Not long ago, I walked out the door of my house on a clear, cold morning and was thinking pure business when, halfway across the porch, I felt that familiar pleasant wave in the chest—the magnetic field of the sneeze—and the long intake of breath and the pulsation in the head. I wound up, reared back, and delivered a sneeze worthy of Pavarotti—a six-syllable sneeze that sounded like "onomatopoeia!" On the accented syllable I stamped my foot (wham!) on the wooden floor, and then the majestic cry (and wham!) came bouncing back to me off the house across the street. I thought, God bless you! I said good morning to the bunch of children who wait for their schoolbus on my corner. They appeared to be awestruck. I climbed into my car and drove off, and at the corner the stoplight turned a luminous green.
-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married, 163-164.
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