I want to write this great, meaningful post on the Spanish Flu outbreak. The frame would be my two great-grandaunts, Dorothy and Roxie, who perished from it. I have a photo of one of them, but there's no one left to say whether it's D. or R. in the picture. They were gone a decade before my grandfather was born. No one knows where they are buried. Dad and I spent an afternoon getting lost, literally lost, one year in the big thickety woods of East Texas, driving back roads and looking for cemeteries, then looking at each grave whenever we'd find a cemetery, often knee-high in mosquitoes and honeysuckle. My grandfather's cousin said they were buried "near" the main cemetery that the family uses, but we never found them. Never found them in a genealogical reference, either, not even for adjacent counties. They're just gone.
The point being, the flu used to be a lot worse.
So, I want to write this poignant post, a stellar combination of personal reflection and provocative science, but my head is too swimmy to even open Wikipedia, and so there's nothing. Bupkiss. I don't know how to spell bupkiss, but if I didn't have leftover flu, I'd look it up.
Oh, who am I kidding? Even the Unnamed Flu can't keep me from the dictionary. Bubkes. Bupkes. Bupkus. All fine. Bupkiss? That means nothing. Unless... we call it the Bupkiss Flu. Bubkes means "goat droppings," and I feel like a goat dropping, so there could be something to this.
Weirdly, Mike didn't catch it. (He got bubkes.) This is still a mystery to me. Maybe it's an Australian flu and Mike already has immunity. The Boomerang Bubkes Flu? Billabong Bubkes Flu is also nicely alliterative, but I like "boomerang" because it fits the "oh, I'm better, no, wait, I'm not, no, wait..." nature of this bug. Then again, a "billabong" is "a backwater forming a stagnant pool," and that sounds about right, too.
Now to boomerang back into the stagnant pool of sleep.
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