Sunday Spo-bits

I have a very bad cold or the flu or something worse. Someone picked it up while working with a group of kids bussed in for a show and then he brought it home. Exposure to kiddie bugs is like smallpox to the Indians; we are not accustomed to such bugs. Someone is worse off than I. He is drinking Dayquil while I am applying The Christian Scientist principle to dismiss the virus as Error and unsee it. So far no such luck. Alas, Babylon! the bug refuses to unsee me. I don’t believe in extra doses of vitamins or herbs make any difference, so there is nothing to be done really but drink fluids and keep it sweet. I canceled the opera and the symphony, which was a loss but the sensible thing to do.

We decided to have a Thanksgiving dinner. Someone works Thursday but he’s off Friday so we can make a dinner then. We have green bean casserole, which I make every other year at my insistence. Someone takes his ritual no-thank-you. In my defense, I don’t make it the usual way using frozen beans and globs of cream of mushroom soup. Mine is a proper version, made with blanched beans in a homemade mushroom sauce made with real mushrooms (no rubbish), topped with friend onions coated in buttered toasted panko. It beats what my Midwest ancestors made by a country mile, but don’t tell my aunts. Someone will make a sweet potato something-or-other rather than proper mashed potatoes.

Saturday afternoon the doorbell rang and I almost didn’t answer it as I had on no trousers and more likely than not it is the JWs (Jehovah Witnesses) who haven’t given up their quest to convert me. I thought to answer the door sans trousers (that means without) and exclaim ‘Won’t you come in my dears I’ve been hoping you would call” but lo! It was a special delivery (signature required). It was Harper’s ashes. They came in a small tasteful box, which we placed on a shelf in the office. It sits near the cedar bent box that someday will hold my ashes. Someone can scatter us both on the shores of Lake Michigan – the sooner the better I say.

While there is work to be done it is probably best to do none of it but stay in bed and keep trying to unsee the virus. I regret not going to a friend’s holiday party today. It was the only party invitation I had for the reason and the hostess, a fellow book lover well over four feet, always gives me a bag of ‘must reads’ whenever I visit. I am rawther cross with Mary Baker Eddy and her not at all efficacious ways of treating illness. Next time I take Dayquil like Someone and not bother reading The Scientific Statement of Being.