January 3: Vicks Nose Drops, Sick People, Book Club

The minute I went in, I was sort of sorry I'd come.  He was reading the Atlantic Monthly, and there were pills and medicine all over the place, and everything smelled like Vicks Nose Drops.  It was pretty depressing.  I'm not too crazy about sick people, anyway...

Holden is visiting his history teacher, old Spencer.  Old Spencer asked him to stop by to say goodbye before Holden leaves the school permanently.  (As I said yesterday, I believe, Holden is being kicked out of his boarding school at the beginning of the novel.)  And old Spencer has the grippe.  He's sick, and Holden can't stand being around sick people.

I'm sick at the moment, and I can't stand being around me.  It's a strange illness, sort of ebbing and flowing all day long.  Sometimes, I feel just fine.  My head and nasal passages are clear, and I have tons of energy.  Other times, my head and nose are filled with mucus, and all I want to do is go to sleep.  That's the way it's been all day long.

I spent most of the day getting ready for my monthly book club meeting.  Cleaning the bathroom.  Sweeping the floors.  Cleaning strawberries and a pineapple.  Melting chocolate for my chocolate fountain.  I also mailed off the last of my Christmas poems to distant relatives and friends.  I haven't had a lot of time to relax.

Tonight's book was Fannie Flagg's A Redbird Christmas.  It's a short, sweet little novel about a man dying of emphysema who moves to a little town in Alabama called Lost River.  There, he's befriended by the town's citizens and learns for the first time in his life the true meaning of love and happiness.  It reads like a fable, especially at the end, and I loved this book.  Flagg has a way of tempering the sentimentality of her stories with wry wit and a twist of the Southern gothic.  All of her characters are just a little off, and that's what appeals to me.

A Redbird blessing

So this night, when Saint Marty feels like he's suffering with the grippe, like old Spencer, he gives thanks for his book club, and Fannie Flagg, and a Christmas fable.