One more week until I get on a plane and blow this popsicle stand for a while. In the meantime, I’m continuing to plug away at various pursuits and projects. Working on a production schedule and final decisions on cuts for The Tempest. Emptying the boxes one by one that have taken over the study due to the rapid loss of my academic office and the need to consolidate work and home offices together in some form. Trying to do a little writing on the new book. Doing some general catchup on life. It struck me that I have four more work days this month and, when I get back to it after my jaunt across the pond, I’ll be down to thirteen months before retirement (and nine months before the start of the process as that’s when the EMR system at UAB is slated to change and I’m stepping out of clinical care at that time).
Time speeds up as you grow older. Each year represents a smaller and smaller fraction of your total life experience and that makes each year feel like it lasts a little bit less. I’m probably three quarters of the way or more through my life span and, given my professional experiences, I don’t plan to stick around for years and years of infirmity. I know what happens when people choose quantity over quality and I don’t really want to end up like that. I’ll be ready to shrink my life space as I age so that I remain relatively independent and things remain manageable. I just hope that my genetics and the vagaries of the gods cooperate. In some ways, I’m looking forward to my last phase where I’m likely to have people to wait on me, I’ll be left to putter around, and I’ll be able to wander and play in the vast field of my reminiscences and past, no longer caring so much about present and future. I just don’t want to get there too soon.
The local theaters are all announcing their 26-27 season schedules and I, like every other performer in town, am busy looking at the titles, the cast breakdowns and starting to figure out where I can be slotted in over the next year. Two theaters have announced bucket list shows for me – Sweeney Todd at Terrific New Theatre and The Threepenny Opera at Virginia Samford Theatre. Of course, they are going up against each other in the same slot and it is the one time during the season where I am scheduled to be out of town on a trip planned more than a year ago. Such is life. Both productions will go up without yours truly in the cast. I’ve worked on both shows before, only backstage. I want to get onstage in both sometime before I give up stage performing due to difficulties with learning lines or poor vision or poor balance or any of the other hundred and one things that might happen as I continue to age.
As the resident plague doctor of this corner of the internet, I’ve fielded a couple of questions regarding hantavirus. For those not consuming the news cycle, a small Dutch cruise ship, has had an outbreak of this relatively rare virus raising some concern. Hantaviruses are carried by rodents and, in general, for a human to contract one, they have to come directly into contact with rodent urine. It was last in the news when Gene Hackman’s wife got it, probably from mice on their property and, not realizing how sick she was, died at home. He was in the latter stages of Alzheimer’s and could not summon help and subsequently died of dehydration as he was dependent on her for food and liquids.
This cruise ship was on an itinerary to various spots far off the beaten path – one of those journeys one makes when one has been to all of the usuals. It departed Southern Argentina on April 1, went to Antarctica, and then sailed across the Southern Atlantic stopping at such ports of call at Tristan da Cunha and St Helena. There is one type of hantavirus, the so called Andes strain, which can be transmitted human to human. It’s endemic, but rare in South America. It’s not easy to catch, usually requiring somewhat extended close contact. An older Dutch couple, who had been sightseeing in Argentina and Chile prior to boarding the cruise, likely contracted the virus prior to setting sail. The husband became ill about five days into the trip and died five days after that. The wife left the cruise in St Helena, two weeks after her husband’s death, in order to return home by air as she too was feeling ill. She collapsed and died in an airport in South Africa while changing planes. After her departure, two other passengers on the boat became ill and testing finally revealed the presence of hantavirus.
Is this the beginning of the next pandemic? Highly unlikely. Even though the passengers were together for weeks in a very isolated environment, the vast majority have not become ill suggesting that spread is fairly limited. WHO and the public health authorities of all of the places passengers from the boat have gone have identified them and are quarantining and doing appropriate testing and finding any contacts. It’s a Dutch flagged ship and all of the stops were in countries or territories of countries with robust public health systems and WHO membership. The story might be somewhat different if this had happened on a Carnival cruise out of Miami. Trump has withdrawn the USA from WHO and RFK Jr. has disbanded the arm of the CDC responsible for maintaining sanitation and infection control in the cruise industry. Cruise ships – with lots of unrelated humans packed together in an inescapable isolated environment, are the perfect breeding ground for viral epidemics, especially those where parents bring their sick children aboard as they aren’t going to miss their prepaid vacation for which they have been waiting all year. This whole incident may be a test run for something far worse one of these days.
Meanwhile, closer to home, Alabama demonstrated Alabama values like nobody’s business yesterday. After the SCOTUS decision of Callais v Louisiana this past week, the Republican majority of the state legislature couldn’t wait to go into special session to put forward newly drawn Federal House District maps which would ensure Republican majorities across the board and erase minority voting power. Their meeting was scheduled for yesterday and even though the heavens opened, the tornado sirens were going off and the state house itself was flooding, they stood their ground to make sure it got passed in record time. This is the same legislature that will not pass Medicaid expansion despite the collapse of rural healthcare and the closure of rural hospitals across the state, deal with a Department of Corrections where conditions in prisons have repeatedly been found unconstitutional, or dealt with the absolute joke of public transit. I’m not surprised. It’s an attitude baked into the state from the overtly racist and fraudulent state constitution of 1901 which still governs us to Bull Conner and his firehoses to George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.
What makes me really sad is the number of intelligent, well educated and well connected members of White Suburban Birmingham who keep their mouths firmly shut. (Those of us who choose to live in the city proper usually aren’t afraid to mouth off). The churches and pastors who profess to follow Jesus who blithely ignore what is being done to their neighbors even as they prepare mission trips abroad. The moneyed who take advantage of everything the city has to offer before heading back to their gated communities where they can conveniently ignore anyone who doesn’t look or think like them. The politicians who gleefully ‘other’ minorities with little voice and less power with performative legislation designed to be cruel to shore up their base for the next primary. MLK Jr. got it exactly right in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail all those years ago and current events show how little has changed. If you haven’t read it for a while, reread it. The powers that be are likely to make it more difficult to access in the future as it’s too ‘woke’ for their tastes. I’m assuming it’ll be replaced in high school curricula with The Camp of the Saints.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 