Swine flu alarmists are warning Americans not to touch their own faces, which means the only way to relieve my pollen-inflamed eyeballs is to dunk my head in a basin of water, bowing deeply at the waist with my hands behind my back, like a contestant in a pie-eating contest.

Three of the last four days have had highs in the 90s — the calendar’s gone January, February, March, August –  and everyone is saying it’s like late summer around here. If so, it’s a surreal, leafless, lawn-mower-silenced summer. A round of golf beneath the bald trees left my bald head Red-Lobstered with sunburn. The only grass clippings at my house are of the fake Easter-basket variety.

The pollen count renders me a shut-in. Serial sneezing, and the occasional effort to pluck out my own eyeballs, make writing nearly impossible (as this post demonstrates). Indeed, the endless sneezing jags have inspired an idea — a nickname for a Canadian Football League team. Picture the side of the helmet, with an allergy-addled big cat, a predatory feline violently ah-chooing: The Sneezing Jags.

All of which is to say I’m sitting in my basement, watching TV, wondering if global weirding will make August-in-April an annual event. And wondering what that will mean for children’s rhymes of the future: April sunstroke brings . . . marathons of “Gunsmoke”?

I know “Gunsmoke” hasn’t been on, even in reruns, for several decades, and that I’m actually bingeing on Champions League soccer. That’s not the point. The point is this: I’m a sneezing, sunburnt, half-blinded bald man who can’t leave the house right now. And that has me feeling — in every sense of the phrase — under the weather.

Mark Fidrych, who died last week on his farm in Northboro, Mass., was a wonderful guy, eminently aware that life is short. Eight summers ago, the Bird and I passed a day on that farm talking about his remarkable life.

Flew to St. Louis last week with the wife, the 4-year-old, the 2-year-old and the 5-month-old. Sat in the last row. As we descended, the Arch appeared outside our window and the 4-year-old, a budding comic genius, said, “Is that river the . . . Mister Sippi?” And the thunder outside sounded like a rimshot.

On landing, the guy in front of the 4-year-old said to me: “I hope your daughter plays soccer because she’s the next Mia Hamm, the way she was kicking my seat.” I pointed out that her legs couldn’t have reached his seat had he not fully reclined on takeoff in the manner of someone getting a shave in a barber shop, but he did not seem to catch my drift.

As we exited the rental car lot, in a predictable Biblical downpour, the booth attendant informed us we did not, alas, have a rental-car reservation. So we returned to the lot and reserved the very car we were already in. We drove into town on I-70, still signposted as the “Mark McGwire Highway,” as 17 cop cars with their sirens on raced in the opposite direction.

We stopped at McDonald’s for our first meal in nine hours. Four-year-old said: “This is good because McDonald’s has two arches and St. Louis has one arch.” I’m telling you, she’s a genius, that one.

On arrival at the hotel, we unloaded so many bags that the bellman wondered if we were Rolling Stones roadies. At the front desk we were informed that we did not have a reservation. We were in fact down the block, at a hotel with an identical name and a nearly identical address. So we reloaded the bags into the van, greased the bellman again, and did same thing on arrival at the hotel a block away, leaving me to assume that the two Renaissances kitty-corner to one another in St. Louis is a conspiracy of the Local Bellman’s and Porter’s Union 376.

Upon entering the room, I turned on the TV and saw that police on I-70 had been chasing a bank robber who abandoned his getaway car and stolen loot when he discovered a GPS tracking device in the bag of cash. And I wondered if bags of stolen bank money are like the ones in cartoons — canvas satchels with $ signs stenciled on either side.

On the first morning, as the wife worked, I took the kids to the Arch, noting the irony of this glorious engineering marvel rendered almost inaccessible by the inglorious engineering non-marvel of Memorial Drive, the high-speed thoroughfare that leaves pedestrians to fend for themselves to get from downtown to the Mister Sippi riverfront. You end up waiting for the bimonthly light to change and hope the 2-year-old is not swept into a raging river of traffic en route. Suggestion: Build another, smaller arch — this one a footbridge — over the street to access the bigger Arch everyone has come to see.

The girls wanted to visit the top of the Arch but the airport-style security required taking the sleeping 5-month-old out of his stroller so that we could run it — the stroller, not the 5-month-old, though I’m not positive about this — through the metal detector. I declined, and haven’t heard the end of it from the 4-year-old, whose sole purpose in life, in the days leading up to the trip, had been to drink in the vista from its observation deck, 635 feet up,  where she could see — she was certain — “parts of the North Pole.”

And yet there were moments of perfection on the trip: The White Castle marquee that said “CLAM STRIPS . . . YUM.” (Presumably they’d run out of Ks and simply put an M at the end of the sign instead.) There was the car we passed, the turquoise Topaz, an ugly ride but a euphonious phrase, one I kept repeating in my head the rest of the trip.

There were the kids, increasingly unhappy in their hammock of a fold-out bed, coming up with novel ways to complain. Two-year-old, at breakfast: “I don’t want that! It has a hole in it!” Me, sighing: “It’s a donut.”

I took the kids to Forest Park one day and noted that the names parents call on the playground seldom vary from city to city and scarcely ever include a Tom or a Sarah: “Kingsley! Socrates! Bennifer!”

That afternoon, driving back to downtown, I passed Busch Stadium, its scoreboard lighted up in a test-drive for the next day’s Cardinal opener, and all was right with the world again.

That night, when the kids finally fell asleep, five of us in a single room, I cracked the door to the  bathroom and set the desk chair in the narrow shaft of light coming from the vanity. And there I read by the light of the crapper, content in the knowledge that for once I had somehow defied the First Law of Hotel Living: No matter what time you return to your room — noon, 6 p.m., three o’clock in the morning — housekeeping will arrive 30 seconds before you do.

My feature on Bill Rodgers, in the May issue of Runner’s World, is online here.

For newcomers to the website, my essay on Tiger, from the April issue of Golf Digest, is here.

And the story on my family’s violent history on the golf course, from the December issue of Golf Digest, is here.

I have a 5,000-word profile of Bill Rodgers, four-time winner of the Boston and New York marathons, in the May issue of Runner’s World, on newsstands now.