I’ve never been seasick although I hear it is miserable – not at all a matter of “imagination” as some say.

But recently I spent a good bit of time at sea being violently sick – although the sea had nothing to do with it.

With my youngest daughter, I’d gone on this thrilling cruise, from Athens to Rome, where I was hired to teach some very capable students to write novels in a group. We met only a few hours a day and the rest of the time was spent on thrilling excursions to Pompei, Sorrento, Capri, and other storied destinations.

Because of continuing knee problems, I couldn’t go on many of those long walks in 90-plus degree weather. (It was while on this voyage, however, that I determined that I would INDEED have knee replacement surgeries because I would not spend the rest of my life, however long that is, hobbling around with a cane and having even THAT be a difficult proposition.)

What felled me was something else.

I was giving a talk to my students about the ways to employ a first-person autobiographical technique, when I suddenly felt poorly – even poorly-er than I’d felt earlier during a warm-water swim in the crystal-blue Mediterranean Sea, which felt more like a task than a pleasure. Coughing and wheezing, I said I might lie down for a few minutes and woke to find my daughter and a friend taking no excuses about my going to the ship’s doctor.

A brusque fellow, verging on rude, he snapped a nebulizer mask on my face and diagnosed COVID and pneumonia. I was banished to my cabin for the duration.

Outside, the snow-white hamlets of the Aegean rolled by, and, by the time the trip ended in Rome, I felt like Coliseum Shmoliseum, didn’t care if I would see ‘em. My daughter and I, who have quarreled maybe twice in our lives, then had a dilly of an argument and she marched out into a strange city alone and wouldn’t speak to me again until we were back home.

People say, I felt as though I’d been run over by a truck. And I have never failed to pooh-pooh that. Grownup people say that they have fevers, and that was hard for me to believe that was true.

I had it all and with no one to bring me juice and hot tea and was never more grateful for my humble room than I was when I finally got back to it.

Now that I’m recovered, I wish I had all of those moments back, some of the most beautiful places I was privileged to ignore. I also became COVID Jackie, laying at least three of my students low. There is no moral to this story.

The fever was, however, strangely rather pleasant, having the effect of some kind of weird drug I never had. – JM