When three boys are 4, 8, and 11 it is difficult to fit all three into the back of a blue Chevy station wagon, but not impossible. If you align the two tallest perpendicular to the tailgate, and make the smallest one lie parallel either at the older boy’s feet or by their heads, it can be accomplished. Such was the arrangement for at least two one way trips annually from the time I was three or four to the summer my older brother turned 18. The three of us, first comfortably tucked, then, some years later when the trip was made with one 17, one 14, and another 10, perfectly, barely smashed into that same once cavernous space. The trip was long, the quarters tight, the smells intolerable, unmentionable, but the journey, nonetheless, fun. Fun, until one of us boarded that blue, then red station wagon with an earache.
This always happened. The family vacation would occur during the first two weeks of August, a time on the calendar when we had all been sufficiently water logged for most of 8 full weeks, no matter if our ears had defied infection up until that Friday night departure, someone, somehow, would come down with an epic case of swimmer’s ear and the trip would be made worse by the painful shenanigans of one wounded brother. Swimmer’s ear was an impossible avoidance during those years. It wasn’t a matter of if someone might find themselves in the clutches of this wicked mistress, it was simply a matter of when. And how often. Summers spent in and under the water are like that. They’re full of fun until some droplet of water refuses to properly drain. The resulting infection can be some of the worst pain an otherwise healthy child will ever experience.
And so this summer went, a summer of fun and of swimming and of boating, and in the combination a resulting summer that far exceeded my own ideal. I spent more time in the water this year than any other year that I can remember. I would dare say that I spent more time in the water this year than I did during any summer that followed my 12th birthday. My writings might not have any affect on you and your lifestyle, but they impact my own actions far more than you could ever understand. The summer was magical, and if you think I’m talking about it in the past tense, I assure you that my summer is no where near ending. Summer only ends on Labor Day in the minds of retailers and lake-haters. My summer was full and it was busting at the seams with all things Geneva Lake, and it also happened to be the first summer since my youth that I found myself with an earache.
When I woke up on the morning of August 23rd, roughly around 6:15 a.m., my right ear had already been awake for most of that night. It was pounding, filling with pressure, aching. It wasn’t so much painful as it was uncomfortable, and as the morning progressed, the pressure grew and the pain began to register. I found myself at the doctor around noon, and by two I was gulping antibiotics at an accelerated, unprescribed rate. When sleep mercifully came Tuesday night, I punched a dent in the middle of my pillow so that my tender right ear might rest without any additional pressure applied. I am, in case you hadn’t yet noticed, not only emotionally soft, but physically soft, both if measured by grit and by tolerance.
Wednesday the pain radiated into my jaw and by Thursday nothing had improved. My ear was stuck in an unpopped state, where sounds echoed but never made it through the swelling. I realized then that it would be difficult to be deaf, even if just in one ear like an unheroic George Baily. Friday things had improved some, but the turmoil of this ear ailment lasted into this week, and today as I sit and write there is a familiar pressure still present. It’s in the background now, but it’s there. Lurking. Waiting for me to dive into my purifying water once again so that it might latch onto another rivulet of water and torment me further.
Throughout the misery of this honestly intense earache, I beamed with pride. After all, I had, at the age of 33, managed to water log myself enough over the course of the past 12 weeks that I came down with a case of acute swimmer’s ear. I had earned this malady. I had earned it not through hard work but through a dedication to the water, to swimming in it and fishing in it and boating on it and sailing over it. I had committed to the lake, and I had willingly paid the price with an ailment typically reserved for a child.
If you’ve ever been walking somewhere with a six year old, hopefully your own, and that six year old, for the first time sees some man with cauliflower ear, you know how that changes everything that six year old has ever presumed about human anatomy. The ear is swelled and curled and the whole visual is rather off-putting. But in wrestling circles, I hear that such an ear is a trophy of sorts. It’s a hard earned badge of honor, earned not through membership but through commitment and through pain. You can’t just sign up for cauliflower ear, even if you wanted to. You have to submit to letting some other strong person smash your head into the mat for a while, then, maybe, if you’re lucky, you might get some cauliflower ear as a reward. In public, with a six year old, this is not something to be proud of. But walk into a high school wrestling match anywhere in this country or another, and your big mangled ear will earn you adoration and respect.
It’s like that with my swimmer’s ear. You might think I’m soft. You might think I don’t work hard enough. But my swimmer’s ear has earned me the respect of my children, and of anyone who has spent childhood summer nights ravaged by an earache. If I were to walk a beach today, whispers and glances would certainly result as onlookers hurried to quietly, but excitedly, tell each other that I was indeed the adult who fought and clawed his way through a water based summer and that I am he who now proudly brandishes the badge that is a bottle of antibiotic eardrops. To the summer of 2011, I thank you for your benevolent ways. For your enduring sun and your warm temperatures and inspiring sunsets and refreshing breezes. I thank you for these things, and through my pain, I thank you for the epic swimmer’s ear of 2011. I shall not soon forget you.