On days when I drive my boyfriend to work, in exchange for his free ride, he reads to me my favorite part of the paper, Dear Abby. After he is finished reading each letter out loud we try to come up with What Would Dear Abby Say, or WWDAS for short, before reading Dear Abby's solution. The winner of course is the one who comes closest to Dear Abby's own reply. This past week "In Quarantine in Morro Bay" wrote in describing her boyfriend who doesn't want to see her when she is sick. Although they are both in the entertainment indusrty (which might explain his aversion), she worries what this implied about his commitment to her in the long haul, the "in sickness and in pain" part of the equation.
    "Dump him and move on," I said, flicking on the windshield wipers. Of course I lost, my boyfriend took some middle-of-the-road response, and Dear Abby never sees things as black and white as me.  She likes to answer with caution, taking a more complex view of human relations, which accordingly leads to a more boring and often inconclusive response. Dear Abby said perhaps there were other reasons, and that it would be best if she talked to him directly.
     On Tuesday I came down with the flu. And since then I have been trying to imagine what it would be like to have no one to cook for me, to administer my advils and cold medicine, no one to hold me when I begin shivering, or read to me cause my eyes hurt. No one to stop in during their lunch break to check in on me and bring me lunch.  I look at the mounds of used tissues, the cups of tea and OJ, the bowl of half-eaten soup, that lie at the foot of my bed and know for certain both that I am extremely lucky and that Dear Abby was dead wrong.