APRIL 21, 2023 – The problem with being in the same boat as everyone else, is you can’t complain. So much as a grunt marks you as a grump, and who wants to be rowing against that reputation? You have only two options: howling in private or bailing out of the boat. If you howl in private, you defeat the point of howling. If you give up and jump out . . . well, that’s not viable unless you’re a nihilist, which I know you’re not. Thus, the sole two options aren’t even options. You’re consigned to joining the chorus aboard the boat singing (roundly), “Row, Row [Our] Boat.”
Overhead, meanwhile, frozen loons drop from the skies. It’s unheard of, but apparently bitterly cold upper winds have coincided with the annual loon migration north. Ice forms on the wings of the poor birds, interrupting lift and sending them into nose . . . er, beak . . . dives into Wisconsin/Minnesota cornfields, barnyards and cow pastures. Unable to take off (with frozen wings and from land) or walk to open water, since their feet are affixed too far back on their undercarriages, the poor loons are doomed unless rescued by human hands.
If the weather boat we’re all in was crowded to begin with, now we’ve got to make room for the loons.
“What to do?” as my grandfather would ask rhetorically before edifying me, he supposed, with an exposition of how he’d solved some imponderable problem affecting the trucking industry he help skipper through the Great Depression.
Yes, what to do in response to winter’s enduring presence? For starters, you come down with a cold. Why not? It goes with the weather, which lately features daytime highs no better than 40F and an icy wind driving intermittent rain, drizzle and eventually snow across your view out the window. Atchoo! But at least it’s not Covid, except . . .
For an added twist, your spouse returns from Scotland and tests positive for Covid. Now you’re in the soup.
But it doesn’t work. The soup, that is. Within an hour after retrieving your Covid wife from the airport, you start feeling more feverish (not from only 30 minutes of masked exposure to her; you were feeling this way even before her arrival), and the feeling doesn’t abate with chicken soup. For excitement you take your temperature several times in a row, each time scoring higher in official fever territory.
To distract yourself further from the cold, blustery weather, you fret that the $50,000/mo. Revlimid (See 1/24 post) you’re taking for the myeloma is suppressing your immune system against the cold-with-fever virus. You call the nurse hotline, treating it like a ship-to-shore call from the boat you’re in with everyone else, except maybe you’re “special” and in need of an at-sea rescue by the Coast Guard.
But it turns out you’re not deserving of rescue from the boat. Since you’ve tested consistently negative for Covid, the Coast Guard tells you to take a dose of Tylenol and suspend the Revlimid. The recommendation works.
None of which solves for the potential Covid brought home by your spouse. You test yet again—negative—and to keep it that way, you and your spouse sequester from each other.
The fever is conquered but then your G.I. system revolts as it never did through any of the tough-love cancer treatment last year. What gives?!
And you were bummed out by the weather?
But just as the weather is bound to improve by June, so is your health likely to recover before April is out. Meanwhile, other distractions await, such as nearly slicing your finger off with a table knife.
Here’s the first cut of the story: Your wife’s feeling quite good recovering from Covid, but her knee is painfully sore from all that Highland hiking. Reserving culinary refinements for a better day, she asks if you’d be so kind as to “throw a frozen turkey pot pie into the oven” for her supper.
Of course you’re so kind, if not particularly smart. You pull a pot pie from the “reserve” recess of the freezer and read the instructions—a test of your literacy, which you pass. “Pre-heat oven to 400,” the instructions command. “Slice top of pot pie,” they continue. After placing the stone-hard, round frozen little pie on a baking sheet, you pull a pointed, stainless steel table knife from the drawer and attempt to “slice” the crust. You’d meet greater success trying to scratch a round chunk of polished granite. You change “slice” to “jab.” One more try, you think, holding the knife higher and jamming it down harder.
In the nano-second before the knife tip hits the frozen crust equivalent of impenetrable stone, you remember the same instant in the bungee-cord incident back in January; the time when you pulled the loose end of the cord to free the other end, which was embedded in highly compressed ice and snow. You couldn’t react fast enough before a critical law of physics kicked in—or rather, kicked out the hooked end of the cord—nearly taking out your left eyeball. Now it’s a different law of physics at play, one relating to momentum: when the knife tip stops abruptly, your hand keeps going, sliding down off the handle straight onto the blade, slicing your little finger right across the inner side of the middle joint.
After blood flow stops and the bandaging is complete, you place the damn pot pie, which under the circumstances you now call a “stinking cow pie,” onto a baking sheet, as per the instructions, and shove it into the oven. No matter how many times you re-read the instructions, they still say, “slice crust” not “slice finger”—or more to the point, “slice” not “jab.” After apologizing to your spouse for the unusual commotion and dressed up expletives, you harangue yourself aloud for such godforsaken stupidity. The self-deprecation dovetails with your wife’s unbridled amusement over the unhappy stabbing that caused your slicing.
And you laugh too, because the ridiculous scene again takes your mind off the inglorious weather. Then for a measure of time as the bare trees outside sway in the wind-driven rain, kitchen pot pie humor harmonizes with another round of “Row, Row [Our] Boat.”
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
1 Comment
Hilarious! And completely right!
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