With the kids and Kris still getting over the last sniffles of their second bouts of colds this season, and with a few days yet to go before the flu shots kick in, I can't help being paranoid about getting sick. I never used to think about it. I rarely got sick, and when I did I wasn't particularly bothered by it – what better reason for a medicinal Scotch after dinner. But now, when one of us gets sick, we all get sick and each of us is sick in a unique way, and with the kids that means at a unique time – David up at midnight with a runny nose and cough, Sofia up at two and Isobel at four, etc., with variations from night to night. This is, of course, in addition to their regular wakings to use the bathroom, get a drink, be soothed after a bad dream, etc., with variations from night to night. Since becoming parents, we've learned to cope, if not always happily, with a night's sleep only in aggregate. But when everybody's got a cold, these aggregate particulates of slumber are more like sand than gravel – and that can really begin to grate.
Given all this, there isn't a situation lately where cold and flu germs lying in wait are not top of mind. At the chapel at our parish recently, I dip my finger in the holy water. Bless myself. Try and settle into prayer (always hard for someone as easily distracted as I am). My contact lenses start bothering me. I rub my eye. With the same finger I dipped into the holy water. Immediately I have this mental picture of a hundred other pilgrims, all with runny noses and hacking coughs, dipping their fingers into that same little basin of blessed but nevertheless stagnant water. My eye begins to itch. Pretty soon both my eyes itch. I imagine a battalion of gibbering, slavering bacteria (that look a little like the booger creatures from the Mucinex commercials) invading my bloodstream. I totally lose track of prayer and begin to think about how it's too bad that the process of blessing water (or wine, for that matter) doesn't impart some sort of antibacterial property to it. Alas, it does not. It should be easy at this moment to slip into a rumination on the harmonization of faith and science, and the distinction between matter and substance and its role in transubstantiation (not that that happens to holy water anyhow)…but my hypochondria's running too high.
I left the chapel sure that round three of household illness had been teed up. Amazingly, these many days later we are all still well. Good luck, the power of prayer, and a vigorous lifestyle … and after-dinner Scotch. That and the anti-bacterial gel in the little squeeze bottle on my keychain (thank you company health fair!). I can now dip into the holy water and engage in the sign-of-peace handshaking without fear knowing there's a post Mass disinfection coming. The communal wine cup is still going to make me nervous until the end of flu season.
