Gezundheit!

Nothing to Sneeze At? Says Who?

By Rick Horowitz

And now, for the man who didn't think he had anything: ragweed.

It started, as things sometimes do, with a tickle, just a little scratchiness back there in the throat. Then I noticed I was rubbing the corners of my eyes a lot. Odd, I thought, rubbing my eyes like that -- I'd had a good night's sleep.

Then my eyes started tearing. Even stranger, I thought; as far as I knew, I wasn't particularly sad about anything (my scratchy throat aside, of course.)

My nose was next: It was twitchy inside, and I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to rub the tip of it back and forth at high speed. Then my nostrils began to flare and my upper lip went tight across my upper teeth. I started making "Ah...Ah..." sounds just like they do in cartoons, and --

Gezundheit!

Thank you.

Gezundheit!

Thank you.

Gezundheit!

Thank you.

People, I noticed, began to run out of "gezundheits" at about three. If only my sneezing were that restrained. But no: I was launching them by the half-dozen at least, long chains of muffled explosions set off into the bright blue sky.

Must be something in the air, somebody said.

Must be -- but I'd always been impervious to that kind of something. Still, a few more minutes of runny nose, teary eyes, scratchy throat and all the rest, and I began having second thoughts. So I pulled myself away from the great outdoors and back to the air-conditioned comforts of home. Things were a little bit better, but clearly there was something going on out there, bigger -- or was that smaller? -- than my ability to comprehend.

I called the weather lady. The pollen count, she informed me, was "23 for ragweed." Compared to what? It sounded like those old joke sportscasts: "..and here's a partial score: Milwaukee 8."

A temperature of, say, "88 degrees" means something to me; I've got history, and years of trial-and-error dressing, to back me up. I'm even starting to cope with Celsius numbers, fighting off the urge to slip into a ski jacket every time I hear it's 28 out there.

But what did "23 for ragweed" mean? Was that a lot? A little? And 23 what? Rags? Ounces? Gezunds? I had no standards. Yet the weather lady's recorded voice rolled on, oblivious to my needs, uncaring.

I was only getting what I deserved.

For years, you see, I'd ignored the reports of allergic outbreaks every late-summer. Ragweed "sufferers," they'd called the poor souls, but that made no impression on me. Truth be told, I probably even chuckled a time or two, filled with superiority, with immunity. If it took an apple falling out of a tree to catch Isaac Newton's attention, why should I be bothered with anything smaller? Microscopic particles? Don't make me laugh!

And if it hadn't happened to me after all this time, it couldn't be happening to me now, right?

Wrong.

Consoling "friends" were quick to tell me of people they knew who had fallen to ragweed, hay fever and similar nuisances "late in life," as one of them put it. It mattered not that I'd gone sneezeless through the decades; my time, it seems, had come. From this day forward, my comfortable existence would be dependent on the vagaries of wind and rain and little nothings floating in the air.

So after years of callous disregard of my fellow man, I've begun to change my attitude. Suddenly I see the world with new eyes. They're puffy and they're red, and don't like it one bit.

Ah...Ah...Ah...

Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist, TV commentator and public speaker.