The last time I got sick was in February of this year. My husband and I attended an annual serial potluck Morris event in Berkeley, amusingly called Wassail, though no veteran of East Coast Wassails would recognize it, as I imagine Brits might not recognize our East Coast version. After the third house I started to feel queasy, and after the fourth house I asked my husband to drive me home, a trip of a bit more than an hour. I curled up in the bucket seat all the way, and when I arrived, I vomited, then slept. The next day I was fine.

Probably food poisoning. These potlucks often include items best for those with iron stomachs.

That is the sickest I have been in a while. I can’t even remember the previous time I was sick enough to abort an event large or small, much less forego one. The rest of my family is the same. Though as parents we tried to demonstrate that we felt school was important, we did not hesitate to remove our children from it for family events, most commonly May Morning. None of us went to school or work on May Morning for a decade. Even so, one year our kids got perfect attendance awards, awards we did not even know existed. We weren’t trying for it, but clearly May Morning was on a weekend that year and nothing else had come up.

Certainly, our kids were never home sick.

Giving such natural resilience, I grew to  view people who get sick as, shall we say, less stalwart representatives of the species. These days, acquaintances in my age cohort seem to excuse themselves due to sickness frequently, and I worry about them possibly having an undiagnosed acute illness. What else could cause them to bow out of plans so regularly?

Not that the over-60 set has a monopoly on sick day. This past weekend, one of the younger members of our docent team called in sick, though with teens there is always the possibility that he got a better offer. We didn’t begrudge him for it, as the rest of the public seemed to notice the beautiful weather as well, leaving the volunteers to watch the whelk repeatedly reach out toward, then reject, a perhaps stale white fish morsel, or spend time searching for some of the more likely-to-hide creatures like the red octopus and the sand star.

I know a lot of mostly young, naturopathic healers from work, and those seem to call in sick quite often as well. One of them explained to me that healers take on the negative energy of their patients as part of the healing process, so if they aren’t careful to rejuvenate between treatments, they succumb to the accumulation.

I do not have a strong opinion on that.

What would it be like, I wonder, to have sickness looming as a daily possibility, to have every plan be subject to sudden cancellation, to wake up to learn you will be missing work? I’ve not lived in that manner, nor have I lived with people who do. I imagine one’s outlook of life would be very different.

I have experienced the analogous experience of rain. For most of my life, rain was a very real possibility as a last-minute event ruiner, leading to the setting of Rain Dates or the making of Alternate Plans. That’s no longer true, now that I live on the Central Coast.

Smooth sailing from here on out? I feel like I might be jinxing myself with this blog post.