Six in the City, revisited

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The first time I saw snow was the year my family lived in Manhattan. My sister and I attended elementary school across the street from our building.  We’d bundle up in our new winter coats, pants, mittens, and boots. Just one winter: getting used to the smell of wet things drying on the radiator, taking turns being freezing and hot. I  remember you had to switch the car from one side of the street to the other. One day the Irish cop told my dad, “Not today, sir. Don’t ya know it’s TuBiShvat?” At least, that’s the story he told.

 

 

 

A longer version of this story was published here

I Should Have Stayed Home

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Judging by the store I went to, I can place this story some time in the late 90s.

Gina was away in Lawrence, Kansas doing some collaborative research with a scientist at KU. Of course I picked THEN to get the flu. After a couple of days, I started to feel very ill.

I had a fever, I knew that. The alternating sweats and shivers was a dead giveaway. But when I went to take my temperature, the digital thermometer blinked on for a second then went dark. Dead battery.

We lived only three or four blocks from a large supermarket, so I got heavily dressed and started trudging through the sleet to get a new one. I felt weak and weird and disoriented. The snow piles I needed to climb over seemed to have formed a dirty white obstacle course. It was a slow and miserable trek. But I got there, found my battery, paid and left.

I did wonder why the cashier looked at me in such a peculiar manner.

Returning home at last, I rested a while, then installed the battery, stuck the thermometer under my tongue and waited for the beep.

106 F. And I normally run pretty low; around 96.

I knew that this was not good, but the idea of doing anything grandiose about it seemed to elude my feverish mind. I took four ibuprofens, then drew a cool bath and laid in it for over an hour, reading. This did the trick; the fever returned to more normal 102-ish levels. It never went back up much higher, and was gone in a couple more days.

Only the next day did I realize why that cashier was looking at me as she did. She was obviously afraid that the dead had risen and were shopping at Jewel-Osco!