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Wives Tales

When you have a baby people will try to frighten you with horror stories about the side-effects of parenting, ranging from sleeplessness to post-partum kleptomania. I have always enjoyed abundant health, but now I have been warned that my robust constitution will soon erode in the face of repeated exposure to particularly virulent germs that are trafficked only by very small children. Naturally I considered these warnings to be nothing but a crock and laughed them off with my best superior-attitude-all-knowing-laugh (I have several).

Next thing you know, my wife and I are both under the weather, and since our baby girl is only four months old and mosly housebound, I think we picked it up from our friends' children. We had a party at our house this past weekend and all of our friends brought their children; a horde of petrie dishes with legs; mobile colonies of bacteria, viruses, fungus, you name it. The crawlers are the worst offenders, dragging themselves through the grime, pausing only long enough to performing the ancient childhood ritual of jamming all five fingers of either hand into the mouth.

Our friend Diane, the mother of one such specimen, greeted us with an LA-style mid-air-kissy-kissy-an-inch-from-the-cheek maneuver. "I'm sick as a dog," she announced. She didn't want to expose us to her germs, so instead we spent a few hours playing with her 18-month old son who was happily oozing high-viscosity drool everywhere. It was amazing; that elastic strand of infectious goo bobbing and swinging and getting all over everything without ever becoming detached. We could probably have caught his bugs by inhaling in the same zip code. Of course, the kid wasn't sick in the slightest... on the contrary, his primitive little immune system was chugging away, sampling and rejecting every germ that came down the pike. But germs are like hoboes; if they can't swing a place to stay, they'll just hitch on for a ride, like microscopic con men waiting for a sucker to get close enough for a play.

So there we were, playing with this little two-legged time bomb, this bacteria delivery system, getting jumped and mugged by two flus, at least three different colds, and, considering the number of handfuls of dirt he'd already eaten, a dose of the fungus that's killing the hedge in our front yard. But I wasn't worried. I've never been scared of germs, and I even use the Three Second Rule as it applies to dropped food. I've never believed all those old wives tales about "catching a chill," or any of that stuff. A cold is called a cold because it's not accompanied by a fever, not because you get it from being cold.

I once had a roommate in college who declined to go hot-tubbing one evening (under what were otherwise undeniably excellent conditions) on the grounds that he felt a tickle in his throat and therefore didn't want to get his feet wet for fear of catching a cold. As if the tickle in his throat would somehow become aware that there was moisture on his feet, and that this would be signal to mount an offensive. Ridiculous. I hear he is a very successful surgeon these days.

The morning after our party, Julia, woke up with a sore throat, which didn't surprise me because she snores like a chainsaw. I don't know which is louder, her snoring or the car keys and loose change jumping around on the dresser. I woke up feeling fine, but by noon I felt like I'd been jabbed in the sinuses with a hot poker. I waved off Julia's theories of how we got sick as mere suburban voodoo jibberish, and reeled off to the kitchen to heat up some chicken soup ... well-known in the scientific community for its virus-killing properties.

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© Todd Pinsky 1998-2002. All rights reserved.