Restoration

by J. F. Krause

  My first year of teaching I was homesick, but my fellow teachers were very understanding and helped me adjust. I called my mom a lot. I went home to Georgia whenever I could. As a matter of fact, I had just been home for Christmas before The Sickness. I miss her to this day. But we all miss someone, nowadays.

  After our visit at my old home, we were back in the car. Lori pressed me for stories about my childhood so I told her about growing up, about my mom, and about college. I talked more than I should have while we drove into Atlanta, at least I talked more than I was comfortable with. I think it was because I was really jazzed about the visit to my old house. She asked if she could record everything, and I agreed without giving it a thought. I sort of regretted that afterward, but I needn’t have worried; it didn’t come back to haunt me. I don’t have skeletons in my background, no scandals. I’m just very private. But talking about my mom, I realized a few things, not just that I took after her in long range planning, but that she had to have understood that her youngest child was gay. She must have worried about me, but she never showed any concern. She loved me with no strings and trusted that I would make my way in life on my own terms, at least as much as anyone can do that, before or after The Sickness.

  As we were nearing the airport in Atlanta, Lori asked if she could write everything up and share it on the Asheville news blog. What could I say? So I agreed, and we parted company. Her article came out almost before I unpacked my bags back in SLO. When we said goodbye at the hotel, I asked about little Rocky. She still has him. And he’s going to be a daddy. Evidently, spaying and neutering our pets hasn’t been at the top of people’s to do list.

  At the airport hotel in Atlanta, I met LaWanda who was on her way to Kurdistan to conduct a weeklong nutrition conference at the old American University there. Actually, the university is quite new and very nice. They are setting it up as an international conference center. LaWanda is one of only a handful of nutritionists with advanced degrees left and is in pretty high demand now that we raise most of our own food locally. She and a few of her colleagues have set up a series of workshops in Duhok to train people in the larger area to be local nutritionists. Interestingly, the Kurds have already invited future nutritionists from both the Sunni Homeland and the Shiite Framework. Even though it’s only been a couple of days since we agreed to work together cooperatively and exchange Embassies, the Kurds moved fast and sent them invitations. After centuries of often being an occupied and oppressed people group, the Kurds have gained valuable insight on how to treat both minorities in their midst and their larger neighbors.

  LaWanda and I had dinner together the night before our respective planes took off. I told her about touring my childhood home, and she talked about her six year old ward, Jason. “Please thank Kevin again for offering to take care of Jason while I’m gone. Ten days is a long time for a six year old. He likes you and Kevin so much that I know he’ll have a great time. And I won’t worry about him since he’s with you. You know, you and Kevin have become the one stop place for overnight babysitting for a lot of us.”

  “We’re happy to help out. This is very important what you’re doing in Duhok. And I’m sure Chad and Charlie will enjoy his company, too, not to mention Kevin and me. It turns out Kevin loves kids, and I love Kevin, so we’re all winners here. What’s on your plate when you get to Duhok?”

  “My ‘dietitian’ colleagues and I have been planning to have a series of these seminars around the Coalition for some time, not just in Kurdistan, but when you worked out an agreement with the Shiites and the Sunnis, the Kurds asked if we would be willing to expand our scheduled training there to include trainees from both of those groups. We didn’t mind at all, and the old American University site is ideal for trainings like mine. It’s amazing how fast they pulled everything together, although when you don’t have to deal with miles of red tape, it shouldn’t keep surprising me. There are, as of now, almost forty registrants, including over 10 each from Sunni and Shiite communities. I’m very excited. Starting this summer, we’re going to rollout undergraduate classes through the distance learning project out of Blumenau and Florianopolis, down in South Brazil. I don’t even have to leave SLO. The Stanford people helped them set it all up out of one of the universities down there. With so many teachers and lecturers unable or unwilling to just pull up stakes and move to a college or university town, this may be one of the answers, especially in fields like mine. Anyway, we’ll find out.”

  “One of the really unexpected results of The Sickness is that a lot of our survivors have a fair amount of time on their hands. Thank goodness so many of them are using it to go back to school. Speaking of time on their hands, how are things working out with Max?” Max Underwood was one of the original team leaders in the food acquisition work group and now supervised the SLO food storage and distribution work group. His expertise from his days as a supermarket manager has been invaluable to us from the beginning.

  “Oh, we’re getting there. He wants to get married, but I’m a little leery. He’s been married three times; of course, the last one didn’t end in divorce. But still, I don’t have a marriage track record and I’m 37 years old with a 6 year old. It’s a big decision. And he wants children, too.”

  “Well, you’ve got a full time professional helping you figure it out, you’ll end up just fine, “ I reassured her.

  “What do you mean, I have a full time professional figuring it out for me? Who are you talking about!”

  “You! Give yourself some advice, think about it, and then follow it. I do that all the time. My full time professional has a college degree, is clean, sober, and over 21. Yours has a doctorate even, and evidently is 37 years old. I think you can trust yourself, don’t you?”

  “You know, your young friend was right, Bobby. You are sort of like a navigator. We all are, now. We just have to keep finding our own way in the world, one day after the other. She was also right about people needing to tell you that you’re doing a good job.”

  “Thank you, LaWanda. I’ll send you a list of my sizes and favorite colors.”

  LaWanda laughed and we continued dinner with small talk, much of it about Max. It turns out Max is twice a widower, grew up in Boise, Idaho, and came up through the ranks in the grocery business starting out as a box boy. The next morning, her plane left a couple of hours ahead of mine. There were four planes taking off that day, and I was on the third one. Atlanta is a busy airport. Sometimes there are nine or ten flights out of Atlanta.

  I didn’t have the plane to myself since I was just a passenger like everyone else. There were thirteen of us in all, but I did get the seat next to me all to myself. This plane could hold sixteen passengers and had two attendants. It would be nonstop to Los Angeles so I could look forward to having five hours to daydream and read. I force myself to read fiction every other book. Like a lot of men, I’m really drawn to nonfiction. Before The Sickness, that was about all I read. But at one of the parent conferences for the kids, Kevin and I were asked to help encourage our boys to not get in the habit of reading just nonfiction. I didn’t tell the teachers that I was guilty of that to an extreme degree, so now I’m trying to expand my horizons. I’ve become a big fan of Rex Stout and his Nero Wolf series. I almost never figure out who the guilty party is before Nero Wolf solves it in the end, but that’s what makes it interesting. Jane turned me on to Georgette Heyer who wrote regency love stories. I’m a little embarrassed about liking them so no one knows about this guilty little pleasure of mine. Fortunately, Kevin likes them, too. He’s not so fond of Rex Stout, preferring Agatha Christie. He never had a problem with fiction and he reads a balance of fiction, medical books and articles, and biographies. Oh, and lately, I’ve gotten hooked on science fiction. Not being a science type myself, I don’t know if some of the plots are doable or not. I don’t care, either.

  As I sat in my seat at the back of the plane, or at least at the back of the passenger section since the plane has been reconfigured to carry cargo and eq
uipment, I couldn’t help but think about how so much has changed. People have changed. For one thing, there isn’t any money. From what I can tell, the economists have given up on introducing money back into our lives, at least in the near term. They’re talking about not bringing it back for years, something that sort of frightens me. Won’t we need money?

  Evidently not, at least for the foreseeable future. Without money, drug smuggling dried up. The salvage crews keep finding drug stashes here and there, sometimes big stashes. In the old world, they might have been tempted to hide it and sell it. Now that money is gone and there isn’t anything to buy, there’s no motivation to try to smuggle it out into the general population. Our citizens are so afraid of devolving into bedlam with anarchy breaking out, a la old TV shows about society falling apart, they don’t have much toleration for antisocial behavior. So our drug dependent people have had to turn to our medical system to get help and relief. Drug use isn’t really a crime so much as a health issue. The worst case scenario for a salvage crew member gone bad is that they lose their job. Salvaging is a sexy job, I’m told, and besides, no one wants to suddenly be looking for another guild to work for.

  Prostitution is also no longer a crime. Our communities just don’t have the heart to punish people because they wanted to experience another human embrace or more. Since money doesn’t change hands, and no one has to participate, how can we describe what is going on as prostitution. I understand that one of the more popular exchanges for sex is getting your house cleaned. Other than Calloway, everyone cleans their own houses nowadays, or at least everyone that doesn’t participate in this little transaction. Consequently, smaller houses and apartments are very popular. Our current version of prostitution is okay, but rape, on the other hand, is still a serious crime and has been known to happen, unfortunately. Nowadays, housecleaners aren’t what they used to be.

  Theft is nonexistent, but we do have a few things that are as close to crimes as we get anymore. Hoarding is a crime, at least nominally. We’ve had a couple of cases of hoarding that we had to deal with. There was a woman in Paris who was caught trying to steal the Mona Lisa. We don’t really have guards around our treasures since there are more treasures than there are us, but we do have cameras. She evidently forgot about them or didn’t know they were there, but since Paris only has a few thousand people now, she was instantly recognized. What passes for a police force nowadays paid her a visit and discovered she had lovingly collected an entire apartment building of paintings and other ‘objets d’art’. Since she was a good citizen and, other than her collection, she had been a contributing citizen of the city, she was given her choice of several places to move to, and in the end she chose the Isle of Wight. It was thought she would benefit from a more rural environment, and her new community was happy to have her since she is a dentist, and who couldn’t use another dentist these days.

  We also had a guy who was hoarding dogs. He ended up in San Diego after we discovered he had set up a little farm outside the Minneapolis-St. Paul Community where he was attempting to house over seventy dogs. He wasn’t successfully caring for them and the local community moved in and managed to rehabilitate most of the dogs before finding them new homes in the area. He was given several options for relocation, and he chose to go to the San Diego wild animal preserve where he’s a welcome member of the team. His heart was in the right place; all of us who loved having pets have ached that we just couldn’t save them all. We didn’t even find most of them before it was too late.

  Another thing we don’t put up with very long is sloth. Everyone works in our communities. We don’t have to work a lot, but we have to work at least four hours a day, five times a week, or twenty hours a week. Most people work their time in what is their assigned job, and they volunteer or study the rest of the time. Or they just go downtown and drink coffee or play tennis, bowl, hike, or whatever. Oh, and some just drink beer. Most people are pretty good about the drinking part, but of course, we have a few who drink to excess, which is another medical issue.

  Working beyond four hours a day is a form of ‘volunteering’. Anyway, volunteering in any acceptable form and taking coursework is how we earn work credits for the few things we can ‘buy’: airplane tickets or cruises or vacations. I have so many volunteer hours on my books I may never be able to use them all. Kevin has lots of volunteer hours, too. Kevin almost always works at least eight hours a day at the hospital, and frequently more. Then he volunteers at the school. The problem is that we don’t have time to take a family vacation even though we have lots of work credits stored away. Besides, because I have been traveling a lot I don’t really want to go away much. Kevin and I aren’t the only ones who have lots of stored work credits. Avery and Dr. Mary are loaded up with work credits, too. A lot of our medical people, farmers, educators, and engineers would rather work than vacation or do nothing.

  As for the people accused of sloth, they’re given a serious talking to, and if that doesn’t work, we give them the option of living on their own or relocating to a more structured environment. So far, a handful has chosen to live on their own, but most of those came back within a few weeks and were willing to put in their twenty hours. Together we can have a good life, but alone, we really have to struggle and it takes a lot more work than just twenty hours.

  Perhaps, the biggest problems, at least in the beginning, were the wastrels. It took a lot of patience, but we got most of it under control. Still, nothing is perfect and we had to exile a few before they finally agreed to toe the line. Being sent away from society sucks, evidently. I’ve never experienced it, but it does the trick for almost every crime.

  And then, we have Tristan da Cunha for severe crime. I think the only thing worse than being alone all the time would be to be surrounded by a bunch of psychopaths. Maybe if I were a psychopath, I’d see things differently, but I doubt that it works that way.

  Sitting there on the plane was almost surreal. I knew everyone on the plane knew who I was, but they did their best not to notice me. I am so thankful I don’t have to worry about photographers everywhere I go. People now are remarkably polite. I think the fact that we all live in what would have been very small towns before The Sickness has something to do with our new found congeniality, that and the fact that all of us have had our hearts ripped open, and that seems to have created a sense of compassion that may have been lacking in the anonymity of our lives before The Sickness. I loved living in Atlanta, or at least a suburb just as I loved living in a Los Angeles suburb. But people now seem a little more like the ones I grew up with in my small home town in North Georgia. I remember reading that, before the sickness, you could leave your wallet on a park bench in Japan and, later, when you remembered to come back, it would still be there. I don’t know if that was true, but if it was, we’re turning Japanese.

  I finally settled in to read some Nero and Archie.

  April 8

  Today is my mother’s birthday. I miss her very much.

  Last week I attended my first Bar Mitzvah. Kevin and I and the kids were all there.

  Eric and Carl were so handsome in their black suits, and I thought both he and Carl would burst with pride as they greeted us after the formal part of the service, or was it a ceremony? Anyway, we had a great party and Eric was the center of attention. Afterward, all of our kids, except Dinah of course, wanted to know when they could have their Bar Mitzvahs. I told them that since we are Episcopalian, they would have a confirmation service after they complete their classes. Chanelle has been taking them with Jerry so they’ll be finished with them sometime in May. Somehow I don’t think the Episcopalians’ confirmation class graduation is going to be able to compete with the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. Kevin will know what to do. I hope.

  I got back just in time for Lydia and Marco’s wedding. They had as big a wedding as I’ve seen in SLO. I was one of Lydia’s bridesmen, and Kevin was one of Marco’s groomsmen. It was a beautiful wedding, but I had no idea it would be so long. Baptists get
it over and done with pretty quickly and that was what I was used to growing up. Catholics really tie the knot up tight. Probably because they’ve been around so long they have a lot of traditions to cover. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to use the bathroom or faint. We stood, then we knelt, then we stood, then we knelt. And we didn’t have it nearly as bad as poor Lydia and Marco.

  Kevin and I haven’t decided what to do about getting married ourselves. We’ve discussed it. I really don’t know who asked whom. Sorry history books. We consider ourselves married already, but I don’t know about having a big public ceremony. Our minister volunteered he’d be happy to do it any way we want when we decide we’re ready to jump the broom. We’ve already been approached by the TV people in LA who want to broadcast it. That really makes me anxious. On the one hand, I think it’s important for people to have shared heroes and experiences, but I don’t really want to be a hero or the shared experience, and certainly not a worldwide shared experience. I’ll just have to think about it some more. Kevin isn’t pushing one thing or another.

  LaWanda is back home. She taught her two-week seminar and caught the first plane she could back home. She couldn’t wait to see Jason, and Max. While she was there she became an unwitting participant in a small revolution in women’s rights. There were several women and men from both the Shiite Framework and the Sunni Homeland attending her classes at the American University campus in Duhok. As the women from both these groups arrived, they took off their head coverings and their outer garments revealing themselves to be modestly dressed in jeans and long sleeved pullovers. Within a couple of hours, women from both groups were called from class to take telephone calls from their home communities. With so many women gone from the class, LaWanda called a break in her instruction so they could handle their personal business. When class resumed half an hour later the women were back in their places still dressed in the same outfits as before, outfits that were very similar to all the men from their communities. For that matter, they were very similar to the outfits worn by most of the men and women from Coalition Communities as well as their teacher, LaWanda. It wasn’t until the end of class that day that they all stayed behind to talk to LaWanda. They had all, every single woman, been ordered to cover themselves or to return home. Every single woman involved stated to LaWanda that they would remain in Duhok if they were required to modify their attire. It was a well-coordinated action on their part, and both groups of women were adamant they would not comply with the directive to change back to their head to toe coverings.