Restoration

by J. F. Krause

  Every day, this went on with the Shiite Framework and the Sunni Homeland making demands and the women, who, with the support of a few of their male colleagues, refused to comply. Since the SF and SH couldn’t really affect any changes to the women’s behavior, the SH and SF sent their emissaries to LaWanda to insist that she remove the women, and even their male sympathizers, something LaWanda refused to do.

  In the end I was called, and I had to remind both groups that we would never send anyone anywhere against their wills unless they had broken one of our laws, and our laws didn’t include what a woman or man wore, as long as their body was properly covered according to our own very liberal requirements which didn’t include headscarves or long robes. I also asked them if they had so many people left that they could afford to lose these individuals even as they faced the extreme technically skilled labor shortages we all faced. Could they actually hope to maintain their current standards of living if women were eliminated from places of responsibility? Finally, I pointed out that we have never promised to enforce their laws on our turf and that unless they modified their rules they would end up hemorrhaging talented women AND men if they insisted on compliance with rules and laws that were unpopular and of no real benefit to their populations anyway. After all, why save a cultural tradition that cost you the people who were supposed to practice it. I knew they didn’t like what I was saying to them, but they also knew it was the truth. No one has the ability to enforce unpopular, unnecessary, and impractical rules. We can’t, and they can’t. To top it off, we are only too happy to have their cultural refugees. I figured they were about to blink in this standoff, and I was right. After all, once again, the Coalition had all the face cards in this little dispute. We had the schools and the educators, and not just the trained dieticians like LaWanda. This was happening in other classes being taught at the time in Duhok in courses ranging from electrical and chemical engineering to architecture and pharmaceutical education. The Sunnis folded first followed soon after by the Shiites, and before the women and their supporters were finished with these specific two-week courses, both the SH and SF were announcing to their publics that most communities were removing the restrictions on women’s dress, modesty excepted. At the end of the course, the participants returned to their communities and the SF and SH kept their word. Women had just made a giant step toward personal responsibility and freedom. In reality, the cultural life of Erbil is not very different from the cultural life in the communities of the Shiite Framework and the Sunni Homeland, only a bit more open and lackadaisical.

  We’re happy LaWanda’s back, of course, but we already miss her little boy, Jason. Jason could be Chad’s little brother the way they have bonded. They even look like brothers. Chad is blond, and Jason has bright red-blonde hair. They both have the same eye color and freckles, and I think Jason is going to be almost as good on the piano as Chad is, and according to Jane, that is very good. I think staying with us for a couple of weeks or so sort of inspired him to work even harder at the piano.

  All of our children are mad about soccer, and they all play on teams at school. The SLO teams are becoming very popular as they have been having quite a bit of success against our archrivals in Fresno. Goodness, how did we already get an archrival? We’re the gorilla in the room with over thirty-five hundred people, but even with our size advantage, Fresno has the best soccer teams in California. Our men have played them three times, and lost twice, but only narrowly. Our win was just as close, but still we are the only team that has a chance to take the California men’s championship away from them. Our women have beaten them twice to their one victory over us. Interestingly, our women also lost once to Davis which puts us in a tie with Fresno in the California League.

  We are also getting ready to form three basket ball leagues, one men’s, one women’s, and one mixed. The mixed one is based on half court basketball with three men from each team playing on one side, and their three women teammates playing on the other side. The first quarter starts with one team fielding three male forwards in opposition to the other team’s three male guards while the reverse happens with the women. Visiting teams gets to choose who forwards first, their men or their women. When the guards get control, either because of a score by the opposing forwards or a turnover, they maneuver the ball to their own team’s forwards on the other side of the court. At the quarter, they flip sides and all the guards become forwards and all the first quarter forwards become guards. It’s much less aggressive as far as physical contact is concerned with practically none allowed. It also means that every turnover is challenged all the way to the half court where the guards deliver the ball to their forwards. Remarkably, this really isn’t anything new. It’s a resurrection of a variety of basketball played in the US until the seventies, maybe longer. Jerry and Chanelle both play on the same mixed team at school. Charlie is much more physically active than Jerry and prefers the more rough and tumble sports programs available at school. I don’t think there’s a single sports activity he wouldn’t try. Originally, we developed the mixed team version so that very small communities could compete, but it’s become quite popular even in places like SLO and NYC where there are easily enough people to field many all male and all female teams.

  Guilds sponsor most teams, but the city team is made up of the best players from each of the guild teams. There are guild team games of all sorts almost every night, but we don’t go to very many of them. We’re too tired. We never miss the all-city teams, though.

  Todd and Cynthia and a whole bunch of their little band of nerds will soon be off to their Gap Years. We purposely reserved the May 1 cohort and the June 1 cohort for the kids who operated the internet connections that got us all together. We wanted them to be together in person. Todd is in the May 1 group, and Cynthia is in the June 1 group. That was done on purpose, too. We want Todd and Cynthia to be close enough to get to enjoy each other’s company, and far enough that they are forced to meet new people. They were okay with it, or we wouldn’t have separated them.

  May 7

  Last week, I had an appointment with a Dr. Skidmore who actually drove down to SLO from Stanford so he could lay out a plan to me in person. I had no idea what he wanted to talk about other than that it concerned “more effective uses of retirees’ skills and time”.

  April buzzed me in the break room to let me know he had arrived. I think I surprised him when I addressed him from behind. He was standing talking to April whose desk is right outside my office. As I stepped out into the hall, I transferred my cup of coffee from my right hand to my left hand in preparation for our handshake. April gestured toward me so he turned around to look in my direction.

  “Good morning, Mr. Caldwell. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.” His handshake was firm and his smile was disarming. He looked exactly like a TV doctor. He was tall, with a full head of silvery strawberry blond hair, and he even had a cleft in his chin. He had a deep voice that if he could carry a tune, he’d have been a great addition to a church choir. I couldn’t help thinking how some people are born with it all. Tall, good looking, hair, and a charming voice topped off with just a little bit of a southern accent, something I never actually had even though I was from Georgia. I guess I watched too much TV when I was a kid. When I try to affect a Southern accent, my friends all say I sound like a Yankee trying to sound Southern.

  “It’s my pleasure, Dr. Skidmore. And please don’t call me Mr. Caldwell. I’m not a teacher anymore. It’s just Bobby or maybe Robert if you need something a little more formal.”

  “Thank you. And my friends and colleagues call me Theo. I’m not a Theodore.” I smiled at April who had stepped over to open the door to my office. We entered and sat down at the smaller of my two tables that are located in the middle and at the opposite end of the room from my desk and personal work area.

  “April tells me you’re one of our teaching doctors at Stanford and that you’re originally from Texas. Is that correct?”

  “W
hy, yes it is. I grew up in Tuttle, Texas, a little town in the Panhandle with maybe 500 people. I think most of them were related to me; I was number four out of eight kids; my dad died in an oilfield accident when my mom was carrying the last of us. If everyone in town hadn’t been family, I don’t know what we would have done. When The Sickness happened, everyone in Tuttle disappeared. Whatever the magic DNA formula was, it only happened once in our family. In addition to all my friends and family in Tuttle, I lost my wife, two kids, and three grandchildren all the same day.” As he paused I couldn’t help but notice the distant stare I’ve seen a thousand times since that day, and I realized once again that no one alive was born with it all. Everyone, including this TV handsome doctor, has suffered incalculable losses.

  “After The Sickness, I was one of three survivors in Prairie Glade, Texas where I practiced medicine. One of them was a 14 year old boy who managed to pull all three of us together because he was listening to you on the internet. We owe you a lot. I hope you know that.”

  “Thank you, Theo, and no one owes me anything. But I don’t think you came just to say ‘thank you’. Am I right?”

  “Yeah. But I promised myself that if I ever got the opportunity to say thank you, I would. All of us ended up in the Amarillo community and from there, I answered the call to come help reopen the Stanford Medical School. I’ve been there for over a year now, but after they spread the medical schools around the way they did, there are more than enough doctors to teach, and I want to get back to what I do best. I want to be a doctor again. I’ve been meeting a lot of people who are around my age, which is 71 by the way, who don’t want to teach what we’ve learned; we want to do it. I’ve been on the internet talking with other doctors and engineers and nurses and contractors. You name it and we’ve got someone who used to do it. We don’t want to end our days teaching our neighbors; we want to get on one of those empty yachts and sail the world and have fun.”

  My heart sank. I didn’t know what to say. Of all the things he could have said, I was totally unprepared for that. I probably couldn’t blame him, but I had no idea how to respond. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. He had more to say.

  “A group of us want to take one of those ocean going vessels and take our skills where they’re needed. We keep reading on the internet where these little communities are asking for medical help or help with their plumbing or electrical grids. We can do that for them. Some of these little communities didn’t have much to begin with, but even though they now have enough food and have decent housing, they never did have enough trained professionals and the few they had survived at the same rate as the rest of the population. We want to do something for those communities while their own citizens are being trained to take care of their needs. Right now I’m in touch with over a hundred skilled professionals who want to make a difference one more time in their lives.”

  Between the relief I felt at the direction this conversation had just taken and the realization that this was a really good idea with a lot of potential to help a lot of people, I was completely speechless. For some reason, my face always makes me look calm and relaxed, so I ended up making him feel that I was unenthusiastic about his ideas when in reality I was jumping up and down, at least inside I was, at such a creative and new concept that had the potential to do so much good for so many people.

  Theo must have taken my expression as something akin to skepticism. “We won’t be abandoning our responsibilities or anything, we will only take this on if we can do it without harming our home communities.”

  “I like everything you’ve described so far, but I wonder if you’re aware that we have literally hundreds of smaller ocean going vessels that might serve your needs even better than yachts. We even have hospital ships available. Would some of those be useful to your group?”

  “They might, but again, even they may be too big for what we are proposing. As it stands, we don’t need to send scores or even dozens of people out to underserved communities. We think we can send a couple of doctors and nurses, a dentist or two, a handful of engineers, some teachers, a few experienced construction people, and maybe some farmers.

  At the moment we are thinking of maybe a boat or ship with twenty or so of us moving along a particular route of service, sort of like a circuit riding preacher. When we get to a location, we would park our vessel, which would also serve as our home by the way, and we’d stay a few weeks or months and help the locals with their projects. Pretty much everyone has the supplies they need, they just lack the experienced personnel to get the projects off the ground. Most communities have medical personnel in the pipeline, but it may be a few more years before their people come back with the skills the community needs right now.”

  I could tell he and his people had been working on this project long before he came to me. “I’m guessing you’ve already put a plan together, so what can I do for you and your colleagues to help you get this project started?”

  “We need your approval first, and then we need help identifying appropriate ships. We may also need to retrofit the ships so that we can perform some surgeries on board in some of the areas where they may not have the proper equipment. That’s something we can do ourselves, but we need access to supplies and tools to do the work.”

  The more he talked, the more I realized his group had pretty much covered all the bases before he came to visit me. “We know most areas have access to some pretty sophisticated medical facilities and equipment; we also know that some of the communities are based in places that were pretty low tech, and some were pretty small even before The Sickness. An example that comes to mind is Morro Bay just up the road from here. They only have around 70 people and no doctors or electricians. Of course, they can rely on San Luis Obispo for all the help they need, but what about the communities just like Morro Bay that don’t have access to their own SLO?”

  “Okay. First, let me assure you that from everything you’ve said so far, this sounds like a great idea. But I don’t get to approve these things. I’ll be happy to take you to the Representatives who actually do approve things for the Communities. Fortunately, their agenda is fairly light, and I think we can slip you in at this next meeting in a couple of days. That will give you time to put together a proposal including all your provision and equipment requests along with some project parameters. Do you have a name for your project yet?”

  “As a matter of fact, we do. We call it the ‘World Emeritus Project’. And yes, there are actually four of us who will want to speak to the Representatives. You’ll have to guide us through the process if you don’t mind.”

  A couple of days later, after lots of thought, I didn’t really think there’d be a problem with what Dr. Skidmore and his fellow retirees were proposing. But, like many optimists, I tend to underestimate the power of negativity and skepticism. Theo Skidmore and his fellow World Emeritus Project planners were waiting in the lobby outside the room where the Representatives meet. We spoke briefly and Theo introduced me to the other three. Brenda Parkerson was an educator/counselor, Matthew Probst was an electrical engineer, and Bob Myerson was a former contractor who had had his own construction company. Each of them were currently working as higher level professors or instructors at one of the adult education schools. And, like Theo, they wanted to practice their former jobs, not teach them.

  While the meeting got started, the four of them waited for me to call them in to make their presentations. As we were reviewing the agenda, which really was pretty light, George decided to be his usual speed bump. I think he realized that after the elections in June, he had no hope of continuing on the Representative Council. I could hardly wait, but, in the meantime, I still had to get through almost two more months.

  George likes attention. If he can’t get it by being good, he’ll get it by being bad, just as long as he gets it. He first tried to insist that we were too busy to consider altering the agenda, something that actually produced a laugh from the other representatives. That didn’t please
him since he doesn’t aspire to be the class clown. His next ploy was to question my motives. No one on the Council believes I have ulterior motives so that didn’t work either. Eventually, he gave up and we added the World Emeritus Project to our agenda. I suspect most of the Representatives were happy to see something of merit on the agenda. We’re so used to having next to nothing to talk about aside from accepting some new and very small community into our ranks. All decisions are made locally and the Representatives have very few worldwide programs or projects to discuss. Our discussions pretty much are limited to the universities and higher-level specialty schools, the Gap Year, conservation, my occasional trips, and the world military forces. Having a retirement driven service wing to add to the civilian component of our navy would be a big deal for a Representative Council that is looking for something to do.