With misery comes a little additional wisdom

The Column: 01.29.24

It’s good to know what true misery is as opposed to irritation, frustration, or annoyance, and now, thanks to influenza B, I am clued in. It hit suddenly last week, fever, chills, chest congestion, a hard dry cough, shivering, shaking, and a profound fatigue such that I grabbed a cane to assist me to the bathroom. Suddenly I was 98 years old. I felt I was at death’s door. I put on a sweater and lay shivering under a quilt. I slept in an upright chair to ease the coughing. I tried to order chicken soup from a deli to be delivered but they needed me to do it through PayPal, which meant creating a new PIN number to add to the twenty I already have, so I declined. Tylenol helped with the fever so I could sleep a little and in the morning I headed for the doctor’s.

I looked so pathetic that the cabdriver got out of the front seat and helped me in the back. The doctor could see I was suffering badly. A blood test revealed influenza B, and I headed home with the prescription. All in all, that’s what I call pure misery.

Irritation was when I spent 85 minutes the day before on the phone, making a hotel reservation, first online, then when that failed I spoke to a reservations agent in Honduras who spoke a sort of semi-English and was in a crowded room who then transferred me to a man who also had comprehension problems. I spoke in my clearest radio announcer voice. I did not use profanity though it would’ve been satisfying. But I am used to the phenomenon of big corporations bidding out customer service to cheap labor in foreign countries rather than hire young people from Indiana or Ohio who would demand a living wage. It’s not a good policy to make your customers irritated and I don’t plan to stay in stay in a Marriott hotel ever again, but so what?

It was frustrating the same day to delete junk e-mails, almost a hundred of them, and then suddenly Gmail twitched and undeleted them and I had to go back to Go. Technology should be a convenience, not an annoyance.

But influenza B put everything in perspective. Nearby druggists didn’t have the prescribed drug in stock but because I was dealing with robots, they simply said, “We’re working on it.” Hours later I called and got a human being who said, “We don’t have it.”

I was in bad shape, hardly able to walk across the room, nesting in a straight-backed chair to ease the violent coughing, and finally in a desperate moment I called my friend Gretchen who was busy giving a flute lesson and on her way to a board meeting but dropped everything, made some phone calls, got her friend Joshua to make a run over to the East Side to a shop that had the Xofluza the doctor prescribed for me, and a couple hours later there he was at my door, a tall young man with a head of big black hair, a record producer (she told me) who’s done a couple of Bruce Springsteen albums and who lives in my building, eight floors up. It’s good to know that Bruce works with nice people.

I was miserable Thursday and somewhat less so on Friday but something in the drug electrified my mind and when I closed my eyes I saw mysterious diagrams, documents, letters, landscapes, all incomprehensible, which made it hard to fall asleep, until I discovered that J.S. Bach’s organ chorales, played softly on the CD player next to the bed, worked perfectly, dismissed the nonsense, restored reason.

And on Saturday I felt better. Not healed but more or less myself, rather than the cranky 98-year-old wacko on the verge of being hauled away to Happydale.

“Where is his wife, for God’s sake?” you ask. She is in St. Paul, working, being an orchestra violist. She offered to quit and come home and I said, No, absolutely not. Why should she be miserable watching me be miserable? One misery is enough. But do this, my friend: look down the list of contacts on your phone and ask, “Whom would I call to go halfway across town one evening to get me the drug I need?” Make sure you have a Gretchen. When I recover I hope to become one myself. Or a Joshua.

Look on the sunny side of life with Garrison Keillor's latest book, Cheerfulness! He encourages readers to choose joy over dread in today's stress-filled world.

CLICK HERE to buy today!