Take a walk in my pajamas:

...Wrap your head in a flannel scarf' when winter begins and only let it out with the crocus or after, when the world turns ash-sort again...

...This essay is excerpted from the introductory chapter of In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, to be published in March...

...On the first day, patient complained of such-and-such and noticed so-and-so, a soreness of the this and a swelling of the that...

...Then, shortly after that, someone else asked me to take part in a symposium about the meaning of God, and I remember jotting down something like this: "If a certain general hadn't ruined the phrase forever, I would say that `God is the light at the end of the tunnel,' and maybe the light in the tunnel as well, if you're a saint"-but this one I didn't send in...

...WILFRID SHEED that just being alive, even on a no-frills basis, is astoundingly good: and this remains, for me, the primal insight...

...who but an actor can work up a full head of seriousness in three hundred words anyhow...

...Afflictions have an uncanny ability to clean up after themselves, and even leave you laughing, but they obviously can't guarantee to root out deep-seated psychological glitches-al though they have a pretty good record with those too...

...How does it look...

...It was basically the same thought anyhow, a celebration of waking up from a bad night and falling head over heels in love with daylight, and I felt the public had had enough of my wisdom on this subject, and I had certainly had enough of dispensing it...

...and by the time it has tried to frighten you to death and threatened to take away your very existence, you'd be amazed at how little you're willing to settle for...

...Does it actually feel like this, or are you just guessing...

...ii' sickness will let you go so soon...

...My first instinct, like that of a child who has to confess to something embarrassing, was to make up a fictitious character to whom the whole thing really happened...

...And, as it turned out, I was not to be let off lightly with a novel either...

...G. K. Chesterton once said that if a person were to fall into the waters of forgetfulness and come out on the other side, he would think he had arrived in paradise...

...We're going to Zanzibar this summer...

...Beyond that I can only hope that if, in the biblical phrase, one lives out one's days "in the eye of God," or at least someplace in the neighborhood, one will someday come to see old age and death as equally natural and simply the next thing to do...

...The trick of course is to stay on its good side, and this would take, has taken, hundreds of books to discuss...

...Remember how Mama would scoop crab apples Born a howl in the sink, checking each one for spots as the water strained between her lingers...

...But as 1 quickly learned, cancer, even more than polio, has a disarming way of bargaining downward, beginning with your whole estate and then letting you keep the game warden's cottage or the badminton court...

...You wish you were shooting birds, the body 01'a thousand willows, needing no one...

...So my private proofs for God, or whatever, begin with this: the sheer capacity for happiness, and one's sense when it happens, that this is correct and normal and not some freak of nature...

...But in matters of sickness and death, you have to put up or shut up...

...Let me just say quickly: concentration, kindness, and in my own case the Catholic tradition-there has to be some tradition-which gives me a sense of companionship over the centuries...

...So one might start the bidding with that...

...So far the jury is still out on this one, and long may it remain so, but the Big C, as they call it in show biz...

...And on days like that, even the God of Job can be sensed to smile for a second...

...Swell-what do they play there...

...And from this I deduce with some conviction that the universe is essentially a good place to be, despite appearances, and that if it means anything, it means well...

...I have yet to meet a victim of this plague who has not made a perfect adjustment to it, and then some-Exhibit A being Franklin Roosevelt...

...cricket or baseball...

...Hiroshima happened the same year: fortunately my life has not kept up this pace...

...The symptoms they can get from a textbook...

...Is there a point at which life is no longer better than death...

...a figure carved front chalk...

...If the war is over for now and the bombing has stopped, that's simply how you feel, whatever the damage...

...So stripped (for now-the novel comes next) of the armor of fiction, I toyed for all of five seconds or so with the possibility of writing impersonal nonfiction...

...1995 by Wilfrid Sheed...

...Did this happen or didn't it...

...For people who try to do this stuff for a living, symposiums are strictly amateur night and a chance to be shown up by Jane Fonda or Hulk Hogan or some other muffin-headed celebrity on a roll...

...White again, the color of death as far as I'm concerned, and back to the hospital for number three, cancer...

...I've never been the least interested in the nuts and bolts of sickness and health...

...you have to level...

...After each of my "unbearable, insupportable" losses, I have felt not only undiminished and unready to die, but quite goofily elated, as I tried to describe in Lear's...

...But all you need to do is spend a couple of months on your back, or return home from a war and come downstairs to have breakfast in your own house (I'm told by veterans that just having a bathroom by yourself can seem like going to heaven...

...There was no way of expanding this particular material without reaching back into the world of sickness that I had just so cheerfully left...

...Mary Crockett Hill Tangles Not to Be Undone At night you rise, hair slurred into confession...

...to, finally, the best part of all, the solid-gold time spent 10: 24 February 1995 Commonweal with friends in the small hours, when for a long moment, held like a note of music, you understand each other perfectly...

...Since I've never regarded myself as any kind of Candide or Lemuel Pitkin, who insists on looking on the bright side as life whittles away at his arm, legs, and senses, I'm sure that there must be such a point--some moment when you're ready to fold what's left of your hand and say enough is enough...

...But in spite of some quite serious whittling, I've never even come close to that point myself...

...When I was a kid, reli gious folk would say things like "God only seems to send polio to people who are strong enough to take it," but experience has since told me that the folk had it exactly backward...

...How would I take it...

...My response was a lot more emphatic than her request...

...The spiritual life becomes very simple when you're sick...

...Try the photograph of Uncle Charles as a boy...

...How she made us drink Tang and hot tea until our urine glowed...

...A thousand times no...

...On the other hand I had a soft spot for Lear's, which had several friends on it and gave great parties, and for once, I also had something to say on the subject, and I thought, "Just this once-and I promise never to do it again," and wrote the following: Last year I was hit by a barrage of ailments that reintroduced me to the joys of recuperation, a pleasure I'd almost forgotten about since I was hit by polio, the A-bomb of diseases, at the end of World War II...

...Thai was how I had felt after each of my illnesses, even though I wasn't exactly dancing by the end, but leaning, like some black-comic character, on a pair of canes, sipping Diet Coke to keep my mouth from turning to dust, and wondering where the cancer would strike next...

...As it happens, shortly after writing that ode, or squawk, to joy, I came across a sublime illustration of the mood I'd been talking about in the form of an old, old movie short built around Johnny Mercer's splendid song "GI Jive," showing an average sort of Sad Sack barely surviving the honors of army life in World War II and plunging at last into the joys of peace...

...You pray to get better, and if and when you do, you don't need to be told to be grateful about it: It gushes out of you...

...Commonweal 24 February 1995.- 1l...

...A fellow I know lost a whole leg to cancer, and was happier afterward than he'd ever been before, simply because he was alive and the enemy was gone...

...So how did I come to write about illness...

...In short, it cost me nothing less than the best minutes of the day and the best years of my life...

...and furthermore, if I couldn't read a whole book about health matters without alternately flinching and falling asleep, how on earth was I going to write one...

...All landing fields are fully equipped...

...But what you really remember is the moment when the wallpaper began to drive you crazy, especially combined with the doctor's cough: sickness becomes personal immediately...

...I honestly don't know if this thought will help me then, but it helps me now...

...And that, I trusted, was that...

...Quite the reverse...

...Insofar as I had learned anything new at all in the land of sickness, it gradually occurred to me that maybe I had no choice...

...Whether you've witnessed a crime, or discovered a pothole or a cure for insomnia, you simply have to skip your next appointment and testify-.especially if you believe you have some honest-to-God, nonsugar-coated good news to report...

...Grandmother's rosewood table, Aunt Josie'seyes bruised and sweet like tobacco...

...On the other side of the ledger was a dawning realization that every time the subject came up in conversation, I had something to say about it that the others hadn't heard before and wanted very much to hear now, just in case it applied to them...

...and awhile later, after we'd met in person, the same lady suggested, so casually that I doubt she remembers it, that I expand the piece into a book someday...

...At least, that's how I felt-and by chance, how every survivor I know seems to have felt too...

...The long, wary truces of cancer that might end at any moment with a call to arms, or might, contrariwise, last forever, send you a command invitation to speculate over and over about precisely why you're putting yourself through all this and whether it's worth it...

...has already left a wintery calling card: without giving away too much, I'll just say that C. has made some mean little inroads into the joy of eating, that last redoubt of the sensual man...

...However, my soon-to-be friend Phyllis Theroux wrote me a letter after the Lear's piece asking permission to reprint and circulate it...

...If you don't know for sure, the experts will move in quick as a blink and sweep your testimony into the disposal, and replace it with the old, outsiders' version, and you might as well have skipped the whole trial...

...The first of my Big Three, polio, cost me, for instance, the world of games, around which my whole world turned: when I wasn't playing them, I was thinking about them and planning a long, happy future with them...

...Innocently enough, and extremely circuitously...

...To which I would add, by way of illustration, that the two most intense and unqualified pleasures I have had in the last year have been respectively the marriage of a son and the birth, courtesy of one of my daughters, of a grandchild...

...Two oranges ripen toward rot on the bedside table...

...After all, what was the message...

...What they want right now is to walk for just a day or an hour in your pajamas or hospital gown and listen in on your thoughts and take your measure...

...When health returns, it feels like coming home, with everything just as you left it: and the other thing, the bad news-the broken leg or even the mental breakdown-feels like the freak...

...But now you are Commonweal 24 February 1995: 9 back where you belong, in harmony with the universe...

...Giving up booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but bare white walls...

...It was in truth a blissfully happy time in my life, and I was delighted to tell someone about it, but certainly not to make a big production out of it...

...The Secret of Happiness is to get sick, or break a leg, or come back from the dead, or perhaps to imagine that you've done these things and hope for the best...

...Sickness is almost done and you're not sure what to put in its place...

...its simple pleasures too...

...The second, addiction-depression, deprived me of not just the sleeping pills that brought it on but the whole congenial drinking life, from wine tastings to barbellyings to motor trips through France (who could bear to send back all those wine lists...

...In fact, even when I've been so ill myself that there's been no avoiding them, my position has always been "Just tell me what I'm supposed to do, and who do you like in the World Series...

...But how little...

...What we had here, in other words, was the literary equivalent of a subpoena in the hands of a surly witness from whom much of this had to be dragged...

...And that's the part people want to hear about...

...How did he take it...

...And you discover, in the same giddy rush, WILFRID SHEED, a former Commonweal literary editor (1967-69), is the author of People Will Always Be Kind, among other novels and works of criticism...

...whose gargantuan, cartoonlike self-assurance saw us through war and Depression as if they were just more pool exercises...

...What distinguishes the only three illnesses I've ever had (if you subtract measles, age six) is that all three are generally deemed incurable, and that each has caused me to lose something quite irreplaceable, something I would have sworn I couldn't live without...

...To judge only from the polio veterans I've known, God has made just about everybody strong enough to take it, so affliction can land where it likes...

...The universe's wishes can be devious beyond exasperation at times, but I like to think that it has...

...Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster...

...In the fall of 1989, the late magazine Lear's asked me to contribute to a symposium on the meaning of the word spiritual, which is the kind of request that usually has the word wastebasket written all over it...

...Or so it seemed at the time...

...In the final scene, the war has just ended and our hero capers around a deserted Times Square in civilian clothes, fairly bursting with happiness...

...Everyone has a tryst with sickness someday, or expects to with various degrees of apprehension, so anyone who has visited that country becomes an automatic object of curiosity...

...Just the facts, ma'am...