Capital Q Makes Me Sick

            Before the sun crept over the mountains this sub-freezing morning, Zac had blown chunks and come to report.  At least this time, he made it to the tub and not just lost last night’s dinner on the floor.  Still working on getting him all the way to the toilet before he spews.  Don’t worry; I’m not going to describe the multi-textured chunks or acrid smell that filled the entire basement.

            Both he and I stayed home from church today, as my stomach wasn’t super excited about life either.  However, I did not hurl, though it gave me cause to think back about the times where I have missed something because I was sick.

            It hasn’t been many.  In my lifetime, I believe I have only called in sick to work twice, and one of those was while I was in college.  Go figure, I had a test that day, and my professor didn’t really believe I was ill, so I had my wife call him since I couldn’t speak without the breathing patterns of a de-masked Darth Vader.

            And I believe that I only missed seven or eight days of school from Kindergarten through MCHS graduation due to illness.  Now, I missed for other reasons, but those might appear in another post, so I won’t go into the details.  I’ll also plead the Fifth Amendment right here and now.  I think the statute of limitations has been reached anyway.

            It so happens that five of those school sick days were five in a row in second grade when I attended Wilkes Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas.  (We drove by where it used to be on a family road trip when I was sixteen, and the buildings had been turned into a dance studio.  I couldn’t even locate that when we passed through there this summer.)  Sidetrack derailed.  I was home and bored with Scarlatina, otherwise known as scarlet fever.  It was like an ultra-nasty sore throat.  I don’t remember the intensity of the pain or the difference between that and the other sore throats I’ve had other than all the down time and boredom that engulfed me.

            I remember feeling disappointed that I was missing school.  I believe it was Thursday or Friday of that week that Mom drove down to the school and talked to Mrs. Smith about getting some work to do.  What kind of geek was/am I?  I did all the math, reading, and stuff before He-Man had ended.  When Mom came in to check it over, she told me that I had missed an entire page of handwriting: cursive capital Qs.  I responded that all I had seen were a bunch of squiggly “numbers twos.”  Apparently, I hadn’t been paying attention the week before when the teacher had explained the nuances of the capital Q.  I thought they were stupid, and I told my mom what I thought.  I ended up doing them.

           However, and I believe this was a first for me, I decided that I didn’t like them.  After I had supposedly put the homework in my backpack to take back to school, I went back and erased all the Qs—I mean 2s—on that dingy handwriting practice paper with the blue lines.  As a budding writer, it was a matter of principle (although I couldn’t have articulated it then).  Mom never knew, and Mrs. Smith never said anything about them.

            And I still don’t use them.

            Ever.

            They make me sick, almost enough to call in to work tomorrow.

            But not quite.