The Fears

Last night I read Poe's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, despite having promised not to delve further into the literature of death. The opening paragraph portrayed a world lost to the plague.

"The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour."

Prince Prospero sealed his castle against the incursion of the poor. His wealthy and royal guests were entertained by nocturnal soirees of decadency. They felt safe within his walls, but the Red Death suffered no barriers and one evening a spectral creature appeared before the host. The nobleman waved for the musicians to cease their playing and confronted the unwanted intruder.

""Who dares" -- he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him -- "who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him -- that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!"

Prince Prospero's attack on the masked figure failed with his flailing death throes.

His guests perished without exception.

"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

Death took them all, but not so Covid 19.

The virus' mortality rate is about 4%.

The 1918 Spanish Flu killed between 10%-25%.

My grandmother Edith might have been infected by the pandemic in Etaples, France, where her sister, Marion, and she were RCME nurses tending to the wounded soldiers of the Western Front.

AIDS killed scores of my friends as well as my baby brother, Michael Charles Smith.

Who will C19 take?

Not me.

I already had it.

I think, but nothing is certain in this world.

Stay safe and I promise not to read anymore plague books.

Step # 1 Normalization From Covid 19

This early evening a soaking rain has cleared the streets of Brooklyn. Bad weather keeps people in their houses and apartments. New York has been locked down since 8pm March 16 per order of the governor and mayor. That evening I closed the 169 Bar with my comrades and since then I have been isolation.

I only venture to the outside world to buy food and vodka. Fifteen minutes on Myrtle Avenue and back to re-isolation to faithfully quaff a pint of Georgi Vodka. Even in a pandemic there is no sense in the rejection of tradition.

But don't dare to think this self-confinement is as bad as being a prisoner in the MAX prisons.

This is nothing and thankfully I don't know what not nothing is between steel bars.

We are prisoners not of own device, but the dictates of governments attempting to stem the spread of Covid 19 and what do they know?

Nothing.

No one does and people are clamoring for an easing of restrictions.

WE WANT TO WORK.

The fighting cry of the right wing, but none of them added, "FOR MORE MONEY."

Georgia looks like they will be the first state to declare we want to live even if we die.

Sie gesund.

The Peach Tree has no plan other than to go back to normal, but we have to prepare for the new normal.

First by supplying the embattled hospitals across the nation with the tools to handle a new outbreak as occurred during the Spanish Flu Epidemic; test kits, masks, gloves, relief workers, cleaning crews, doctors trained to deal with this virus. The first line of defenses has to be strengthened to withstand another wave of death and traumatic altercations.

That is Step # 1.

No more.

No less.

Etaples France 1917

Accoriding to Wilipedia the major UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by researchers as being at the center of the Spanish Flu. The research was published in 1999 by a British team, led by virologist John Oxford. In late 1917, military pathologists reported the onset of a new disease with high mortality that they later recognized as the flu. The overcrowded camp and hospital was an ideal site for the spreading of a respiratory virus. The hospital treated thousands of victims of chemical attacks, and other casualties of war, and 100,000 soldiers passed through the camp every day. It also was home to a piggery, and poultry was regularly brought in for food supplies from surrounding villages. Oxford and his team postulated that a significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated and then migrated to pigs kept near the front.

Marion, my grandaunt and Edith, my grandmother, were nurses along with her future husband, Frank A Smith, served as a surgeon with the Royal Canadian Medical Expedition at Etaples through 1916 into 1917. Edith was transported back to the States in 1917 and I often wondered why until I read the above passage. I phoned my Aunt Sally in Marblehead and asked a question about a story more than one hundred years old. Sally pondered my query for several seconds and then said, "I do remember something about that, but not much."

Global anyplace from seventeen million to fifty million lost their lives to this killer influenza.

Thankfully my grandmother survived into the early 7Os.

To this day she remains one of my favorite people in the world.

Then, now, and forever.