Brooklyn, New York: Today I woke in Brooklyn at 530 am – good time for running in Fredrick Law Olmstead’s Prospect Park on a raw spring morning in the big city.  A mile or so out – I felt funny, and came in.  Something was happening weird. 

8:00 a.m. conference call – voice felt funny, like something was stuck in it.  9:00 a.m. and I convened a meeting of the Management Council, and by noon the voice was virtually gone.  That feeling that you need to clear your throat, but for some reason, you just cannot do it. By mid-afternoon, I was reduced to a whisper!  I virtually needed a translator to bring the meeting in by 5:00 pm. 

Strangely, when a cold lodges in one’s larynx, you feel all right generally, except for the fact that one is squeaking and bleeping instead of talking.  One second I was speaking, and the next I was hoping that someone could understand my quiet gasps over a cell phone line.  No way to live and a worse way to work!

I always remember reading frequently about President Clinton in his time or Howard Dean more recently and the common complaint of one politician after another whose voice suddenly disappears.  But how could that be me?  I would swear I was neither talking that much or that loud – trust me!

Advice came through the email from New Orleans:  vitamin C – and lots of it – tea with lemon and honey and citrus in mass quantities.  And come home, which is the only thing they in fact do not sell at a health food store.

What a drag?

Every couple of years about this time this will spring up out of nowhere and silence me in some irony of rough justice.

How does one keep this from happening in the first place?