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JOURNAL OF PLAGUE YEAR # 33

A couple of weeks ago I rolled up my sleeve and got jabbed with the Pfizer booster shot, which ought to immunize me against Covid for a long time to come. But the virus has taken a back seat as a menace to my health: less than two months ago, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and aggressive prostate cancer, a double whammy that’s set me back on my heels.  I am 80 years old. The lesson is, one of the lessons anyway, is that if you hang around the planet long enough something is bound to go haywire; however, having beat bladder cancer recently, I did not expect two more things to go  wrong at virtually the same time. Stoic philosophy, which I’ve been studying and attempting to put into practice for the past 25 years, advocates a method known as premeditato malorum, literally the “premeditation of evils.” Through this Stoic exercise, we imagine things that could be taken away from us or anything that might go amiss as a way of preparing for life’s curve balls and developing resilience in the face of uncertainties. It’s a useful practice, but it’s impossible to anticipate every evil that might befall us, and as I’ve said, I did not expect to be struck by two serious illnesses one right after the other.

That said, Stoicism has proven to be invaluable  in confronting this situation. Parkinson’s, a neurological disorder that afflicts millions, is incurable, though it can be managed with a Levadopa, a medication that replaces the loss of dopamine in your system. Lots of physical exercise also helps, particularly sports that emphasize balance, like boxing workouts, and certain forms of physical therapy. I was an amateur boxer when I was young, and continued heavy bag and speed bag work, as well as shadow boxing and light sparring routines into my old age. So doing what’s necessary to combat Parkinson’s effects has not required a radical change in my lifestyle. The prostate cancer, a disease more common in men than breast cancer is among women, is another matter. Mine is a high-grade cancer, scoring a 9 on the Gleason Scale (nothing but the best for me), but  it has not spread beyond the prostate. It’s currently being treated with hormone therapy; in about four months, I will undergo radiation treatments for about 5 weeks, and then an additional 18 months of hormone therapy. That deprives the cancer of testosterone, the male hormone the malignant cells feed on. It’s sometimes called “chemical castration.” As an old-fashioned guy who thinks the current trends toward gender fluidity are nonsense, the term sends chills up my spine. Not that I’ll soon be singing soprano.

I’m not giving up. I will continue doing the stuff I love to do until I’m incapable of doing it. I hike in the woods several days a week, both for the exercise and to boost my self-confidence negotiating difficult terrain. Earlier this month, I traveled to western Maine to go grouse and woodcock hunting with my English Setter, Luna; later today, I’ll be flying to to a Colorado for an elk hunt.

I have no fear of death, having faced it in Vietnam and the Middle East when I was in my 20s and early 30s, but I’d be less than candid if I did not admit that I dread becoming a helpless geezer who cannot tie his own shoe laces. On the plus side of the ledger, I have led a long, interesting, fulfilling, and productive life, and though there are a few things I would do differently if I had them to do over, I will leave it with no regrets.

My apologies if this entry in the Plague Year Journal has been more personal than the others.

 

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Q & A about the new family memoir/murder mystery DEAR MISS BRYANT by Leslie Ware

My wife Leslie’s new book, Dear Miss Bryant, is a true-crime account about the unsolved murder of her remarkable great aunt Julia Bryant in 1967, seamlessly fused to a family memoir in the vein of John Sedgwick’s In My Blood and George Howe Colt’s The Big House. I am biased, of course; still, I think it’s an exceptional tale written with style.

Below, I surrender my spousal role and assume the persona of an interviewer.

 

Phil: When did you hear about your great aunt’s murder and how did you react?

Leslie: I heard about my Great-Aunt Julia’s murder shortly after it happened, when I was 13, but at that age, I didn’t really know (and probably wasn’t told) the horrific nature of the killing.

 

P: Nearly 50 years later, you decided to look into the crime and, possibly, to write a book about it. Why?

L: Not many families have a relative who was murdered and whose murder remained unsolved for 50 years. The idea of looking into it had percolated in my mind for a long time, and when I retired I finally had the time to act.

Julia Bryant shelling peas at the family’s summer house. She was a free spirit, wearing braids and a headband long before hippies came on the scene.

 

P: Much of Dear Miss Bryant is family history. How does that fit in with what happened to her?

L: I wanted to show that this unusual woman came from an unusual family. And themes about the whole family emerged as I thought about Julia and her murder. I had an awful lot of ancestors whose good deeds were “rewarded” with punishment or even death.

 

P: Her accused killer was acquitted. Did you start with the hope of finding the murderer?

L: I did. I guess I’d seen lots of crime shows in which ancient DNA was used to find a killer. Now, I realize that’s pretty tough.

 

P: What surprised you most during your lengthy investigation?

L: Three things: that evidence in a murder case can simply be thrown out even if the case isn’t solved; that people in Durham, Connecticut, were still remembering Julia 50 years after her death; and that my last-ditch, offhand attempt to contact a new police commissioner led to a release of 350 pages of records I’d been told for years didn’t exist.

 

P: What were the greatest difficulties you encountered in your investigation and in writing the book?

L: A huge difficulty was getting an answer as to why evidence from a murder trial could be tossed. As it turns out, that happens in lots of cases, sometimes by mistake and sometimes intentionally. The writing itself was easier. 

In later years, Julia Bryant adopted a menagerie of animals, including dogs, goats, a duck, a kinkajou, and this raccoon.

 

P: You have a droll sense of humor that manifests itself in the book, particularly in the parts that deal with your family’s long, quirky history. Does this wit come naturally, or do you strive for it when writing?

L: I love wordplay and tried hard to make each page of the book at least interesting. If I could crack myself up when writing about those odd family traits, I was pleased.

 

P: Now that the book is done, how do you feel? I’m often elated when I finish a book, but that’s quickly followed by a letdown and the question, “Now what the hell do I do?”

L: I have a lot of hobbies and am doing some volunteer work, editing stories about the environment. That helps. I’ve now produced two books that I really wanted to write, but I haven’t felt a great need to write others.

You can read an excerpt and find out more about DEAR MISS BRYANT at this page on my site or on Amazon.

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FROM SAIGON TO KABUL

Those interested in reading my take on the disaster in Afghanistan can click on this link to an essay I wrote for Politico magazine. It was published today, Aug. 21, 2021. Or you can copy the link and paste it into your browser.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazin...

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 32

After a week-long, 2,700-mile drive from Arizona, we arrived back in Connecticut last Tuesday, on time to mark my 80th birthday on Thursday, the 10th. Considering that 600,000 Americans, most in my age-demographic, have died of Covid19 in the past eighteen months, this birthday really was one to celebrate — though I’m struggling to think of myself as an octogenarian. Exactly forty years ago, on the occasion of another milestone, I took a test to determine how long I was likely to live. It determined that my departure would occur at 77; so I’ve beat that forecast. Quitting cigarettes 25 years ago most likely helped.

During the drive, we stopped off for a day to see my sister in Cave Creek, Arizona, then pressed on to the San Luis valley in Colorado to overnight with an old friend and colleague, Tony Oswald, and his wife, Jan. Oswald had been a free-lance photographer who joined me on an assignment in Mexico in 1993 and another in 1996 — a five-week journey through the Alaskan wilderness. From his place, we drove to Denver to see Leslie’s cousin, and then spent three days crossing the Great Plains, the Midwest, and the Pennsylvania hills before finally pulling into our driveway in the early evening of the 8th. I mention this brief, unremarkable travelogue because it was unremarkable. Masks were required in some places, but for the most part life felt much as it did in the Before Time, which is to say, almost normal. We are in the final weeks of the pandemic, at least in this country. (Inshallah, as is is said in the Middle East — Allah willing). Sometimes i feel as I imagine GIs in World War Two  must have right after Germany’s surrender and just before Japan’s: All over but the shouting.

Normal is a relative term. Political conditions in the U.S. are anything but, what with millions still believing that the 2020 election was stolen, that the insurrection of Jan. 6 was really a patriotic rally, that QAnon is a Delphic oracle of truth. We seem to be living through another kind of pandemic of irrationality. And still another — a surge in gun violence. I don’t see a vaccine for either one. Facts cannot cure people who insist on believing outrageous lies and conspiracy theories; nor will state and federal legislators pass meaningful controls on firearms (And even if they did, we would have to contend with a society in which drug gangs, extremist militias, and psychopaths view shooting people as the solution to their various problems).

And yet…And yet, I’m glad to be here, upright and breathing and looking forward to however many weeks, months, or years I have left.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #31

We had never seen anything quite like it. At sunset on the day before Memorial Day a band of pinkish light shimmered all along the western horizon except for one broad segment, where a rough triangle, gray-blue in color, rose into the sky. We were at the summit of Mount Lemmon, 9,157 feet above and about 13 miles east of Tucson, and I thought we were looking at another, distant mountain. Not exactly, said Travis, our guide on a night of star-gazing — We were looking at ourselves. That dark, massive hump was the shadow of the mountain we stood on, projected onto the hazy horizon like an image on a screen. The phenomenon occurs only when the air is exceptionally clear and stable, as it generally is in Arizona.

Observing this earth-bound sight was prelude to celestial observations we made at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, which maintains the largest telescope  in the U.S. open to the public: the 32-inch Schulman telescope. It is housed in what had been a radar dome during the Cold War, one of several such scopes atop the mountain. Among them is a 60-inch instrument that just might save civilization as we know it by detecting asteroids and near-Earth objects, some of which could crash into our planet and, depending on the object’s size and velocity, cause anything from a fizzle to a global catastrophe. An example of the latter occurred 65 million years ago, when a huge asteroid struck in the vicinity of what is today the Yucatan Peninsula, annihilating the dinosaurs and plunging Earth into the equivalent of a prolonged nuclear winter.

On the night of our visit, a young grad student, clad in flip flops, shorts, and a T-shirt, sat monitoring a bank of computer screens inside a control room. They glowed with columns of numbers and/or images of asteroids ranging in size from large boulders to kilometer-size monsters capable of repeating reptile armageddon.The Catalina Sky Survey catalogs as many as 1,000 of these bodies every night; there are an estimated 800,000 of them zipping around the heavens. I remarked on a certain symmetry between the grad student’s work today and the radar technicians’ of 50 or 60 years ago, the one watching for incoming Russian missiles and bombers, the other for a rock that could blast us all into oblivion.

It was 100 degrees in Tucson when we began the winding, 27-mile drive to the summit. An hour later and nine-thousand feet farther up, the temperature  was in the high 60s. By nightfall, it was chilly enough for sweat shirts, jackets, and caps. For about three hours after sunset, Travis took us on a tour of our near neighbors, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus, then reached out billions of miles to galaxies like M-81 and M-82, to remote open star clusters and globular clusters containing hundreds of thousands of stars that resembled, through the Schulman’s eyepice, whitewash splashed on a black background. I’d observed some of these objects in my 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain, but they appeared as mere smudges; the Schulman revealed details I’d not seen before except in photographs. The big thrill of the night, for me, was noticing the shape of M-81, a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way and so far away that its light began its journey to our eyes 12 million years ago. And how far is that? Consider that one light year is 5.8 trillion miles, so just multiply that number by 12 million, and you get, in round figures, 70 with 18 zeros after it.

Confronting distances like that can be soul-crushing. You realize that all that out there, reaching back in time and space beyond your mind’s capacity to grasp such scales, could not care less if an asteroid slammed into Earth and destroyed every living thing. It would be an exceedingly minor event to the universe. But I find the cosmic view soul-cleansing– pandemics, political upheavals, even wars and famines are not as all important as we like to think. Once again, Marcus Aurelius: “Look to the stars as if you were going on their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings purge away the filth of the earthly life.”

 

 

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IN MEMORIAM — ONCE AGAIN.

Below are 17 reasons why it’s called Memorial Day and not Picnic and Barbecue Day.

LCPL CARROLL FANKHAUSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 8/24/65
PFC ROBERT FERNANDEZ, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/20/65
CPL BRIAN GAUTHIER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
LCPL REYNALDO GUZMAN, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
1STLT WALTER LEVY, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 9/18/65
PFC CURTIS LOCKHART, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
PFC PATRICK MANNING, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
LTCOL JOSEPH MUIR, 3d Battalion, 3d Marines. 9/11/65
PFC STEVEN PAGE, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 1/25/66
2DLT JAMES PARMALEE, 2d Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/14/65
1STLT FRANK REASONER,3d Reconnaissance Battalion. 7/12/65
LCPL KENNETH SEISSER, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/11/65
1STLT ADAM SIMPSON, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines. 10/3/65
PFC LONNIE SNOW, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 7/30/65
SGT HUGH SULLIVAN, 1st Battalion, 3d Marines. 6/5/65
1STLT BRUCE WARNER, 3d Tank Battalion. 2/3/66
SGT WILLIAM WEST, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines. 3/28/66.

Semper Fi, Brothers.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR # 30

The other day, while walking home from lunch at the Pancho Villa cafe, I ran into my favorite anti-vaxxer, who remarked that I wasn’t wearing a mask. Her tone was anything but censorious — she was maskless as well — leading me to believe she was hopeful that I’d joined the tribe of vaccine refusniks. I was sorry to disappoint her, pointing out the obvious — I was outside and alone — and the not so obvious — I’d been vaccinated. “You know what’s in those vaccines, don’t you?” she asked. I replied that I had a pretty good idea what but that it probably wasn’t the substance she had in mind. Indeed it wasn’t. “Mercury and aluminum,” she informed me. “And a naturopath I read online has said that she will NOT accept patients who have been vaccinated because they give off stuff like mercury and aluminum.” I asked, “Do you mean like it’s on their breath or comes off as vapor from their pores?” My friend only smiled, and backed away a foot or two, apparently afraid that I would infect her with mercury-aluminum poisoning if she stood any closer. Her version of social distancing. I offered to put on a mask if it would make her more comfortable, she inquired what color it was, I answered that it was a standard pale blue surgical mask. She shook her head. Blue masks were the worst! “If you knew what they’re putting in them…” She trailed off, leaving me to guess who ‘they’ were and what toxins had been injected into facial coverings. I broke off our conversation, sensing that it would soon drift into the domain of space aliens, QAnon conspiracies, and government plots to rob us of our vital bodily fluids.

As i mentioned in the previous post, #29, I’ve given up arguing with people who think like her (if their mental processes can by dignified as thinking), but the brief encounter reminded me that the Pandemic has exposed a kind of social cancer in our society, one that has metastasized, possibly, to Stage 4. American individualism, our strength and our virtue, has been pushed to an extreme and has become a flaw and a weakness. David Brooks points out in his New York Times column  today that we are no longer capable of collective action, of pulling together to achieve a national goal, in the present case eradication of the COVID19 virus. The response to it has been, at first, complete denial, as expressed by former President Trump’s assurance that it would soon vanish, “like a miracle,” to a reluctant and uneven acceptance of its reality, with vast numbers of our citizens refusing to obey the most basic public health requirements, and now to get vaccinated. If that endangers ones fellow countrymen, well, that’s the price of liberty, right? My friend, she of the mercury-aluminum school, is not a lonely outlier but representative of the thirty percent of our populace who decline inoculation or who mindlessly shout “USA!” at anti-mask, anti-restriction rallies.

The last time I remember a spirit of unity in the U.S. was in the wake of 9/11, and that didn’t last long. Our lack of coherence as a society is a river with many sources, but its main one is distrust of government. It sprang up fifty years ago on the left, in response to the Vietnam War, but eventually flowed to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan, and has now spread just about everywhere. If we’d been as we are today in 1941, we could not have mustered the cohesion to win World War Two.

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #29

The drive we made from Norwalk, Connecticut to Patagonia, Arizona, a month ago was very different from the one last June in the opposite direction. The people we met along those 2500 miles were taking the pandemic more seriously, obeying mask requirements posted on the doors of most restaurants, convenience stores, and gas stations, maintaining social distancing in lines — or at least attempting to. One exception was the incongruously named Liberal, Kansas (Home of the Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy), where red-blooded Americans seemed to make a point of going about bare-faced while siting or standing shoulder to shoulder. But the most noticeable distinction between the two trips was the mood; it was more relaxed almost everywhere, happier, with a return to normality glimmering on the horizon. Tens of millions had received jabs in their arms. Herd immunity now a realistic hope rather than a fantasy. Contributing, non-medically, to my own upbeat spirits was the blessed absence of deranged tweets blasting from the White House.

Not that all is well in the land of the free where very little is free. Far from it. The lead story in last Sunday’s Arizona Daily Star was headlined, “VACCINE TEMPO TAILING OFF HERE.” The gist of the article was that as the pace of vaccinations slows and the spread of a more contagious variant accelerates, herd immunity is getting harder to reach, and may never be reached. That is, the aforementioned hope might not be realistic.

Ideally, according to Arizona State University researchers quoted in the story, policy-makers should keep interventions like mask wearing and limited capacity in crowded bars, nightclubs, and restaurants in force until infection rates slow to below the virus’s effective reproduction level. But that’s not happening in Arizona. Governor Doug Ducey (who seems to be in a race with Florida governor Ron DeSantis as the anointed heir to the Trump crown) has lifted every single mitigation measure except for vaccinations. However, a lot of people have decided not to get their shots. I know of three in this small town of 900 — an elderly woman, a middle-age woman, and a young woman. I don’t doubt I could find a few men as well if I conducted my own personal survey. So why the reluctance to get jabbed? Elderly woman (89) said, “Oh, no, I’ve read about what’s in those vaccines and I’m not letting that into my body.” She would not, or could not, tell me what the toxic substance was, nor where she’d read about it. I suspect the Internet, font of most mis and disinformation. I learned about the middle-age woman (44) from her husband, who also told me about the young woman, his 22-year-old daughter. The former is refusing the vaccines because she is a libertarian, while the daughter rejects them because they cause infertility. I’d never heard that one,  so I researched it, and….

IT’S FALSE! Another myth super spread by social media. It was started in a letter to the European Medicines Agency (the equivalent of the U.S Food and Drug Administration) written by two antivaxxer propagandists. For details, click on: https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/25/i....

I’d argued with my older son, who also has declined to bare his arm, that he owed it not only to himself and his own health but to his fellow citizens and their health to get the vaccine. I might as well have been speaking to a rock, and I assume I would get the same reaction from the three women.  I don’t know how widespread opposition to the shots has become. The Star article suggests that it’s significant in this state. Do a little extrapolation and you’ll probably come up with hundred of thousands nationwide. We live in an age of extreme individualism. Whether it’s the right to own military assault rifles, the right to have as many abortions as you wish for any reason you wish, or the right to imperil public health, it’s all about you.

 

 

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #28

The malicious little bug called COVID19 is to social interaction, not to mention marital intimacy, as the Volstead Act was to drinking. Leslie spent a week self-quarantined, after being exposed to virus at her hairdresser’s (See #27). She was tested at a clinic last Tuesday, and got the results on Thursday: Negative. The axiom, Only with medical tests is a negative a positive, was never more true for us. This morning, I drove her to Stamford Hospital, where she received her second dose of the Moderna vaccine. So now, with the happy test results and completed inoculations for both of us, we can again sleep in the same bed, kiss each other, hold hands. Next Saturday, barring some unforeseen event, we will load up the 4Runner and head west to our place in Arizona. Having watched “Nomadland” on Hulu last night, we’re eager to once more hear the song of our tires rolling down a highway.

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JOURNAL OF A PLAGUE YEAR #27

Yesterday, March 4, Leslie went to see her hairdresser for the first time in months. She has received her first shot of the Moderna vaccine and is scheduled for the second on March 14. The hairdresser, whom I’ll call Jane, had gotten both. She is fully inoculated, so when she phoned this afternoon with the news that she had tested positive for COVID19, Leslie was unpleasantly surprised. So was I. She will now have to be tested, but because the test isn’t accurate immediately after exposure, she must wait till Tuesday or Wednesday to have it done. Meanwhile, she  has to quarantine herself, wear a mask even inside the house, and keep at least six feet away from me, although I, too, am fully inoculated — for whatever that’s worth. Apparently not as much as we had thought.

I relate this domestic anecdote to underline, italicize, and emphasize that for a long while yet vaccinations are not going to catapult all of us back to normality. This disease is called the Novel Corona Virus not because it’s an extended prose narrative but because it hadn’t  been seen before its appearance in, roughly, January, 2019. Scientists and medical experts have learned a lot about it since then, but by no means everything. It’s full of nasty surprises, mutating into variants that spread more rapidly and severely than the original, infecting people, like Jane, who think that vaccination has made them bullet-proof.

I ponder this as I read and hear about the governors of Texas and Mississippi lifting all restrictions in their states, including mask mandates and requirements to maintain social distancing. The war’s over! These moves, which, count on it, will be copied by other state governments, have been cheered by the nation’s  ignoramus faction — generally the same people who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats — and lauded in the conservative media. The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial and oped pages are to unbridled capitalism as Pravda and Izvestia were to Soviet communism, ran an editorial in this morning’s edition scorning President Biden’s characterization of the above governors as “Neanderthals.” The paper’s argument is that Democrats want the COVID crisis to be perpetual, using it to “expand the welfare state.” Public Health experts have warned that the vaccine rollout ought not to be an excuse to lower our guard until the pandemic is fully contained. But these experts are the despised elite, part of the cabal seeking to cripple the economy so the welfare state can emerge triumphant.

This is nonsense, of course. But in a country where millions believe that liberals drink the blood of children, among other atrocities, it is too much to expect common sense to prevail. Nevertheless, I’ll throw out this idea: mandating that masks be worn in public and that people practice social distancing does not force restaurants, bars, stores, and other businesses to shut their doors. Those sorts of restrictions, as opposed to lockdowns, do not gravely effect economic activity; but if they are not followed, you may be assured that infection rates will surge, ICU’s will become overcrowded, and medical staffs extended to the breaking point, all of which will result in lockdowns. In so many words, the governors of Texas and Mississippi, among other state leaders, aren’t lifting restrictions for economic reasons; their motives are political. As Paul Krugman phrased it in the New York Times, “Refusing to wear a mask has become a badge of political identity, a barefaced declaration that you reject liberal values like civic responsibility and belief in science.”

Are we becoming, if we’re not there already, an ungovernable country?

 

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