I wanted this column to be about something important, something happening right now in the world, something urgent. I began to look up words: pandemic, virus, epidemic, Spanish flu. I wanted to write about fear and anxiety and courage.
But, in the middle of all this thinking, a sudden trip arose: My 14-year-old son and I would fly to northern California to see Grandma Great and to help my parents move. All around me flu news swirls. People I know are buying masks, circling their arms around their children and holding them in, frightened.
Oh, pooh. I think, but I drive to a little out-of-the-way store thinking surely it will still have some masks in case I need one for my son. His safety is, after all, my job.
I play in my head the first time he got pneumonia, before he could even walk. He would get it twice more before he turned 3. What would have been a cold for a regular child, for him turned quickly into six weeks of compromised breathing and a cough that sounded as if his lungs would come up out of his chest.
I lay in bed more than once with him, tiny, tucked beside me in his red or blue or green overwashed, almost worn-out sleeper. I knew how many respirations per minute were safe, and I counted over and over until I fell asleep.
I understand fear.
At the little store, I park the car, and walk past the blue tangerine boxes stacked to the side of the entrance, past the small cafe tables and the mama with the baby; he stops drinking to smile, three-toothed, up at me.
I walk down the aisle, and pass the hand sanitizer, which I notice because there are only three or four bottles left. I think, “Yes. Sure,” and grab two bottles, feeling vaguely foolish. A woman spots my bottles of hand sanitizer, smiles at me and, still smiling, says brightly, “It’s the illegals. Anywhere where there’s illegals, we’ll have it.”
I’m too shocky-frozen to speak a word, and I hold on my face what I assume is an utterly blank, non-inviting, surely-I-heard-you-wrong stare. She doesn’t even take a breath before she fills me in, still smiling. “The flu. The swine flu. It’s because of the illegals.”
The pharmacist calls her name, and she swooshes away.
I’m dazed. My throat still hurts now. I’m disgusted, not only with her, but with myself for not saying a thing.
On the way to the front of the store, I pass more babies, one in a seersucker pink-striped dress with skin like the whitest of cotton balls; she smells of coconut sunscreen even from 5 feet away. Down her pretzel goes on the table — her father picks it up, wipes it off, hands it back. I wait in line to buy a sandwich and coffee. Someone behind me coughs. Someone else sneezes. When it’s my turn, I move to the counter, slide my credit card through the machine and punch in my number, touching the same buttons that are finger punched a thousand times over a day. I choose the side exit, touch the same handle the woman in front of me touched, and the man in front of her, and the child in front of them.
I planned to write a column about the flu, about being afraid. Instead I’m fretting about the lady in the flowered blouse and the sad, dangerous thing she said. At the airport, the Transportation Security Administration officer directing the slow, obedient bodies through the security line was lighthearted. “Folks,” he said, “Don’t be afraid to step up to that podium. Give the man your ticket and ID. He doesn’t bite. He doesn’t even have teeth! Don’t be afraid!”
So I went, with my half-Mexican- American son, his itchy allergy eyes, his cough. We pass the black security guard, the Indian photographer, the two Asian tourists, the white woman with her daughter, the Spanish-speaking teens, all of us moving toward the concourse, with hundreds of others, all of us coming from places, going to places, all of us moving on beside each other gently; it behooves none of us to forget that we’re all in this together — come hell or high water, or any kind of flu.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
