The Write Thing

I think that the so-called Influenza A (H1N1) should be a good vehicle for revising the age groups to which we connect. I have long heard the chant claiming that nobody cares about the elderly and they do not deserve such poor treatment, having done all they have for us, younger folks.

Well, my dear readers, let me break the news. You now have a golden opportunity to change the course of ungratefulness toward senior citizens. How? Follow me as I go through my reasoning.

There is not a lot of information on the H1N1 virus that is causing uncertainty and wreaking havoc with Argentine health authorities (well, it does not take much to wreak havoc with them anyway, but a virus is always a good excuse). However, a little bit of online research will reassure you about the most common prevention measures. These include boring stuff such as washing your hands a hundred times a day, staying away from potentially sick people, keeping your house clean, etc. Now, if you start reading about the way the disease is developing, you will learn that the tranche of the population above 65 years old or so have shown considerable resistance to the virus. Here is where the prevention guidelines could be expanded.

We live in a society that goes all soft on children and gives a little less than a damn about the elderly, even if some look good in pension funds commercials. The H1N1 pandemic now calls this preference into question. What are you thinking of staying anywhere near noisy infants with snots running down their noses and coughing on you every thirty seconds? No matter how charming those short versions of an adult may seem to you, my friend, you have to stay away from them. I know the temptation to play with the devilish creatures will be strong, but consider what sort of hands will soon be touching yours as you help them across the street, how dirty and full of viruses and bacteria they will be. You are in danger, and you have to face the fact.

Instead, reconsider your views on older people. I know some may bore you by telling you the same story over and over again, or even by speaking about recipes for hours on end. Their life seems uneventful to you? Dispel those thoughts…think how safe they are to be around. Who knows? There may be even some way of developing immunity by proximity…science evolves by the hour. Moreover, how many times have you been told you should slow down and calm your stress? Now you can do it by crossing the street in fifteen minutes instead of two, discussing the good old times as if they were still around, and a myriad other things that flailing memories allow. Think again, the elderly are not contagious.

My dear reader, you can do it. There is still time before H1N1 condemns you to a probable death in Argentina and a very difficult flu almost elsewhere. Go find an elderly person and make a new friend. You will not regret it.

If I could put words to my music, tonight would certainly involve Adriana Calcanhotto’s Mulher sem Razão. There is a lot of sense in that song, in many ways. My favorite lines are definitely the following:

Parta, pegue um avião, reparta
Sonhar só não tá com nada
É uma festa na prisão

Isn’t it the cruelest and truest of facts to actually accept that “dreaming alone does not mean anything, it is a party held in prison”? I guess it is, and that sometimes you do not know better than to have your party in prison. Why not? First of all, it is safer. Second…it still feels like a party.

Tonight, as I play the track from Maré in the background, I would say it is good to accept the fear, the risk of winning and losing (please let us face there are only very few win-win situations in life…somebody sooner or later pays for lunch). It is liberating in a way, it humanizes you. Admitting that fear is sometimes all you have is good enough to help you plod along and still cross the scary waters that separate you from your dream, whatever that is.

In this month of June, in a cold and H1N1-ridden Buenos Aires, only a few days after another commercial plane crashed with no real explanation, the uncomfortable question hangs in the air. We can have the party in prison and delude ourselves into thinking there will be a reason why we will not develop the fatal flu or our plane will not be buried in the cold waters of an unfathomable sea. We can have that limited range of security to build for ourselves…the cause why, regardless of how implausible it sounds. Yet, at the end of the day, we will still have a party in prison and there…we already know the guests.

The year is unfolding in surprising ways. Where I expected continuance, I am now seeing sad but necessary closure, by marriage, distance, or both. Where I expected briefness, I am now seeing the inevitable development of a relationship. I bet the gods are amused at the dice they cast. I thought I knew, I thought I was wise. Until recently, I even claimed to have an instinct, an ancestral memory that rarely failed. To my disappointment and, in a way, to my relief, it does fail, and the truth now dawns on me. I have to come to terms with the fact that there is a day-by-day quality to whatever we do, despite the long-term frameworks in which we technically see things. I am caught in the certainty of uncertainty, and I’d better like it, or else I’ll have to contend with my own ghost when fate decides for me.

However, no matter how much life insists on contradicting my instinct, I cannot help seeing it in action again. Perhaps that is why, one afternoon in a day of recognition and lovemaking, ages ago in a dreamy Mexican town, I turned around in bed, held her hand in mine around my waist, and without looking at her I said: “I have this sense of…arrival with you”. If I am home or not, or if the gods are just fooling around with me again, I will claim not to know. I will breathe in deeply, count my blessings and hope that my instinct is right.