It hit me Sunday over a week ago. I had been to the Wisconsin/Illinois football game the night before, a chilly, misty night, but because the Badgers won, that evening could have had nothing to do with my illness. Besides, I’ve read numerous studies that have said cold weather alone does not cause illness. Certainly everything I read on the internets must be true or Zuckerman or Bill Gates or Wikipedia volunteers or Anonymous would have it removed. Our two grandchildren were staying with us and at least one of them had a cold, but that couldn’t have been the source of my cold and sore throat because they’re so cute. I think my cold must have come from the girl who sold me a bratwurst at Camp Randall. It was a bad cold she sold me with that brat, a throat sting that made me resist swallowing, a balloon nose and damned dammed sinuses worse for me than for other people because my sinuses are so cavernous and encroach into areas where other people have brain matter. Coupled with the local symptoms was a tired, downer blah-ness like a car coasting to a stop on the side of the road because it had just run out of gas. You know the feeling.

There are people in the world who get ill and can best be cured by attention, pampering, and gentle face caresses accompanied by, “You poor dear.” Bonus points may be given for servings of chicken soup made from scratch, hot lemon-and-honey tea or runs to the drug store for aloe-suffused tissues, Dayquil, Nyquil, four kinds of cough drops, zinc pills, Mucinex, a Neti pot or two, Vicks Vaporub (remember your mother’s generous use of Vick’s Vaporub?), and various homeopathic remedies whose names I can’t even pronounce – but they all contain rare Tasmanian roots, berries from Tibet, and Extract of Supercalifragilisticexpealadocialshroom from the deepest caves of the Incan Andes. Me? I go to bed and demand to be left alone. Just me and my saline nasal spray. And maybe the Vicks.

Several other things inevitably happen when one gets sick. The first and perhaps most important is that one achieves the Buddhist Nirvanic state of becoming a human being instead of a human doing. Drowsings, naps, and fading in and out of misery are punctuated by extensive periods of – nothing. You lie there with yourself, your sluggish thoughts, and a passing daydream or two. This is a truly wonderful time.

Sometimes a vision takes you anywhere but the time and place where you are. It is summer and you’re in the back yard where all the flowers are blooming at once and there’s a robin warming a nest for good luck in the oak tree, and it really is a good-luck robin because you saw that she already crapped on your neighbor’s car, not yours, and it’s the neighbor whose new patio flushes rainwater into your driveway. You tell the robin, “Good job.” There in the back yard in the summer, you’re sitting on a cushioned lawn chair reading some rough draft you wrote on your iPad when suddenly you get an update from Amazon’s CreateSpace that tells you ten more people just bought your book, and it looks like they appreciated it because it hasn’t been sent back and no one’s flamed you with a one-star rating.

Sometimes a vision takes you back to college – your classes are all going well and you just turned in the best research paper of your life. Suddenly you’re onstage at the Barrymore Theater, and the crowd hums with expectation. Then you pick up your brand new Gibson Les Paul with the tobacco sunburst finish and gold fittings – no, it’s a cranberry red Fender Stratocaster with a black pick guard and an ebony neck, and you plug it into your array of effects pedals and a Fender Twin Reverb tube amp with a tuned-and-ported custom external cabinet, and you begin to play – exactly like Eric Clapton – wild flurries of notes, and then you become Mark Knopfler, smooth and melodic, and able to finger-pick your strings like you had eight fingers on each hand. When you get tired of that, you switch to playing a portable Hammond organ with a Leslie speaker that spins slow and fast and slow again so the Doppler effect kicks in and out like the controlled tremolo of an opera singer. You’re surrounded by your buds, a bass player – yes, it’s Kevin Kelly – with a booming bottom line that throbs, and Tom Wild on his Telecaster, and – oh, man, my throat hurts. There’s a cough drop here somewhere. It doesn’t matter that half of the paper wrapping is somehow embedded into the cough drop. It will all dissolve eventually.

In a few minutes or maybe an hour – you can’t tell because time has become irrelevant – you choose to walk through a stand of tall pine trees carpeted by soft needles. A squirrel chatters away; birds you can’t see chirp at each other, and off to your left is a woodpecker knock, knock, knocking. You follow a faint path around a gentle rise and hear the gurgle of a riffle below a deep pool. There are trout in that pool, large rainbows and darting brookies, and you have a fly rod in your hand, a Sage 8-foot 4 weight, no, it’s a handmade Payne split cane rod worth thousands, and it casts your dry fly with the smooth silkiness of a Michael Jordan jump shot. – the one where he hung in the air for thirty seconds while Craig Ehlo flew by, and the shot floated….

I’m in that gym, only now instead of 5’10”, I am 6’5″ and quick as a cat, and some taller oaf tries to guard me, but my first step already sends me past him, and another guy appears and bangs into me, sending me into the stands in the corner, but I see the basket, so far off with the diameter of a mere frisbee, but I shoot and feel the shot, keeping my hand in the air because I can guide the ball even after it leaves my hand, and it sails in slow motion, and – swish – 3 points and we win. Then I remember I played so long ago that the 3-pointer wasn’t even part of the game back then.

Ow, I think I need another spray of saline solution, even though it burns when it goes down.

Someday I’m going to write about this.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, when I feel better, maybe by next spring, I’m going to get my bike out – I like my bike, the shock-loaded Trek with the two-tone root beer float finish – and I’m going to start on the trail along Lake Mendota – no, I’m going to head along the trail through the University of Wisconsin Arburetum where the breeze is always gentle and pushes you along as you head out of town – out into the rolling hills toward Verona and the little spring-fed streams that run into Kittleson Creek where I know there are trout, especially in the pool around the bend from the bridge, where the other, that nameless creek runs into it…and…the pool is…ah….

Is it still today? The light has changed. When this cold is over, I’m going to do everything: practice music for at least six hours a day; clean out the basement; build more raised beds out of 2 by 12’s for next summer, then maybe shake the rest of the pin oak leaves off the large tree in our back yard so I can rake them one last time. Then I’ll finish that non-fiction book I’ve been meaning to write on alternative Facts of Life; add more insulation to the attic; fix the screen door that has a little hole in it for next spring; move our compost bin closer to the garden and then travel to all those places I’ve seen on PBS, starting with the boat trip down the Danube or Rhine, or whatever river that is. It’s gonna’ be great…if I ever get over this cold and sore throat.

Where was I? Was that a minute ago or an hour ago? I guess it’s important to get sick once in a while. Everybody should get sick, and it should happen more often. I’m going to write about this someday.