Thanks to the Flu

The current flu pandemic has many positive aspects about it and might leave our world a better place. Of course, it has its tragic side. We should remember those who died before their time because of it.

But there are ways in which the flu might inject new life into our lives. Some commentators have mentioned how this period of self-isolation might bring families closer together. Instead of scattering in all directions each day, with children going to different schools, then off to different soccer fields and socials, and the adults rushing off to separate high-rise jobs as admen, madmen – families are forced to gather close together around that old metaphoric home-fire. It’s possible that each family member will retreat to his or her own room to tweet and watch separate TV shows. But it’s also possible that this enforced togetherness might spark a few conversations between family members. Children and adults might get to know each other a little better, and for the first time find out, for better or worse, who is really aboard those other ships that previously just passed in the night.

Some people might get cabin fever with this enforced isolation. But that was never my problem. I always found the times I had to stay quietly at home to be delicious reprieves from social obligation. When the Great Snowstorm of 1967 hit Chicago, I was a teenager and the surrounding piles of snow cast me as Queen of my own Ice Castle. I iglooed in place; I cocooned in the wonderland of my thoughts. I could quietly metamorphize into my own fated maturity.

Not that I wasn’t generally able to be more unto myself than most people my age. I was largely homeschooled, (or more accurately, I was a learner-at-home) in a time before there was a word or a movement for that practice. Almost invariably, when people who are imbued with the necessity of going to school hear about that philosophy, they ask, “But what about socialization? Don’t you miss out on learning how to interact with other people?”

Well, one could observe how most teens interact, and see that their social skills haven’t really improved as they’ve advanced from first grade through high school. In reality, it seems as if, during that time, many of them have only honed their techniques of cruelty to others – and to themselves. If anything, I would argue that the world is suffering from too much socialization. What people need, especially young people, is more time away from social pressures, more time to be themselves, or rather, to become their best selves. They need time away from bullying, peer pressure, and pressure to conform.

To interject a somewhat sadder, more world-weary note of wisdom into these considerations, I think of what a handyman once surprisingly said to me – or rather, to my dog. After my father died, my mother and I went through a difficult series of handymen enlisted to do odd jobs around the house. Most of these catch-as-catch-can itinerants proved to be rather incompetent or unreliable. Some proved to have positively sinister ulterior motives for coming into our house, motives other than repairing the leaking faucet. However, for a while, there was one capable stalwart of a fellow we could count on. He had the weathered, raw look of a ship’s figurehead. He generally concentrated on his work, not seeking to engage in any small talk.

I’d just acquired a new puppy then, a little mutt who was proving to be an incessant yapper, a little bundle of uncontrollable energy who wanted to dart into any household activity she saw going. Our handyman was remarkably tolerant of this noisy interference most of the time. But one day, he paused to address this fur-ball cavorting around him. “You have to go off by yourself and be quiet now, little one,” he said. “That’s what growing up is. It’s learning how to be alone.”

And so this period of sequestration that the flu is bringing upon us might be an opportunity to practice that larger lesson. Maybe we can all grow up a little.

But simply considering the cozier, more down-to-earth aspect of this enforced enclosure - English writer J. B. Priestley expressed it well in his essay “Not Going” in his collection of delights. When he was young, he said it was horrible not to get an invitation – to the party, the dance, the excursion. But as he got older, he realized he wasn’t missing anything by being at home. As he would ensconce himself in his favorite chair, people would ask him, “But don’t you like to enjoy yourself?” To which he’d reply, “On the contrary, by Not Going, that is just what I am trying to do.”

However, there’s another boon this period of stoppage can confer, a boon that I oddly haven’t heard any news commentators remark on so far. This widespread slowdown in industry can give the environment a brief respite, a brief time of healing. I’m surprised that this advantage to the earth’s ecology hasn’t been widely heralded as something positive that can come out of this epidemic.

A couple of decades ago, there was a lot of regret about the loss of our Sundays. Environmentalists noted how Sundays used to be a time of rest, a time when people didn’t go to work. They stayed home and slept late, then read the Sunday newspaper over a second cup of coffee. Scientists noted how CO2 levels in the atmosphere sharply dropped on Sundays. There wasn’t the dredging, the drilling, the extracting, the in-putting. The levels of all kinds of pollutants in the atmosphere declined – on Sundays. Our atmosphere got a breather.

But then Sundays stopped being so sharply marked by cessation. With flex-work schedules and with a more general ambition to get the job done around-the-clock, Sundays weren’t as quiet as they used to be. They stopped being Kris Kristofferson’s “sleeping city sidewalk.” People were almost as much up-and-at-it on Sundays as they were on other days. So the earth hasn’t had quite that same one-day-a-week to recuperate and rejuvenate.

But now with the shutdowns the flu has enforced, the earth might be getting a whole swatch of time to recover, perhaps its first since the industrial revolution really got rolling. Again, when scientists look back at this time, they will probably record a steep down-turn in effluents being dumped into the atmosphere. It probably won’t be enough to allow the glaciers to start to accumulate inches of ice again, and not enough to make our next winter noticeably colder again, like Victorian winters used to be. But it will probably make some difference, however small.

What’s more, mortality rates from a variety of usual causes will be seen to have declined during this period. The police in big cities have already been noting the decline in crime. One report said there were 30% fewer street murders in Chicago this month than there were in the same month last year. Although, some worry that for every street crime prevented by our encouragements against congregating – there might be a domestic crime committed in the created hothouse of indoor togetherness. But so far at least, that kind of offset doesn’t seem to have happened.

Meanwhile, the reduction in sheer levels of activity must surely have a net positive effect in other areas. With sporting events postponed, there will be fewer sports injuries. With fewer people rushing to get to and from their jobs on time, there will be fewer car crashes, fewer highway fatalities.

And then there are the animals. I know I should be more concerned about humans than animals, and yet, the life and death of animals has been made so much a matter of human whim that their injury can be so much more guilt-producing and heart-breaking. I feel somehow complicit in each such death, with my presumption of need to go somewhere or consume something. So when I see a deer hit on the road, left to limp off bleeding and broken to almost certain torturous death, I feel a more piercing sadness than I feel over the death of many humans.

But with the slowdown of the world in the wake of this Covid pandemic, there will be fewer such killings. The world will be less splattered with dogs, cats, raccoons, squirrels… If it’s true that “not a sparrow falls but that our Father sees,” there will be a lot less carnage for Him to see.

When this is over and the scientists go back and calculate the decrease in pollution and bloodshed that marked this period, I wouldn’t be surprised if some leaders don’t consider making a regular event of such cessation. Let one week out of every eight be a “Faux Flu” week – a week in which everyone whose job isn’t absolutely essential for life support stays home. For that week, stop the “getting and spending” and coming and going, and simply abide in quiet appreciation of what we all already have.

A Born Atheist

I’m the only person I know who was born an atheist. I never went through any crisis of faith, so I’ve never had anything to say when I’ve been with a group of acquaintances who, in the small hours after a number of drinks, have started to confess the wrenching feelings of desolation they experienced when, in their teens or beyond, they slowly began to realize there might not be a God.

I’m not sure about the reason for my precocious lack of belief. Neither my father nor my mother ever mentioned the word “God” as I was growing up, or ever observed a religion in any way, with one exception for each of my parents. My mother had perhaps not completely abandoned her Catholic upbringing, which she said she had done when her favorite aunt died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, despite all my mother’s fervent prayers. But I don’t think my mother quite made it all the way to absolute atheism. I remember she had me baptized when I was a toddler, rather late in the game. I think she might have been pressured into it by her brother and other still devout relatives. But she told me she had finally agreed to the baptism… “Just in case.”

Then when I was in my late teens, I happened to drift through the kitchen where my father was sitting while I matter-of-factly muttered some statement of disbelief to myself. My father caught my under-the-breath remark. He startled up from reading the newspaper and said to me, “What? You don’t believe in God?” I said “No, of course not. What? Do you?” In a shocked tone, he answered, “Yes.” We looked at each other in wild surmise for a moment, realizing how little we’d known of each other all those years. Then, in resignation, my father went back to reading the paper. And I went on out the door to go sit in the yard and read.

Those were the only two times that religion was mentioned in the house. But I knew from the start that all my other relatives were religious, and I knew that included an over-arching belief in an omnipotent God. Before I started kindergarten, I would often stay the weekends with my grandmother. We would sleep together in her king-sized bed. But she’d set the alarm for 5:00 A.M. so that she could get up and go to early Mass. One of my earliest memories is of me thinking, at the moment that alarm clock went off, “Thank goodness I don’t believe in all that. I can go back to sleep.” I’d snuggle back under the covers while my grandmother trudged off through Chicago’s wintry streets to St. Michael’s.

I’ve wondered about this lack of any religious feeling on my part, this lack of any sense of a directing higher power. Perhaps, in addition to the fact that there was no religious atmosphere in my house, I grew this way because there was a lack of any hierarchy in my house. My parents talked with me as they would talk to an adult from the start. I can’t remember a single instance when they told me what to do, when they issued an order or made a rule. They never told me to go to school or do my homework. I went to bed whenever I was sleepy. I ate whatever I wanted. I watched anything on TV for however long I wanted to watch it.

My parents had started a small mailing business just before I was born, and I became a full partner from the start. By the time I was 2-years-old, I was amazing passers-by as I sat in our front display window on my little chair, collating flyers and stuffing them into envelopes at lightning speed. We had a financial struggle. I think it must have been like growing up on a farm where the children often become needed partners from the start. At the dining table, family conversation centers around how they are going to bring in the harvest against daunting odds, rather than around the delivery of orders and options to the children. So our family conversation centered around our customers’ foibles and demands. There was no hint of, “OK, you can either do your homework tonight and skip the movie, or else you can get up early tomorrow and do it.”

This pattern of treating me as an adult was carried down to the smallest detail. How different other families were from mine in this regard was brought home to me with a seemingly insignificant incident. I had never liked toys or playthings of any kind. I almost dreaded Christmas because it meant more distant relatives would be bringing me novelty gifts that I really didn’t want but that I’d have to seem delighted with for a long period of time in order not to hurt anyone’s feelings or squelch their joy of giving.

But there fell one brief exception to this opinion about the tawdriness of toys that I held. For some reason, a little Farmer in the Dell musical contraption that Art Linkletter was hawking on TV caught my attention. You’d turn the handle on the tin box, and as you turned – farmer, farmer’s wife, child… mouse and cheese would pop out in succession. They’d advance around a little proscenium stage, then would go back into the recesses of the box again, all to the ditty of “The Farmer in the Dell.”

I expressed a desire to own such an animated box. My mother was rather surprised by this. I’d almost never wanted anything before, and this seemed an unworthy object on which to expend such an exceptional longing. My mother did mention that the toy would likely become boring in a short time. It had very limited versatility; it allowed for a very limited play of the imagination. I could see a bit of regret shadow my mother’s face – and perhaps also a bit of fear that I might be turning into a trivially demanding little brat. She had almost never signaled any kind of disapproval over my actions before. So this in and of itself was a departure of attitude for her. But I persisted. I made a case for the enjoyment this type of toy could offer.

So at our family Christmas gathering that year, the duly wrapped Farmer in the Dell appeared “from Aunt Hazel and Uncle Carl.” Sitting off to one side of the adult circle, I eagerly started to crank the handle of the box and bring the farm family onto stage one-by-one. I went through the “Hi-ho the derry-o” ditty once. Then I launched the parade a second time. When I showed signs of cranking into a third go-round, my uncle leaned over and somewhat sternly ordered, “Ok, you can play it one more time. But then you have to put it away.”

This assumption of command over me sent a shock wave through me. I was torn by a multitude of emotions. I suddenly realized that the repeated rattling of the ditty was annoying the people around me trying to hold a conversation. How thoughtless I’d been! I also realized at that moment that I’d have made that third go-round the last one of the day of my own accord. I had already realized how right my mother had been about such a toy. I could myself already see how tedious the toy would soon become.

Most of all though, the emotion that gripped me was one of utter shock over being issued what was tantamount to an order. Since I hadn’t started school yet, I’d never before been addressed that way. My utter equality had always been assumed, as well as my capacity to intuitively know what was right and proper. My parents would no more have told me how many times I could do a thing than they would have ordered their own parents or an adult guest to stop indulging in a relatively harmless enjoyment. How strange!

Of course, when I started school, I was hit with the pervasiveness of that pattern of adults telling children what to do. Children had to be lined up, had to ask permission to go to the bathroom, had to comply with an endless stream of instructions, rules, orders, commands. I never came even close to getting acclimated to that alien way of relating to people. Not that I was ever a rebel or a trouble-maker. I became a slavishly meek, compliant person – not always so much out of niceness as out of sheer fear of that drive I saw in other people to assume dominance and control over others, or else to be dominated and controlled.

My point in relating this piece of autobiography is that I’ve sometimes read that there’s a correlation between the degree of people’s religiosity and the amount of dominance they experienced growing up. People raised in an atmosphere of strict hierarchy, particularly within the intimacy of their nuclear families, often seem to become the most fanatically attached to fundamentalist religions. Those who have experienced households in which the father is boss over the mother and in which both parents are in agreement about the need to boss their children, to the point of controlling them with harsh physical punishment – quite often become people committed to the concept of a punishing God. They grow up convinced of the need for discipline in the form of continuously imposed rules and order from above. What they experienced in microcosm, they project onto the macrocosm.

Whatever led to my assumption of atheism, it’s provided me with the only answer I can give to Oprah’s interview question, “Tell me one thing you know for sure.” My one thing is, and has always been – there is no God.

Meghan and Harry - The Dying Swans

I’ve never taken too much of an interest in the doings of the Royal Family, so I don’t have a lot of emotion invested in their defaults and defections. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time tweeting either praise or criticism of Meghan and Harry for dropping out of the continuous round of royal duties. And yet, and yet – I do sort of regret their decision. In the British Royal Family, the world has one last long view back down a colonnaded succession. The British Royals are the last Royal Family that can capture the imagination and make a stand for life-long duty to tradition.

I wish Meghan and Harry had watched the movie The Swan before making their decision. It’s an almost lost gem of a movie. Grace Kelly found the perfect, prescient role for herself there. She plays a Princess in a branch of a royal family that was side-lined by Napoleon. The Crown Prince is scheduled to pay a visit to her family’s manor house, reputedly in search of a suitable wife. This has sent her mother into a flurry of preparation and hope that a union might be secured for her daughter and that the family might thereby be restored center-stage to the Court.

When the Prince arrives though, in the form of Alec Guinness, he is a distinct disappointment. He is rather dismissive, almost rude. He seems to take no interest in Grace Kelly whatsoever. He makes himself scarce about the house, generally registering his presence only when he needs to be waited on.

When it seems he’s not going to court Grace Kelly, her mother hatches a plan to spark his interest. She advances Louis Jourdan, Grace Kelly’s handsome tutor, as a likely love-interest for her daughter in order to make the Crown Prince jealous. The plan backfires though. Grace Kelly sincerely falls in love with her tutor and plans to elope with him, even in the face of Guinness’ rather back-handed proposal after all. This decision sends her mother into a tizzy of despair and entreaty. The audience is bound to side with the eloping young couple at this point. But even as a child, watching the movie for the first time, I didn’t feel drawn to root for that commoner conclusion. I felt something rarer should prevail.

And indeed, it likely does. As Kelly is all packed and ready to take flight, Guinness approaches her with a sadder, restraining wisdom. He proves himself to be a much better man than we took him for in this unexpected turn. His speech to her then stands out for me as one of the most moving moments in movie history. He likens her to a swan – a creature who floats beautifully out on the water. But he reminds her that if that swan should choose to wade out on land, it becomes a mere goose, waddling along in a gaggle. So it is the lot of that swan to never make its home on solid ground. It is the swan’s lot to maintain a commitment to that more distant beauty, out on the water, essentially silent and alone – through to the end.

This is a memorable rendering of Ferenc Molnar’s play and it confirmed me as a monarchist. Again, I don’t mean that in the sense that I take an interest in what the Royals wear for their weddings or in the details of their peccadilloes. I certainly wouldn’t collect Royal Wedding plates or scan People magazine for tidbits of gossip. But that movie, that speech, made the final case for there being somewhere, always, at least one last persistence of duty to tradition.

When Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII stepped out of the procession – they most decidedly became mere geese. After that one stirring moment of abdication, their lives became dull and devoid. Well, they probably were essentially geese all along. But if they had maintained the mantle of royalty, they would have had the stirring bearing of authority that comes with kingdom. They would have meant something, to onlookers and to the world. They would have meant history. As it was, they dwindled through shallow, listless lives, making the scene, going to the casinos in Monaco, appearing as prize catches at socialites’ parties.

The Prince of Wales became Governor of the Bahamas for a while, but really didn’t do much of anything. In a late interview done with the couple when they were older and the Prince of Wales was ill (available on YouTube), this sense of wasted lives becomes apparent. When the interviewer asked the Prince why he never took a job, he implied he’d thought about it. But for some reason, he said, “I never did. I don’t know why, but I never did…” and he trailed off in regret.

Jerry Seinfeld more cruelly summarized the couple’s later life in one of the episodes of Seinfeld. When the gang briefly discusses Wallis, the Prince, and the abdication, Jerry finishes them off by pronouncing them, “Euro-trash.” I hope that’s not the kind of vacuity that Meghan’s and Harry’s lives become.

There’s a quote from another play that rings back to me now and that seems as if it also might have informed Meghan’s and Harry’ decision. It’s spoken in Act V, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry V. After Henry’s stunning “We few, we happy few” victory at Agincourt, Shakespeare changes the mood to what’s generally rendered as a comic scene set in the French Court. It’s already taken for granted that Henry will now take Katherine, the French Princess, as his wife. It’s his right as the victor to consolidate the English and French royal houses in this way. But Henry wants to make a more personal proposal, not as a matter of form, but as a matter of the heart. Much of the scene centers on Katherine’s humorous attempts to speak English and on Henry’s attempts at a few French phrases.

But in one outstanding presentation of the play, Richard Burton rolls the proposal to a more serious, sonorous bidding. After having listed both his good and bad points as just a man, he concludes, “If you would have such a man, take me. Take me and get a soldier. Take a soldier and get a king.”

It’s entrained as one inevitability that must be honored. And so one feels it should perhaps have been when Meghan accepted Harry’s proposal. The world doesn’t need another cute Yuppie couple dabbling in charity and then drifting among the coffee shops and boutiques of some upscale Canadian neighborhood. The world needs those last, lonely swans who in their remote beauty seem not to be flesh and blood at all but who have assumed a lifelong commitment to being symbols – symbols of tradition, Country, and Majesty.