First flu

My mother declared this to be my first flu, though it seems impossible at my age, me being too old for firsts by now and there having been so very many assorted ailments along the way since that day, long ago, when the doctor rent me from her. Screaming, probably.

I mean to say that I am likely to have been the party doing the screaming, not the doctor. I cannot say for certain.

Almost from the get-go there has been hacking. Fountainous discharges. Infections and wounds of all variety. Over a lifetime, this body has played host to viruses and bacteria big and small, both foreign and domestic, some of which, I imagine, stuck around and remain to this moment, here and now, biding their time.

How can this be my first flu, I wonder. I tell her as much. I say, “How can this be my first flu?” and I say it with audible skepticism, too.

“Well,” she says in way of informed response, “there’s no flu listed in your book.” Across the miles between us, I hear the turning of pages.

My book.

This book, a secret until now, is an awful thing. A chronology of misery. Every hurt and harm of a lifetime documented, from the sore throat to the sprained ankle to the fattened lip.

“You had a lot of ear infections,” she says.

1986 seems to have been the worst of it. The book chronicles twelve months of disaster. Chicken pox and an ingrown toenail and even a summer faint from blood loss after stepping on a bottle in the bayou. Then later, food poisoning from undercooked seafood at seventeen. Pneumonia at nineteen. O, it is a wonder how I have survived to write this blog post!

Most remarkable, to me, is my mother’s commitment to continuing with her project long after I’d reached the age of adulthood. Every complaint mentioned in passing – every “I’m feeling under the weather” – noted with a guess as to intensity and duration.

But no flu.

I swear to you, this horror log shall be the first thing to go upon my mother’s death.

Swallowing my revulsion, I give changing the subject a try. I say, “When was it that Jeff nearly blew off his hand with a pile of gunpowder and a magnifying glass?”

I can tell my mother’s reading.

I say, “Was that in 1988, when that happened?” but there’s just more silence and more reading.

Some time goes by and she says, finally, “I don’t know when that was.”

She says, “I didn’t do one of these books for your brother.”