Measles @ 17

THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE HAPPEN ALL THE TIME




School was just a few days away from our graduation. The events were going so fast everything seemed like a blur. I knew that the best part of my senior year was rapidly nearing an end. FFA Banquet, Sports Banquet and of course the biggie, THE SENIOR TRIP  to the Grand Old Opera in Nashville, TN  and then the Graduation Exercise. All school work had been completed and it was time to celebrate.


Just a couple of days before the big week, I removed my shirt to clean up and shave, whether I needed to shave or not, when my mother asked to take a close look at the red spots on my stomach and chest. A half a century plus later I can still hear her on-the-spot diagnosis  "Glenn, you have the measles." My first reaction was classic denial: "Mom, you cannot be right."


She continued her examination and she saw red spots on my face, neck and arms. I now saw them also and I then tried to minimize the problem: "I can still go to school can't I?" Mom looked at me as if 17 years of living somehow had failed to register even a fraction of common sense:  "Of course not; you are just know entering the contagious stage and you'll have to stay home for a week."


I do not recall crying, although I wanted to, but I do recall a great sadness. To paraphrase my oldest granddaughter's favorite cartoon character---Sponge Bob Square Pants---it was Advanced Sadness.


I do not know exactly what it feels like to be condemned to death for a crime you did not commit. But my feelings then were as close to that injustice as I ever hope to get. Modern mental health terms like "chronic clinical depression" had not entered the vocabulary of average Americans, much less the lexicon of a 17 year old, soon to graduate, young man. Looking back, I was very, very, depressed.
As a result, I just wanted to be alone. My family seemed to appreciate and understand my great disappointment.


I listened to the Grand Old Opera the night my classmates were there. It was hard for me listen, but I did anyway. I missed everything I so wanted to experience, except the graduation, which was a few days hence. The graduation seemed so anti-climatic.


Several classmates expressed how sorry they were for me. That helped. But it was a note written in my school annual by a graduating classmate that I still treasure, after over one half of a century.  Sometimes brief notes, like the people who write them, are never, never forgotten!