ever-fixed mark

One. The afternoon before our departure on our big camping trip, Aitch arrived home all excited because he had been in his babysitter’s pool. It was hot, and he was still shirtless and wearing his bathing suit. He raised his arms to demand, “Pick me up!” and I saw a huge lump under his right armpit.

“That’s probably just the way he’s built,” Husband said.

“I think I should take him to the doctor,” I said.

When the doctor came into the room, Aitch lifted his arm again and announced, “Look at my armpit!” I explained the situation and then immediately started apologizing, “You’ll probably tell me I’m an idiot and there’s nothing there…”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I can see that thing from here.”

Bottom line: One reasonable possibility is mono, since he’s recently been exposed via me. Since he had no other symptoms and no other enlarged nodes, and since a mono titer might not yet be positive, they decided to hold off on a blood test and gave us the go-ahead for camping. I am still nervous because isn’t this how Debra Winger got her final send-off in Terms of Endearment?

Two. We arrived at the campground, unpacked, and spent our first night without incident. That screaming? Oh, you heard that? That was Minor, in as foul of a mood as he’s ever subjected us to. For twelve hours, any kind of stimulus — annoying, painful, exciting, even pleasant — elicited a high-pitched shriek. I believe the chipmunks took up a petition to evict us from the campground.

On Saturday morning we went to a deli for breakfast (we were not as committed to the camping aesthetic as we might have been), and Minor took a digger off his chair. It was a bad one. I scooped him up and kissed the left side of his face, the side he had fallen on, relieved that there wasn’t a mark. Then he finally calmed down and turned his head and, good God, there was a HUGE white goose-egg on the right side of his forehead.

“He seems to be okay otherwise,” Husband said.

“I think I’m taking him to the doctor,” I said.

The walk-in care physician, who ran a practice out of his home, was amazingly on-site at eight a.m. when we arrived. He examined Minor and said there was no immediate sign of concussion, but he told us to be on the lookout for warning signs and gave us directions to the emergency room. Minor’s demeanor actually improved for a few hours, which worried me — was this the major personality change we were supposed to watch out for? — but soon he was back to his exceedingly crabby self.

Three. Meanwhile, I had hurt my back. On Thursday night, when I took Aitch to the doctor, it was a bit sore. I took a bunch of ibuprofen first thing Friday morning, but on Friday’s run it was killing me. It wasn’t just a pulled muscle or inflammation, but spasms. Spasms are the worst, because there are only two cures: time or muscle relaxants. Sometimes you can avoid them, because they only kick in when you try to move in certain ways, but as the day wore on the list of movements grew to include sitting and inhaling, two things I was certain to do on the car ride. Right before we left, I took half of a three-year-old (expired) Flexeril. They are always extending expiry dates for clinical trials; why not in my own medicine cabinet?

At first, it didn’t seem to have much effect, making me wonder if it had lost its magic. After a few hours, though, a kind of haze settled over me, and the knot finally started to unclench. The haze is sort of pleasant when you have nothing to do but loll in bed and watch bad TV, but when you need some level of alertness — say, when you’re preventing two children from damaging themselves while unpacking a car and setting up camp — it’s most UNpleasant. I was so irritable that I wanted to die, and yet I couldn’t muster up the energy to complete any task the way I wanted it done. I imagine that’s what it feels like to be in a deep depression: the kernel of your personality is tucked away there somewhere, but your body just sits there stubbornly like a great inert carbuncle, refusing to engage.

And the camping? In spite of all that, it was…okay. The biggest drawback was that our campsite was slightly remote from the others in our group. Not really remote in adult terms, but too far to allow the kids to run up the road to play with the neighbors without supervision. Some of the other families had arranged to be near their friends, so adults were able to hang out in a big knot at their campfires and drink beer as the kids played en masse. We took the kids on walks to visit their friends but always seemed to be interrupting their parents’ meals. Thus, the kids weren’t able to entertain themselves with friends nearly as much as we thought.

On Saturday, desperate to get Minor to nap for a few minutes before he detonated his afternoon cranky bomb, I took him for a car ride. He was still babbling happily when we came upon the Desert of Maine. This is perhaps the greatest roadside attraction in the history of tourism (it is a desert! in Maine!), so we had to stop. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me, and the camel is long gone.

Currently, there are large plastic bins placed at strategic points throughout the house, and periodically when I spot some item I deem necessary to sustain life, I pull it off a shelf and throw it into a bin. I am packing to take the boys “camping” this weekend, although when you transport more than 80% of your household goods across the state line, I believe technically that is called “moving.”

The local mothers’ club (those snooty bitches!) is hosting a camping weekend in Maine, and I signed up on impulse. I’m not sure what made me do it, as I’ve never been an enthusiastic camper. I’m outdoorsy enough in the daytime, I guess, but at night when the dew point is around 60 I don’t even want to sleep indoors without the life-giving properties of humidity-filtering air conditioning. (However, I did sleep in a sleeping bag with only an airline pillow for my head for three years in the Peace Corps, so if that doesn’t give me camping cred, I don’t know what will.)

Still, the boys are growing up in prime camping country, and I thought they should have the same chance to enjoy summer nights under the Maine sky as I did, vicariously, through all those WASPy books I enjoyed so much as a kid. Except, you know, for real. Camping seems like their kind of thing — they love looking at bugs and playing in dirt and swimming and running around for hours with the other kids — but I am just a tiny bit worried about the sleeping, for different reasons. Aitch is Pavlovian in his attachment to his bedtime routine. If he doesn’t get the signal that it’s bedtime, he doesn’t shut down. In hotel rooms he’s never asleep until after we are. Minor is much better about being able to nod off under different circumstances. I can see him falling asleep on my shoulder in front of the campfire while the older kids run around. But he does not sleep well in the company of others, and once he’s awake, we all will be.

It’s a good thing this is nearby and open 24 hours.

Two Fridays ago, my trainng partner and I ran 8 miles, our longest run to date. Afterwards, I felt a little tired, as you do when you push the human body to the outermost limits of endurance. The next day, I felt completely wrecked. I spent most of Saturday in bed, took it easy on Sunday, and still felt dreadful on Monday. It seemed like the kind of thing that could only be arrested by a massive infusion of antibiotics, so on Monday I went to the doctor instead of going for a run.

The doctor asked, “What’s the trouble?”

I said, “You know, it feels exactly like when I had mono in high school.”

He did a physical exam. “Your throat’s not that red, and there are no white patches. You don’t have too much post nasal drip. Your glands aren’t too swollen. You don’t have a fever. Your spleen’s not enlarged.”

I said, “Other than all those things, it feels just like mono. Can you give me some drugs?”

Well, “mono” was the wrong thing to say, because it is a virus, not a bacterium, so he insisted on giving me a blood test. “It’ll be back in two days, and if you’re still feeling lousy we’ll see about antibiotics.”

A week went by in which I could not get the office to return my phone calls. I figured all the tests were negative, but I still felt strangely horrible, which made me really cranky. I resumed my running schedule on Wednesday, thinking if my malaise wasn’t confirmed by medical tests or actual symptoms, I had better power through it.

The doctor finally called me back last night, saying that the test showed a reactivation of the mononucleosis I had my senior year in high school.

Hey! The viruses are having a twenty-five-year reunion, just like my classmates!

I am not pleased by this turn of events. Although it is gratifying to have my House-like differential diagnostic skills affirmed, it sucks to have a lingering illness with no treatment and no measurable symptoms to earn me sympathy.

A few tidbits from this morning’s newspaper:

Garden coaches. The Escapes section ran an article about people who hire coaches to teach them about gardening. I laughed, but if there’s anyone who is the target market for this kind of service, it is I. Even though our garden is a scanty affair (it’s a one-yard strip around the perimeter, no front or back yard) it looks like hell’s weed patch. I’ve never been that interested in it, but if I wanted someone to teach me about gardening, I think I’d call my mom, not a coach.

Designer babies. On the Op-Ed page, David Brooks writes about the latest craze sweeping the country: Hipster parents trying to produce designer babies by requesting Harvard-educated sperm with liberal tendencies. Mr. Brooks apparently thinks the greatest menace facing the country today is not terrorists or even the current administration, but rich white parents. [Husband: We should go down to New York and scare the crap out of him: “Our kids have funny names and we’re going to run you down in our big stroller! Booga-booga!”]

Family photos. According to this article, men display photos of their wives and kids at work, but women only show photos of the kids. Why? Because modern women think of the dads as kind of superfluous once they’ve dropped off their sperm donations. (I had to look twice to make sure David Brooks didn’t write it.) In our family, it’s just the opposite. Not only do I take most of our pictures, but I have a serious aversion to having my photo taken. I’m not afraid of losing my soul, just of seeing myself on film. I am probably the only person wed in North America since the invention of the videocamera who has never seen her own wedding video.

Fill it up with leaded. And to really cheer you up, here’s this from the Business section by way of Sodor. Now I have to explain to my boys why I’m throwing out a small fortune’s worth of their very favorite toys. These things are small blocks of wood with wheels, people. Only two things are required to make them childproof: 1. Remove all choking hazards and 2. Do not coat them in a toxic substance. Well, I guess that explains Aitch’s early inability to distinguish between mommy and daddy.

On Sunday evening, Aitch’s “best friend” from preschool stopped by with his mother to see if we wanted to go for a walk to the nearby school playground. We did, and after spending a half-hour exploring the joys of the swings, the slide, and especially the water fountain, we walked home by way of the pond.

The kids threw a few stones into the water, which attracted a family of ducks, who thought we were throwing food. I had some dog biscuits in my pocket, so we broke them into tiny pieces and fed them to the cute little ducklings. We said hi to the city councilor for our ward, who was out walking his dog around the pond.

As I’ve mentioned before, the pond is an old kettle hole, so the surface sits well below street level. On our way home we climbed the stairs to reach the street just in time to see a police car pull up. One of Port City’s finest got out and hurried down the stairs, and we stopped, curious to see what nefarious crime was taking place right in our midst.

About halfway down the stairs, he spotted the city councilor, and they exchanged a few words. Then he came back up the stairs.

“Is something going on?” I asked him.

“Well…” he said. “Someone complained that you were throwing stones at the ducks. We have to respond to everything.”

Let’s get this straight: Someone called the police to neutralize the menace posed by a COUPLE OF THREE-YEAR-OLDS SKIMMING STONES.

My kid’s not even out of preschool, and he’s already appearing in the police blotter.

When Dog was a puppy, we took him to obedience training. Most dog owners in this town use the same trainer, so virtually every dog in town responds to the same hand signals and voice commands. If you stand in Market Square and make a biceps-curling motion with your right arm, 80% of the dogs within visual range (and both of my children) will sit. It’s kind of magical.

The trainer espouses the “either you lead, or the dog leads” philosophy, and she sets a number of ground rules that are meant to show the dog that the human is boss. For example, the dog is not supposed to eat until after the people are finished, and the dog has to sit and wait politely while you fill his dish, until you tell him, “Okay.”

As you can imagine, it’s pretty hard to train a puppy to wait in most circumstances, but at dinner time they tend to be especially inattentive. Our trainer advised us that if the dog got up to eat before hearing the command, we should take his dish, ostentatiously pour the contents back into the dog food bag, and then walk away without a backward glance.

Well. If you every want to see an expression on a dog’s face that unambiguously indicates “What the hell, woman?” try this. It’s hilarious, and also effective. Our dog learned very quickly to sit and wait until we told him it was okay to eat.

But we couldn’t leave well enough alone. We started getting cute with the trick. We’d put the dog into a “wait” and then talk to him for a few minutes using words that sounded very much like “Okay” to tease him. “Oh no, oh well, oh hey…okay!” Then we changed it up by giving him a kiss on the head with the “Okay.” Eventually the kiss became the proxy signal, and then we teased him a bit more by kneeling down and giving him a few minutes of pats and caresses before getting to the final kiss.

Eventually, the kids came along and we didn’t have as much time for the dog as we once did, so the pre-feeding petting ritual was a twice-daily chance to lavish some affection on him. I suppose that Dog has caught on to this, because lately when I tell him to sit and wait and then give him a few pats and a kiss and then tell him “okay,” he refuses to eat until we spend a few more minutes petting him. He actually holds out for more love.

I know the trainer would tell me to dump all his food back in the bag and walk away, but I can’t. It’s a total power play, but you would have to have a heart of stone to resist this.

Reebok has an interesting commercial for running gear airing these days. It cuts between pairs of runners who are jogging slowly enough to carry on conversations. The copy urges us to “run at the speed of chat…run easy.” I suppose Reebok is trying to differentiate itself as the anti-Nike — don’t kill yourself! have some fun! — and while some “real runners” have given them flak for this approach, I will come down on the side of Doctor Mama: running slowly can be good for you. I would even buy their shoes if I made those kinds of purchasing decisions based on the cuteness of the commercial and not on how well the shoes fit my double-wide feet. (Sorry, Reebok. I wear the same Asics as 80% of the running population. Seriously, look down. Everyone has these shoes.)

I have very ambivalent feelings about running with other people. I am always very nervous about falling behind on group runs, and I really like to have the option of speeding up or slowing down at will. My nervousness is kind of like a debilitating form of stage fright. A few years ago I joined a running club, and on the days when a run was scheduled in the evening I’d be half queasy all day just thinking about it.

On the other hand, the most fun I’ve ever had running was with company. Just yesterday morning, I did the first five miles of a seven-mile run with a friend, and the time just flew by. In high school, I sometimes begrudgingly allowed my teammates to push me much harder than I would have pushed myself, leading to amazing endorphin highs. And then there was the Hash.

I started running with the Hash House Harriers in Tunisia. One of my friends in the State Department invited me to a run in Carthage, a beautiful town on the coast famous as the seat of Roman civilization in North Africa. At that point in my life, I would have attended a sewing circle or revival meeting if beer were served and English spoken. And both beer and English were promised. So I went, and I was amazed.

The Hash, which bills itself as a “drinking club with a running problem,” puts on orienteering trail runs. The trail is set by the “hare” before the run, and the runners have to follow marks on the ground (chalk or flour) until the end. The runners gather at the start and disperse in all directions until one person finds an arrow; then all the runners gather together, following the arrows until the next checkpoint. There are sometimes false trails, so if your arrows disappear you need to return to the checkpoint to look for the real trail. Sometimes there are beer stops mid-way, so you might stop and chug a beer and then run on. There are always beer stops at the end. Has virgins (”new boots,” in the parlance) are expected to chug a beer in one gulp at the final beer stop; what you can’t finish, you have to pour on your head.

(Yes, chugging a beer in public while wearing running shorts IS about the most culturally insensitive thing a female could do in a Muslim country. Why do you ask?)

Anyway, with the trail markings and the people and the beer stops and the uncertainty of how far you’re going, or even where, a Hash run is just about the most painless way to crank out five miles that was ever invented.

So when I moved back to the States after the Peace Corps, I joined the Chicago Hash, but it was not the same. I found that US Hashers were a different breed. The Hash has a tradition of raunchiness, a tradition that was held in check by the State Department crew but expressed full-force by the Windy City hashers. It involves off-color “hash names,” ribald drinking songs, sexist attitudes and jokes, etc. Typical frat-party stuff. Unfortunately, the Chicago hashers were committed to these traditions with a humorlessness that bordered on fascism. For example, one guy refused to answer me when I called him by his real name; at the Hash, he would only respond to his Hash name. A special tribunal threatened to kick me out of the club when I refused to follow the rule requiring runners with new shoes to drink a beer out of one of them. The singing of multiple rounds of mildly dirty songs was an officially sanctioned and even enforced post-run activity.

I am not a prude, I don’t think (of course, does anyone ever stand up and say, “Hey! I’m a prude!”), but all the non-running stuff was very tedious, and eventually I decided I was too old for a “Hash name” and the nonsense that went with it. I do miss the runs, though. Is there a Hash out there where you can run under your own name? Maybe I should start one.

Last week, when I was out running, I passed my neighbor whose child only naps in her stroller. It was the third time that week, and suddenly I realized, I’m one of them! I’m a Port City Road Regular, one of those people you always see on the street, for whom every citizen has a private nickname.

I wonder what my nickname is?

Maybe something simple and alliterative, like “Running Rosie” to evoke my red, red face.

How about “The Empress of Ice Cream,” to account for the avoirdupois that persists in spite of all the calories burned on the road?

I hope it’s “Mary Monoboob,” in honor of my fearsome running bra.