The Musical Fruit

I began to feel out of sorts on the Thursday evening before Labor Day. At first, I thought it was something I ate, but I had my normal French Fryz meal that evening: two chili dogs with mustard, bottomless root beer, and a killer dessert. I forget what the restaurant calls the dessert, but I call it Diabetes in a Bowl. It consists of two fried apple pies inserted into a bowl of vanilla ice cream and topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. At any rate, I wasn’t feeling quite right by bedtime.

Friday morning I awoke to a full-blown end-of-summer cold. I was sneezing and coughing. Fortunately, that day at school was a ceremonial half-day, Convocation, and I was not required to teach at all. Afterwards, I repaired to my home, and suffered, though perhaps not in silence.

I stayed in bed all day Saturday. That is how Kathy knew that something was seriously wrong with me. I cannot remember the last time I stayed in bed a whole day. I didn’t even do that three years ago when I came down with the China virus.

By Sunday I was feeling well enough to take Lucy on her extended weekend walk, but that was all I was capable of doing. On Monday, Labor Day, I was only the slightest bit better, but capable of taking Kathy out to dinner at the Corner Kitchen, only recently re-opened after the fall flood of last year.

Tuesday began a shortened school week, and I made it through the week. The sniffles were gone by Friday, with only a hacking cough to remind me of my misery. But the cough was bad. It was worse when I was a smoker: the after-cold cough would last six weeks. I was just past one week, and the cough remained. It is greatly to be hoped that it goes away in a considerably shorter time than six weeks.

I have heard thousands of jokes over the years, but I remember almost none of them. I wish I could remember the one I heard recently, about how to get a wife to talk to her husband when she was giving him the cold shoulder. It had something to do with the husband sitting on the sofa, watching a football game, while looking satisfied. The fragment of that joke came to me on Saturday, the day I was looking forward to as a day to do nothing but recover from the cold. That was when Kathy declared that we needed to go to Sevierville to buy shoes for me.

I bought three pairs of shoes in Sevierville maybe three years ago. I have worn one of those pairs, the blue suede shoes, nearly daily since then. I don’t need new shoes. When the blue suedes finally give up the ghost, I have the other two pairs to fall back on. So Kathy didn’t really want to go to Sevierville to buy shoes for me. She wanted to eat at The Chop House, and to do a little shopping in the outlet mall there.

Normally, the drive to Sevierville is a simple 70 minutes down Interstate 40, but Interstate 40 is still recovering from the flood last fall. It is down to one lane near the Tennessee/North Carolina state line, and the DOT recommends a detour: west on I-26 from Asheville to past Johnson City, then south on I-81 to Beech Springs, where you pick up a Tennessee highway for the straight shot down into Sevierville. That detour has to add one and a half hours to the trip each way, and as you can imagine, it did not appeal to me.

So we took the back way, a route we have used before, a nice leisurely ride through some beautiful countryside, through Marshall, Hot Springs, Newport, and Chestnut Hill. Once again we passed the Bush Beans factory in Chestnut Hill, and vowed that one day we must stop at the visitors’ center there.

The Chop House was a disappointment, for the first time. Lunch was nothing fancy: two French dips, Coca-Cola, and coffee, which with the tip came to $61. The shopping seemed to make Kathy happy. I was fine, as the outlet mall provides several benches for the less-than-enthusiastic shopper.

We stopped at the Bush Beans visitors’ center on the way back, and it was lovely. Not only do they have a very nice center (where I managed to buy 13 cans of various beans), but they have a cafe there that serves home cooked food at a reasonable price. Our next visit to Sevierville will include lunch there, instead of at The Chop House.

I was completely bushed (pardon the pun) when we returned home, so much so that I slept through dinner. By Sunday morning, I was starving, so I had a can of baked beans for breakfast.

Kathy tells me I will be sleeping in the guest room.