Flea, Fly, Flu
I recall that when Thomas, my youngest was a child in his early school years he needed to recite a \poem for school. The poem could be of his choosing and, like any kid, he wanted to find as short a poem as he could. The world’s shortest poem is supposedly called Fleas and it goes:
Adam
Had ‘em
I didn’t like the implications and the contraction, so I encouraged him to look further. However, once you are attached to fleas they are apparently hard to get rid of. It seems John Donne published a famous work with the title The Flea. It was a poem written in 1590 and was only published posthumously since Donne the religious man would not consider his younger effort to be appropriate with its erotic undertones. Basically there is a lot a male and female blood-sucking going on in this poem and is a metaphorical effort by the writer to convince a young lady that hey should lay down together. So, it was not grade school material and it was still too long at 27 lines.
That was when I happened upon a poem (technically a limerick) that didn’t have a name. I liked the notion of him telling his class that this was an important example of the verbal history that marked man’s first many millennia before recordation of the written word was the norm. It went like this:
A fly and a flea in the flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “Let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
There was lots of rhyme and plenty of rhythm to this little ditty, so we spent the night memorizing it and it stays with me still all these twenty years later. I actually think it is very elegant and it shows how very similar words can have nuanced but different meanings. The alliteration alone makes this a worthwhile poem to know. So, off he went with his poem in his head to Little Red, the school in the West Village where he spent his entire pre-collegiate career except for three weeks when he opted to start high school at The Bronx High School of Science, to which he had gained admission by Citywide exam. That temporary blip in his Little Red career was relatively easy to reverse since the small private school loved Thomas and he was, after all, a ten-year alumnus. The only thing that was irretrievably lost was the Elizabeth Erwin Scholarship for $10,000 per year for all four years. So, that little flirtation with the world of science in the northernmost outer-borough was an expensive sidestep. But in the long run it is all a mere bag of shells, right?
I was always very impressed by the environment created by The Little Red Schoolhouse and the Elizabeth Erwin High School (the affiliated upper school of Little Red). While I believe Little Red provided my son a solid scholastic education, what I believe it gave him more than anything was a degree of tolerance to diversity that will serve him well in the world he will be living in for the next sixty plus years. There are not too many schools where you can spend every day around a small coterie of people of every ethnicity, race, creed, sexual orientation and color as well as the children of both famous celebrities, artists, businesspeople as well are low-income, working-class families. What a wonderful advantage I believe that all gives him as he grapples with a world gone haywire, a world infested with fleas and flies that have nothing but flu to face them.
The flea and the fly are in cahoots because they are in a tight squeeze in the flue. It is hard to avoid the realization that we, as a world and species, are in a tight squeeze in our own flu. COVID has grabbed us collectively and literally by the throat. I am reminded of this today not because I have Bob Woodward’s book, Rage in my Audible inbox or that Donald Trump is continuing to say that he has done everything he could have done, despite all the expert evidence and testimonials to the contrary. I am reminded of it because I went to my local Walgreens for an appointment to get my annual flu shot, as I do every year about this time. I checked in with the pharmacist receptionist who was of Asian descent. She was polite and efficient and accommodated my early arrival telling me to sit down and wait for one person who was ahead of me. That person was a woman more or less my age from what I could tell. We both wore masks and I asked if she was there for her annual flu shot. She said she was and that she didn’t think she had ever gotten the flu. She also told me she was doing her accounting job from home and liked that just fine. There we are. A flea and a fly stuck in a flu. She fled after her shot and I flew after mine and we both flew out through a flaw in the flu, the flaw that causes immunology to be a statistical game that can predict some degree of vulnerability, but ultimately cannot say who will be able to flea or fly out of the flu through the flaw that makes it only a threat to what Donald Trump told Woodward was “the wrong person”.
At any time, in any circumstance, any of us or our loved ones can become the “wrong person”. That is one of the rules of life. Anything can afflict any of us on any given day. One man who seems to understand this and has lived his life to the max in the vision of using wealth to help people who suddenly find themselves to be the “wrong person” is Chuck Feeney, the guy who brought you Duty Free shopping and who has spent the last forty years giving away the billions of dollars that he had accumulated. All for the benefit of mankind. Another such legend in philanthropy is Millard Fuller. I once had to go on stage (I was running the Global Private Banking business of Bankers Trust at the time) following Fuller in a program called Wealth With Responsibility. Fuller took the audience to tears when he described how he had an epiphany at age thirty that he needed to stop being the “wrong person” who focused on wealth accumulation and become the “right person” who spent his time helping others in need. It was then that he gave away all his wealth (not some, but all) and started Habitat for Humanity. His efforts have made him the “right person” to help all those who found themselves to be the “wrong person” living without a home. That was a hard act to follow and did a great deal to reinforce my “liberal” mentality.
But Chuck Feeney succeeded in improving on Millard Fuller’s vision of righteousness. This week he finally finished giving away all his money and, at age 89, retired to his spartan apartment in San Francisco where he walks among the “wrong people” daily in search of humanity. These are the diverse and desperate that have found themselves at the wrong end of the flue and now face the challenge we all face of finding a flaw in the flu to fly through. In fact, I bet if Millard (now deceased) or Chuck were asked what they felt about our new flu, they would say that we are all the “wrong people” if we do not help all the fleas and flies stuck in the flue to fly through some flaw in the flu.