Late in his life, my father developed a severe allergy to shellfish. For a person from Maryland who loved oysters and crabs, this was a genuine hardship. He was a world traveler and an adventurous eater, so for the last decade or so of his life, he went everywhere with an EpiPen, just in case.
Well, that isn’t strictly true. He didn’t carry the EpiPen. It was my mother who had custody. Wherever they went, she was the one who carried it. She had terrible nightmare scenarios running in her mind about a careless restaurant cook, or a hidden ingredient in something, or my father himself forgetting that snails, a dish he loved, drenched in garlic butter, were included in the family of shellfish. It was a serious allergy, and she took it seriously.
My food allergy is that after two or three glasses of wine, usually the red kind but occasionally the white as well, I will erupt into about a dozen sneezes. I’ll feel the first one coming on, politely excuse myself to a quiet spot if I’m in a restaurant or someone’s house — if not, I’ll just let them rip — and sneeze away. The people at the table who know me will reassure the people at the table who don’t that everything is OK. “He’s just got to sneeze,” they’ll say. “It’s nothing serious.” And they’ll count them down for the others: “I think he’s got two more to go and then it’s over.”
Then I sit back down and reach for the wine glass. “Should you be doing that?” Someone once asked. “I mean, if you have an allergy?”
“It’s just sneezing,” I said after a sip or two. “And who doesn’t like to sneeze?”
Which is true: Sneezing is fun. There’s a big wind-up and then a whooshing Achooo! And then everybody blesses you! How amazing is that? Most of us go through our days without a single person offering us a blessing, but the moment we sneeze, everyone in the vicinity is obligated to send us their best wishes.
As long as you have a handkerchief or something similar — not your sleeve — nearby, sneezing provides a nice little break in the day. Of course, if you don’t have something to sneeze into, a sneezing fit can quickly become awful for everyone to look at. But that’s true of many things. The difference between something that’s fun to do and something that’s disgusting often comes down to whether or not you have the proper cleanup supplies.
“But that means you have to carry a handkerchief,” someone will say. To which I reply in a haughty and superior voice: “I have to anyway. Because I am a gentleman.”
Most of us, of course, make these small decisions all the time. If wine makes you sneeze but you really love it, and I mean really, really love it, then what’s the problem? If a late-night breakfast plate at Waffle House causes urgent gastrointestinal distress, well, you just have to plan for that. It’s really no reason to skip a meal and a show at 2 a.m. at Waffle House. Life is about navigating your way through a lot of small disasters.
My father’s food allergy, on the other hand, was severe and unbending. A bite of a phylum Mollusca on the half shell or a phylum Echinodermata in a delicious beurre blanc and my mother would be hunting through her bag for the EpiPen as his throat began to swell shut. Me, I get a little toasted on some good red wine and I turn into Sneezy, one of the Seven Dwarves. That’s the difference, I guess, between the generation that grew up with the Cold War, the Space Race, and the American Century and the one that grew up with skinny jeans and Sesame Street.
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Former President John Adams famously said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”
Which is about right, especially when it comes to me and my father and our very different allergies. I wonder what made John Quincy Adams sneeze?
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.