Sir The Grandson was out for the afternoon recently, on a pretty day when it was just right to be outside.We swang, played in the sandpile, picked up sticks and started bonfires with them – all manner of fun and closeness. The next morning Sir’s momma called to say the kid had Pinkeye!

Mine and Betsy’s eyes immediately started itching – paranoia, obviously.

It seems that Pinkeye is not the health problem that it used to be when I was growing up; just like many old-timey diseases are no longer considered dangerous, except by a family experiencing them at the time.

Lordee, I went through mumps, three kinds of measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, malaria, a dozen ruptured eardrums, quarantined for polio down the road, got regular shots for typhoid and tetanus as well as stickings for smallpox which never took, was medicated for tuberculosis when Big Robert came down with it, all before I got Lyme Disease.

Seems like Pinkeye was a periodic scare, especially since we had cattle on Brownspur back then. I recall having to help round up the milk cows and beef steers to drive into the catchpen at the green barn, which had a narrow slotted gate at one end, so Mr. Mac would vaccinate the bovines as we drove them slowly through the gate – except seems like he squirted something into their eyes when there was a Pinkeye scare. I’m not sure that he didn’t dose Troy, Alton, and me just for good measure, because I never remember having the Pinkeye.

But I do recall that now and then a youngster would show up at school with a case of Pinkeye, and the Health Nurse would quickly get that child isolated and dosed, then send the rest of us home for a few days until the danger of an epidemic had passed. Thank the Lord that Sir The Grandson has come along at a time when the medicos have come up with something that stops so many of what used to be dread diseases when I was a kid.

Yet there was one year when we had just started back to school after the Christmas holidays that the subject of Pinkeye surfaced amongst us teenage boys. It used to get cold for duck season back in those hallowed years, but that early winter had been abnormally warm and dry – no ducks came south until finally a cold spell hit right before New Year’s, and suddenly we had water and ducks!

And school started back the Monday after New Year’s! We were convinced that there was no justice in the world, especially when School Bus Number 13 dropped us off that afternoon late, and we had to migrate over the truckloads of ducks that our fathers and uncles had brought in that day – and they were going hunting again the next day!

We younger Nimrods griped and whined until lunch at school, for Tuesday was one of those cold, drizzly days just made for duck hunts.

I disremember who it was – seems like an upperclassman – that came up with the threat of a Pinkeye epidemic, but it spread like wildfire amongst the young sportsmen of that high school. One of our classmates bravely sacrificed his own eyesight, temporarily, for the Cause, although it was later rumored that he was paid well for his sacrifice. A bottle of Tabasco Sauce was pirated from the cafeteria, and two aspiring young epidemiologists escorted the sacrificial lamb into the boys room, where one held the patient’s eyelids up whilst the pepper sauce was applied judiciously to his eyes. 

The weeping, red-eyed boy was then guided down the hall to the Health Nurse’s office, with a legitimate complaint.

That lady had authority! She recognized the oncoming case of Pinkeye, immediately quarantined the victim, marched into the next door principal’s office, and the school buses ran early that day!

School was shut down for the rest of the week, and the Nurse was later had up for recognizing and nipping an epidemic in the bud – not another case surfaced!

We duck hunted the rest of that week, too. Even the Pinkeye victim.

P.S.: Oops!  It wasn’t paranoia – Betsy & I both caught it from Sir!