Sometimes it feels like my anecdotes only come in two flavours: painfully complete descriptions of paint drying or offhand remarks that prompt an involuntary step backwards.
But back in the Before-Before Times, which is to say when I was young and my parents told my stories, I had some proper mundane sitcom problems of the week. Like, the time that I had my turn with what used to be a typical rite of passage: chicken pox.
It was Halloween 1976, and I would have just turned seven. By the books it should've been my seventh birthday exactly, but I don't think in those days I knew the finer details of my premature birth or my predicted end-of-October landing.
For many years as a kid I would remind myself of the costume that I'd worn each year, a little litany so I'd never forget, but I did forget, and I don't always trust my memories versus a thousand times a thousand Gen X memes of other people's outfits. The year before this one particular Halloween, or the year after, I was Wonder Woman - pretty sure - and wore one of those mass market plastic masks with the wisp of elastic attached to each side, and the year before or the year after I may have been the Bionic Woman. I can picture unfolding a cheap jumpsuit, but something about it feels like that may have just been a shopping trip.
I remember that maybe it was in Kindergarten that I had been a fairy princess. I can't picture the dress, but I do recall the beautiful wings constructed by my parents - I think Dad manipulated some wire coat hangers? - and how my mother spent hours sticking little silver star after little silver star onto the backing, generously overlapping them at different angles. These were the sort of stars that teachers gave for good work, and here was my mom with not only her own supply but lavishing them on me. The wings hung in our Michigan townhouse basement for a time, too wonderful to discard but soon too small to wear again, and then they disappeared along the way, as everything does.
Another thing that puts me in doubt of ever cosplaying Lindsay Wagner is that my costumes started getting better every year. Fourth grade was the court jester, when I banged out songs on my tiny wooden piano in what never became the dining room of our newly constructed split-level in what I thought would be a dose of magic and inspiration to keep Mom's sewing machine alive long enough to finish.
In fifth grade, I was a bride in white satin, again by Mom's hand. She sacrificed a dried arrangement that normally sat inside her glass cabinet so that I might have a realistic-looking bouquet of peach rosebuds and baby's breath. My beloved fourth grade teacher must've spied me from across the large open library area in the center of all the classrooms, as was the fashion in Sterling Heights schools then, and when our class came to his as part of the parade, his students surprised me with Here Comes the Bride as I entered the room. (No wonder my actual wedding took place in armchairs in an office. I'd already done veils and choirs and paparazzi.)
Sixth grade was the year we went to a costume shop and invested in a Spanish dancer costume that my mother and I were meant to share for years to come. There was talk of eventually building some sort of collection over the years. Dad's business was expanding. We were moving to fancier home in Romeo, closer to the new office. This might be the beginning of a small but not insignificant wardrobe just for the many masquerades in our future. I can think of one printed photo I have somewhere, the costume's probable third and last wearing, when I was in eighth grade and attending a small, experimental private school. As one of the four oldest kids, I stood in the back of our group photo, the red flounces of my skirt and sparkling necklace all hidden, only the black lace mantilla rising above some fifth grade hobo's head like a dour curse in the making.
But this year was second grade, and I wanted to be an Indian. A "squaw" I would have said, proud to know the terminology. (These are not my 21st-century words.)
My dad had a good friend named Bill that he had worked with at Burroughs before starting his own business, which was right around this time as well. We would visit Bill and his wife Shirley at their ranch home somewhere close enough for an afternoon trip but far enough away that we didn't see them as a family but a time or two a year, usually. I assume Dad and Bill crossed paths more often.
Shirley was crafty, not like a fox but like with a needle, and this was in evidence everywhere. I think she may have given me Old Dog, which was a little pillow with a dog's face stamped on it. I don't think there was a Young Dog, like there was a Big Julie and a Little Julie, my favourite dress-up dolls. There was Drooper Dog Bean Bag - who always went by his full name - who was properly dog shaped and brown and fuzzy and who had a tail, but I did love shapeless Old Dog even if I was never quite sure that I got him back and not a changeling after a visit to some other family friends whose son had the exact same pillow. That son killed his little brother in the cradle, but I didn't know that until years later. (Only now might I wonder if Old Dog could've fit over an infant's face.)
Trips to Bill and Shirley's were fun. They had cats named Leonard and Ashley, both toms, and my father found this hilarious, so of course I appreciated the deadpan mirth inherent in giving human names to animals. I can picture one of them in the big front window, another by the piano. All of this immediately on the other side of the front door amongst the crowded sofas and shelves and candy dishes (stocked!) and cookie plates (same!) and other evidence of creativity against the brown behind everything in those times.
Now that I think of it, how odd that my godparents were also named Bill and Shirley; always sent me a birthday card with a dollar (eventually a fiver!), but I didn't know them to remember them. This Bill was also a workmate of my father's but from when we had relocated from Texas to Illinois when I was around two, and he had been a mentor to Dad. My parents respected this Bill and Shirley so much that they put them vaguely in charge of making sure my fate would be efficiently sorted should the worst happen, which would probably be just looking after me until my grandparents could step in. It was not a religious assignment.
When I was just about a teen, the invisible godparents passed through our part of the world as part of a bowling tournament and I remember being taken to wave hello between sets, but otherwise it was just the cards, and those stopped when I was eighteen, well after I lazily stopped writing thank you notes for them. My dad told me in the year or so before he died that these godparents of mine were still out there, still doing well. I wonder if they were amongst the many calls that he made to say goodbye to people the week that he left us.
Now here is the part where I admit that I typed most of what is in this post as a cathartic exercise but left it when I was tired enough to sleep. Now it's the next day, and I got to thinking about Bill and Shirley - the ones with the cats - and I tried to find out more about them online. I didn't get much, other than the realisation that I'd misremembered: it was Bill and Patti. Forget everything I said about Shirley. That was Patti. I don't know Shirley (alas). Okay, now to just run a wide-gap comb for any other outlandish errors and then I'll hit post.
But back to 1977, when the world was full of Bills and Shirleys. Bill - the Bill I knew - had a coffee can full of actual gold dust. I didn't know this until well after he was gone. I forget how he acquired the gold; Dad did say, but I only sort of recall that he collected it gradually as part of his work on what I'll just call "business machines" as I'm not sure where Bill specialised.
Bill was "eccentric", it turns out. Or something. I was at fat camp a decade or so later when a letter from my mother mentioned that he had killed himself after being "unhappy" a long time. I asked about Patti but she had left "ages ago". I hadn't known.
Dad added later that Bill had been an alcoholic for years. I wonder if Patti is still out there, doing amazing things with sugar or wool. Their surname was very common. I tried, just now, looking for a Bill/William of this name who died in the summer of 1985, and one result gives a street name that I swear is a little familiar, and Google Street View shows a house that is the red brick I expected and has a big front window and a driveway I couldn't have described before but now swear is right, but I don't know.
Patti is the one who gave my parents the loan of the Indian costume. I remember being a little disappointed that it wasn't mine forever, but I also didn't question why this grown woman had such a costume on hand. I seem to recall a fitting session, making a decision about a headband (wasn't it beaded?) and the feathers, but maybe that was all on the day. Did she perhaps make it for me than keep it to donate to some other little girl or a drama department or to use on a scarecrow?
Well, I loved it. Mom did the stripes on my face and a few other stylish marks.
No one made anything of what seemed to be either ornamental dots or stray flakes of warpaint.
We trick or treated from townhouse to townhouse to apartment building in the well-after-dark at King's Arms. Autumn in Sterling Heights always delivered on mulchy ancient smells and a crisp mystique that briefly put this middle-class explosion of corduroy and feathered hair in its place. The cider and hay and a slight haze of potential eldritch bargaining drove us kids wild. We were free and in the world and sure we could peek just past it, our parents standing back on the sidewalks as we ran to doors, at worst holding coats they'd force us to wear when walking to a new street if a cold front had come through. This is why my people cannot abide the trunk-or-treats, the day-walking to people who aren't strangers.
No one noticed that my make-up job had intensified.
(Remember chicken pox? This is a song about chicken pox. -Arlo Guthrie.)
When my mother washed off the face paint that evening (no doubt with pots and bottles of Merle Norman cleansers), some of it just wouldn't budge. And my face, once believed to be pink with the cold and the excitement and the effort to fill my candy bucket, was hot and reddening into fever.
Chicken pox.
Somewhere there is a slide of me on that night, and always after we would look at it and, knowing what we knew now, point out the evidence.
It was a better story when told by my mother ruefully smiling, her sighs of reminiscence then turning to righteous huffs when she recalled how the school insisted that I return to school after my first week in confinement. The indulgence of a mother, they thought.
"But she still has pox!" "Wash them off!" "The doctor says no!"
My mother fought them every day for that second week then eventually, carefully, bathed my remaining... pustules?
I remember a slip of this. Mostly I have the memory of a memory, the intellectual knowledge that the amount of itchiness was shocking, merciless and unbelievable and miserable, and nothing compared for years beyond. I remember speaking of this. "You haven't had chicken pox? The itching is past anything a person could imagine. It is not possible to be any itchier."
I don't remember exactly how my parents kept me from scratching. Did they wrap my hands or did that happen in a book? I seem to recall strategic socks, or was that only later, when I was suffering with flea bites or mosquitos?
I know that I writhed and wanted to cry, feeling like hour after hour was passing and no one would let me out of a box of ants, but what good was crying in this eternity? It shook me, that one could just keep suffering. Despite all of the modern medicine. All of the ministrations.
I'm sure there was calamine. Lukewarm soaks. Then, one day, my mother's face before mine, her anxiously dabbing at the little scabs. Me watching both of us in her vanity mirror. Could be just a picture in my mind based on a story I heard often.
"And that's how you got the little mark on your forehead," she told me when I was older. The last one hadn't wanted to go. My mother resented the system that bullied her. I looked in the mirror - how had I never noticed the little circle before?
Few close-up photos of me as an adult exist, period, with most being from the time of smartphones, which I think is after time or wrinkles rubbed out my little spot. I remember one day realising that it was gone and had probably been gone for years, like the smallpox circle on my upper arm.
Never fear, I have since made many other spots.
And this week, over Thanksgiving and not Halloween, but close enough, I brought back the pox.
Maybe. Tests were run at urgent care last night after I finally caved and popped in before closing. The short version is that I had a cold six days ago and seemed to also have a few bug bites. I didn't question it; bugs find me. Bugs love me. Don't bother with your zappers and your citronella candles. I will attract away any mosquitos from your campsite.
The cold or virus got worse. The bug bites increased. Some sort of mite in the sofa? This is where I was mainly sleeping so I could breathe, napping in short installments while sitting upright.
That was Thursday through Saturday. Saturday night was a misery of wiggling and itching and, yes, scratching. I know it's wrong. I am willing to be wrong, sometimes, in the name of relief. Brief, brief relief.
Sunday morning was the delivery of the thinnest calamine lotion ever made, Our guest bath is now Pollack'd with pink. Sunday-day was me growling about how the cold medicine was keeping me from taking an antihistamine.
Monday saw me back to work as my nose was largely clear. However, this entailed putting a bra over some of the areas where I had been most affected. Add two cups of fresh hell to the simmering brew.
Was it hives? It didn't look like the hives I'd had before but did look like some hives on the internet.
Was I spreading it?
Was it scabies? How do you get scabies? (Okay, nope, not scabies.)
Mike did the heavy lifting in my classes during his off periods while I operated as a figurehead, at one point seriously considering a nap on a bench just out of sight of my students in the library.
When we got home, Mike found my old cortisone lotion from 2016 (year of the flea bite saga at Dad's). That helped. I took antihistamines. Could I now mend?
Tuesday saw the cold's aftermath continue to wane down to "just" Tardis-revving wheezes. Mike remained in lurk mode nearby. The steroids provided manageable stability. I only madly tore at my flesh every few hours. (With light, light fingertips.)
I was bothered, though, by the red patch that was spreading in one "bite" zone. And why did one bite have a tail?
"I'm not saying I'm going in," I said to Mike as he drove me in the rain to the after-hours clinic down the road.
I did go in. "Shingles?" murmured the intake nurse. "But I have it on both sides." I remembered, see, when I went to the doc six months ago for a pain in my side and she noticed all of the bites on my stomach from the previous week and said IS THAT SHINGLES?! but then dismissed it because it was on both sides. (See previous post, actually.)
And as I was talking I was also thinking, um, wait? Maybe that's relevant? How did I forget this?
"Shingles?" said the doctor's nurse when I was led to the next room. "But I have it on both sides," I said, shrugging.
"Shingles." The doctor nodded. The nurse nodded. They both cocked their heads at my other side. Swabs were taken. "Do you have any that are... moister?"
How is this shingles? Both sides. No pain.
"Wait! There's a bonus one!" I now realise how this may have looked to the staff since I was gesturing to my lower midsection and starting to pull down my pants. What kind of "bonus" was this mad woman about to reveal?
I showed the doctor the bite with the tail (by my belly button, thanks). "And it stops where the nerve is," he said, musing and nodding again, and I nodded because it seemed significant.
More pricking and swabbing and pumping and peering.
"Are you stressed?" someone asked at some point. "Well... yeah."
I didn't mean to sound sarcastic. I'm stressed about so many end-of-year deadlines and now so many things requiring my energy when I'm not well, and every day when I have a day with planning time I live in fear of losing it and being given a relief class instead. This is a reasonable fear, due to the teacher shortage, and one that has made my job very different. It is the reason that I am actually out of paid sick leave, thanks to the number of times when I was "well enough to manage my own lessons but not well enough to get hit with a relief lesson during my planning period and all of the behaviour management that goes with it", and the number of times I was only not well because I didn't sleep enough because I was anxious about the relief lesson I might have or the relief lesson I had already had. And in this I, and not an insignificant number of my colleagues, have then ourselves contributed to the need for relief teachers.
And I've definitely been stressing over how effing itchy and tired I am while trying to make class meaningful when grades are in for the year and the kids are now openly not going to do any activity that reeks of learning.
But at least I've been too stressed to stress over students seeing my soft red raw burger underbelly of bumps should I accidentally raise my arm.
It's possible that I may need a better stress management solution. Being able to say "Fuck it. What's the worst that can actually happen?" about half the time is apparently not good enough.
Or maybe it's not shingles, these rare bilateral shingles of the lucky no-actual-pain sort.
Tests are being run. I'm in good shape otherwise, the usual tedious post-cold wheeze and fatigue aside. And the obnoxious itching when the cortisone wears off. No fever, good blood pressure, enough oxygen, still not diabetic, numbers showing some inflammation but not enough to worry.
So I'm on anti-virals and antibiotics three times a day, new bloodwork in 48 hours to see if there's a change in inflammation levels, and for tomorrow (that is now today, that is now yesterday) and Thursday, my potentially contagious and itchy self is to stay home.
I may have picked the wrong year to balance three advent calendars. I've been too snuffly to enjoy the jam calendar yet (we're doing the Bonne Maman again), and those snuffles have certainly meant keeping the bands firmly on the L'Occitane calendar, which I finally splurged on after two years of maybe-maybe-nope. And what my nose may now forgive, my epidermis won't. So those lotions and potions will have to be enjoyed on their own timelines.
But the crochet one is going okay, and someday I will say, "this is my shingle blanket". (Much better than a smallpox blanket.) Perhaps I will drape it over the back of the sofa and call to Mike, "I'm hanging up my shingle!" and it will be our catchphrase when putting out future Christmas decorations, and oh, how we'll laugh about the year that I had shingles (or didn't) and how then they never ever came back again and they never hurt and they never got into my eye and drove me blind. (I may have done some Googling when I was home alone and querying a throb beside my eye.)
I wonder if anyone has ever made a Halloween costume that is a roof shingle with a guilty-looking chicken perched on top.
It's funny to think that the old family story of the time I had the chicken pox has a sequel. Arguably, every moment is the sequel to something set in motion long ago, but this has poetry. The monster, sent to burrow for eternity in its cave, wakes decades later, summoned accidentally, and here I am, the Final Girl. Let us hope for a mostly figurative boss battle; after all, I have now been part-virus for almost as long as I've been alive.
A skeleton! I'm sure one year I was a skeleton. And I am still a skeleton, and a bride, and a jester, and woman full of wonder.
05 December 2024 | Permalink
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