Sick as a Dog

Waking up at 3AM on a Monday morning, Memorial Day, I didn’t expect my husband to be walking into the worst day of his life. Granted, that was my assessment by the time we rolled in to Four Corners, Florida, 10:15 that night. He still insists that it wasn’t.

Anyway, things started off innocently enough. We joined the gang at the Big House by 3:45 to kick things off. A few jokes to fire up the engines, the usual Snicketts/Silverspoon kids sense of humor.

“I shut my alarm off this morning and went back to sleep,” Rose declared almost proudly.

“Nobody tells me what to do!” Oxbear imitated her.

That was the last humorous statement he made for the rest of the day.

5:15.

BAM.

Car sick.

It happened so fast, he wasn’t even prepared for it. He was moved from three rows back to shot gun. No bueno.

Seventeen hours.

Sick.

“Oh, this isn’t as bad as the food poisoning I’ve had,” he explained later, flat on his back on the ground of a rest stop somewhere in Georgia, hundreds of gnats swarming his mummy-state body. “They smell something dying,” he added.

Okay, so one more joke.

It was getting a little ridiculous. I knew he was prone to a little car sickness, but I had no idea. Given that this was the first car trip he had taken (that early in the morning on an empty stomach in the back of a wind-blown 15-passenger van), maybe I should have started him off with bananas or something. But I had no idea.

Sometime before nine, Joe leaned up from two rows back to say, “Well, Collette, you can take some small comfort in the fact that at least we’re not on the Oregon Trail. If we were, Oxbear probably would have been knocked off from dysentery.”

That is always a good thing.

A very grateful Oxbear crashed into bed by 10:30, a final reprieve from his nightmarish road trip.