Ohmmmmmmicron
I’m a traveling man again this week. As I’ve perhaps mentioned more times than I care to count, I get more and more inclined to stay put the older I get, but I am nonetheless traveling this week and the one thing I know about myself is that I can shift gears when needed and revert to traveler mode when I need to. There must be a part of my cortex that knows how to travel since I have been doing it for sixty-eight years now whenever needed. I was born not so far from here in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1954 when my mother, my two older sisters and our nanny, Maria (Hispanic-sounding name, but German heritage and accent) took home leave from my mother’s Rockefeller Foundation job in Venezuela to come to this southern peninsula specifically to give birth to me. So I was traveling internationally in the womb just before my birth and in my nanny’s lap within a few weeks after my birth. If that doesn’t hard-wire you to traveling, nothing will.
Back in those days our parents worried about small pox, measles, chicken pox, rubella, mumps and polio, so we got as many vaccinations as soon as we could for as much of that stuff as we could get. We were serious about stemming infection in those days because there was a lot of bad shit out and about and child mortality was a real threat. This must have been especially so for someone like my mother who was ostensibly a single working mother before such animals existed in large quantities (I doubt dear old Dad ever took more than a moments notice that he had three kids and a wife since I suspect my mother’s paycheck took care of most of the cost of living for all of us…including him). Here she was, taking children into a foreign and somewhat wild land where in addition to the normal array of global bugs mentioned above that felled children, there was also such nasties as malaria and other tropic shit that crawls up inside vulnerable youngsters in the warm and humid environs of the equatorial stretch of northern South America.
After getting us the hell out of the tropics and over to civilization in Santa Monica in 1958, she next had to contend with Dad’s new citizenship dilemma. I think of that as something like trying to figure out how long he had to stay with this burdensome kluge of working wife, nanny and three kids after the War Brides Act of 1946 enabled him to quickly attain American citizenship without seeming like too much of an opportunistic shithead. It turns out that wasn’t so very long and within a year of arriving on the Pacific shores, we were headed to the familial farm in Lansing, New York where my grandfather still cooked spinach and hot dogs on a wood-burning stove (like a good Slovak boy who had worked in the Cayuga salt mines would) while she regrouped and figured out her next steps. I’ll bet there were lots of farm bugs in Upstate New York in those days that could bite a kid in the ass as well, but we lasted the six months we needed refuge and were on a plane to San Jose, Costa Rica before you could say Dionne Warwick.
I still remember thinking we were headed to Puerto Rico where I envisioned beaches and palm trees. That notion got dispelled as we came in for a landing in San Jose over a sea of tin-roofed buildings and shacks and my thoughts that this looked less beach-like than I thought it would. After a few days at a pleasant Colonial-era hotel in San Jose where the wait staff served us with white gloves on (not a metaphor…they actually wore white gloves and treated us like little princes and princesses), we trundled up in a car and drove over the jungle hills of central Costa Rica like a scene from Romancing the Stone and ended in a little tropical town called Turrialba. My early memories of that little wide spot in the road was of a mangy dog crossing the street and the flies in the bakery that I thought were raisins on the sweet rolls. There were more nasty kid-killing bugs in that misty tropical valley than you can shake a stick at.
Speaking of shaking sticks, after we moved into our temporary house on the side of the gravel road with the banana plantation in the back and the sugar can rising high across the street, me and the other local boys would spend our days chasing snakes and then dragging them behind our bikes (not sure if they were dead or alive at the time, but they were pretty big). My mother was not so amused when she saw that trick after a long day at the Institute offices where she was learning how to better the lives of the indigenous population. Between the snakes and the Un ripened bananas waiting to be lassoed and eaten in the back yard, I’m not sure how I avoided getting bitten by all manner of bug, spider and critter every day. The truth is that I probably was bitten a lot and my system managed somehow to adapt and defend itself since I don’t remember being particularly sickly during the two years we lived there.
Several years later and several moves later, when I lived in the wilds of rural Maine I do remember getting a fairly rough bout of bronchitis that would have me coughing my lungs out if I so much as ran 50 yards or exerted myself in any way. Even more years later, when I entered college, I was required to have a chest x-ray and they discovered that what they thought was perhaps tuberculosis was actually just bad scaring on my lungs from living in some tropical or farmland place in my youth. I told the doctors my life history and they just nodded and said, “that would do it,” acknowledging with a jaundiced look that I was lucky to have survived such a hard-travelled and body-threatening youth.
So, here I am, sitting in a hotel room in Orlando, Florida as I near my 68th birthday. I just spent a day at Disneyworld with thousands of other masked disease carriers and a wife who just recovered from a bout with Omicron variant of COVID-19. I feel fine. I’m up at 7am getting packed to drive down to the Palm Beach area to stay consecutively with three friends who live in that area and are at least pretending to want to host and see me for a visit. I will expose myself ove r the next three days to at least nine old friends who are all older than me and presumably more vulnerable than me. We are all very COVID-conscious, even the two friends among them that are anti-Vaxers (can you believe that ridiculousness in this day and age among thinking adults?). I will brave the risks of infection in the state that continues to be a leader in the COVID-infecting field thanks to its “enlightened” governor, Ron De Santis (a.k.a. Pretender to the Trump base throne as soon as Trump stumbles one way or another).
I, like everyone these days, read every day about how Omicron is doing this and that and is safer, faster, but more infectious and that the biggest risk may be the health care worker and school teacher absentee rate that it causes. Kim’s case was like a mild cold and no problem to get over. I saw a guy with a t-shirt that said “Variant” on the back so my guess is that there are lots of people around here who think this is all a joke. And maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. I don’t know, but I do know that I am in traveling man mode and I am hitting the road for Palm Beach now, so all I will do is chant softly to myself….Ohmmmmmmicron.