Sick Thoughts

6 March 2014: Today I awoke feeling yucky--sore throat, fever (?I'm never sure because of the screwy effects of Lupron if I'm feverish or just experiencing one of my Lupron-related suffusions of heat?). I had resolved to stay in bed, but then by about 9:30 I was feeling better, got up, headed out to Bruegger's to do my Kirkus quota for the day--100 pp each morning. Joyce felt guilty: She's in the final stages of something similar, something that she's been battling for about a week. I was sure I'd escaped it, then, this morning, was not feeling so confident. Anyway, you can hardly help what you pass along to a spouse (intimacies have their rewards, their punishments), so I feel no blame whatsoever flowing from me to her. (That would be asinine.) I got home from Bruegger's in time for lunch (good timing!), then entered into FB some of the silliness I'd written yesterday. But what about my blog? I didn't think I had the energy for it, so I just looked at my cache of un-posted entries and found this one for 25 January. Seems fitting to put it up today!

From Saturday, 25 January 2014:

Not my favorite sort of weekend, this one. It's cold; it's snowed all day; I don't feel well.  I went out only once today, about 8:30, a trip to Bruegger's Bagels, where I sat for a couple of hours and read my quota (100 pp) for Kirkus Reviews, my daily installment of a book I will finish tomorrow (Sunday)--if I feel well enough. (I probably won't write the review tomorrow: It's not generally fair to authors to review their books when I'm feeling cruddy and vindictive.)

When I got home, I worked a little in my study, then had lunch with Joyce. Afterwards, I popped the steel-cut oats into the CrockPot, then, feeling my energy solidly in the red zone, I headed upstairs and disappeared into the bedroom, from which I did not emerge for about two hours. (The sound of plows awakened me. Somehow, I could not integrate that particular sound into whatever dream I was having at them time, a dream that fled before I even had any words to capture it.)

Not feeling much better, I sat on the couch downstairs--Pendleton blanket wrapped around my legs (I think of photos of people on cruises in northern latitudes, outside on the deck, watching icebergs drift by, trying not to think about what would happen if the ship were to, you know, have a Titanic moment). I wrote some silly doggerel for my daily FB ritual, then read the final forty pages of a book I'll be reviewing for the Plain Dealer, a new biography of E. E. Cummings by Susan Cheever. I did some editing on a review I've been working on all week--the new novel about Lincoln by Jerome Charyn. I'll be filing that review on Sunday with the Plain Dealer.

I generally write a draft of a PD review a week ahead of deadline, then pick away at it all week. That way--say, if I'm sick or something--I don't have to try to compose something when I'd rather be in bed.

By the way, I think I've written here before (I know I have!) about how Cummings' poetry befuddled me when I was student teaching back in 1966--his poem "anyone lived in a pretty how town." His poetical experiments with capitalization, punctuation, grammar, line-spacing--all of it was beyond me back when I was a puppy, fresh from reading cowboy novels and the Plain Dealer sports pages.

During that time with S. Cheever, I also started making chicken stock from the bones of a bird we ate earlier this week. The rich smell soon permeated the house, and Joyce came down to see what was going on--and was pleased to discover what it was.

The CrockPot did its job, transforming the oats into something soothing, and we watched, via DVR, this season's first episode of Sherlock, which had its moments. I do love seeing those two, Holmes and Watson, embodied by just about anyone.

Afterwards, it was clean-up time. Later this evening--9:30 or so--I'll feed my sourdough starter so that I can bake bread tomorrow--my Sunday routine for many years.

And in the meantime--I'm trying to ignore my cough, my sniffles, my slight fever, my aches and pains. I want to enjoy this Saturday night, even it I don't get to leave the house, don't get to go to a movie or a play or a bookstore or OfficeMax (nerds love office supply stores) or Starbucks or Kohl's or Marshall's (where, a couple of weeks ago, I found a great All-Clad omelet pan at a can't-pass-it-up price) or anywhere on earth where I can be with Joyce.

Which, this particular Saturday night, is right here in snowbound Hudson. Where I am weepy-eyed grateful to be.