Restoration

by J. F. Krause

  Anna and Zach are both in their first year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. There are actually three Air Force Academies, one for each of the three military regions. All three of the academies conduct their own first year of training. Then they combine resources for the next three years and all the students do years two, three, and four together moving collectively between the three campuses. It’s hoped that this way we can integrate the personnel of the widely disbursed Coalition Communities. We have the same system for training Naval officers. We may not know for certain if we are successful until we have a couple of classes complete the process. My personal thoughts are that no one wants to put all their eggs in one basket. Who knows if the Coalition Community will succeed?

  One unusual rule the academies have, at least I thought it unusual when I first heard about it, is that cadets cannot marry each other while in training. They can marry if they like, just not to each other. Anna and Zach haven’t discussed any marriage plans, and once I heard about this particular rule, I understand why. They seem to be okay with things as they are so I don’t think it’s a drag on their relationship. Marriage notwithstanding, Anna and Zach seem very happy with each other and their career paths. So while I didn’t see any overt show of affection, at least in public, I think they have a great regard for each other.

  Todd and Cynthia are both really enjoying their Gap Year and are planning to attend college in Stanford. Cynthia wants to be close to her mom but not next door, and Todd wants to go to the best computer engineering program around. Stanford fills both of their needs so that’s where they will be. At least that’s their plan for now. Todd is barely aware of how people feel about him, and all his online fellow heroes. One of the agreements that was sort of arrived at by the people in charge of Gap was to put as many of ‘Todd’s Nerds’ in the same cohorts as possible. We weren’t thinking they would invent something; we just wanted them to get to meet physically after all they did to help us all get organized. We’re all very aware that it took a lot of tech savvy kids to get us off the ground and connected to each other. Without them, things would have gone south quickly and stayed there.

  Eric Bowersock is excelling in his high school studies and will be going off to his Gap Year in a few months. When he rode his bike into SLO from Pismo Beach soon after The Sickness, he was a quiet, almost awkward, skinny kid of 13. From my conversations with Carl Markowitz and with Eric himself while he was spending time with Kevin and me, I know that his biological parents had been pretty busy the last couple of years running an insurance office. Eric was an only child and had become pretty independent, something that may have enhanced his chances of survival on his own before he showed up in SLO. After he became Carl’s ward, he blossomed. Carl doesn’t claim any responsibility, but we all know that Carl has shined as a surrogate parent. He and Eric bonded beautifully. Eric, who was completely non religious before The Sickness, embraced Carl’s Jewish faith and culture so fervently that he even completed his bar mitzvah, not an easy feat starting from scratch at 13. For a while he talked of becoming a rabbi, but now he seems to be headed into the sciences and will probably study some field of engineering here in SLO. All that could change though after his Gap. I’m under the impression that a lot of changes unfold during that year. After all, look at Jovantha.

  What I have noticed is that people tended to fall into two categories as they rehabilitated from the day everyone died. Many of us, especially adults, put down roots and rebuilt families and friendship circles. On the other hand, a lot of us seemed to find the road to rebuilding our lives led us to new places and new goals. A lot of our young people are very taken with seeing the world and achieving their dreams, no matter where that takes them. I hope this is a good response, and that eventually they settle down and call someplace home, but we’re really in totally new territory on this. I have to remember that what works for me may not work for everyone, or even anyone, else.

  Julie and Kyle also shared what they have been doing this past year. Jane has been a wonderful influence on them. Like Eric, they’ve both been frequent guests at Calloway House, and I’ve gotten a great chance to get to know them. Since I need help with Kevin’s and my kids while he’s at Stanford during the week, Jane, Kyle, and Julie are currently with us, and I’ve had a chance to talk with both of them quite a bit over the last few weeks. They’re both very good with the younger kids, something I think they do natively. I also think they get some of that from Jane and our school system. Julie is a few months older than Kyle and both of them are a bit older than Eric so they will be leaving for Gap in three different cohorts.

  One of the changes Katerina Brueckner put into effect after she took over The Gap Year is that now, new entrants are carefully screened so that they aren’t with family members or best friends. She wants everyone to have the same experience of making new friends. I would have thought surviving The Sickness should have taken care of that, but evidently, some kids had been coming with each other to their Gap and kept their old social networks from home while others have been coming as isolates. Now, working with the schools, they are all coming on the same terms. Another change is that instead of spending the entire year at Camp Pendleton, now, during the second half of Gap year, their cohort spends a month in Kyoto, Japan, and another in Lagos, Nigeria, a third month in Prague, Czech Republic, before going off to Mumbai, India and then returning to Pendleton to finish up. When I was approached with the idea, my first thought was how we would pay for it, then I remembered that we don’t have to pay for anything anymore. Old habits and ways of thinking die hard. Of course, the host communities had to agree, but that turned out to be no problem. This new schedule has only been in place since July, and it seems to be very popular, not only with the kids but with the host communities. They do the same studies and have the same social interactions, but instead of doing it all in Southern California, they do it all over the world. It’s been great for integration and creating ties between the different communities of the coalition.

  Jane shared how much pleasure she has gleaned from being Julie and Kyle’s surrogate parent and how much she will miss them when they head off to their Gap Years and then to college. I know for a fact that she’s already pouring her heart into our little Chad. Chad takes piano lessons from Jane. According to Jane, Chad is so good that she wants us to let him study in Bloomington, Indiana under some of their superb master piano teachers. Chad clearly wants to go, and Jane will accompany him, but he also doesn’t want to leave Kevin and me and the kids who are now essentially his siblings. It’s going to be a tough decision when we are forced to make it. But we have a year or two. Hopefully, it will be easier as time unfolds. I suspect that now that Jane is living with us at Calloway House, she will probably just stay on, at least until she takes Chad to Bloomington. It’s hard to tell, but Jane will be 80 this next year.

  Avery Wells and Dr. Mary talked about their wedding and her pregnancy. Dr. Mary had never married and wasn’t planning on it. But The Sickness changed things for everyone. Taylor is now three and going great guns. He loves Dr. Mary; he loves school; and he loves Dinah. They both go to the same preschool and evidently he talks about Dinah all the time. They spend a lot of time together outside of school so they’ve become great friends. Taylor looks like his dad and will probably grow up to be tall and slim, too. I wonder why it is that so many rich people are tall and slim. When I was a kid I thought that’s what made them rich, but of course, now I know better; many of them inherited their money just like they inherited their body type. I know; that’s not fair. Avery is very talented and very well trained. But he did inherit both his wealth and his good looks from his parents. Of course, now everyone is sort of equal, at least in the wealth department. For that matter, being slender is sort of the norm as well.

  Avery still travels, almost as much as I do. He’s on the Coalition Council and is one of my closest advisors. He literally taught me how to behave properly at important dinners and state functions. I’ve d
iscovered that a lot of what I have to do has nothing to do with being fancy or formal. It’s just to avoid offending people unintentionally. It’s hard to work cooperatively with people that you find offensive, even if that’s part of your job. I don’t think the American side of the Atlantic cares about those things as much as the Europeans do. That makes sense when you realize that we don’t have nearly as many languages and cultures to navigate right next door as most of the rest of the world does. They’ve learned through centuries of wars and diplomacy how to behave and make the fewest unnecessary waves.

  I understand this idea first hand. Before The Sickness some people complained about ‘political correctness’. But I still remember discussions in which the words ‘faggots’ and ‘fairies’ were used, and I remember feeling very uncomfortable. The offending speakers had no idea that someone in the room might find those words troubling and offensive so they had no idea what effect they were having on one of their friends or family members or acquaintances. Needless to say, I readily agree that sometimes, for the good of everyone involved, we need a public language for speaking to individuals or groups of friends or strangers without unknowingly offending them. It’s difficult to feel confident around people who use words like ‘faggot’ or some of the other hot words that we grew up with. The sad part is that the speakers would probably never know the damage they had done to their relationship with someone who no longer felt safe around them.

  Most Europeans generally had a pretty good grasp of dinner table etiquette and formal group behavior already. Now, thanks to Avery, so do I. For that matter, so do many of our people on this side of the Atlantic now that we have a series of videos to show us what to do. As I’ve mentioned before, we have a dearth of television shows, and since we have a lot of people eager to improve their education, a lot of our people have participated in a wide variety of distance learning fare. Added to that is that people are traveling to a lot of very different places, and there are so few of us that we don’t have luxury of being just another tourist in the crowd. Now, when we behave like a clod, lots of people know who we are and where we came from. Like I said, we’re all rich and thin now.

  Avery no longer teaches art curatorship all over the world. That has fallen into the capable hands of some of his assistants. He does teach a full load of art classes at SLO. His classes are also online. The Brazilians have really taken the online courses and run with them. I don’t know what they did before The Sickness, but now we see their film crews everywhere capturing lectures and full courses. They do this everywhere in all of the schools. One thing about us now is that we know how easily everything can be gone in a matter of hours. We’re trying to get as much information and instruction recorded so that if we lose the teacher, we still have the teachings.

  We had a near miss when our sole surviving master sommelier had a mild heart attack. Her apprentices were in a panic, not just because she was their teacher, but she was also their friend. Unfortunately, we can’t actually teach wine tasting on a video so filming her instruction wouldn’t have helped a lot, but it underlined how precarious some of our knowledge is. For that matter, there weren’t that many master sommeliers before The Sickness. We are lucky to have even one of them left to share their knowledge.

  Two of my other close advisors are Irma and Carl. I trust Irma’s judgment when it comes to people second only to Kevin’s. I’m not always so sure of my own judgment since I tend to think the best of everyone. Kevin and Irma have pretty much corralled my impulse to trust that all people do the best they can whenever possible. I’ll talk to one or the other or both about what is going on at Coalition meetings, and they’ll point things out that I missed completely. It’s surprising how many people try to manipulate other people, and frequently I’m the person they’re aiming for. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really naïve, but perhaps just a little slow to judge people unfavorably. On the other hand, I’m not bad at reading situations. People and situations are different somehow.

  Anyway, Carl is my go to person for government questions. He’s given me a lot of books to read, and I’ve read most of them, sometimes twice. Carl has talked with me extensively about the forms of government that are taking shape around us. Coalition Communities, no matter where they are, tend to be pretty much the same since it’s so easy for people to leave if they’re unhappy, and right now, all people are very precious. SLO is very prosperous in people, again, relatively speaking. We have their experience, their training, and their willingness to be part of our community team. If we were to do something that made them want to leave, we would lose that. No one wants to rock the boat when it comes to population. A few months ago, when I accepted the Executive Director position for the Coalition Communities, there was a fair amount of consternation when a few people left some of the member communities to head off to form independent local villages because they were unwilling to accept a gay man as their director. I felt like resigning, but enough people wanted me to stay that I decided to wait a few weeks to see how things panned out. Then, just as Carl predicted, after a few weeks, the same people who left started drifting back to Coalition towns and villages. I didn’t turn out to be as big a problem after all, at least not when compared to some of the rules these little villages started putting in place. Rules or not, the villages offer people an alternative way of living in the midst of the Coalition, and that’s probably good.

  One thing we’ve learned very clearly is that women won’t accept living in an unequal society anymore, at least not for long. And we’ve made it very clear that holding women, or anyone else for that matter, against their will, will get you a one way ticket to Tristan da Cunha.

  The experience of losing a couple of thousand residents from our Coalition Communities was jarring, but at the same time it was a great social experiment that taught everyone a lot about human nature. It turns out that when people can easily vote with their feet, they will, and after they’ve done it once, they can do it again. People want to live in a place where they are left to themselves while also having the opportunity to be part of a community. It seems that most of the people who left us because I was gay decided that my being gay was easier to live with than all the rules and judgment that existed in their new communities. We didn’t do exit interviews or re-entry interviews so we may never know their motivations to leave and return. But I know the differences between those little independent communities and the Coalition Communities, and my money’s on rules and judgment being a big turnoff. Of course, we know what money’s worth now.

  Unfortunately, right after The Sickness struck, many of our pre-sickness informal immigrants here in the US, especially those from Mexico, quickly returned to their homelands. No one could blame them for wanting to reunite with their families, but we lost hundreds of valuable people with skills that we miss and will continue to miss. Almost none of them have returned. The world is a level playing field now, and no place, not even the US, has much of an advantage over any place else, at least materially. People are really the only resources around, and older people with lots of experience are particularly valuable. They’re also the most likely to call BS on frivolous rules and requirements.

  Elaine has found herself a cowboy. He’s from a little town not far from Lubbock. When Lubbuck merged with Amarillo a few months back, he moved to Morro Bay. He’s a horse trainer on a horse ranch just outside of Morro Bay. Elaine met him soon after he started working there. A lot of people, not just in SLO, keep horses for their own enjoyment. Elaine kept a horse before The Sickness at a horse barn just outside of Oxnard where she lived. As soon as the Morro Bay horse ranch started up, she moved her horse there and was a regular weekend visitor and volunteer, at least as much as possible. Wade Estes is no one’s fool and as soon as he met Elaine, they started to form a team. They’re both members of a fledgling rodeo circuit that’s been started by aficionados. It’s nice that so much of our cultural heritage is being salvaged by people like Elaine and Wade. Anyway, I suspect Elaine and Wade
will be getting married before too long. They make a charming couple. All I can hope is that Elaine doesn’t quit my office to train horses or something. I really depend on her and April. She’ll probably get pregnant though. I can live with that.

  April Watanabe brought a man she’s been seeing ever since our trip to Guangzhou last year. He was one of our pilots on the way back. Okazaki Nagato speaks beautifully accented English and grew up in Aomori City. He’s taller than I expected and has a great beard, something he attributes to his mixed Ainu-Japanese heritage. Due to my childhood curiosity I knew something about the Ainu in Japan so he and I had a great time talking after dinner. He’s no longer an airline pilot since SLO doesn’t really have an airport that handles larger planes. We always fly or drive down to LAX and leave from there. Oak (that’s what we call him) teaches piloting at our airport and is one of the local pilots shuttling people down to LAX. By the way, a lot of people take flying lessons.

  One thing I know about the Ainu that most people generally don’t know is that they have the highest survival percentage in the world, even higher than the original Tristan da Cunha survivors. Almost five per cent of them survived The Sickness. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of Ainu to start with. Nevertheless, over 1000 of them survived, and there is speculation that thanks to their genetic admixture to the Japanese gene pool, the Japanese survival rate was twice the average of the rest of the world at almost 1 in 2000. Now, Japan has about 50,000 survivors, a truly remarkable number. The Koreans also have a better than average contingent.

  For that matter, the Finns and their relatives in Estonia, Hungary, and the Ural Mountains of Russia also have a higher than average number of survivors relative to their populations. Theirs is similar to the Japanese survival rate of 1 in 2000. Of course, that bleeds over to their near neighbors and to a lesser, but still statistically significant, degree, other nations close by. Our research is getting closer and closer in figuring out exactly what it is that made us all survivors, and the smart money is on a lucky gene or two. We could use more researchers.