Here's to My Sister.... and Even Older People....

[captainsblog]

Turns out today is a popular birthday.  One of the musicians I've been helping out during this shutdown of their shows is one that I go back with to Ithaca days. I linked a few weeks ago to the request he played for me on Youtube when I bought one of his CDs; it arrived yesterday, and it includes "Ithaca Sunset," but not "Here's to My Sister," which we have on cassette from a show of his we probably saw in Rochester before Emily was born. While the sister in that one is probably a younger one to him, the chorus more-or-less fits that other birthday girl of this day:

Here's to my sister, I probably missed her
Grown to a woman, after these years
And though we are older, I'd still like to hold her
Share all her laughter, and comfort her tears.

(That's from a 30-year-old memory, not lyrics dot anything, and we don't have a cassette player anymore for me to check them on.)

Just what would those tears be about, you ask? Well, let's see:

- Breaking her nose under the Christmas tree when I was two, for one ("Mommy! Mommy! Donna has Hi-C juice coming out of her nose!")

- After Eleanor had a fairly difficult time after her shingles vaccine this winter, I called my sister to make sure that I'd had chicken pox as a kid, because that bears on how likely a reaction will be. ("Did I ever have it, Donna?" "OF COURSE YOU DID! YOU GAVE IT TO ME!")

- And lest you think that things got better by the time I reached that pox-y age of 18 or so myself, I ended my first year at Cornell with no summer job and horrid prospects of two months in the old homestead with no transportation, so Donna kindly bought me, and for insurance purposes owned, my first-ever car.  You'll never guess what we picked:
 

Watch on YouTube

Okay, it was blue, and there was no tank, but in my roughly three weeks of motoring freedom, I managed to rip the four-speed stick out of the transmission in the middle of freaking nowhere driving back to Ithaca, leading to the slowest drive of my life as we limped back to Binghamton with the deathtrap jammed into second gear with a top speed of about 35 mph on Route 17; and then, somehow safely arrived on Long Island, proceeded to total the thing on a Sunday drive (fortunately, with an impact to the front end and not the deathly gas tank in the back). It would be two full years before I would get behind the wheel of an automobile- this one, mine.

Yet somehow we've survived all that, our dysfunctional family, and her sharing the lifelong stain of being born in the same hospital as Donald Trump a month before he was hatched. I sent her a card and two tax refunds, which is about all one can do in these times.

----

Donna called a few days ago about the tax returns and other things, and it gave me a chance to ask her something.  We're often hearing comparisons of the current pandemic to the influenza outbreak of 1918- particularly to the "rebound" of it that wound up killing far more people that year than the first wave of it did.   One thing I've wondered about recently is whether she recalls any of our older relatives ever talking about the 1918 flu pandemic. (The 'rents were barely two years old at the time, but Donna has clearer memories of aunts and grandparents than I do.) Short answer: no. She agreed with my theory about that: it wasn't because it wasn't bad (it was, although maybe not where they lived at the time), and not because they were raised to not talk about ANY bad things (Mom and Dad talked about the Depression, trust me), but because it was probably a PTSD response among their elders to NOT talk about it.

 

On the other hand, our mother DID talk with Donna, but not with me, about surviving the next bad thing to come along back then: the Black Diphtheria outbreak of 1921. Mom told her that she got it (she would have been 5), and was quite probably comatose for at least several days from it. The only thing she remembers about it was that when she finally came out of it, she was really hungry. I said, "Yup, that's Mom."

That plague, which claimed 200,000 lives in that year, is now one that was eradicated by the DPT vaccine. I say "was" because the goddam anti-vaxxers seem determined to bring back THAT hit parade, as well:P

When I posted that anecdote on Facebook, I heard from quite a few friends who had family impacted by the 1918 outbreak.  Some had relatives who died of it and whose family did discuss it; others, with rels even closer to the front lines, reported the contrary. From

glenmarshall:   My grandparents were MDs. She was working in a TB hospital during the 1918 pandemic, where he met her after returning from the war. He was a battlefield doctor and talked a lot about that experience. Both of them did not talk about the pandemic.

I, and more than I, should probably write more about this experience. One other comment was that the quiet may lead to a loss of institutional memory about it, that will make it even more likely it will be repeated someday- and probably sooner than a century from now.  Somehow, despite the death toll fast approaching the hundreds of thousands in this country alone, I've yet to lose anybody directly to it, although I know many who have.  I'm still waiting to learn more about the death of a client in early April who had not been in good health when we last spoke sometime in March; I emailed him yesterday because state courts have finally begun allowing new filings to resume, and it was his ex-wife (and executor) who responded with the news.

The stupidity over it all continues to burn with the heat of a thousand suns.  Eleanor's been dealing daily with COVIDiots who have taken the word of "partial reopening" to mean "YAY! Lose the mask and pass the red line on the floor!" (It does not mean that.)  My own experience with it was, again, secondhand. Over the weekend, Eleanor asked me to get a couple of supplements from the Wegmans pharmacy. One of them, a zinc compound, was sold out of her store. And two others, and three health food joints I checked. Turns out, zinc is part of the Hydrochlorableachaqueen "miracle cure" that Cheeto and his Foxsucker Friends have been pimping for weeks with no clinical support whatsoever.  The last vitamin outlet I checked is a local outlet of their online operation, which I ordered the stuff from earlier in the week with a two-week wait; the cashier at Ye Olde Vitamin Shoppee (housed in a former Krispy Kreme shop, of all things) said online orders are getting priority and she can't even get a bottle for herself.  Just then, though, that original Wegmans came to the rescue and I found a bottle of the stuff; I even called the cashier back to tell her.

----

There has been a little room for fun and games, though: I'd posted a version of this from the UK a few weeks ago, but the Ministry has now asserted jurisdiction here and I did as told-



That's on Sheridan a couple blocks from home. Around the corner on Harlem, an art installation:




And then this turned up the other day, where Rochester got a chance to represent:

 

 

 

That's pretty impressive, considering what you can find in NYC alone, let alone any of these closer to home, which include Nick's signature pile of garbaggge, the North Country's "Michigan," our own bizarre sponge candy,....

And yes, Donna, the spiedie;)
 

Comments

[angledge]

I think one of my great-grandfathers died of the Spanish flu. I don't have any definitive proof, but according to his obituary he died "suddenly, after a short illness". And it was during a wave of flu that hit Oregon hard.