Day twenty-six

Confirmation

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

It is sometime in the early 1980s and I impulsively pull a book off my mother's bookshelf. The book is called The Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care, and the author is someone named Benjamin Spock. For as far back as I remember, nobody has ever touched that book. This is unusual in our house. We have many books, and nearly all of them seem to be read. I feel sorry for the book for being so neglected, so I pick it up and start reading. The book seems very old and has yellowing pages that crumble if I turn them too fast, so I have to be careful.

I notice immediately that the book is a guidebook for raising a child. All the way from infancy up to adolescence. I find out through reading the beginning pages that Benjamin Spock is a pediatrician. So he is not just a writer, he is a doctor. Dr. Spock. I see chapters on feeding, changing, clothing, soothing, and potty-training your baby. I skim past all of these. I also skim past the chapters that come next - suggestions on how to manage tantrums, whether or not you should send your toddler to nursery school (you should, says Dr. Spock. It's good for their social development). I don't much like babies or very little kids. The next chapters about school-age behavior, including bullying. I am briefly interested, then turn away. Those chapters hit way too close to home. I am embarrassed and nervous to read about the boys and girls sexual development and puberty chapters, because I am too scared to think about that yet.

By this point, I am about three-fourths of the way through the book and getting progressively more bored of the subject matter. Taking care of a kid is the furthest thing from my mind. I am an only child. I am interested in staying a kid for as long as possible. When I do come across a younger kid or baby, a rarity in my world, they are usually someone's siblings. These little kids are messy, unpredictable, uncommunicative, and foreign to me in every way. Girls only a few years older than me are already babysitting their neighbors or little siblings, but me, I spend my time away from school either reading some book or watching something on TV. I do not have the desire to take care of something smaller and more helpless than me. The whole process seems so off-putting. I am about to put the book down from boredom until I finally come to something interesting. The chapters on illnesses.

It starts off slow with colds and fevers and ear infections, all familiar, and then switches to bronchitis and pneumonia. My grandmother had pneumonia as a young woman, my father once told me. She was so sick she needed to spend weeks in the hospital. She went through a period called the crisis, where no one was sure if she would live or die. When she finally recovered, you would not have noticed a thing was different about her, except that her hair turned white and remained that way through the rest of her life. You could do nothing but bed rest for illnesses like that in those days, my father would tell me. Next comes a section on sinusitis, tonsillitis, and swollen glands, all familiar-enough - enough of the kids I know, including myself, have had these, but I never knew anyone who had to have their tonsils out, as Dr. Spock recommends. Finally, the meaty ones. The diseases I've heard of only in old books. Measles, German measles, mumps, whooping cough. Scarlet fever. Diphtheria. Infantile paralysis, which I know is also called polio, because I had to do a big report on President Franklin D. Roosevelt that year. He had polio. Polio was a virus that paralyzed you. But no one I knew had ever had it. No one I knew had mumps, measles, or whooping cough either, yet the way how Dr. Spock wrote about it, you would think that every kid in the neighborhood had gotten sick from one of these diseases, or was about to. I wonder when the book was written. I flip to the front pages. The book is copyright 1946. It is an old book, but both my parents were born before it was published.

Of course I know why those diseases weren't around anymore. It was because of shots. Vaccines. But I have no memory of ever having them.

"Yes, you had the shots," my mother reassures me later. "You had them when you were a baby."

I ask if she remembers when she got hers. She tells me that she got her polio vaccine when she was in elementary school, and all of the others much later - measles, mumps, German measles, and whooping cough between the time she went to college and got married.

I ask my father what he remembers. He tells me he got his polio vaccine while he was in the Army, and all of the other vaccines when he moved to Boston. He moved to Boston when he was thirty. College and thirty seem quite old to have to get those shots. I try to comprehend about what it is like to wait that long to protect you from something that will make you very sick.

"You should be lucky you got to have all of those shots where you were little, not all grown like us," my mother says. "It's terrible being scared of getting sick with those things. You never know what could happen. "

"You need those shots to go to school," my father adds. "Everyone has to get them now. Which is good, because you don't ever want to be that sick."

Both my mother and my father tell me about childhood friends who had limbs weakened or paralyzed by polio. My mother mentions her first cousins, both boys, who both had the mumps when they were teenagers. They recovered, but when they grew up and wanted to start families, they couldn't have children of their own. My father had a childhood friend who was almost blinded by the measles.

"Those diseases, they're all gone now," my father says. "Not around for us to worry about."

"Why are you asking us this, Alissa?" My mother says. "Are you reading some of those old books again?”

It was true. Dr. Benjamin Spock's Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care aside, I mainly read books first published a hundred years before, or new books set a hundred years before. I am particularly fond of books where the heroine got some crazy wasting disease and became an invalid, yet made a miraculous recovery. Or, better yet, where the heroine's best friend got some crazy wasting disease and the heroine nursed them back to health. Like The Secret Garden, that was a good one, where that girl found that isolated sick kid who turned out to be her cousin. Once she dragged him out into the fresh air, boom! Instant recovery. Or Heidi, where the main character drags her invalid friend in a wheelchair up to her shack in the Swiss mountains. Something happens to the wheelchair and it rolls down the mountain, but the invalid friend miraculously escapes, and Heidi and her family teach her to walk again in the fresh mountain air. All it took was fresh air for your recovery. It all seems so simple.

But even while reading, I got just enough of the idea that real life events have no guaranteed ending, and that fresh air will never be enough to give you a complete cure.

"Let's be happy for science for keeping us safe," my father says. Science is a big thing in our house. We have a stack of science books in the basement that we read regularly. My parents both have exacting, scientific careers. My father is an electrical and mechanical engineer. My mother was a biochemist before she got married and took time off to raise me. We spend our weekends visiting the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and American History Museum in Washington. We watch the science program NOVA every week on PBS. My father has a subscription to Scientific American. From what we have all read and see, trusting the scientists and doctors who develop all of this is important. Those scientists are some of the few people who know how all of this complex vaccine stuff works. They are there to protect all of us. They would never do us any harm. The ones who are medical doctors, of which there are many, even say an oath promising it.

My mother nods and smiles. Then she takes a little sideways glance at her bookshelf and sees that the copy of the Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care is pushed out a little further on the shelf than usual. She looks at it quizzically and pushes the book back to line up with all the others.

Today’s egg prices:

• $5.52 for Great Value Cage Free Extra Large White Eggs, per dozen, at Walmart

• $7.49 for Kroger Grade AA Large Cage Free White Eggs, per dozen, at King Soopers

• $5.92 for Member’s Mark Pasture Raised Grade A Large Brown eggs, 1.5 dozen, at Sam’s Club

• $9.28 for Kirkland Signature Eggs, Large, 24-count, at Costco

• $4.99 for 365 Organic Large Brown Grade A Eggs, per dozen, at Whole Foods

Cage-free eggs are the only eggs you can now buy in our state