Deja Vu: the Way We Were

A younger friend asked me to join him for pizza yesterday, saying that it might be the last time we could do it.  (I usually have a beach picnic with pizza on Mondays, and he lives across the street from the pizza joint.)  We talked, of course, about the return of Voldemort, and he asked me if I had ever known anything like it before.  At first I said no.  Then I reconsidered and said, well, yes.  It was really a lot like my early childhood, except with panic.

I was born into a world which no longer exists anywhere except in memories and imagination.  People complain that they can no longer afford houses while my parents could.  (The houses my parents bought, however, had one bathroom, small bedrooms, often shared by several kids, no air conditioning. They weren't even wired for  Wi-Fi.) People complain that they can no longer buy cars while my parents could.  (The cars my parents bought required one to roll up his own window, lock the door with a key, and pay extra for an AM radio.  I well remember the infotainment system:  I would stand up--there were no seat belts--and stick my hand out the window and learn about air pressure on surfaces.)  If houses and cars were cheap, televisions weren't.  It would be 1952 before my parents  had a television .  The Republican and Democratic conventions seemed as good as circuses, with banners and parades.  Before there was a television in my own living room, I would be awed at the wonder of it when I visited my grandparents or great grandmother.   My grandfather watched the Friday night fights, sponsored by Gillette  when they sold razors instead of feminism.  My grandmother watched The Grand Old Opry and I was confused by Cousin Minnie who looked a lot like my Aunt Minnie--could they be the same person.  My great grandmother particularly enjoyed the broadcasts of Margaret Truman's playing piano in the White House.

Those years seemed--little did we know--continuous with the world of Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer 1915.  The photograph from the video of that wonderful piece of music  could

have been lifted from my mother's photograph album.  It seemed an idyllic world.  The war was over--except for the 'action' in Korea, for which my cousin Fred had to interrupt his medical studies to go to tend to the far-away wounded, and from which he would send home 16mm movies.  (I don't remember the movies even having been censored.) My parents could easily buy tires for their cars, and sugar for birthday cakes.  I had a bicycle and could ride it wherever I wanted.

There were some imperfections in that idyll, black cats walking through the frame from time to time.  I sometimes went with my mother to visit one of her friends whose daughter lived in an iron lung.  Kids got polio.  (It was mostly kids, but it could happen to adults, who didn't talk about it.  Those were the days when the media never told anything less than the truth unless they were

asked by the president to fudge the facts a bit.  (You probably know Barber's music because it is associated with the death of presidents.)I don't know who paid for my mother's friend's daughter's iron lung.  I don't remember Adlai Stevenson telling parents not to worry, that if their

child contracted polio, their bills would be paid.  I do remember that the March of Dimes had cool  little cardboard dime savers with rocket ships on them.  Being obsessive compulsive, I always placed my dimes heads up and aligned straight across.  Then we were raising money for a polio vaccine, a miracle.

Bad things did happen to adults, too.  Besides the polio virus, there was the tuberculosis bacterium. My cousin Fred's mom, Ruth, had one lung because the other had been removed to keep tuberculosis from spreading.  My aunt Minnie, the one I got confused with the cousin on the Grand Old Opry, was married to a man who was a mystery to me for years:  he lived in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and we didn't visit him.

Then there was the overarching danger to adult and child alike of nuclear annihilation.  Ike, the good old grandfather who would warn of us of the same military industrial complex that had let him lead the allies to victory in World War II, would lead us deeper into the cold war.  For that there was no vaccine, but there was duck and cover. (And yes, my first school desk still had ink wells, left over no doubt from 1915.)

Alas, we were not woke enough to panic.  One summer the swimming pool was closed to try to prevent the spread of polio.  My grandfather built a combination tornado and a-bomb shelter, which my half-uncle and I loved because it had a short wave radio.  (It's a good thing the bomb never fell, because if it had my grandfather would probably have found his batteries drained.) We didn't worry about micro aggressions.  I was raised by folks who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, who told me that sticks and stones might break my bones, but words would never harm me.  I wouldn't argue that they were entirely correct, but I would argue that such an attitude helped one learn to cope without needing a safe space.  One needs a safe space if atomic bombs are dropping, or if polio has paralyzed one's diaphragm.

Now, I am not suggesting that polio and covid 19 are perfect parallels, even though  there were 58,000 reported cases of polio in 1952, with more than 3,000 deaths.  It probably helped then that the population was much smaller, and we saw the USA in our Chevrolet rather than in a Boeing. I am merely suggesting that there have been similar fears abroad before.  Voldemort is someone we have known before.  What flabbergasts me about how we are reacting to his return is that we seem to have lost or abandoned any coping mechanisms.  One day we try to convince ourselves that there is no danger.  The next day we shut down the world.  And that is something I haven't seen before.