The Tet Offensive, when the communists lost on the ground but won in the media. Martin Luther King: murdered. Seventy-five percent of NYU students admitted they’d tried marijuana (a big gasp! omigod! deal back then). Bobby Kennedy: murdered. The Chicago Democratic Convention, when Mayor Richard J. Daley threw up redwood fences along the entire length of expressway from O’Hare Airport to downtown so conventioneers couldn’t see the slums they were passing and sent the police to break up protests, thus creating the worst democracy disaster conceivable. J. Edgar Hoover declared war on the Black Panthers while civil rights activists clashed with police, and what would become known as “the silent majority,” a euphemism for “the frightened complacent,” decried integration. Bigotry abounded on all sides. Americans killed each other with increasingly justifiable (not) passion.

And I got bitten by a mosquito.

Actually, I got bitten by what felt like a swarm of mosquitoes. Quick background: Skokie is a 20-minute bus ride from Chicago, just on the other side of Evanston. You could walk to the elevated (El) station if you were in a sprightly mood; you could ride your bike faster than riding the bus because you didn’t have to make stops. This is all hearsay for me; I never walked or rode my bike to the El. I took the bus when I lived in Rogers Park, a subsection of Chicago, and worked in Skokie, but not when I was a kid. As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to go to the city by myself or with my friends. My brother was. All my friends were. But not me.

Let’s don’t go there.

The point is we were all of maybe 30 minutes away from Lake Michigan, known for its dead alewives that washed up on the shore every summer, the resulting stink, the wind with its own personality and agenda, and hordes of mosquitoes. More than hordes. Battalions. Whatever is bigger than battalions: armies. Navies. Marines. Lots and lots of mosquitoes that, not satisfied with the merger thousands who packed the lakeshore every day, spread out across the city and into the suburbs. Suburbs like, oh, say, Skokie, where I, in my innocence, wore short shorts and sleeveless tops against the humidity-laden heat. It rains in the summer in Chicago, thunderstorms with lots of lightning leaving behind little pondettes and puddles.

Mosquitoes love standing water. Someplace to refresh their tired wings. Someplace to wash their tired feet. Someplace from which to zip out, attack, and retreat before anyone can swat them dead.

Mosquitoes loved me almost as much as they loved their watering holes. I spent most of my Midwestern summers covered with their love bites, the little shits. But that summer, at least one branch of their military had visited a seriously baaaddd stretch of mud somewhere, and by early to mid-Fall, kids with meningitis were piling up in hospitals all over the area

I didn’t have meningitis. Probably. Maybe. Could be. No one knew for sure. What they did know was that my swollen glands, headaches, and blurred vision weren’t responding to antibiotics the way they usually did. My blood tests were alarming but inconclusive.

I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was that I felt lousy. I couldn’t get enough sleep, and I slept constantly. I spent more days in bed than in school. One day when I felt up to trudging the hallways, I discovered that the fastest way to get from the top of the Niles East professional-stature auditorium to the bottom two floors down was to simply pass out in mid-first-step and come around tangled up somewhere just above the floor with your girlfriend screaming in your ear and feeling  for blood.

No serious blood, no broken bones. When one passes out, one goes totally limp; ergo, the fall, which I admit I don’t remember, was loose. My only injuries were some scrapes and bruises, and—oh, yeah, I forgot about this one—another bump on the head. Probably the back of the head that time, but seriously, I don’t remember. Don’t remember if I had a concussion, either, but that really didn’t matter because my doctor, who was really my mother’s doctor, thought my new method of descending a staircase stunk and stuck me in the hospital.

I spent nine days in St. Joseph Hospital, enjoying it not one little bit. They did an upper GI and a lower GI. They did a spinal tap and took enough blood to start a new person. They x-rayed my head, because I so seriously needed more radiation exposure. They probably did some other stuff, but God bless my Swiss-cheese memory, I have no idea what that might have been. Some friends came to see me once; I remember the fact of the crowd but not the actual visit. Did my brother come? My father? Don’t remember. Sorry, guys.

The most interesting part of being hospitalized—besides being so dizzy and blurry-eyed  I couldn’t even watch TV, the first time in my life I had a television completely to myself and total control over the remote—was the voices. I heard voices.

They were the same voices I’d heard the previous time I’d been hospitalized in the same hospital in the same kind of room but on a different floor when I was a little girl and something was wrong with my digestive tract. See how nicely I put that? I’d love to say I’m omitting the gory details out of a sense of delicacy, but come on, you know the truth: I don’t remember what was wrong with me. (But Denise Dorn’s birthday is forever planted in my brain. Now why is that?)

What I do remember is the rice. Plain, boiled rice, every meal for a week. Three times a day, plain boiled rice. Want a snack? How about some nice rice? It was supposed to help my gut. It helped me hate rice.

Why was a little girl having digestive problems? I hear you ask. Okay, but only briefly, because that’s another story, except, of course, it’s all one story. Quick version: mine was not an…uh…easy household. Nobody put their hands on anybody, nothing like that. Just a lot of…uh…let’s use the word “tension.” Guess you’ve got to understand the people involved in order to understand the dynamics of the situation.

My brother Richard really was a genius. IQ tests proved it, and his damned eidetic memory demonstrated it all the time. He wasn’t alone. Everyone in Dad’s family was irritatingly smart: Aunt Ruth was erratically brilliant, first-cousin David was infuriatingly gifted, and first-cousin Jack was quietly an egghead. They all had logical, methodical, problem-solving minds and personalities.

My mother dreamt of being a singer, ala Judy Garland, or an actress ala Veronica Lake (look it up). She had a wonderful voice and a deep-seated love of being center stage, but her parents had inculcated her with the idea that she was stupid, worthless, and a major disappointment in the general scheme of humanity, so surprise, surprise, those dreams went by the wayside. She’d spent her entire girlhood longing for the kind of smoldering true love Heathcliff had for Catherine in Wuthering Heights, a movie she watched over 50 times instead of going to school. She married my father, she told me numerous times, although I didn’t believe her, because he was a nice Jewish boy who adored her, and her mother wasn’t interested in any more stalling. I’m encapsulating. Extensively. To put it simply, my parents were an…interesting match. Still are.

They both loved to dance.

The point is Mom was nice; she liked things “pretty.” (Please don’t ask how I came from her; the universe is full of unfathomable mysteries.) She was also a pretty savvy lady but had learned to not show it–not that it mattered, because raising a genius when you’re not one yourself is no easy task. I know of what I speak: Tom’s paternal line also leaned way over into gifted and the combination of our genes produced a daughter whose IQ outranks mine by a good 20, maybe 40 points, probably more. She could outthink me by the time she was seven or eight. Fortunately, though, she has my sweet, adorable nature, so all is well.

Hey, my blog, my perspective.

Mom may not have been able to outthink Rich, but she knew right from wrong and it was only right to expect deference from her son due to the simple fact that she was his mother. Maybe Rich didn’t believe in deference, or maybe he was just a normal, gifted kid who couldn’t understand why his mom didn’t understand him. This is probably a false encapsulation, but whatever. Here’s how dinner time went at our  house:

Rich said something that raised Mom’s hackles. Mom called him on it. Rich snapped back at her, voice rising. She yelled at him, he yelled back, and then—now, here’s the tricky part—DAD yelled at MOM, who snapped and yelled back until everyone was yelling enough that Dad slammed the table in fury to end the whole mess.

Notice anyone missing from this equation?

Since I cannot claim accurate recall, I also cannot categorically point to stress as the root cause of my stomach problems, but I’d be willing to put real money on it, even up to $2.97 or all the way to $3.46.

Which brings me back to the week-long plain, boiled rice adventure during which I heard voices. Not, I quickly learned, voices coming from the nurses’ desk, the bed next to me, the people in the rooms on either side of me, or the televisions from any of the above. The voices talked on top of each other, and I could never make out what anyone was saying. My mom chalked it up to goofy-gaming. The nurses said I was dreaming. I put my hands over my ears, but when I pulled them away, the voices were there again. Maybe it’s coming from the pipes, someone said. Now, that didn’t make any sense. Why would a bunch of people go into a pipe to whisper to each other late at  night? And just how big was this pipe, anyway?

But the same voices were there all those years later (however many years that was), doing exactly the same thing, talking on top of each other, whispering in snatches, every night, all night when I was confined for over a week so the powers-that-be could poke, prod, and medically molest me.

The upshot of all those tests and medication failures was presented to my mother on a visit to the doctor’s office after I’d been released from St. Joseph’s and had returned—headache, blurry vision, dizziness, bone-weary fatigue, and all—to school.

“Multiple Sclerosis.”

No, no, wait! Don’t touch that dial, because you just don’t know my mother.

The doctor said, “M.S.”

My mom said, “No.”

That was it. End of discussion. Excuse me, Mr. Fancy Pants M.D., but you can take your M.S. and put it where the sun don’t shine.

Being a 15-year-old child with no rights whatsoever, I was not, of course, in the room. I don’t even know if I was there at all, to be honest. But Mom drove home crying, and by the time she reached the house, those ugly, disgusting initials had been safely locked away in some inaccessible cell cluster in a remote area of her brain, never to be seen or heard from again.

She told no one. Anything. Ever. Period.

Until 1999. Or was it 2009?

I don’t remember.

If Tom was here, he’d know.

The amazing thing is, my not knowing didn’t stop the M.S. Can you believe that?