Sick Days

Ginny returned to work today after having been ill all weekend.

I’ve played nursemaid.

She came in from work last Thursday saying she felt “a little off”.

On Friday we went to her doctor for a scheduled routine appointment and he said she checked out fine. Her diabetes appears fully under control and all her blood chemistry is in an acceptable range.

But she woke Saturday night ghastly sick—to the extent that we considered going to the hospital emergency room. But, being of the old school of folks who don’t deal with physicians for anything short of a chainsaw accident, we put it off and she toughed it out.

Besides, we were poor for so long that, although we now have hospitalization insurance, we still have the mindset of the poor who only have the traditional Get-Well-Or-Die insurance policy.

So, I fed her chicken soup and ginger ale all weekend and nursed her through her downtime by showing her movies on my computer screen. We watched back-to-back movies all weekend and Monday because she was too down to do much else. In fact she slept through many of the movies.

We went to the Hulu site at http://www.hulu.com/browse/alphabetical/feature_film where I played old Carry Grant movies from the 1940s for her amusement. And we watched a few Disney movies as whitenoise background. And, of course we could not resist some Elvira horror films. And we saw Bad Girls From Mars (my choice).

Last week Donald and Helen gave us some vcr tapes of long-past Superbowl games and we also slept through a number of those.

While Ginny napped, I did our grocery shopping and I worked correcting the proof pages of William Short’s 1854 Diary (It will be ready soon). Then I’d watch more movies with her when she woke up still too ill to even read..

All this lounging around and my fine cooking cured Ginny enough for her to sit up a while yesterday to supervise my activities. This led to some tensions.

For instance, she thought my cooking curried chicken was splurging, though it cost less than a meal at McDonalds. And when she asked me to water her plants and I started, she started a load of laundry which cut off my water supply.

Ever notice that men and women have different ways of washing clothes?

I mean you put the cloth in the machine, sprinkle it with soap, close the lid and push the button.

But Ginny magnifies this task into a project requiring 18 steps so complicated that they would daunt the astronaut pilot of the space shuttle!

Yes, she began feeling better and I began feeling grumpier.

I took her suggestions and comments as devastating criticisms of my care for her.

Getting along while living together has little or nothing to do with love. Living in peace has more to do with courtesy, and forbearance, and assuming the goodwill of your partner.

Although we are deeply in love, we do sometimes snap at eachother; this is just one small part of life together. It’s not wise to make more of it than there really is.

And just where was Jesus during all this?

Same place as always.

Yes, we feel blessed in times of great prosperity; and we feel comforted in times of great tragedy. But God is never more present with us than in the ordinary, mundane, boring days of common life. He is Lord of the Ordinary.

So, watching movies, cooking curry, washing clothes, snapping, making up, being together—in all this we live in the hollow of His hand. He is a daily God.

In Him we live and move and have our very being.

But, boy am I glad Ginny’s back to work today. I’ll hurry and do up the laundry and have it hanging in the closet before she gets back home—before she sees how I do it.