When I was a very young child I was visited by a disorder both of the breathing apparatus and of the emotional response system. It was often triggered by fear or its twin: anger. Life giving and sustaining air could pass into my lungs only by the exertion of great physical effort. Sometimes, unable to sleep lying down, I sat upright all night long, head on a kapok pillow, at the oilcloth covered kitchen table, between my mother, father, grandpa, grandma, aunts and uncles who, afraid that I might die then and there, took turns holding me so that my airways would be more open and I could sleep and dream.

    It was this so-called bronchial asthma that kept me at home in the company of my books, dreams, and radio on any and many a wintry New England schoolday or week of my choosing. I need not pretend to be ill. As time slipped by, I learned that I could evoke the disease at will! I could conjure an attack out of thin air by irritating the uvula. The itch therefrom, or the air of anxiety it generated, would lead soon enough to wheezing and breathlessness. Its onset could be and was, oftentimes, involuntary, to be sure, though later, I was able to forestall breathing difficulties by making efforts not to irritate, and, indeed, to actually soothe that particular flap of flesh at the entrance to my throat and eventually, in the mists of time, seemed to forget about it altogether...

    I would not give up the ghost nor, even, the ailment until some years later when the Arizona sun baked it out of me, drying the pulmonary passages almost against my will.

    Though I would suffer no more episodes of this specific illness, I clung to it as a personal and defining affliction.

    Today, barring unforeseeable and unexpected miracles of science, as I find myself in the final quadrant of my life, the miasma clears and I now recall this in clarity and depth.

    Usually, when the illness befell me, I would be taken to my great uncle Perry’s house. He, the very doctor who had administered the slap which accompanied my first breath, now, with morphine addicted wife, long, black, Packard, and surly dachshund, lived in Victorian splendor and gloom. There we would be ushered into his library to sit on leather covered chairs amidst an orderly tumble of wooden racks of meerschaum and briar pipes, sweetly sour, aromatic, humidors, and stacks of 78 rpm recordings by Stokowski and Schnabel of works by Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt, which would transport me far away while we waited.

    Soon he would come with his hypodermic needle and administer adrenaline. I would act as though this were truly loathsome. But what, in truth, was a painless exercise would now be rewarded by a coffee milk shake at the soda fountain on the corner. What an elaborate scheme, eh?  But, listen! there’s more of this godsip...more whispers on the wind...

     When the illness was long gone and the extended family had re-formed, I joined the Navy to escape what I now perceived as a suffocating environment filled with aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents who, as they could bestow love’s blessings upon me, were, as members of my greater family, each and every one, authorized to chastise me at their seemingly random will and pleasure. And I never did nor could return to that home for while I was away it vanished like the entire apparition that was the past.

    Well, now the air is clear. The soul, which as my mother warned, enters and leaves my body with each sneeze and cough, has been cleansed. Yet all those persons mentioned above have passed on to the world of vapors and spirits and, though my asthma changed their lives as much as mine beyond any anticipation or airy imagining, this, until now, was my secret and mine alone.

    But, wait! the fog returns, shapes and shadows, dimly perceived, shimmer in the murk. From somewhere, as I sit in this mountain cabin I call “Fool’s Paradise”, I hear a small voice from a wheezing boy asleep at a kitchen table on a humid, citronella scented, summer night..