cooties are not carbon based.

Did you smell Gabe? asks Olivia. He smells good today. I mean, he smells like a boy, but he smells good.

So I go, briefly, into the Chamber of Secrets aka the computer room, and take a whiff. Yes, I conclude. A nice, pleasant masculine aroma. Not the stink that so often occurs after a long day at school under the couple of extra jacket layers the kid always insists on wearing.

Gabe is not impressed one way or the other by having his sister and mother come in to give him the sniff test. But I am gratified, as I hope that one day other people (or person) will want him to live with them, and it is satisfying to know that he can potentially smell attractive.

I cannot yet attest to whether or not he has cooties. Personally, I most certainly do, and I have no doubt that it’s a congenital condition and, as far as I know, not contagious. Yet I have spawned 3 cooties-negative daughters and I hope that once Gabe outgrows his 15 year old boy troll phase that he too will not be the sort of person who sends out my almost palpable “go thither” vibe

Luckily, some cooties-negative folk are immune to the repellant magnetic field we cootie-positives emit, and I know that because I married one. But as my buddy continues his slow fade, I’m confronting, after 20+ years, the ridiculous fact that the cooties are still there. You would think that all that childrearing and middle-age would have eradicated the cooties, but it has not. Hence, I conclude that it is a life-long, incurable condition, and that it is my problem to work around.

Or perhaps most people are like Hydrogen, Oxygen, or even Carbon, and rather inclined to form bonds, whereas I’m Neon, and relatively non-reactive. When I do, it can be quite spectacular, but in the meantime, we neons float around wondering how it is that O and H have such an easy time making connections.

Well that’s easy. They don’t have cooties. And we wish Gabe smelled good all the time.