In-flu-enza: A post in several parts

A multi-part post in which I alternately stand on my soapbox and step down to muse a bit.

There was a little bird

Her name was Enza.

They opened up the window,

and in-flew-Enza.

--American jump-roping song popular in 1918-1919

PART I: Flu on my mind.

I've been debating for months whether to add my voice to the cacophonous bluster about flu that fills our media these days. I'm writing about it here because the whole pandemic influenza thing is not a new worry for me. I've been wary of it for many years, probably because it hits all my sorespots of worry and illness and control. I'll get more into that in the third part of this post series. For now, hang on for a bit while I hop up onto my lecture/soapbox and explain a few of my thoughts on it.

If you know me, you might well know that I have been, at times in my life, a fantastic worrier. But I'm also pretty damn willful, and I've been willing myself to let go of that worrying tendency. Over the past five years, I'd say it's actually starting to work.

Sometime in my anxiety-ridden twenties, I discovered completely by accident that I loved reading about history. And it brought an added benefit: visiting and studying the past was soothing, comforting. I am nostalgic at heart, and a sucker for a story--it's amazing it took me until my twenties to cultivate an interest in history. As I read more, I found myself not only drawn into the stories, but also calmed by the greater fact of history: the fact that life goes on.

Of course, looking to the past presents other problems. History is unconcerned with neat endings or safe outcomes. The past is, in its essence, a place peopled with figures who, right or wrong, with dignity or with disgrace, lived--and died. To embrace history is to make the admission that we, too, recede into the past; our lives will become simply remnants of stories, bits of ephemera that fade away.

Did I say earlier that I had willed myself away from worrying? That history soothes? Because that last paragraph is nothing if not melancholy. But as I consider history, I find a strange comfort in the juxtaposition it presents. Thinking about the past offers that rare chance to hold in the mind, simultaneously, the ideas of both mortality and hope.

The events of the 1918 influenza pandemic distilled these feelings for me, when I stumbled onto it. As I learned more about it, I had the feeling of discovery, as though I had unearthed some weird secret of the recent past. Of course, it's getting its fair share of play right now, but for decades, it was a largely forgotten story.

My interest in what happened in 1918 fostered a curiosity about influenza in general. And what I hope to do with this next posts is to share some of my thoughts and attempt to make some sense out of pandemic flu since I started thinking about it years ago.

Pandemics are nothing new. And--this part is important--pandemic does not necessarily mean deadly. Pandemic just means a disease significantly "spread worldwide." Simply because a virus has a high infection doesn't always necessarily mean that it's deadly for many people.

But influenza is a tricky virus, and it *can* be deadly. It's that unknown element that makes it frightening.

The past 900 years of European history is peppered with accounts of entire countries or continents being besieged with deadly respiratory disease. We would certainly consider these pandemics today. Many of these aren't well documented, but the descriptions that do exist bear a striking resemblance to what we know as novel influenza. Of course, the most well-documented pandemic in history is the one of 1918, which killed upwards of 50 million people worldwide. As a comparison point, consider this: 675,000 Americans died as a result of the 1918 influenza, more than twice the number of Americans who died fighting during World War I.

When I first encountered them, these figures stunned me. I mean, come on. Flu. Everyone gets flu once in a while, right? A sore throat, a fever, a few days of rest---and it's gone. Flu is no big deal, right? I was incredulous that the flu actually killed so many otherwise young and healthy people. My initial, childish reaction to these accounts came from fear and ignorance: I scoffed at the limits of medicine at the time. What a long way we've come since then, I reassured myself. Nothing like that could happen today.

Still, my curiosity had been piqued, and I read anything I could about 1918. And then anything I could about influenza in general.

The picture that started to form in my mind was less ill-informed, and more frightening. The pandemic of 1918 was a perfect storm of circumstance, and it was not unlike what is happening now with the 2009 H1N1.

I want to be clear: I'm not implying that history is repeating itself. The H1N1 virus of 2009, while similar in makeup to the virus of 1918 , is not the same virus, and the scenario is obviously different. I do not believe that the strain of influenza (Novel H1N1/2009) circulating at this point in time will kill 6% of our population. I do not believe we are seeing the beginnings of story to rival The Stand, or the bible (how strange to see those in a sentence together). Still, some things happening now with the current strain of H1N1 give me pause. And my alarm bell, though admittedly prone to go off, has started ringing.

Part II: A Primer on Influenza

Part III: An Anti-definition of Influenza

And to skip to the reason on why I, in particular, am concerned:

Part IV: The Tricky Part for Me: Making Sense of Risk

Balancing Act and a Time Audit

Like every other woman I know, I spend altogether too much time trying to "achieve balance." The fact that that tired phrase includes the word "achieve" is telling. It's held up as a goal for the modern woman; being balanced is an achievement, balance is a treasure we "find."

I've been thinking of this a lot lately. I go through projects in fits and starts, and sometimes I berate myself for not being able to do all the things I want to do in a day. But recently I started reevaluating my standards for completing things. Last month, I caught myself ending a string of days with a sigh of resignation that I "didn't do enough." That was a clear signal that something was indeed out of whack: my perspective.

I love the idea of having a balanced life, a picture perfect combination of rest and activity, of giving to others and cherishing myself, of order and chaos, of consumption and saving, of social activity and alone time.

And why wouldn't I love that idea? Consumer media feeds my desire of such a life with images of a sleek woman in a lotus pose, or a neatly put-together "mommy" type person vacuuming her home with the super-efficient Dyson, or whatever. I'm admittedly hungry for approval, and so a perfect patsy for advertisers who prey on that need. I buy into it, and chase after balance in my life.

The funny thing is that as much as my imagination would like to run with these images and flesh out the details of such a "balanced" creature, I cannot. I can picture pieces of that life, sure: the put-together Kirie, lithe, made-up, wrinkle-free. I imagine patient hours with my kids spent in spotless spaces of my kitchen, my studio. Nutritious dinners, which I have prepared, are eaten, without complaint, by our daughters, and evenings with my husband are quiet and long.

Nowhere in my imaginings are the real nitty-gritty of day-to-day. Into what spaces does the balanced woman squeeze the following?:

• the endless washing and folding of laundry
• the scrubbing of dishes
• the tidying of toys and books and markers that creep under chairs and couches and everywhere else
• the reading time--how one book turns to ten books, and afternoons are dreamed away with a curious toddler cuddled in a lap
• the continual process of reorganizing spaces--drawers, cabinets, shelves
• the packaging and mailing of gifts and letters
• the coaxing of said toddler into naptime, or bedtime, or getting dressed time, etc.
• the visits to friends' houses, the entertaining when a friend visits ours
• the baking--for school, for friends, for our own cookie jar
• the endless sweeping and vacuuming
• the workout--and recovery!
• the self-care time, from a simple shower, to a self-manicure, to keeping my eyebrows neat
• the fixing of all things broken--from the leg of a Playmobil deer to the toilet paper holder that's come out of the drywall
• the cleaning of spills, from milk to scat
• the spontaneous walks or outings or explorations that lead us away from the house for untold hours
• the late night "pop ups" from the kids, with worries about monsters, or excitement about caterpillars
• the mommy-time reading--from books, to blogs, to the newspaper--that fills my mind as I move through the other tasks of the day
• making any kind of art at all--from music to painting
• the phone calls to and from friends
• the slow and savored time spent gathering fruits and flowers from the garden
• the whole chase of groceries, from shopping to putting things onto shelves
• the minutes (or hours) that can be lost because you sat down, and were too exhausted to get up to finish any of the above...

What of these? The advertisers have left these out, the most pleasant, most repetitive, and most necessary parts of the day.

I give up. The logical part of me sees this list and recognizes there is absolutely no way I could complete all of this in the space of a day, or even in a week. I would be crazy to even attempt it. So no more berating myself for not doing it all.

My daily schedule is like a balloon, with finite space in it. Squeeze one end, and the excess air will have to go somewhere. If I take time to do one thing intensively, it will steal time from somewhere else in the schedule. It does not all fit into the small space I've been allowing. So obvious! But I'm only just now starting to recognize that.

Perhaps, over the course of a month, I do have some kind of equilibrium. Regardless, the majority of my tasks these days seems to focus on making order or the illusion of it. Instead of fighting it, I'm trying to accept it as part of life at this stage. As I get older, and our kids get older, I imagine that will shift slightly away from chasing after toys and spills, and into the very different focus that teenagers bring. I recognize that my mix of activities will always include some need to control chaos around me, as well as my need to create new things, whether it be a painting, or a quilt, a costume, or a song. These are endless chases of their own, each pleasurable and challenging in their own way.

With my revised view of balance, perhaps my goal instead should be to look at whether my life is balanced as a whole, as a long line of days that each offers opportunities to indulge in the repetitive or the generative. It seems to me to be a much more forgiving and reasonable perspective. Maybe, if I see it that way, I will start to see I've "achieved" the elusive balance already.

Whispering in my ear--Can you miss someone you never met?

A little background:

I have a thing for stories, as you might know. And as much as I like to read, I love to hear a story, too. My mom would read to me incessantly when I was little, and long after I knew how to read to myself, she continued to read aloud to me. She read, late at night and her head nodding with fatigue, through many series--Little House, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew. It must have been exhausting for her, after long long days at work.

But how I loved it! We shared the story together, discovering it, though in a way it also seemed almost to spring naturally from her as she spoke the words. I especially loved how her voice wrapped around the characters, made the pictures move in new ways, different from the way the pictures formed when I read to myself. Listening to those stories was pure pleasure.

I still love to hear a story. It's probably why I am an NPR addict, and I am usually a rapt listener to anyone willing telling me a narrative of their life, or even what happened to them that day. I love to hear it.

So it's not surprising that I have affection for audiobooks. I may have resisted the ipod for years past its introduction, but at the prospect of hearing podcasts of This American Life, and the Moth, and StoryCorps, well--I caved this winter, and now I'm often found wearing my earbuds, a story whispering into my ears.

The past few months I've been mining itunes for good audiobooks, and listening to a mixture of oldies and some new, more pulpy stuff. Heart of Darkness was amazing, real and thick and haunting in a way that, shamefully I admit, it wasn't before I heard it read to me. After Conrad, I wanted to go for something lighter, with the thought that it would be good to listen to while doing chores or exercising. My choice was James Patterson's Beach Road, which definitely falls into the pulpy junk pile, was disappointing and grungy.

So, in an attempt to find a middle ground, I stumbled across a mystery by Kate Wilhelm, a writer I'd never heard of before. Of course, I’ve since come to find out that she is prolific, talented, and lauded by many. I’m thrilled to know I will be able to explore her books for a long time to come.

For now, I am into Wilhelm’s books featuring character Barbara Holloway. Just as I did when I was a little girl, I still enjoy a series of stories. Mysteries are especially great in a series. While they can be cute and fun, a series can also leave lots of room for development of character and place. More importantly, they leave room for ambiguity and growth, and maybe that's why I like them so well. That, and the fact that my mom and I can exchange them between ourselves and have our own little book club.

Anyway, Kate Wilhelm's series about Barbara Holloway are like pearls on a string, each one smooth and well-constructed from the inside out, glowing. I started accidentally in the middle of the series, with The Unbidden Truth. Read by Anna Fields, it was engaging, lively, haunting. I was hooked.

I say hooked, and I mean it. As I listened, I was almost addicted to hearing what would happen next. In particular, I was drawn to this narrator, Anna Fields. Like my mother, her voice made the story move, wrapping itself into the plot and the characters so that it really did feel as though the story was being spun exactly as I was listening.

I was so taken with Anna Fields’s warm and mysterious voice and the way she gave life to Wilhelm's characters, that beyond finding other books in the series (which I did), I wanted to see what else she had given voice to.

A Google later, I learned that Anna Fields was the stagename for Kate Fleming. Like Kate Wilhelm, Kate Fleming was prolific, narrating over 200 books. And clearly, she was talented. She was asked to narrate the 9/11 Commission, and awarded honors from her peers. I also learned, with heartache, that she died in 2006, tragically trapped in her Seattle studio during a flash flood.

All of this background leads me to confess this:
In some strange way, for the past week or so, I've been feeling a certain loneliness knowing she is gone. I was puzzled over this melancholy, but I finally put a label to it: it's that I miss Kate Fleming. I know, I know--I didn’t know her at all, she is a disembodied voice in my head, and yet, I miss her. The intimacy of audio can foster that kind of connection, I suppose. I think of the way she could get inside a character, and get inside my head, and I know that the world has lost someone special.
Is it possible to miss someone you didn't know? Perhaps.
I suspect I have this lonely, loss-filled feeling about her for another reason. Because while her voice is firmly in my head, I have the sickening outside knowledge that at the same time she was making those detailed recordings, her fate was rushing toward her in a way she couldn’t know. She is stuck there in time, unknowing, but vibrant and powerful with stories each time I listen.

We are all like Kate Fleming, in a way. We are firmly in our own reality, with the voice in our own heads shaping and moving the story of our daily life forward. And it feels so permanent, like something recorded and tangible, something to be accessed again and again. But it’s not. For each of us rides on an unstoppable river--or that river flows toward us, I don't know. But I do know that the permanence of things is an illusion. Like anyone else, I shove that knowledge down each day to some hidden place so I can "get on with life." I only recognize the pull of the river again, if only for a moment, when I encounter beautiful and fleeting, something perfect and special. Something like a perfect whisper in my ears as I'm lulled into another storyland.

Space Between

I took this shot from the bridge the other day, hoping to capture what I see as I drive off the island every day. I was surprised to see that the camera saw more bridge and less vista.  For the camera, the water is just an afterthought, the spaces between the railings simply placeholders.

Of course, I take the bridge for granted. I must, since I don't even notice the railings when I'm looking out.  What do I see is the shifting mood of the bay below, the craggy islands. On the rare occasion that I'm in the passenger seat, as I was on this day, I drink in the view and let my eye follow the bay as it runs back out to the shimmering ocean. I watch the strange map-like lines that the ebbing tide draws on the surface of the bay. I squint at the tiniest rocky islands, hoping to catch a glimpse of a sunbathing seal.

The space between the railings reveals so much, a whole world away from the soaring bridge itself, and it might as well be. God willing, the bridge and the water will continue to remain oblivious to the other forever. There is a space there between them that won't be crossed.

We live on an island, and the ocean is, clearly, the defining factor for our town. Given that, then, it's amazing how little contact we have with it. Sure, we swim and play in it, and fish and boat on it. We can even scuba dive and see up close those who live there. But all of our forays into the sea are, inevitably, only momentary daytrips, with no visa extended. As close as the ocean may be, it is other.


When we moved here, we lived closer to the bay, and I would sometimes lull myself to sleep by imagining all the life teeming beneath the water just a few blocks away. It was thrilling and a bit terrifying for me to think that deep at night, deep in the dark, dark water there they were--the tuna and the scup, eels and dogfish, the skipjack tuna, alewives, squid, herring, butterfish, occasionally a shark--these and countless others proceeding with their watery lives just steps from my door. Even my mammalian cousins, the dolphins and seals--even they couldn't begin to comprehend my life, or me theirs. We are, as they say, oceans apart.

That impenetrable distance fascinates me. What gets me most is that it's a distance not of space itself, which is physically crossable, but a distance of consciousness. I think that's what gives me the shivers. It feels dangerous somehow, to be dwelling so close to a deep unknown. If I dwell on it too long, I'm overcome with a feeling that must be something like a fear of heights--all that abyss looming. It makes me feel the smallness of myself, vulnerable and anonymous.

When I was a child, my mom took me to visit a college friend of hers. They lived on an open, windblown piece of land in Ontario, Canada. We were only there for an evening, as I recall, and the details have fallen away from me. But I do have a vivid memory of hearing their neighbors--a wildlife preserve. Actually, it was a sort of safari-type place, with all sorts of "exotic" (read: nonnative) wildlife. And as we stood on their porch, I remember hearing the roar of lions, who lived within shouting range of their backyard fence.

A simple thing, that roar. In a zoo, it's innocuous. When you hear it while standing on a front porch-- well, I was chilled by it. The funny thing is that it wasn't the prospect of a lion crossing the fence that was disquieting. Honestly, I didn't even imagine that fear. What got me was the same thing that gets me when I think too much about the mysterious lives that are lived under the surface of the bay--it's the vast otherness that makes me catch my breath.

You may know by now that I can get sucked into dwelling on something, and for some time, my thoughts will continue to go there. During those times, I welcome a distraction that brings me away from that edgy feeling of isolation. My mind does eventually quiet, of course, and runs on to other obsessions.

I think back on that visit to my mom's friend, and I wonder what it would be like with the constant presence of the lions, announcing itself again and again in the night. Would it be like having a relentless reminder of how small I was? Or would it fade into the distance like the static noise of the waves and the fog horn, the shock diminishing with exposure, until I would have to force myself into noticing it?

In reality, I know that life is balanced someplace, very neatly and incredibly, between noticing the spaces we live in, and noticing the spaces we do not occupy.  Were it not, we would all certainly be insane.  

My photo of the bridge reminded me of that so clearly. It is interesting and sometimes disturbing for me to shift my vision, as the camera does, from one focus to the next...knowing all the time that I will never really be able to see the whole perspective, that I, too, will always remain other.