The Things We Lost

 

Despite having followed all the CDC guidelines, and hardly ever interacting with any other human beings, I had the distinct experience of the Virus.  I  lost f March. April was a time of recovery so slow I wasn't completely convinced that it was recovery.  May was the first month when I began to feel happy that I had survived instead of wondering whether it would have been more pleasant to have died.  And even now, five months later, I am just recovering something like my pre-plague stamina,  I am still suffering from a pretty serious bout of Deep Vein Thrombosis, a condition I had avoided for nearly two years, and which I now wonder will be my new normal.

I know therefore from personal experience that the virus is not a hoax.

But.   I am writing this essay outside of a coffee shop that I once would visit nearly every morning,.  Now it is still closed for inside seating.  At the beginning of the plague year, I continued to come every morning because i wanted to support the business.  It's owned by a young  family with two children, and the place has what I suppose most succcincttly can  be called a good vibe.  The owners don'tt know when that will change.  They can't find staff for more service.  

The coffee shop is at least still open.  Many shops in my little are gone.  No more bagels with the picnic tables by the round-about with the view of the port and the mountains.  The bagel shop was one of the first to go.

I am not a bit follower of conspiracy theories, and yet . . . . It was Barach Obama's buddy Rahm Emanuel who said that no good crisis should be wasted.  And there were calls from such folk as Klaus Schwab who hoped the pandemic might be an opportunity for a reset. And it is yet to be seen whether the United States and other governments who have offered to be the 'saviors' during the crisis will be able to pay for their help.   Another round of 'free money' is going out to families with children.  I can't help but wonder what country those children will live in as adults.

Now, full disclosure of my latest status a a pariah:  I have not been vaccinated.  I don't know whether having had the virus has given me as much immunity as would result from the jab.  And I can't find any consistent data for the likely effect of the vaccine on my DVT.  I feel that there was so much disinformation from 'experts' during the early days of the plague year that I no longer am willing to believe anything they say.  

The virus probably cost Trump the election.  People made fun of him for saying things that he admitted were just guesses, or something he had heard.  It certainly didn't seem to me that such statements were very good actions for a head of state.  But the same people who made fun of Trump clung to the statements of the 'experts' who were also just guessing, but without the honesty to say so.  

I have often, during the plague year, thought of the Bastille song, The Things We Lost in the Fire.  I have no idea what the results would have been if the  'officials' had told people not to panic, bu to go on as much as possible with business as usual.  But somehow I doubt that the results would have been worse than they are now.  I suspect the economy will recover sooner than will trust in experts.

What an Odd Thing Is a Life

 

Today would have been my mother's  97th birthday, so today seems  a good time to think about her.  Of course, the memory is an odd faculty, and I can never be sure what is real and what is memorex. Besides, and this is one of the odder things about my memories of her, we had very few conversations from the time I started to school until she was a little younger than I am now. She was in failing  health and I moved back in with her to try to take care of her.  I say try, because I could see no reason she shouldn't be enjoying life and she was looking for some reason to die. 

 For about a five year period, I would go back to Jonesboro to find her not eating, and I would start cooking for her and trying to take her places, but she would say that she had some sort of deadly disease, and she wasn't afraid to die, and that she didn't want  the treatments.  She would eat less and less until she really did feel sick, and then she would decide that maybe she should get some treatment.  So, we would go to the doctor, who would say there was nothing wrong with her except that she was starving herself.  And she would start eating again, and feeling better, and start going out.  And she would tell me there was no reason for me to be there, and kick me out.  So I would go about my life, my now rather segmented life, which mostly consisted of kayaking explorations, until I got a phone call from either her or my brother asking me to return.  (I bought my first cell phone so I would be available on more or less 24 hour call.)  I think what happened is called rinse and repeat.

In retrospect, I think she would have been happier had  I just left her to starve the first time  But during those period when I was saying 'just one more bite', I learned for the first time really about her early life.  It was a much more impoverished life than I had ever imagined.  One easily forgets how recently electricity and indoor plumbing had come to rural Arkansas, or even to some of the towns.  It made sense of mother's delight in keeping the temperature at about 80 in the winter, when she wore summer dresses, and around 55 in the summer, when she piled on sweaters.  And why washing her children was almost a fetish.  She had grown up with no cooling, and wood stove for heat and cooking in the the kitchen, and baths in a tub in the back yard or the porch.

She was very romantic person, and also a sort of fatalist.  She believed that each person had one true love. For her, that person had been my father, who was two years younger than she but who had been accelerated in school.  He had a car when he was a teenager, even though it was a model T Ford, and he had seen her when she and her family first moved to Jonesboro.  He told his friend was was with him in the car as they drove past mother's house with outdoor plumbing that she was the girl he would marry.  And he did, in the midst of World War II.  He was sent to the Pacific, where he probably would have been killed during the invasion of Japan since he operated some sort of top-secret radio/radar apparatus that would direct landing ships, but the bomb saved him.  He returned to San Diego, where my mother was waiting for him in a boarding house full of navy wives, and where I was conceived in December of 1945.

As far as I know, her (their) marriage was pretty near perfect.  I never heard them argue, although she would get angry over his flying and pout for a few days.  I could hear their passionate making up through the air conditioning vents.  She found her dream house, with total climate control and a steady stream of ever-changing decor, he started a successful business, they had three sons, &tc.  Then my father managed to crash his airplane and kill himself.

Then began a very difficult time in her life, although I hardly knew of it.  She was having much more trouble with number two son, my brother who was four and a half years younger than I, and who was very disturbed by our father's death.  But she never really spoke about it, and I was off at school, thinking about my own imagined future as whatever it was I was going to be if the Vietnam War hand't entered the mix.

Oddly enough, since my mother didn't want to let anyone think that my brother was mentally ill, or perhaps because she didn't, she took a job after my youngest brother was out of the house and married off, as a recreational director at a mental health hospital.  There, her co-workers set her up with one of the staff, a man younger than she from Paragould, the town where she had been born.  There was some sort of party, and they arranged that mother and Alex would end up alone at the end of the night.  Not much later, they were married.  Alex was a much less interesting person than my father, with no hobbies that took him away on hunting trips or into the air.  It was a pretty placid affair, one that mother enjoyed after some rather tumultuous years with my brother and his problems.  Then Alex died.  

One of the reasons she had married him, she would tell me later, was that she was sure he would outlive her.  She didn't want to be widowed again.  When he died, she kept a photo of him beside her bed for just a few days, and then replaced it with one of my father.  She had divorced Alex, she told me, because he had died on her.

During the years that I was basically prolonging her death, I kept trying to find things that would amuse her.  Glenn Miller and Andrews Sisters recordings, for instance.  (She wore her hair in an Andrews Sisters style nearly until her death.)  A video player and Mickey Rooney and James Stewart movies.  And I bought a laptop and a subscription to Arkansas Net.  She was a little bit curious about the laptop.  I tried to explain the growing wonders of the world wide web to her, encouraging her to explore the world beyond her bedroom and Lazyboy.  Could she see the Officers Club in San Diego, she asked. The young Google brought up photos of a newly-restored San Diego Naval Station Officers' Club. Yes, she said.  That's it.  She remembered being surprised that Cokes cost twenty-five cents.  What else would she like to see?  Nothing. That's enough.  That't what it was like.

Mother never quite forgave me for not being a daughter, a status she had expected for her second child.  She had been very devoted to her mother and wanted a daughter who would have the same devotion to her.  She seemed a bit embarrassed that her son was shopping and cooking for her.  Eventually she hired the daughter of a friend to do those chores, and she would even occasionally go to the store with her.  But she was putting the meals, uneaten, in the garbage.  We never quite noticed how odd it was that she always took out the garbage herself, given her usual difficulties with such tasks.  We should have seen the clue.

Each bout of starving herself made her weaker, and eventually she moved into a nursing home, the only one she trusted, where she had for a while been on he staff.  Sometimes she thought she was still working and would start to run the charts and prepare meds.  One morning in February of 2003, she was in the hospital from a fairly minor procedure and the nurse brought her breakfast.  I don't think I will eat again, she said, and with those last words, turned towards the wall and died.