Moving

I am moving, a statement I made very often during my husband’s 30 years in the Marine Corps.   I just considered it a part of life, packed up our stuff, and went to a new house/state/country.  What was once something I took in my stride in my twenties, thirties and forties is looking a lot more daunting when I can see 80 from here. 

Let’s start with portals.  That was once a word of which I was confident I knew the meaning.  It was simply a door, with an old fashioned feel.  Exciting things would happen when you went through a portal like Narnia or Harry Potter’s train platform 9¾. Now it is a doorway on your computer into all the paper work needed by the settlement people, the moving company, and the realtor. No human wants to talk to you, and there are no actual pieces of paper to fill out.  Exciting things happen when you go through these portals as well, but not the kind you really want.  There is a lot of exclaiming, key banging, creating yet more passwords, swearing, and, if one is lucky, completion which is marked by singing one’s name with a finger which in no way looks like one’s real signature. 

Then there is the stuff.  I really thought we lived a fairly Spartan life, so where is all this stuff coming from?  Opening a drawer can cause heart palpitations as it is full of things that one was going to get to later and never did.  And now later is here.  Do we really need all these lamps?  Why are we not more like Abe Lincoln, reading by firelight instead of by all these pesky things with cords and bulbs and harps and shades?  Why do we have more than two dinner plates, two bowls and two glasses?  There are only two of us after all, and that should be all we need.  And why did we not strive for the minimalist look in decorating instead of hanging all these glass enclosed pictures on our walls?

But now all this stuff has to be put in boxes, and we are looking like people who had an epic party.  The best small boxes are from our local liquor store.  They are sturdy and have the added cachet of being free.  From where I sit at the moment in my office, I can see New Zealand wine, Russian Standard Vodka, gluten free Vodka, Bourbon Whiskey and Capa del Ora wine.  There are even more choices downstairs. But the real challenge is the boxes that come flat with sort-of instructions telling you how to put the box and lid together.  After the fourth box I got into the swing of it, but I think my swing might have been slightly off.  At least they are holding together and the tops are on. Time will tell. 

I think of one move that I made from Beirut, Lebanon to Jacksonville, North Carolina (Camp LeJeune) which involved not only moving a household but doing it with a one-year-old, a four year-old, and a seven-year-old.  There is no way I would have the energy for that today. I think I had better serve notice to my three unsuspecting daughters.  The next move is on you.    

Learning from History

A Jewish paramedic faces Jerusalem, his prayer shawl hanging off his shoulders while a Muslim paramedic kneels facing Mecca, his prayer rug unfurled before him.

While in my over three quarters of a century on this planet I have never experienced anything like the events taking place world-wide with Covid-19, there are aspects of it, from my long view over many years, that I can see repeating themselves. Take for instance, the debate over calling this disease the “Chinese” virus which has caused people to yell and/or attack people on the street who look Asian.    

I have always had an interest in the Second World War.  While I was only an infant during the course of that conflict, I think my interest evolved because my father was shot down while flying a B-29 bomber over China.  I felt a compulsion to learn about the war’s history as it was also a record of a parent I had neither met nor known. 

Because of this interest, I would listen with attention to my mother’s tales about events after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.  She was attending the University of California at Berkeley, and would tell two stories from that time that I always remembered.  The first was the fact that many Americans of Chinese descent wore signs around their necks declaring themselves Chinese so their Asian faces would not be mistaken for Japanese by a frightened population. She also, in something I always admired, organized her whole sorority to go to a neighborhood corner store owned by a Japanese-American citizen to buy up as much as they could of his merchandize. She wanted him to have some money in his pocket as he and his family were taken to the desert detention camps where they remained for the duration of the war.  In this instance, once again, fear of the unknown causing us as a nation to do something to some of its citizens that was indefensible. 

The next instance was from my own personal experience.  My step-father worked for the United States Information Agency and was assigned to one of their libraries and information centers in Hiroshima, Japan in 1956.  As we left home, the United States was facing one of its earliest onslaughts of a disease which was named by Americans the Asian flu.  We arrived in Japan and I promptly fell very ill with flu-like symptoms.  We were staying with another American family stationed there and our hosts, alarmed as I got worse, had a Japanese doctor come to the house to check me out.  I was prodded and poked and then this Asian man announced to his American audience that I had a very bad case of …….. the Occidental Flu.

The truth is that disease knows no national boundaries, no defining race, no form of government, no gender. It is a thoughtless, mindless entity that strikes out indiscriminately wherever it finds a home.  We, as its universal potential victims, need to use our intelligence, courage, and kindness to fight this epidemic rather than fight among ourselves.  Perhaps the picture which accompanies this blog, that has gone viral, expresses the best hope for mankind.