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I was reading in the paper the other day about how our bodies' immune systems are shutting down because we don't use them enough. I couldn't agree more.

Everything has to be so antiseptic that if a germ gets through, you're done for.

It was George Carlin who said in one of his comedic diatribes, `` Your immune system: Use it or lose it.''

Today it seems like people get sick at the slightest provocation, which wasn't the way it was when I was a kid.

I grew up believing you shouldn't get sick, for a lot of reasons, not the least of them being that doctors and store-bought medicine were too expensive. Those were the days that if you dropped your slice of watermelon on the floor, you washed it off at the sink and kept on eating it.

If your ice cream fell out of your cone, you scooped it up and ate around the dirt.

You shared the same water glass in the bathroom (no one used paper cups) and the same towel. If you were lucky, everyone had their own toothbrush.

And if some of the bread got a little moldy, you threw away those slices and ate the rest.

We swam in murky rivers and walked barefoot on city sidewalks.

I was also taught that the best cure for being sick, if you let yourself get sick, was to work it off. Get up, get moving, go to work.

I always credited the four or five years I wrestled in school -- wearing two sweat suits in an overheated wrestling room, jogging 'til you dropped in the darkened school hallways, going days without eating, gaining and losing 9 pounds in three days -- with being so grueling that getting sick never became an option, even today.

Oh, I've been sick a couple of times, don't get me wrong, but it's usually on a weekend when I have the time for that kind of self-indulgence.

The rest of the time you have to get up, get moving and work it off. I've been coming to work here for some 37 years. Know how many sick days I have logged on the books? Zero.

Your immune system: Use it or lose it. Thanks for the papers

Thanks to Esther Pederson of Plainville for a copy of The Royal Gazette from Bermuda.

`` My family and I spent a few days in Quebec City and brought back these (bi-lingual papers,'' writes news editor and columnist Tom Reilly. `` You may notice that Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper got in trouble when he dodged a question about whether Quebec is a `nation.' Would President Bush have fared better if someone had asked him the same question about Red Sox Nation?''

Thanks to staff writer Mike Gelbwasser for a paper from Holden, Mass.

Thanks for the cuddlers

Thanks to Tim and Jennifer Drain of Mansfield for four teddy bears for Bears of Board.

And thanks to Jennifer G. Campbell, store manager at Starbucks in North Attleboro, for dropping off five bears.

Bears on Board is a program of the Attleboro Area Council for Children. The bears are given to local police officers, firefighters and ambulance crews to give to children in crises. Our teddy bear total to date is 4,852.

See you next week.