~a column by Colleen O’Brien, Feb. 12, 2015
I awake to sunshine hitting me in the eye and a gradual realization that my adjectives have altered.
I am back to passable, lively and snuggly. For five days, in between periods of moaning and groaning because of being in the throes of the flu, my adjectival litany was dull, boring, pointless, mundane; as well as fat, lumpy, flabby, hurty, weepy, melodramatic, forgetful, freezing and sweating.
I can open my eyes all the way, so I am apparently well. I detect a smidgeon of eagerness rather than a pervading anxiety. I may live.
I turn on “Weekend Edition” after having ignored the radio all week. NPR is an intolerable accompaniment to fever, nausea, bone ache, headache, ennui, exhaustion, thirst, starvation and sensitive ears. One of my familiar friends, Scott Simon, intones in his improbably sonorous while at the same time cheerful voice on the beautifully named Boko Haram. This is a group of killers wiping out entire villages in Nigeria, where Ebola is already enough of a plague. Too bad such a pretty phrase like Boko Haram has so sickening a meaning; loosely: forbidden (haram), fraud (boko). It could be the name of a sexy, flowing, tango-like dance but more particularly means “kill all things western.”
It saddens me that the simple fact of “West” feeds radical Islamists’ anger to the point of killing all hope of the good in life because they kill their own neighbors who like some of what we offer. I too am full of anger and terror, for I am human, but mere reasons that have nothing to do with rhyme place me among the only occasionally homicidal (when I am in the company of fools and happen on uninformed, sexist, racist and stupid remarks about women, welfare, African Americans and history in general); but, it is not my fault or personal plan that I was born in Iowa rather than on the lovely and deadly west coast of Africa, so, like the people I stay out of the way of because of their shoddy facts, I really don’t understand enough about Boko Haram to do anything but remain sad for them all, killers and killed.
I actually do nine sit-ups, then I do a creaky lotus and attempt the bends and stretches. I am as bendable as a board. I turn slightly within the exercise and see my reflection in the mirror. I shake my head imperceptibly as I hold the turn and the stare into my own eyes. “Saggy old baggy old flabby old Col,” I whisper to the mirror. But not with rancor. “Who cares?” I say out loud and look away.
I suddenly need to sweep the floor, wash the sheets, scrub the soup bowls piled in the sink among the Pepsi cans. I drink pop only when I’m sick if I can get someone to bring me Pepsi; Pepsi, the nectar to my nausea. In and out of fever, I dreamed of its sweet fizziness.
I straighten things, make order while I make toast — someone left homemade bread on my counter. I love toast and hardly ever eat it — the wheat, the carbs. What is wrong with me? “Eat bread,” I say out loud. “It makes you happy.”
While coffee drips and bread browns, I search the full-of-dead-food fridge to find the expensive cherry jelly I bought for myself just before I got sick, then stand looking out the window. The toast pops up, and I jump, seeing my reflection for just a moment before I turn away. I was really into a memory of when I was young, 45, not this Biblically aged specter peering back at me from the window.
I eat breakfast — toast, mmmm — somewhat chagrined at my self-centeredness in thinking in the face of terror tales via Boko Haram that my life is so horrible because of a mere flu. I am happy. For the moment. Maybe for the rest of my life. I may be tortured by the flu again, but I won’t be tortured by radical neighbors of a different intensity of faith. Recovering from the flu is an experience in being born again in a very human, secular way. . . there’s health in the old girl yet — and hope — partly because she lives in America where hope is as abundant as good neighbors.
