One if the great things about being retired is that I’m no longer
the oldest childless geezer working in a corporate office who manages to catch just about everything that moms young enough to be my daughters would bring from wherever nursery school, kindergarten or day care their children young enough to be my grandchildren attended, including my second and third cases of strep throat. The moms were so cute until I caught their kid’s kids plague, then they were a menace. I mean whooping cough? Who gets whooping cough?

Every time I had strep throat my voice, torn to sheds by that vile bacterium, would plunge several octaves so that when I returned to work after two weeks those same moms would call me up every day just to hear how sexy my voice was. Life is full of stupid ironies.

Incudentally, I had a great line in there about Typhoid hotties but I couldn’t decide if hottie should be capitalized or not, then figured it was too historically obscure anyway and dropped it. I have a novel length collection of such lines. Sometimes they still bug me years later. The price of learning how to write by watching stand up comedians. Every word counts and there’s no room for error. Hence, Typhoid hottie goes in the dustbin, and rightfully so. Don’t fuck with the punchline.

But I digress.