Yesterday was my 51st birthday, and how did I celebrate it?By coming down with a very nasty case of bronchitis. I was already feeling so poorly over the weekend that I begged off of attending the RTG’s children’s theater production of “Sleeping Beauty” in which my wife played a fairy. . . bowed out of two different cast parties . . . and skipped out of playing second service at church (evidently I looked so bad that the entire senior choir practically hog tied me and threw me in the trunk so I would go home where I belonged.)
If I had been smart, I perhaps should have skipped my trip to the Lyric Opera Tuesday night, except that would have meant missing a great meal at The Berghoff (Marshall’s treat in honor of my birthday) and a fun night at the opera which included a huge surprise…. sitting right next to a couple who used to live in Racine and whose daughter is a good friend of Kathy’s from high school. (What are the odds that in an opera house that seats 3,563 people, we would end up next to the Charofs? Incredible.) One of the biggest reasons I still wanted to go to the opera is that I had managed to be put on the list to visit the dressing room of Deborah Voigt, the star soprano of the evening, after the performance (thanks to the radio interview I recorded with her several weeks ago.) That would have been really fun- and I already had it all planned in my head that I would not shake her hand or come all that near her because of my bad cold. . . but at least we would get to exchange pleasantries from opposite sides of the room. But then as luck would have it, she was feeling a bit under the weather and ended up not seeing anyone at all after the performance. (So near and yet so far.) So we were on our merry way rather soon after the performance, and I was back home by about 12:40 and in bed by 1.
It was downhill from there. About 3 in the morning, I awoke myself and Kathy with a bad coughing jag – but what was more alarming to Kathy was the heavy rattling in my chest, which evidently sounded like something from the percussion section of a marching band. Then and there, Kathy issued the edict: no WGTD and no Carthage the next day and I was going to Urgent Care. Case closed. It’s in moments like that when I am SO glad I’m married and that the woman to whom I’m married is smart, caring, and gets right to the point! And the truth is that I felt too lousy to put up any fight at all.
So it was a quiet birthday, spent mostly in bed, kept company by my pills and prescription-strength cough syrup, a pile of kleenix, and a couple of opera videos. (It’s a good sign of how sick I was that I barely touched the laptop, aside from reading the birthday greetings that came through on Facebook.) I’m struck by how odd it feels to be really sick on your birthday; it has the effect of making you feel like you’ve aged ten years rather than one.
Fortunately, Kathy could not have been a nicer nurse- as patient and kind as Florence Nightingale herself- but better than all of those kindnesses through the door was the special and entirely unexpected treat she presented me after supper: boston cream pie, my very favorite dessert, which in and of itself felt like the greatest banquet I’d ever been served. I’m sure when she grabbed that out of the refrigerator case at the store, she had no idea that in that one gesture she managed to make this a birthday worth smiling about. It goes to show that a great gift need not be fancy or expensive. What counts is when it’s thoughtful- when it’s exactly the right thing to make you smile again.
pictured above: the boston cream pie Kathy bought for me at Pick n Save.