Karma

Children love me.  How do I know it?  They willingly share all of their nasty germs with me.  Once again I find myself coughing my lungs out.  I have been sick more than I have been well this year, it seems. After forty-five years of teaching children, shouldn't I be immune to every vile contagion ever concocted by their devious little minds by now?

Adding insult to injury is the fact that my husband never gets sick.  I try my best to infect him--I mean to share with him--but somehow he manages to avoid catching the myriad "gifts" I bring into our home. He proudly reminds me that he never missed a day of school from kindergarten through high school (yes, his mother corroborated it).  "I did contract the measles one summer," he adds.  This announcement is usually followed with "and I've never taken an antibiotic."   I'm sure he's just trying to make me feel better. Right?

Well, this time the impervious he-man hasn't been spared.  He, too, is sneezing, wheezing and hacking.  We make quite the comic duo, he in his recliner, overdosing on cherry flavored cough drops and me on the sofa, shivering under my afghan. Since we both have laryngitis, we communicate by texting . . . from across the room.  We try to watch TV but, even with the volume turned up, we can't hear over the incessant coughing.   He looks at me with pure disdain as if to say, "You did this to me." I smile and nod ever so ruefully.