To your heart from mine and pray to keep us safe

[sovay]

My father talks occasionally, obliquely, about having come of sexual age before AIDS and how much he hates that just about the first thing my generation had to learn about sex was that it could kill you. (It was not strictly true of me, but I take his point.) It has crossed my mind more than once lately that I may feel similarly about the children of my friends and their sense of physical community. I am hoping that is depression more than science talking. I may have had to know a world with AIDS, but I didn't have to know a world with smallpox. I suppose we'd have to start funding the World Health Organization again, though. Vote in November and vote these murderers out. The way I feel about the current administration has almost certainly exceeded operating tolerances of witchcraft.

Anyway, I wish to register a formal complaint that on top of missing the freedom of my city and very possibly my city as I knew it for thirty-eight years of my life, I appear to be badly missing New York. I had nothing on the calendar this spring that I had to cancel, but reasons had a habit of turning up. It was never my city, but it was my family's. I have walked it on and off since childhood. It always made me feel at home.

(I am afraid I never spent enough time walking D.C. to miss it as a city, I just miss some people in the metropolitan area intensely. Portland has been curiously distant since the deaths of my grandparents, although I do not like the feeling that their graves right now are off-limits to me. I am attached to Providence, but not yet in ways that have cohered into a map. I have ghosts of New Haven more than I miss it.)

Comments

[vass]

*nodnod*

[asakiyume]

I hear you. I miss the companionable presence of strangers.

[cmcmck]

If you need some countryside, see my latest.

Not my country and not my cities...and yet...

[dewline]

...I think I know the feeling you speak of here.

I was born in one of the smaller cities of the Canadian prairies, and raised in others scattered across them before finally finding the home of my heart if not my wallet here in Ottawa-Gatineau. I have walked and bused and otherwise travelled some of the length and breadth of these two cities across three decades now, and I feel largely at home here.

And now, this.

As for your first paragraph...

[dewline]

Heartbreaking in its own ways.

First AIDS, then this. The parallels and escalation from one to the other are a pain to too many among both friends and strangers right now.

[sartorias]

I vaguely remember the fear of swimming pools and polio when I was very small. Various waves of stuff have blown through my life. AIDS hit especially hard as women had fought (and were still fighting) for sexual freedom. And yes, I feel the way your dad does. (I guess not surprising, considering he and I are probably of an age.)

[a_reasonable_man]

The pandemic of 1918-1919, coming as it did the midst of war and revolution, was largely forgotten, and so I don't think it affected people's behavior much. I have a feeling this one will be remembered, and it may change people's behavior. But I hope not always in a bad way. In the supersaturated solution that is the current political moment, the pandemic may be what crystallizes a new, more humane political consensus. We shall see.

I have to find a way to get you to Portland.

[sovay]

*nodnod*

*hugs*

[sovay]

I hear you. I miss the companionable presence of strangers.

I miss not having to think about the density of people unless I was on a sardine train at rush hour on the Red Line! I miss being able to trust crowds.

[sovay]

If you need some countryside, see my latest.

I will, thank you. Right now I am most acutely missing streets I can safely roam.

Re: Not my country and not my cities...and yet...

[sovay]

And now, this.

I grew up in the Boston area, but it took me a long time to feel at home in this city rather than merely trapped in it. I hate that I feel cut off from it now. And trapped.

Re: As for your first paragraph...

[sovay]

The parallels and escalation from one to the other are a pain to too many among both friends and strangers right now.

Right down to the government doing its best to ensure that people die.

[sovay]

And yes, I feel the way your dad does. (I guess not surprising, considering he and I are probably of an age.)

He was born in 1952, the year of the highest reported incidence of flying saucer sightings in America.

(And then he caught polio. My mother and her siblings, born between 1946 and 1950, were lucky enough to get sugar cube vaccines instead, although they did catch the full complement of MMR. I grew up in a household that took pandemics seriously and is furious right now.)

[sovay]

In the supersaturated solution that is the current political moment, the pandemic may be what crystallizes a new, more humane political consensus. We shall see.

I hope so. I should truly prefer that to an entrenchment of the systems that are killing us instead.

I have to find a way to get you to Portland.

When it's safe to do so, I'd love that.

[sartorias]

A year younger than I. The sugar cube vaccine (oral) wasn't around until 1960, I'm pretty sure. It was only injections during the mid-fifties, a literal nightmare that still revisits me. I wonder how your mom and sibs escaped the shots.

[sovay]

I wonder how your mom and sibs escaped the shots.

She remembers sugar cubes distinctly—she was taken with her sister by their mother to the vaccination site near the university where they were given terrible-tasting sugar cubes and then had fifteen minutes to rush the other doses home for her father and brother before the vaccine expired. (The story goes that my grandmother hoped to be stopped for speeding so that she could impress upon the police the importance of her errand and arrive home escorted by sirens, but instead she just got home on time.) I agree that that sounds like a live oral vaccine, but my mother really thinks the year was 1955 or '56. I'll see if I can find anything else out.

[sartorias]

As memory can be slippery, I looked up the history of the vaccines. Acto Wikipedia, the oral vaccine didn't come out until 1961, which jives with my memory--I was ten when Mom sneaked us to the YMCA to get it, after the disaster with the shots when I was five.

[selkie]

People who live on Capitol Hill may walk there, but the folks who live in the suburbs don’t walk in DC. Probably analogous to NYC dwellers not visiting the Statue of Liberty because she’s right there. We will always be here when you’re done walking, though.

[sovay]

We will always be here when you’re done walking, though.

I'll bring photos back. I hear the cherry trees are really something. I miss you.