Sick Days

For the past few years I have watched my nation crumble on YouTube news broadcasts. I have watched and waited for a turning point, a turning back, a rescue, a restoration, and yet the march to ruin has proceeded unimpeded. At last, it has all become too oppressive, too discouraging, and all too predictable. Therefore, I have gone to watching old TV shows, harkening back to childhood days when I had stayed home sick from school. My mother would have situated me on the couch with blanket and pillow, a hot water bottle or an icepack, depending upon the symptoms of want. She would bring me hot drinks or cold drinks, Jell-O, toast maybe, or crackers, applesauce, a banana, and there would be medicine on the table, cough syrup, aspirin, fruity animal shaped vitamins, a thermometer, perhaps a steaming air-humidifier, the distinct though otherwise indescribable scent of Vicks Vaporub constituting the atmosphere in the old front room, and she would turn on the TV to take my mind off my misery. There would be Ossie and Harriett, Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, the Dick Van Dyke Show, and these to me were all sweet balm, welcome comfort, taking me away in laughter or rocking me gently to sleep. I return to such consolation now, a steady convalescence, the assurance of recovery, in the same old way, but also in a new way, for I understand now many things I did not understand as a child, I hear now what was once hidden between the lines, accessible only through experience. I laugh out loud, knowing not only the intention of the script but also the quaintness of bygone times. And in this my mirth is complete.