Unlucky pot

By Todd Stadler · Saturday, February 25, 2006 2:10pm

My friends Beeman and Kirsten hosted a potluck last Sunday, where we watched the previously recorded demise of Arrested Development and enjoyed the luck o' the pot, as the Lutherans call it. Well, the Irish Lutherans do. Actually, I made that up.

Anyhow, on Tuesday, I woke up feeling rather ill — the kind of sick I don't normally experience. To summarize and yet give "too much information" at the same time, my body was prepared to get rid of that virus in any way possible. Any way. Ahem.

Normally when I'm sick, it's a fairly genial affair. I sit on the couch with a blanket over me, a box of tissues at my side, and large quantities of orange juice and chocolate chip cookies within reach.

(As a side note, for whatever reason, I always get sick when we have run out of these items at our house, necessitating a truly pitiful trip to the grocery store in which the state of my hair and shopping cart send the distinctive signal of "Warning! This man is sick! Warning!")

But this was not to be a day of sniffling, sneezing, and surfing the Web. No, this was a day of long stretches of moaning and self-pitying, punctuated by the aforementioned virus-expurgations (ahem), which while painful were at least a break in the monotony. A day spent wondering why I could think of nothing else than the fact that I could think of nothing else, in which the smallest phrase or song snippet would get caught on infinite loop in my brain (pondering the word "ache" led inevitably to that accursed Billy Ray Cyrus song, and I'd like to have a word with him about that).

In short, I was miserable, and I had plenty of time to think about how I would have liked Julia to take care of me had she been home.

Interestingly enough, Julia called me later that afternoon, interrupting a stretch of bed-occupying in which I'd actually spent more time sleeping than wondering why I wasn't sleeping, and said that she apparently was sick with the same thing I had.

It instantly occurred to me that God had me get sick first so that, having experienced misery, I would be a far better sympathizer to Julia's illness than I normally would have been.

As I mentioned before, I don't usually get that sick. The usual phlegm-flam once or twice a year, but that's all. As such, when Julia feels bad, my responses to her aren't always as tender as they could be:

Julia: Honey, I think I have a cold.

Me: Walk it off!

Or perhaps:

Julia: Dear, I think I have the flu.

Me: Walk it off!

And, as if you didn't see this coming:

Julia: Todd, I lost both my legs at work today.

Name2: Walk it off!

As you can see, I'm practicing to be a coach of a youth sports league.

But with several hours of miserable sickness under my belt, I knew very well what it was that Julia needed. So rather than let her take the bus home from work (or, optimally, walk her illness off over the several miles between her work and home), I picked her up, in a car stocked with water, pain medicine, tissues, and, most importantly, a plastic bucket.

So that was that. A just-the-two-of-us retreat to Vomitville, written up in such detail that it actually took you longer to read it than it did to take place.

But wait! What about that dangling narrative modifier up there in the first paragraph? What's that all about? Well spotted, dear reader! Well spotted.

You see that overly-hyphenated phrase in that paragraph just a bit back? It was a lie. A lie!

Because on Wednesday, Beeman (to refresh your memory: potluck host) e-mailed all the potluck attendees and asked how many of us had come down with the stomach flu. It turned out a grand total of eight of us had, making for a grand percentage of 66%!

This prompted me to write Beeman an e-mail:

Hmm, that's strange. I distinctly remember avoiding the dish with the stomach flu in it, since it didn't look very tasty.

So what are we thinking it was? Terrorism? Democrats? Personally, I'm going to guess it was the Crème Anglaise, because in spite of translating to "English Cream", I still can't ignore that the name is French, dadgummit! French!

Oh well. I'm probably going back to work tomorrow. Hope you all have recovered well enough by now.

Todd

P.S. I bet you pulled this stunt just so you won't have to host any more potlucks. Fat chance! And next time we have one at your house — which we will — I'm not pussyfooting around. I'm bringing the freaking Pasta à la Anthrax!

P.P.S. This e-mail is so getting wiretapped for having the words "terrorism", "anthrax", "Democrats", and "French" in it.

So there you go. It was the potluck's fault. To put a very fine point on it, I will henceforth refer to said event as The Potunluck. Yes, very fine.