Two days before my son was born, my mother called my home and told my husband to find a reason to leave the house in order to call her. She needed to tell him something she didn’t want me to hear about. Yet. My dad had died. I was on bed rest and, apparently, they were afraid the shock might do something to the baby or me. Shock because although death is a normal part of life, my dad was 47 and I had not even been told he was so ill death was in the picture. There is nothing normal about a 47-year-old dying. His death certificate, I discovered years later, says “natural causes” under cause of death. I have never understood that. I guess it’s because he didn’t die of a gunshot wound or drown or something clearly unnatural. I suspect his alcoholism and smoking finally caught up to him although he had stopped both almost a year prior…perhaps coinciding with finding out he was finally going to be a grandpa.

Minutes after my son was born, the doctor – considered callous and thoughtless by every nurse in the hospital thereafter – said, “Oh, by the way, your husband and your mom didn’t know how to tell you, but your dad died two days ago.”

So the most beautiful moment of my life, the birth of our son, was dimmed by the death of my father.

Or, was the despair death inspires softened by my son’s birth?

My mother wrote a lovely poem about the souls of my father and my son meeting as one left this world and the other joined it. I like that image. I used to tell myself that my dad had had such a sad life, perhaps God gave him a chance at a happier one in my son. I like that thought – especially as I watch my son not only pursue his passions but also work hard to inspire others to do the same. To be the best version of themselves that they can be. Beaten down by family, friends and society, my dad drowned his aspirations over the course of his 47 years, too late realizing he did have something for which – for whom – life was worth living if he could not do so for himself. I love that my son tries to help people live fully, joyfully, so that they never regret what they didn’t do.

I still grieve for my father. I never got to say goodbye. He never got to know the grandchild he was requesting on our wedding day – “When are you going to give me a grandson?” Two years were a few days too many for him to wait.

Despite the grief, a lesson was learned in my hospital room as tears of joy merged with those of sorrow: Life goes on.

Old King Cole is a murderous soul and a murderous soul is he.

He curved up his wife with his hunting knife and called for his fiddlers three.

To dispose of the body and toss it in the river with the other three.

He wanted to marry this fair young maiden with long locks of golden hair.

She knew of the plot of his four wives then came up with a plan that would kill this old man and his fiddler's three.

To his delight, he had no idea of his plight, that his new wife cooked him up a delicious meal with pudding on the side, and arsenic laced.

Old King Cole was a merry old soul but a dead soul is he.

You're my honeybunch, sugarplum

Pumpy umpy umpkin

You're my meaty pie

You're my cuppycake, gumdrop

Snoogums boogums, you're

The filet of my eye

And I love you so

And I want you to know

That you're cooked best with a sear

And I love to season meat real well

To mask the taste of fear

Hush little baby don't you cry,

Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird,

And if that mockingbird don't sing,

Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring,

and if that diamond ring don't shine,

Mama's gonna buy you some turpentine,

And if that turpentine don't do,

Mama's gonna bury you in a box for shoes.

And if that box for shoe's don't kill,

Mama's gonna throw you in the landfill.

lalala, la, la, la....

A red maple shaded the yard in front of our Victorian. There was one branch just low enough that a tall nine-year-old, leaping with an outstretched arm—or a six-year-old lifted by her father—could snatch a leaf to treasure for the duration of a walk, or occasionally press in a dictionary. It was tall. The deed indicates that builders made our fieldstone foundation in 1891, and I assume the maple had been planted around the same time. Dozens of seedlings appeared each spring. I always meant to transplant two or three to the back yard instead of mowing over them, but I didn’t, and now I can’t. There’s a stump, and my home is not my home anymore.

They desperately looked in all the wrong places, first. I mean after it decimated the hospital, because at the hospital they weren’t really looking for the cause. They only tried to treat a patient, and then it was too late for all of them. The bodies of a dozen doctors and nurses get an awful lot of attention, even more than the few dozen patients, because we assume the professionals can protect themselves. When they couldn’t, the CDC vans rolled into town, and we knew we were in trouble.

That dread was all we knew, that and what the evening news could say. “Mysterious lung ailment,” “unknown disease,” “killer plague.” Even within the quarantine, we got no information from the hazmat suits that roamed our streets. I do not blame them anymore because silence is better than a lie. Advanced degrees or not, when you know nothing, what can you say? They rounded up the usual suspects – rodents, birds, mosquitos, romaine lettuce – and found no origin. None of the initially presenting patients had left the county for six months, let alone the country, so it had to be endemic. Whatever corrupted our lungs, it came from here, and we demanded that they find it.

And they did. Some still blame them for the time the investigation took, unfairly. Who would have suspected fungus? They could not immediately recognize the spores in the tissue samples: the smallest previously-known spore had been 3 micrometers by 2 micrometers, so they did not know to look for 1X1. When they did find spores, they believed them incidental rather than the culprit because while pneumonia can stem from fungi, the rapidity with which the disease murdered the doctors and patients at Davenport Hospital screamed “contagion.” Fungal pneumonia was never contagious and rarely rapid, until now. Prior to this mutation, only the immunosuppressed were at risk. And, of course, fungal infections respond to antifungals.

Our plague responds to nothing.

Certainly, they could not have suspected it came from the trees. Healthy trees, of all species, with not a visible blemish on them, until you looked very closely at a limb, any limb, and saw the spots. Black. Myriad. Fecund.

So now the trees are gone. It was the only way. Mile after mile of pine and oak and birch, chopped and incinerated. They found fire kills the spores if it’s hot enough (cremation is mandatory), and it’s all they know to do, here and in the other places. Most of the contamination spread in-state, but there were also outbreaks across the border in Pennsylvania. A few poor souls drove spores to Kentucky when their kindergartner kept a hiking stick, which souvenir cost them their lives and everyone else Knobs State Forest.

There have been no outbreaks for ten months. We’ve all moved away, and I assume my family will be safe, miles and miles from our Victorian where, for all I know, the plates still wait at the dinner table. The hazmat suits who rushed us away ordered us to leave everything behind for fear of those micrometer by micrometer specks. They think they’ve destroyed them all, though of course the world will know soon enough. The spores would germinate in June.

I have listened to people complain ad nauseum about how unfair death is and how they wish they could live forever as well any number of conspiracy theories about how there is a way to live forever, but “they” are trying to keep it secret, while “they” enjoy the benefits eternal life.

Balderdash. I have lived for three millennia at this point and let me tell you, immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Consider this: The first time around, I had a fairly "normal" existence. I was born – although I really don’t remember that so maybe I just appeared one day but I think things would have gone differently had that been the case, I don’t know. There’s no one around to ask. Anyway, I was born, I grew up, I had parents – again, I am assuming at this point because my memory isn’t as good as it once was, and I could only start writing things down on paper about 1500 years after I was born. So anyway, I grew up, I had a partner, we had children, they grew up, my partner died, my children and their partners died, my children’s children died…but somehow, I didn’t. Of course, I figured out that something was up long before I had to leave the place I had called home for those early years. I didn’t need a mirror (thank goodness since they were invented some 2800 years after I was born). I had the eyes of my family, my friends, my neighbors. The little insidious comments about how I never changed, I always looked the same, I looked better than my children, my grandchildren. I had no answers. I’d just hunch a shoulder and say, “Thank you?” People telling you how young you look gets old very quickly. It’s never a compliment. Indeed, it became the death knell to each iteration of my life.

And I have to say, yes, it is a miserable thing to bury everyone you love and have to find the wherewithal to continue living. And watching generation after generation find new reasons to hate (or the same old reasons with new packaging) and more technologically advanced ways to kill, is not heartening. Watching economic and political systems, nations and religions, rise and fall? Not great entertainment. Seeing knowledge expand exponentially only to contract (remember the Dark Ages?): not fun.

But it is absolutely terrifying to have to leave everything that you have known, everything that is familiar and treasured, to forge a new life elsewhere where you know no one and, most importantly, where no one knows you, because those that do know you - indeed even those who have loved you - become fearful of you. You are an aberration of everything they know should be. And as far as everyone knows, the circle of life is just that: a circle. Life should not be a continuous, unending line. No one should look 25 for 100 years, never mind 3000. Granted, the witch hunts and all their manifestations could not kill me even when they tried. But they did send me off and running from lives I loved too many times to count.

I wouldn’t wish immortality on my worst enemy.

It came softly, first, with the timidity of a new student matriculating halfway through the year. Transmitted through the tight spirals of familiarity and trust bred by otherness. Infecting and propagating unfettered until awareness dawned too late, that, independence is a learned behavior. That because the skill-set and will necessary to think for oneself has long since fallen out of fashion we faced this catastrophe absent inoculation. And so it was that scholarship was overtaken by the social media perpetual motion machine. Which values only the sensational. Ushering in this new decade in our great age of enlightenment awash in epidemic ignorance. Contracted through eyes, and ears precisely tuned for the reception of information which changes continuously and cannot be investigated. Bolstered by the compulsory and universal acceptance of godheads speaking and writing fast enough to recraft the world in the image of their half truths and whole lies.

White Noise reigns from the pulpits of power granted the popular and we can no longer distinguish fact from fantasy. Because, questioning is anathema to the salvation promised the obedient. Because the threat of excommunication, of cancellation, hangs over the heads of those faithful lest they do or say or think anything outside the approved messaging. Conformity, even and especially in the pretense of individuality, has become our god and our country. And it came softly. Welcomed into our homes in the shortened news cycle, the lackadaisical relationship with accuracy, and the appellation to authority usurped from the worthy by the exciting. Ours will not be death by disease, stress, war, famine, or loneliness. Rather all those and more as functions of the greater pandemic, ignorance.

in the style of Robert Browning

A soda. There’s a chimpanzee downtown

At Robinson’s, right now, drinking soda,

And all the while reporters scrawl and laugh

To see this monkey—Joe Mendi, it’s named—

With straw in furry hand ten feet from where

I first agreed to do this thing. Is this

What it was for? A headline, scores of them,

To show the circus came to Dayton? I’m

Unsure about it, George, unsure of how

This serves our cause, or Dayton, Tennessee—

Why do you laugh…? Of course I know we’re in

The news! But to what end? Evolution’s name,

And Dayton’s name, are tied now to a chimp

Who sips a soda on a stool, a joke,

A flannel-suited mockery of all

We know is true. …I won’t. My lips remain,

While angry, silent, mum. But answer me:

Am I a puppet, Mr. Rappalyea?

I thought I joined a team that day, but shots

Are fired about my head and I call none.

You set the meeting, asked me there,

Contrived arrest for something I’d not done

And I agreed, to end this backward law.

I will not spill; the story’s safe with me:

“A drugstore argument, a broken law.”

And not at all confederacy, and not

A plan. None will admit the origin.

They can’t—ungilded candor lacks the shine

Demanded by ambition. Robinson

Is slinging drinks all day (his drugstore will

Replace its fountain when all’s said and done,

Just wait), and Bryan wields his Bible, verse

By verse declaiming holy words in town

So people nod “Amen.” And Darrow, he

Spins yarns and charms and holds his court, a king

And clown commingled. George, I’m nauseous. I

Just want to swim. July’s thick heat just grows

Unbearably, and swim I do, but they

(reporters, always more reporters) stand

With notepads. I can have no peace. It’s not

Your name they know, the mastermind behind

The scenes. It’s mine. You choose to speak

But I am forced to hide. I’ll always hide.

You knew that, George, I think… a brand new hire,

Fresh out from university... The books

Will say that Tennessee v. Scopes took place

In 1925. That’s not the end

For Scopes. They print my name, not yours. The case

Soon ends, but I will never teach again.