NOTES FROM AN ISLAND – Day 222, Oct 31, 2020 - Halloween

 

Another holiday falls to the pandemic. Halloween 2020 is relegated because imaginary terrors cannot measure up to the real anxieties of disease and politics.

I’m sorry for the youngsters who will miss a Halloween. Hopefully, there is just this one lost, for you get so few magical days in your life before the humdrum of adulthood takes over. Halloween is one of those holidays where youth is not necessary to believe, but there is something about the innocence of those early celebrations that instill the strongest of memories.

I was raised in part in Scarsdale NY, a fashionable but not overly stylish bedroom community of New York City. Even from age six to twelve, I could tell that Scarsdale had little of note to recommend it. Except that it may have been the best Halloween town in which I have ever dwelt. Small enough to roam through, at that time quiet enough that traffic was not an issue and by and large safe enough to let children free on this Devil’s night of October 31^st, the village was formative in my love of the holiday. It had small patches of woods (which I’m sure were just a few trees but seemed liked haunted forests to my impressionable young self). There was a pond around the library where a dreaded and eldritch snapping turtle of legend lived. There were creepy lanes and colonial houses that might have sheltered witches.

When I was young, we would meet up in packs as the sun went down, nervously greeting each arriving friend to make sure that he or she was in fact wearing a mask and not an actual witch or mummy or monster or ghost. Our numbers set, and swag sacks gripped in our cold enthusiastic hands, we would set out on our missions. This is the year, we would boast, that we will hit every house from Hartsdale to the Village. This is the year, we crowed, that we will demand our fair share of candy even from the meanest of providers. This is the year, we vowed, that we will finally ring the door of the ancient house at the top of the Old Post Road.

None of those things ever happened, as tired and frozen legs gave in to the lateness of the hour. Our pack would dwindle, members slipping off home without announcing their shame to the rest of the group. Finally, it would be two or three of us huddling together in a night swept by ghastly winds, no stars daring to glow in the sky where menacing clouds or spirits would cover the moon. We would stomp along in brave exhaustion, silent as the tomb lest we attract the attention of some hideous creature of the night. We would walk in the middle of the road so nothing could grab us from the bushes.

At the top of the road a small group would appear and approach, an inexorable force. Do we run or face them? Our path home lay ahead and the three or four of us were too tired for the long loop around. We trudged forward into dreaded unknown. Monsters? Highwaymen? High schoolers? Each prospect more dreadful than the last. Finally, in sullen shadow, we would reach hailing or grabbing distance. Fight or flight frenzied our minds.

A call, a voice, a greeting. It was my brother David’s pack, equally worn and equally scared. A laugh, a playful threat so that the older kids would not have to admit their own secret horror. A passing of foragers in the haunted night, then home to count the booty and fall asleep to nightmares of happy singing ghosts and werewolves wagging their furry tails.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN to all!

 

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 207 – October 9, 2020 Happy Birthday, HJM

 

My father, Henry Mankin MD, would have been 92 today. He was a wise and powerful leader, a larger-than-life hero who never entered a room without commanding it. He was also funny, snarky and sentimental. I miss him all the time.

I have often wondered, since the early days of the pandemic, what he would have said and done in the situation. Not the enfeebled and docile Henry of his final years – it is a mercy that he didn’t live to experience this. But the powerful Young Turk Henry in his pomp. What would his reaction have been?

It is not as far-fetched a question as it sounds, because Henry had lived through his own pandemic. He was born in 1928, raised in Pittsburgh PA in the 30s and 40s and graduated from Pitt Medical School in 1953. Students of history (as we should all be) will recognize Pittsburgh 1953 as one of hose epicenters of earth-change. It was the very site where Dr. Jonas Salk developed and first produced the vaccine which defeated polio. In fact, my father’s medical school class was the first wave of humans to receive the new inoculation.

Polio is all but forgotten now, but it was a scourge. Communities were decimated by its viral reach. Public buildings and parks were shuttered and abandoned. Families were cast out of society for having the weakness to allow the virus to affect them. The disease returned every year, unmitigated in its devastation. That is until the brilliant work of scientists brought it to its heels.

Henry in his prime would have looked at our current condition as another of life’s hurdles. He would have been spirited and energized by his firm belief that there was nothing, nothing, that science and rationality could not overcome. He would not have suffered fools to raise conspiratorial doubts. Mostly, he would have been there on the front lines, exhorting his followers to provide care and support, challenging the scientists to stick to their task, sticking out his arm to be in the first wave of the treated.

Henry had a voice that would be heard. He testified before congress on numerous occasions advocating for research and rational healthcare. He would have been on television and radio and newspaper articles.  But mostly he would have been in the ears of everyone who could hear his stentorian tones. “Keep working! We’ve got this!” Where are the voices like that now?

Happy birthday, dad.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 206 – October 8, 2020 Two Hundred Days!

 NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 206 – October 8, 2020

Two hundred days on the island have come and passed – two hundred! The pandemic that was supposed to be gone by Easter has consumed Memorial Day, Arbor Day, the Fourth of July, both Mother’s and Father’s Day, Labor Day and both versions of Patriot’s Day. It looks to be a Halloween specter and an uninvited guest at the Thanksgiving table as well.

There have been some positive signs along the coronavirus trail. The death rate, albeit still horrific, has stabilized in many parts of the world although infections have gone up. Either we are getting better at managing the virus or the virus is learning to live with us. Although the early autumn surge has again put hospitals under stress, there has been a breather of sorts in many of the hot zones – recharge, regroup, restock. On the imminent horizon is an accurate and inexpensive rapid test which may at least allow better tracking and isolation of active cases. And the vaccines appear promising, although they will most assuredly be a spring arrival.

What hasn’t changed is the cavalier attitude of much of the nation towards the deadliest pandemic in our memory. I had harbored hope that the number 200,000 would be shocking, but we have become so numb to others outside our vision that the number seems abstract and distant. Even at a time when every American knows someone affected by the disease, possibly with death or incapacity, but certainly through financial hardship, we as a nation have not admitted how seriously we are threatened. Americans don’t talk about threats unless it is to rally their political bases. The John Wayne/ Clint Eastwood “strong, silent type” gives a grimace-like grin and turns towards the danger without expressly calling it out. Danger is beneath our notice. And therein lies the problem.

The virus is not an ‘enemy’ per se. It has no intelligence, aside from the shrewd calculating of its RNA functionality. As such, it does not care if you grimace or grin or wail or scream. It simply is a fact of nature, like the wind or the smell of grown grass. And, as all viruses, it is ubiquitous. It is inside and outside, up and down, over and out. We can’t turn and face the danger because it is around (and in) all of us.

By framing coronavirus as an enemy we can fight, we have placed an imaginary border between it and us – a sort of biological Maginot line, where French troops massed their weapons and focus as German troops nimbly skirted the region and overran from the rear. We are none of us waiting for the coronavirus to arrive. It is already here – everywhere. If we imagine the virus is in front of us – somehow “out there” like the plant-based monster in “The Thing” we can hunker down and feast until it arrives. But if the beast is already among us, then we need to always be on alert. We would need to use precautions all the time and not only when the sirens sound.

We should not be terrorized by the prospect, but we should be very wary of it. Masks up, everyone. Respect social distance. Let’s find a way to keep two hundred days from becoming 365. And 200,000 becoming an order of magnitude more.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND, Day 121 Statues and Heroes - 7/22/20

When I was a third grader in Scarsdale NY, I had a teacher who was a daughter of the Old South. Mrs. Langdon was born and raised in South Carolina, never explaining how she happened so far across the Mason-Dixon line.

In general, things worked out fine with her instruction. I had one mortification when I crashed out of a school-wide spelling bee, unable to spell her word ‘iggle’ (which we Northerners would have pronounced ‘eagle’). And she once mischaracterized the location of Cambridge MA, a sin that my Bostonian mother could never quite forgive.

The oddest part of the school year was her treatment of the Civil War in our proto-study of American History. She abandoned the textbooks to instead teach us about the “Real Heroes” of the ‘Late Unpleasantness’ as she preferred to call it. We learned about wise and warm Robert E Lee, crafty and indomitable Stonewall Jackson, stalwart AP Hill, elegant PGT Beauregard and my own favorite, dashing JEB Stuart. She could barely bring herself to name the Northern Generals preferring to say that they won by shear numerical advantage or by somehow cheating at the noble game of war.

It took me a while to unlearn what she taught me. Fortunately, intellectual curiosity and a well-read brother taught me to look for the unvarnished history.

There are many people decrying the disruption of statues as erasing of history. What they are not accounting for is the bias of these statues. It is rare in America to produce a non-heroic statue. City planners do not want to fill public spaces with warts and all depictions of events that are being commemorated. The trend has only changed with Holocaust memorials and arguably with Maya Lin’s inimitable Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall.

When you see a statue of a great man on horseback or nobly scanning the horizon, you assume that figure was a person of profound influence. You don’t need to know the history of Belgian politics to recognize the power embodied in the statue in Ghent of King Leopold II (at long last removed from display). What you won’t recognize from the bronze itself is that these statues were erected by those in his (or his family’s) political thrall. What you will not learn is the monstrous cruelty of his African colonization or the subsequent disgrace of his entire lineage.

Statues are not history, except wherein they fit into the architectural history lore of a city. The Robert E Lee statue in Dallas, for instance, only represents the history of an era of Black suppression or more recently of the decision to remove it and the protests that occurred. It tells (told) us nothing about the man or his actual time. In fact, its very presence was a complete historical fallacy. Lee had nothing to do with the history of Texas or Dallas. One of my colleagues even remembered it as depicting Lee leading a group of black people to freedom. There were no black figures on the Lee statue, not did the historical Lee ever lead black people anywhere constructive.

The opponents of statue removal are right in one thing. History should not be forgotten or erased. But it is historical fact that should be preserved, not some comfortable legend that plays into anyone’s social agenda. The distinction is that whereas the past should be recalled, it should not be revered. A man like George Washington was a great leader of our country – fact. He was also a slave owner who relentlessly hounded his escaped hostages – fact. Both should be remembered as they are both essential to understanding the nature of a nation’s past. We don’t need our heroes to be untarnished. That’s not what heroes are. Instead, they are humans, fault-ridden and fallible, who happen to do immense things.

Sorry, Mrs. Langdon. There was so much more to your icons than you were willing to share.   

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 105 A. Hamilton – 7/6/20

I missed a milestone.

I could not bring myself to write about the hundredth day of the shutdown in part because I have a distaste for arbitrary celebrations. My hundredth day may have been a New Yorker’s 150^th or a Parisian’s two hundred somethingth, rendering my declaration meaningless.

The main reason though was shear frustration. After a hundred days, the situation in Texas (and in the USA as a whole) is worse than it was when we started. Our governor may be finally speaking out in forceful terms, but he is still being undermined by his own Lt. Gov and Secretary of State. What little leadership we have seen, both in this state and from the Executive branch of the Federal Government has been muddled and tentative. Why commemorate a hundredth day when there is no reason to think things will improve by the second or third hundredth?

I celebrated the Fourth of July by watching Hamilton – for once a product that is even better than its hype. The play is a work of genius with stellar performances and a powerful, frenetic strength that is constantly challenging. Where is it written that the theater is meant to be easy? I urge everyone to find a way to watch it.

For those of you who have spent the last five years under a rock, Hamilton is an urban musical biography of one of the towering figures of US history. But it is really a vignette of the times and the brilliance that went into the formation of our country. Its motive force is the juxtaposition of Hamilton and his nemesis Aaron Burr – Burr a man so cautious that he achieves nothing and Hamilton so rash that he almost destroys everything he has achieved. In the end, history is kinder to Hamilton than Burr, who is now barely remembered except for the one shocking act of (spoiler) killing his rival.

The most striking thing about the play, and in fact the historical period it depicts, is the electric energy that crackles throughout. The world was stripped down and turned on its head and American leaders invented an entire country from whole cloth, taking fewer than fifteen years to do so. The production captures this energy in fierce and rapid-fire song and in the constant swirl of action in the background. It can be easy to forget how much effort was involved in the American experiment, of thought and documentation and debate. Hamilton, the play, is an active reminder.

For Hamilton, the man, and his colleagues, History was there for the taking and they grabbed it without hesitation. They recognized the task ahead and flung themselves into work with wit, brilliance and wisdom. Their solutions were far from perfect but created a framework for growth. They strove and accomplished.

Where are today’s Hamiltons or Washingtons? Or even today’s Aaron Burrs? Where are the energy, the wit and the courage to take history by the scruff of the neck and make a move? All these have been lost in the cowering fear of voting bases and approval ratings.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 79 Reservations 6/10/20

Today’s note is about Reservations.

‘Reservation’ is one of those remarkable English words that contrives to have diametrical meanings. On the one hand, the word means a sense of hesitation or reconsideration (“I have reservations about writing this essay.”). With typical linguistic agility, it can also mean securing the time and place to do something (“I have a reservation to write this essay, so you can’t tell me the internet is full.”).

Our time on the island has been full of both types of reservation, especially now as the community tries to open within the bounds of safe capacity. I can now use both meanings in a single sentence (“I have reservations to go to dinner, but I have reservations about how safe it would be to do so.”). I do not mean to make any sort of moral or even scientific judgement. I’m merely pointing out that we are now in the odd intersection of Venn diagrams.

Recently, I was bemused by the news item that the Dallas Zoo is now open for business (I should have saved this essay for my ‘z’ entry). There is nothing striking about that fact or the associated attempt on the Zoo’s part to control the flow of the crowds who are likely to come out, especially with the fine weekend weather we have been having. What I do find comical is the concept that the Zoo will be open By Appointment Only. In fact, the appointments represent time of admission and I presume there will be some guidance as to the flow of passage through the park to limit potential exposure. But in my mind, I picture a tuxedo-clad lion standing at the maître d’ station, checking out names on a list before passing us off to a giraffe for seating. In the kitchen, a rhino is hard at work making soup while hedgehogs garnish the salads.

There is always something subversive about zoo parks. They are not locations where you can govern the flow easily. Patrons want to be able to choose their favorites (I for one would hate to be shuttled through the spider exhibit). They want to sit and make faces at the gorillas (which they should not be doing and which the gorillas in their far greater wisdom generally ignore) or roar back at the tigers (who spend the day sleeping in the sun despite the noisy visitors). We may be forced to adjust for the pandemic, but I have trouble envisioning a zoo that has a turnstile flow like some exhibit at an art museum.

Cancel my zoo reservations for now, thank you. I have far too many reservations about how a rigid structure will change the experience to attend right now.

NOTES FROM AN ISLAND Day 67 The Questioneer 5/29/20

This is the story of the Questioneer.

The Questioneer was an occasional visitor during my childhood. His visits always involved my brother, three years my elder who delighted in nothing more than scaring me from my dreams. David was notorious for reading terrifying passages from his many horror books into the intercom that we shared in our haunted corner of the house. Or holding glow-in-the-dark toys over me until I’d wake and scream.

The Questioneer was a softer form of teasing. He came only on those nights when, due to a guest lodging in my room or perhaps because I had been scared by some other source, I would be sleeping in the second twin bed in David’s room. We would we chatter a bit, my brother and I, often hushed by my parents (or my grandparents if they were the guests next door) until the peace and the silence would settle. In the faint half-doze of those midnight hours, a hollow disembodied voice would gently sing its welcome. “Keith,” it would intone. “This is the Questioneer.”

The voice would ask questions, of course – a light quiz which would range on everything from Ancient Egypt to current comic books. It thrilled when I got the answer right and coaxed when I was stumped until the correct answer would come. And then, with barely a whisper or a farewell it would be gone, and my brother would sit up in his bed and ask, “Did you hear something?”

I lived in a house that was always a knowledge test. At dinner, my father was constantly playing “Who Was…?” My brother would test me during waking hours to make sure I had read the latest book he had recommended or researched the latest topic. Somehow, of all these interrogations, the Questioneer’s were the most gentle and welcome. Although his questions were always tough he never seemed condescending or even challenging, as if he were only soothing my busy young mind with the balm of knowledge.

I have no evidence that the Questioneer was my brother at all. Heaven knows, we had enough ghosts in that old house that we certainly might have harbored a quizzer. At times, I would try my best to watch my brother ad see if I could see any sign that it was he who was voicing the questions. But the darkness was always so deep, and he was always so still, even when the voice was present, that I still to this day am uncertain.

It has been years since the Questioneer has asked me a question. Sometimes, though, when I am lying in the stillness of the deep night too tired to sleep, I can just make out the high, reedy voice in the inky silence around me – a sweet silken voice with an interrogatory tone. Then I can almost hear my brother calling out, “Keith, do you hear something?”

I think that I can, David. I hope that I can.