Most of the nine months I should have spent in the first grade I spent in bed. My problems started with the measles a perfectly ordinary case and then got steadilt worse. I had about after bout of what I mistakenly thought was called "strioe throat"; I lay in bed drinkingcold warer and imagining my throat in alternating stripesof red and whiter (that was probably not so far wrong).
At some point my ears became involved, and one day my mother called a taxi (she did not drive) and took me to a doctor too important to make house calls an ear specialist. (For some reason I got the idea that this sort of doctor was called an otiologist.) I didn't care wherther he specialized in ears or assholes.
I had a fever of a hundred and four degrees,and each time I swallowed pain lit up the sides of my face like a jukebox.
The doctor looked in my ears, spending most of his time on the left one. Then he laid me down on his examining table. "Lift up a minute, Strevie," his nurse said, and put a large