It had been attached to my bulletin board in Niagara Hall at Penn State Behrend, this anti-war poem by e.e. cummings. And over the years, Arthur and I have often applied the 'nipponized bit' fragment to particularly bone-headed behaviors we've observed - even in ourselves.
Today with another kind of war - the war against that relentless two-year-old, Covid 19, the poem resurfaces.
It's been two years in the long life of my mother, the woman whose husband was born in the midst of another pandemic all those years ago. Two years for the two-year-old granddaughter in Alaska who knows nothing of the times before. Two years for the big grandchildren, their carefully planned routines upended and new ones often requiring face masks. Two years for our offspring and their partners, responsible now for these children in a world where even a trip to the grocery store could seem perilous, where day care and school are canceled. A world where working from home added layers of complication and layers of convenience too.
And it's been two years for us too. At first we couldn't find hand sanitizer and toilet paper. At first we learned how to wipe down the groceries from the store. At first we turned to the sewing machine to fashion our face coverings. We heard about shut-downs and lockdowns, essential workers, social distancing, testing, CDC, FDA, MRNA, PCR, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson.
In these two years of a worldwide health emergency, we've been told many things, and some of those things we've been told we believe.
(I've written about the worldwide pandemic in other posts, here and here. )
*The final lines of e.e. cummings' poems refer to Manhattan's dismantled Sixth Avenue elevated tracks, which were bought as scrap metal by Imperial Japan three years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
