I Got What I Deserved

I got what I deserved—the chickenpox.

“Stay in your own yard,” my mom told me. “The kids next door have been exposed.”

Usually, there weren’t kids next door. But for this one glorious week, the house was full of kids visiting their aunts. And some were my age.

“You hear me?” my mom said. “We have a new baby at our house, and we don’t need the chickenpox.”

I wandered outside where the yard seemed big and empty and suddenly dull.

Across the lane, the porch door opened and kids spilled out.

“We can’t come over,” they hollered.

So I watched them play tag. I moved closer to see the camp they built under the maple tree and still closer to hear Simon Says. They drifted my way and asked about the new baby. And soon we sat at the edges of our yards, separated only by a narrow lane. Pushing the gravel with sticks, we spent the rest of the morning designing a town.

This is where my mom found me.

“I didn’t leave the yard,” I told her.

“But you didn’t think,” she said, “about why it was important for you to stay in the yard.”

In bed, I had plenty of time to think.

A fever rose and from my scalp to the bottoms of my feet, small spots appeared and turned into blisters, which turned into scabs. New bumps kept coming, some in my ears, some in my mouth. I ached and itched and dreamed bad dreams. Food lost its taste, and calamine lotion stuck to my pajamas.

I got the chickenpox hard, hard enough to learn myself a lesson—that following the rules and doing the right thing aren’t always the same.

When one obeys only the letter of the law, one can often find loopholes and exceptions that allow technical obedience to the law and at the same time violation of the spirit of the law.