I remember getting the croup when I was little. Dad got the shower going really hot, and then carried me, kicking and struggling, into the steamy bathroom, to open the airways, of course. Heaped onto the pile of terror of not being able to breathe was the unquiet assurance that he was going to throw me under the scalding water. (*1)One of my best and most easily recreated memories, though, is of the end of those terrifying croupy nights, when cool scented mist all around me replaced the bathroom's angry steam, the vaporizer pop-pock-pockling near my bed where I was breathing easy once again.
Even now, when I hold an open jar of Vick's Vape-o-Rub to my face, I'm being transitioned from the 4th to the 5th movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Frohe und dankbare Gefühle nach dem Sturm: Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm.
FOOTNOTES
(*1) Why would I have imagined that my father would do that? He was generally a kind man, sure, but he was also the man who had hauled me away to the hospital to have my stomach pumped, and that was no fun.
"COMET! It makes your teeth turn green. COMET! It tastes like gasoline. COMET! It makes you vomit! So buy some COMET! and vomit today."
Or maybe it was something else that I ingested. Maybe memories of the COMET! advertising jingle and memories of the story "of the time we had to pick you up off the kitchen floor and take you to get your stomach pumped" have mingled and bled all over each other...
We Kids of the Sixties similarly enhanced the ad for Chiffon Margarine, didn't we? "If you think it's butter, but IT'S SNOT! It's Chiffon."
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