Sick Day.

My big toe is sore, which makes it official. I now hurt from one end to the other.

I woke up in the middle of the night, less than two weeks shy of Christmas, with the flu.

I shouldn’t be surprised. My wife came down with it a day earlier. So now the two of us make a fine pair. Dragging ourselves from bed to couch, then couch to bed, taking turns mustering enough energy to let the dog out at the back door.

Mostly what we do is sleep. I don’t know if this is the strain of flu that was supposed to be taken care of by the shot I received last fall. I heard on the news the vaccine isn’t all that effective this year. Maybe it’s just some random bug. What I can tell you is whatever has infected me leaves the head throbbing and the rest of me feeling as disoriented as if I just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl. I can’t wear my glasses. I can’t read. Thinking is out of the question. The only human function I am equipped for is sleep.

After an eventful middle-of-the-night in the bathroom I didn’t open my eyes again until almost noon. At that point the sole thought running through my enfeebled brain was that I was supposed to be attending a lunch meeting at The Nature Conservancy.

I managed to open my laptop and squint at the screen long enough to get off an apologetic email. I hoped they’d find someone else to eat my sandwich. The last thing I wanted to think about was food. I went back to sleep.

Later in the afternoon I made another attempt at reading. When you’re feeling this poorly, Ron Chernow’s thousand-page biography of Grant is not the thing to attempt. The book was crushing me just sitting on my chest. I picked up the iPad to check out the New York Times. The Republican were still at their tax bill. Powerful men were still behaving badly. Yet another high profile person was fired from the Trump administration. It’s strange to have events of powerful consequence come at you in a blur and you lack the mental capacity to process it. Maybe there’s an insight there, a root cause of how it all went wrong in the first place, some short circuit in the national attention span that left the whole country as robbed of its thought process as I feel right now. I fell back asleep for an hour.

I tried putting some Christmas music on. A gentle hammer dulcimer rendition of Angels We Have Heard on High. It sounded so sad and delicate my wife started to cry. There is so much to do this time of year, and days lost to sickness rush out like a tide you know you won’t get back.

So why am I writing this? Misery loves company, I suppose. And I’ve figured out a way to prop my laptop on my knees so I can write from a horizontal position.

But there is something of value that came from a miserable day spent sick. It’s worth telling. Late in the day it occurred to me that one of us would have to go for provisions. Saltines, ginger ale, soup. I hoped Campbell’s still made chicken noodle soup the old fashioned way, in a can with a red label and too much salt.

I was the one most fit to make the run. I slept a little more before finally stealing the moment. I pulled on some clothes and made it out to the car.

The cold of a winter evening washed over me like a balm. My head stopped hurting. I pulled out of the driveway into a world of pure magic. It was snowing. Big flakes drifted to the ground like elegant Victorian lace. Christmas lights up and down the street gave the neighborhood a soft glow.

It was the sort of moment you know there is a God in the heavens and the hope of a better day ahead, and it was healing. Not a show stopping drop-thy-crutch sort of miracle that banishes every last remnant of disease. It was a small healing, enough to get me to the store and back. For the moment that was sufficient.

Sickness, falsehood, hatred, there’s so much in this world that would convince us hope is gone. Then in one moment of sublime beauty the message comes down like snow falling from the heavens that if we can manage to look just a little further ahead, we’ll find the healing we need to get through whatever comes next.