It was supposed to be a vacation. But instead of fishing at the lake with my father, riding the porch swing back and forth, or waiting by the curb for the ice cream truck, I was lying on the couch in pajamas, weak and feverish, with anxious adults hovering and angry little red spots all over me.
It was August of 1962 and I’d somehow come down with measles while my parents and I were visiting my grandmother in Illinois. In those days, before the vaccine, it was a common, even ritual childhood disease. The kind I had was known as “the hard measles” to distinguish it from rubella, which we called “the three-day measles.”
Kids also got mumps, chickenpox, and other things that’ve probably since been vanquished. I caught the pox on an earlier visit to Illinois, when my mother and I went down during Easter vacation planning to stay for the week, but got stuck for two weeks instead. That August, we’d expected to spend two weeks and wound up staying for three weeks because it took me that long to get better. It was definitely hard.
The couch in my grandmother’s living room became my bed because it was cooler on the ground floor with the windows open. I don’t remember much except feeling miserable and knowing I was pretty sick. I do recall one night when I lay wide awake, my worried dad sitting up with me. By morning, the rash had spread across my whole body.
Eventually it ran its course, and I was no worse for the wear. But if any of us had thought that any parent would ever, for any possible reason, withhold a simple shot that would spare us all that sickness and probably save some kids’ lives, we’d have wondered what the hell kind of world we were growing up into.