Staying home sick from school

Staying home sick from school, a writing prompt from Red O'Hare.

Most of this was over sixty years ago. My memories are pretty fragmented.

It seems like many of my recollections include my father. I recall reading in bed, my dad bringing stacks of store-bought, not-from-the-library books to my upper bunk where I was about eye to eye with him. He also made me hot milk with egg and sugar in it, which today sounds to me exactly wrong for my usual symptoms of too much snot and phlegm and coughing. If I was well enough to be out of bed I watched "I Love Lucy" which I always hated, but this was the era of three-channel television, and everything else that was on during the daytime was worse. All these scenes are flavored by the moldy taste of spoonfuls of penicillin, incompletely masked by some kind of sweet flavoring.

It must have been the measles. I'm pretty sure I had the chicken pox earlier, when we were moving cross-country. And if it had been mumps my dad would have been sicker than he was. So, measles, and my dad being home sick at the same time. He taught me to play chess and we played together. Decades later my son was home sick. Not the measles for him, there was an immunization by that time. I got so involved in playing chess with him that I forgot to go to my very part-time counseling job, standing up a client.

One morning I woke up early. This should have been a sign in itself that something was out of whack; I never woke up early. If it wasn't a school morning, I was often still in bed at 11. Nor did I ever do my schoolwork, but since I was awake and there was a big assignment due that day, I got to work. At breakfast my mother must have noticed I looked flushed or something. She took my temperature. I stayed home.