A Little Hole

Another week begins at work and I am glad to be here, considering the alternative. It’s good to have a job these days and I’m always mindful to be thankful when I meditate upon it. However, sometimes I lose my concentration in the area of thankfulness, especially when I find myself fighting tooth and nail to get rid of this head cold I’ve become infected with. It’s been a tough one; fighting my immune system for going on three weeks by this point, which means I’ve had it since the holidays.

I’m not sure how or why it happened this way—I’m a vitamin C addict and have been pushing the envelope of daily dosage recommendations since my bout with the flu last summer. I stabilized at around 2000mg a day but it appears to have been all for naught. I also took a flu shot in the interim, thinking that it could quite possibly hedge my bets. I eat right (sort of, maybe) and I exercise a lot more than the general population of folks my age, so what gives?

I’m not a malcontent, at least not often anyway. In fact, I’m more apt to seek a solution than to worry over symptoms and afflictions. Yet I refuse to see my doctor, because I know he’ll order me to (cringe) take more vitamin C, or at the worst, he’ll merely give me a B-12 shot. There is no cure for the common cold. As I hacked up a lung this morning (not literally) I found myself cruising memory banks of days gone by, trying to recall one of the antidotes my grandmother used to cure us with when we were young. Granny had a home remedy for everything from warts to salmonella, and most of the time—oddly enough—they worked. Miraculously so.

Unfortunately, the only one that comes to mind is an antidote she used on my sister and me for an illness I can no longer recollect. In fact, I ‘Googled’ it and cannot find mention of it within that hallowed search engine, and that speaks a lot these days. I’m almost scared to write about it in this blog, because then it will be added to the annals of Google, and someone searching later on will find this—but leave as confused as they will be when they first arrive here.

The cure went something like this: Danna and I were instructed to dig a hole with a teaspoon in the rich, black Pearl River County soil. Then, we were advised to place a four-leaf clover inside the crater—you could still find them back then—and spit into the hole, completing the task by covering it back up. As we were in the process of performing these steps, we were told to recite the following talisman:

G_d made man and man made money;
G_d made the bee and the bee made honey;
G_d made Satan and Satan made sin;
G_d made a little hole to put the devil in.

Sadly, I do not recall anything else about the sequence, nor can I recall what we were trying to solve or what we were endeavoring to cure. I also cannot remember if it even worked. But if my cough and sinuses fail to level out and return to normal, I will consider risking it on general principle.

Probably not—it’s proving hard to find a four-leaf clover these days, climate change being what it is, ya know, and such.

I guess I’ll proverbially grin and bear it for the time being, as that is what I’ve learned to do with colds through personal experience. At least it’s not a kidney stone. In that regard I’ll gladly choose a cold any day.

There is coming a time and a day when sickness and disease will no longer be an issue for us frail members of the human species. John foresaw a time (soon to arrive) where G_d Himself will provide a readily available cure for all of our sicknesses and infirmities: “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” A veritable Tree of Life, to handle whatever ails you, whether it revolves around kidney stones or something as mundane as the common cold I currently find myself suffering with. And it will be as simple as gathering leaves from a tree He'll provide with no shots, doctor’s appointments, pills or elixirs, and most of all; no secretive talismans to memorize.

I look forward to that day—I really do. In the meantime, uh, more orange juice, please.