Covered For Covid

Don't worry about us old people. Sure, we tip over a lot--you would too if you had one foot in the grave. But check this, Junior. We're going to sail right through your little virus dealie. Because we got Life Skills. We got Lore. We got Laudanum. We'll be fine.

Shoot, we been training for this forever. We're supposed to start looking at children as little disease vectors? Way ahead of you. And we know exactly how far apart six feet is. It's coffin depth. It's the gap you keep from the person in front of you at the ATM. It's the distance between Rob and Laura Petrie's beds. It's the length of a proper dog leash. You young people with the retractable beagles are the ones getting confused.

Six feet is weird anyway. Supposedly that recommendation comes from the idea that it is the distance an infectious droplet can travel when coughed out. Well ain't that precious. Doesn't anybody smoke anymore? We had an old man down the street from us growing up who could launch a loogie ten yards into a headwind. He'd get started hacking and you'd think someone had tied tin cans to his bumper. Speaking of bumpers he had a hell of a tailwind too. Mr. Frank was a deeply frightening man, to a little kid. We kept our germs well away from him. He had to get sick all by himself using nothing but Viceroys but that's the kind of can-do initiative people used to have, before we had to have fancy imported viruses.

What else? Wash our hands all day long? Oh fine, but there's a limit. Our tissues are thinner. You start soaping off too many layers and you're getting into a damaged-packaging situation. And then we're supposed to stop touching our faces? What's left to touch that we can still reach without bending over?

Old Person Amusing Himself

Besides I only touch my nose ten or twelve times an hour, just to get the crusty bits on the outside. I don't do any actual excavation unless there's no one else around, so that's safe. And I hardly ever have to go in past the first knuckle. What I really do a lot of is stick my finger on my eyeball. I do that because I wore hard contact lenses for forty years and completely lost the revulsion factor. Sticking your finger on your actual eyeball is the best way of getting those stray eyelashes out. Of course, you have to lick it first. Anyway, I haven't seen anything specific about not sticking your licked finger on your eyeball. I'm fine. Also, I've made extra sure I wipe my nose thoroughly on my sleeve and my hands thoroughly on my doorknobs. The doorknobs are metal and viruses slide right off.

You want contagious, you should try measles. One kid could easily measle up a whole class of fourth-graders. But we measled in rolling shifts for efficiency. That way we could still maintain dodge-ball teams all winter, which was an important lesson in survival skills, especially for your smaller and squishier children.

I'm in fine shape. I spent a good portion of my life learning how to amuse myself. I can hole up here in the house for months. And thanks to our lack of weatherstripping, we can get a pizza slid right under the front door without losing a mushroom.

But we've got another ace in the hole: nobody visits old people. We only have hard candies and our breath is bad.

The Retro Look

Everybody loves the retro look, so it's no surprise that people are giving measles a try again. I had the original version, of course. At least once. Seems like there was a variety-pak of measles. We had regular measles and red measles and German measles and brown measles and speckled measles and anadromous measles, which kept coming back again. Or possibly they didn't come back again, but they left enough of an impression that we remembered them over and over, or adopted our classmates' episodes as our own. I do recall one bout clearly. I was in fourth grade and I missed Valentine's Day. I remember Dr. Martin coming by with his black bag and telling mom, whom he always called Mother, that I would probably be fine but she  had to be careful I didn't come down with Scarlet Fever. That made an impression. Some colors are scarier than others. Scarlet Fever sounded really bad, so much worse than the Pink Pox or the Ecru Flu.

I didn't come down with any color anything, but I did have a very high fever. It gave me this awful nightmare. It had something to do with things being really really little right next to really really big things, and one of the things was the typewritten lower-case "e," which was for some reason terrifying. And then I went whooshing off in the dark really far and really fast, like from Virginia to India in two seconds, and that was terrifying too. Either that, or I got shot down in a military helicopter in Iraq; I get mixed up.

Years later I read about that dark tunnel you're supposed to go through when you're dying and realized that was another way of describing my fever dream. So I think I was pretty sick. I kept having that nightmare periodically for years even when I wasn't sick. One night I finally recognized it and thought to myself "shit. This again? Here to India again in two seconds in the dark?  I don't even want to GO to India." And I never had the dream again.

When I got all better someone dropped off a big bag of Valentines from my class.  Some of them were made out of pink and red construction paper and white paper doilies, and others were little cards separated at the perforations. You can drop five bucks on a single card these days, but we'd get whole sheets of them for pennies and pull them apart and carefully decide whose desk should get BEE MINE and whose should get O U KID. What I don't remember is if this business was an ordeal for the unpopular kids, because I was just about the most popular kid in class, and remained so until I changed schools the next year, after which I was feeding off the bottom of the social swamp until well into high school.

So I think today's kids are really going to enjoy the measles, what with all the Valentines, and being able to stay in bed and listen to the little melamine radio, and the probably not dying and all. If you don't get it, just hang in there. It's tremendous contagious. Evidently a single measle can remain suspended in a doctor's office for hours floating on a miasma of old People Magazine fumes. Then it waits for an unvaccinated child to come in and jumps on it, making a little hee-yah sound. The vaccine for it also protects against mumps and rubella. I'm told I got the mumps when I was very new, but inasmuch as (like all infants) I looked like Winston Churchill at the time, I don't know how they could tell.

Vaccines are a remarkable medical success story. My goodness, we got rid of smallpox altogether, and almost got rid of polio. You just about have to have a drug problem or a car accident to check out early these days. That's why people are sort of casual about joining the vaccinated herd. We'll probably have to drop a few cattle to get people back on board.

Round Up The Kids

Typhoid Murr on the left, at Camp Mawavi

The hosts of the holiday open house emailed everyone to advise us not to bring small children. Their own toddler had come down with Hand, Foot And Mouth disease, and they didn't want to infect the whole herd.

I've said it before. There are just too many things to choose from now. Used to be we made do with a simple selection of childhood diseases, all of which we were expected to sample at least once. There was always a possibility of dying, but ours was a generation that could accommodate some culling. Some mothers even brought their children to infected kids' houses for a Pox Party. Even the children they liked. The thought was it was better to get it all over with before the kids got old enough to really be missed.

But then they came up with all these vaccinations and now nobody gets measles anymore. Or mumps, or whooping cough, or chicken pox. I had the standard set, minus the whooping cough, which I didn't get until just before I did a public reading of Trousering Your Weasel. I don't remember the mumps. Apparently I got the mumps when I was just a month old. It's hard to diagnose. A whole baby looks a little like a mump. Is that mumps, there, or just more baby?

Survived to see my eighth birthday

Measles I remember. There were all sorts of measles you could get: red, German, German brown--no wait, that's a trout--Common, and Flammulated. I got one of those over Valentine's Day in 1961 and got dreadful sick and had stark, Valley-Of-The-Shadow-Of-Death fever dreams and Mom set me up with a radio ("Where Have All The Flowers Gone") and Dr. Martin came by with his black bag and called mom "Mother" and mentioned something about scarlet fever and someone came by from the school with a bag of Valentines from the whole class (perforated: Oh You Kid, Peas Be My Podner, Bee Mine; or glued up from pink and red construction paper and white paper doilies) and I recovered.

What I really nailed was chicken pox. People used to get terrible sick with chicken pox. I didn't. I was going to camp and felt just fine except for the nice itchy rash, but since I had already demonstrated a real aptitude for poison ivy, I was sent right along. I was Chicken Pox's Ambassador to Camp Mawavi. Chicken pox is another one of those antique diseases no one gets anymore, but it's usually a doozy. Furthermore, it crouches inside you, quietly, for decades, waiting for a sign you have

not been sufficiently humbled by the indignities of old age, and then it pounces into shingles. Shingles is very painful and affects one side of your body, but given my history with the virus, I anticipate a pain-free case with a rakish but attractive rash.

It could happen. I'm pretty sure my mumps came back.