YOU KNOW THERE'S A NAME for that verticle indentation beneath your nose and upper lip: it's called a philtrum, from the Greek "philos" meaning "mucus" and "trumin" meaning "gatherer." Scholars may disagree on the etymology of the word but it has always proven true in my case and I can be forgiven as a little boy with a constantly runny nose for thinking that the proper name for philtrum was "that's what sleeves are for."

I remember having this maroon corduroy jacket in third grade at St. Margaret's that I had to wear to school everyday during a particularly sniffly winter season. The right foresleeve grew so crusty from continuous philtum swabbing that it hurt to wipe my nose, forcing me to seek unused swaths of sleeve and eventually to wipe left-sleeved. By the month of March both sleeves on my Catholic school boys jacket looked like one big booger.

Forgive the indelicacy of today's subject matter but I have just emerged from the other side of the tunnel. Not the one with the bright light shining at the end, I speak of the annual tunnel that goes by the name "whatever's going around." Call it the flu, call it the common cold, call it Satan; it's all the same to me.

But whatever's going around is usually what puts some people in the hospital, and others in bed for a week. One thing's for sure, nobody walks around for long with whatever's going around. It wins in the end. With me it starts with a tiny little parched spot deep in the back of my throat that no liquid can moisten. Within 24 hours the parched spot has become a desert covering my entire throat and at the bottom of the dryness is a well of wetness -- let's call it disgusting goo -- that keep forcing itself upward and outward with great hacking coughs.

Then come the aches, like the day after the first football practice, a universal ouch set off by the slightest movement. This is accompanied by an overinflated basketball that has replaced my head, filled not with air but more disgusting goo. And then. . .the tunnel. Blessed oblivion. Nothingness for 36 hours of sleep and people being nice to me. Even my children.

At the other end of the tunnel I am reminded of what my mother told me about the origin of my philtrum: "That's where God put his finger on you to say you were ready to leave heaven." As an adult I see that indentation more as a reminder that in God's eyes I can be dispatched as easily as an ah-CHOO!.