Spread of coronavirus prompts reflections on AIDS epidemic
Aidan caught the sniffles at his retreat. He lounged on the LaZBoy, and though able to operate the television remote, he was incapacitated from performing algebra.
“Do you think I’m dying of COVID19?” he asked.
“You’re not dying. You’ve had a stuffy nose since the day we adopted you. Truly, you look up the word ‘grippe’ in Webster’s dictionary, and you will find the name Aidan FisherPaulson,” I replied.
Other parents would have had a Hallmark moment. Nurse Vivian would make sweet warm tea with cinnamon toast. But cinnamon is “too spicy” for my son, so instead he drank ginger ale with his hot Cheetos. I’m in the highrisk group, so you’d think I’d avoid Typhoid Aidan, but he’s a teenager. He naturally avoids me.
Longterm readers know we’re related to Calamity Jane Canary, and though we’ve dropped the Canary/Kiniry, we retain the Calamity.
This is the second plague I’ve lived through. Well, at least so far. I was in the highrisk group then, as well, though there was a lot more shaming.
Summer of 1981 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I led a “coming out” group with the Pink Triangle Collective. On the week that we talked about health, my cofacilitator, Danny, pulled out a New York Times clipping about a “Rare Cancer Seen in Homosexuals.”
The irony had not been lost on me that I’d come out on the exact wrong day. There were more articles about acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), notably by Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts.
And then it got real. By the time I moved back to New York, the end times had begun. David Norrie was my first friend to die, and then a funeral every week.
We got angry, because the government wasn’t doing enough to keep us safe. We formed the first national AIDS switchboard, to dispel the rumors. We formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. We didn’t know whom to love, whom to touch, but we knew enough to tell people that they wouldn’t get it from their Haitian cotton couch.
So far, 32 million people have died from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), including Zane’s first uncle, Tim. I’m a lightonecandleratherthancursethedarkness kind of guy, and if you are as well, then support Terry Asten Bennett, the woman who runs Cliff ’s Variety. She’s the bus mom for the AIDS Life Cycle, and she’s trying to raise money to fight that scourge at www.tofighthiv.org/goto/busmom2020.
Fastforward to the scourge du jour. There are a few parallels (it’s likely that Corona beer won’t do much better than the Ayds Candy line), and while I’m in a different place than I was in 1981 — decades past the age where I worry about the exchange of body fluids — there are a few lessons from then that we can use now.
The big one is not to blame anybody for a virus. Not the gays, not the Chinese, not the Italians. We don’t need scapegoats. We need compassion. We need to be kind.
The downside to being a sheriff ’s deputy is that I don’t get to call in sick for Armageddon. We cannot telecommute emergency service, so we show up.
But Aidan got two weeks off from school, thanks to the generosity of the archdiocese. Which means that he has Papa as his fulltime teacher, and if Aidan thought Sister Lil was tough, he’s got Dolores Umbridge now.
The new schoolhouse is the Bedlam Blue Bungalow in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior, and everything is a teachable moment when you’re homeschooling. Even the pandemic. Given his unique challenges, we haven’t had to teach him about social distance. We taught him emotional proximity was more important.
We tell Aidan to cover his sneezes. We tell him to keep his fingers (and toes) out of his mouth. “Stay informed,” I say. To which he replies, “Did you know it’s named for the crownlike spikes on its surface?”
To which Papa replies, “Not the tiara I was hoping for.”
“We can each of us die at any moment, Aidan, but what’s important is how we live. In the meantime, we wash our hands, and though other families may be humming ‘Happy Birthday’ to get the full 20 seconds, the FisherPaulsons sing, ‘I Will Survive.’ ”
This is the second plague I’ve lived through. Well, at least so far.