee colored
skin and thin features with penetrating eyes. We found ourself
wondering if finding skinny noses attractive on women regardless of their
skin
color was a sign of hidden racism.
In another life we would have told her how exquisite she
was. The bag boy was as hopeless as he was chinless. He
was hanging on her every word as though she were Halley Berry, whom she
did in fact resemble. She was speaking in a delightful island accent,
more Creole than Spanish Caribbean, but he couldn’t understand most of
what she was saying. She prattled on about why she needed another
"part-time job".
The bag boy looked confused. "Parking job?" he asked.
The channel changed as we grabbed our bag and headed for
the parking lot. We had purchased Alka Seltzer Extra-strength Night-Time
Cough and Cold Relief, which is about as close as we get to hard drugs
these days. In fact, this may explain, at least in part, the convoluted
narrative of the present post. What were we writing about? Perhaps we
had better climb back into bed.
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