by J. F. Krause
Another discovery, one that we made fairly early on, is that about twenty per cent of the survivors are left-handed. That’s about twice the percentage before The Sickness. The same is true of ambidextrousness. Kevin and Chanelle are both lefties and Chad is ambidextrous, something that probably contributes to both his skill and his pleasure in playing the piano. It’s probably a little early to see what the next generation of survivors will be. Since science didn’t know what caused left-handedness before The Sickness, we certainly don’t know now. Aside from that, we don’t seem to have any new information about how or why we survived.
LaWanda and Max both work in areas that deal with food production or distribution, something that is shedding so much of its reliance on The Pre Sickness world. Most food is fresh now, with very little processing. For the most part, the local kitchens provide for all the local baked goods. But some products come from non-local food preparation centers. Max, who came from a background of food management and distribution has been a big part of that. We still have breakfast cereal that we make in one of the regional preparation centers. They also make what I think of as junk food, but, thanks to dieticians like LaWanda, even junk food is healthy. And thanks to lots of training by LaWanda and others, we don’t eat as much as before. I used to be almost addicted to really spicy-hot cheese curls, pretty much any brand. Right after The Sickness, I was so busy that I sometimes forgot to eat. It was literally months before I even thought about my favorite snack and by then, I was over my ‘addiction’. Now, the whole family eats fruit when we want a snack. It wasn’t planned, it just happened because for the longest time, fruit was about the only snack that was readily available. The food courts didn’t have the time or resources to make spice cheese curls. I’m not a conscious health food type of person, but I think Kevin is, and I know the kids are taught nutrition at school. Sometimes, though, I miss the old fashioned chemical laden junk food from before. And that’s the reason our kids get steered to fruit for a snack.
I remember, at least in the beginning of our survival experience, sort of craving all sorts of things that I think about less and less now. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make any decisions about food on my own; I just ate what the food court was serving. Even now, when I go out to a restaurant or a café, the local establishments serve dishes that would probably be classified as rather healthy, particularly when it comes to portions. I had a large friend in college who insisted that when he went out to dinner with his friends that the wait staff always gave him the smallest portion. I know that isn’t happening now, but Jason Kryschtoff, who operates our favorite restaurant tells me that they are allotted food based on their expected clientele on any given evening, and that they have portion guidelines to help them avoid food waste. In fact, on some days, his and Mia’s restaurant has had to close its doors to non reservation customers because they ran out of food. In the beginning, calling ahead took a lot of getting used to, but we did it because we were constantly in a state of shock or fear, and most of us did just what we were told. It’s hard to believe, but, even though people would have thought that I could do whatever I wanted, at least they would have thought that if they consciously decided to think about it, even I ate what was being served, or I called ahead. I still do. Fear is a big motivator although I don’t think it’s as effective as success. We’re learning new habits.
I’ve come to rely on Jason and Mia for advice and information about what life is like for people who just go about their own business making a living. Jason doesn’t have to worry about governing and diplomacy and such. He’s just living life as it happens, and from what he says, he’s happy and feels safe and useful. He tells me that he and Mia plan to have a whole lot of Kryschtoff-Lins, something that wouldn’t have been financially feasible before the sickness. That seems to be the way things are for most everyone now.
Some of what happened in the beginning is just a blur. I barely remember why it was decided that I was the right person to do my particular part in our initial recovery and survival efforts. I was just as scared as everyone else, and I certainly didn’t have any plan in place as to what to do. But I do know that fear and stress makes me focus and think very clearly. I was totally unsure of what to do next, at least until I got to next. The biggest thing was that no one was afraid of me becoming a dictator like Hawkins tried to be in Indiana. In the end we all did what we had to do because we were numb and afraid. Everything we are today is a result of what we did then.
Because of our fear and our grief, we needed to keep busy, so we put together programs and policies that have blossomed or morphed over the last couple of years into what we have today. None of our plans remained static, of course. They kept evolving. For that matter, even our Thanksgiving meal was a result of LaWanda and Max’s initial efforts. Now in addition to the food courts that mostly serve our schools and hospitals, and production facilities, we have restaurants, cafés and coffee shops run by individuals and groups of friends. As I’ve mentioned before, Jason and Mia operate a Chinese-American fusion place Kevin, the kids, and I love. Evidently a lot of people love it, too. We have a standing reservation twice a week, once just as a family, and once with Marco and Lydia, and Carl and Irma, and of course with all the kids. We also love breakfast there, too. Who would have thought a Mongolian beef omelet would taste so good.
Kevin and Chad played a piano duet for the group while we were having our catch-up conversation. I’ve heard them practicing together, but I wouldn’t have believed Chad was so proficient if I hadn’t heard it and seen it for myself. He’s only nine now, but he clearly demonstrated he could keep up with Kevin who’s no slouch himself on the piano. We had two grand pianos placed so that Kevin and Chad were able to face each other and Chad was just glowing as they played. Kevin was very proud, too, but mostly of Chad. He plays piano to relax, but Chad was clearly performing.
After everyone had shared a bit about what was going on in their lives, our family got the stage. Kevin is getting his nurse practitioner level and that means he’s been away from home Monday AM through Thursday PM every week. Jane and her kids moved in to help us when Kevin started his courses, and that makes everything possible. I don’t believe we could have kept our heads above water without her, Julie, and Kyle. Of course, Chanelle and Jerry are old enough to pick up a lot of the slack, but kids are still kids and need time to play, study, and chill so Jane was really the make or break person in our lives.
Everyone wanted to know if Kevin was going to pursue his full physician level, but that’s really up in the air. Doctors have to really be willing to delay their lives while they go through the years of study required to become a doctor, and Kevin is already in the midst of a lot of commitments to the kids and me. Putting his life on hold isn’t an option, and besides, Kevin is very happy with where his life is already. He’s not one to constantly want what he doesn’t have. If we were a normal family, we would just move with him to Stanford and wherever else he needed to go, but with my job and the kids happily enrolled in the schools here, we can’t do that. Kevin misses home and family dreadfully, and I think this may be the extent of his formal medical education. We think there may be another year of medical school added to Stanford in the next year or so, but even continuing what he’s currently doing is challenging. Right now, the Coalition maintains ten medical schools but none of them offer a full program. There are only a little over 600,000 people in the Coalition and ten partial medical schools is a stretch, and certainly trying to maintain ten four-year or five-year medical schools would be impossible, especially because in about fifteen or so years we will hit a birth dearth because so few toddlers and infants were discovered in time after The Sickness. That’s something that still haunts my thoughts and dreams. All of our colleges are going to have fewer students. They will have to survive though because the birth dearth is followed immediately by a baby boom.
As for me, I’m guessing not many people want to replace me, and the few rivals out there for my job seem to sca
re the bejabbers out of people. We have lots of pretty benign projects going on, many of them just to keep up our skills. Some others are to force us to integrate with each other. That’s trickier than one might think. Now, more than ever people are aware of their cultural heritages and want to preserve their customs and traditions, not an easy feat when there are only a thousand or so people, or fewer, that belong to some of these cultural groups. We all seem to want the same thing so we work very hard to support each other in this.
I can’t say I actually enjoy everything I do. Reading reports is, frankly, boring at times. At first, we had five hundred communities, but that is down to under four hundred now as communities consolidate. That’s a help to me, but I also know it was often wrenching for the people making the decisions to move and merge. Having Elaine and April help me and having standardized report forms makes it tolerable, barely. Not much happens which is a blessing, but it’s not very interesting. I don’t want it to get interesting, at least not in a stressful way, but maintaining what we have is a lot of work, even if it’s not exciting. It’s going to be a long time before we build a new highway, or a new skyscraper. We’re all about maintenance and conservation, neither of which is attention grabbing. The different guilds, academic/artistic disciplines, and conservancies take care of their own specialties almost like clockwork. I sit in on meetings just so I know what’s going on in case I need to help them meld with each other and also to let them know their work is important, but I don’t actually do anything. Lydia tells me that’s why I’m so important to everyone. I don’t actually do anything or interfere, at least not very often, and I know, more than anyone else, what’s going on everywhere about everything, at least everything we’re doing in the Coalition. I’m like the extra sandwich you pack for a picnic, just in case. At the same time, I represent all sorts of things to people. To some, I’m a safety net, to others, a security blanket. People can relax knowing there’s someone in charge. They wouldn’t and won’t believe me when I tell them I don’t have any idea what to do. I really don’t, but very few problems need new solutions; they need old solutions that have been tried and tested. Even if I don’t know what to do about any particular problem, I know if I ask the right question of the right people, I’ll get the right answer.
The last time we had anything really exciting going on was when we tried to reintroduce currency. For a while it looked like it would kill the communities that decided to do it. Fortunately, they stopped their experiment before too much damage was done, but they, and we, learned the lesson. Right now, people like things the way they are. Maybe they’ve already had enough change for one life.
But things are still changing, especially in ways that not everyone is paying attention to. For instance, I notice that young women, and increasingly more and more older women, aren’t wearing much or any make-up. Even Chanelle, who looked so beautiful and grownup at Kevin’s and my wedding just thinks of make-up as some sort of costume. I suspect we can trace much of that change to the Gap Year, and probably, to be more precise, to Katerina Brueckner, the superintendent of the Gap Year Program. Along with modifying the Gap Year so that parts of it take place in several places around the world, she is working hard at insuring all participants understand, and hopefully, support democracy and equality. It seems, at least at this early stage in its application, to be breaking down the lingering provincialism that could easily tear us asunder. What with the Mandarin learning camps in Shanghai, the Hindi ones in Bombay, the soccer camps in South America as well as several other sports camps and language camps around the world, as well as the science modules that are being developed in Germany and Russia, along with the Gap Year segments all over the world, our kids are growing up to be truly citizens of the world.
At the same time, there are pressures around the globe for some of the larger people groups to go their own way. It can’t be helped, but it can be addressed, and a more formal Coalition of Communities is becoming a goal that more and more of us recognize and support.
Along with the drive to make the Coalition stronger and more clearly delineated as an over-arching governing body, there is a movement to define my role a little more clearly. Oddly, the people pushing this idea want me to have more power, especially the power to veto. I’m not so sure about giving me, or rather, my position more power. Paradoxically, while I don’t see me using the veto very often, the fact that I can’t say I would never use it keeps me from trying to block it. I can imagine times when I would definitely want to veto some of the discussions we’ve had from becoming policy. While Panhandle is falling apart, their ideas are out there, and we’ve had short-lived movements on every continent concerning religion, morality, language use, cultural dominance, racial identity, travel rights, and monetarizing labor to name the most impactful. I would be tempted to veto those if they actually gained traction. Fortunately, they haven’t. The only one that was actually tried within a coalition member community was the tying of labor to money, and that was so unpopular in practice that it ended up threatening the existence of a couple of our otherwise thriving towns. The damage is almost repaired, but not completely. Austin, which didn’t participate in the currency experiment, is now the largest Coalition Community in Texas as a result.
I had a college professor who was fond of sayings. One of them was ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. That’s still true. Another one was ‘there’s nothing guaranteed but death and taxes’. That one isn’t still true. We don’t pay taxes anymore. Maybe that’s new? Or maybe we pay it in another way. Maybe working twenty hours a week is a form of tax?
As we all caught up on each other’s lives, we couldn’t miss how little most things have changed. Of course we all suffered horrible losses, but we did what people have been doing from time immemorial: we carried on. We took care of each other; we made new friends; we got married; we started families. Without doubt, if we were to compare our lives with those we led before The Sickness, we’d see the differences. But if all we did was to take a snapshot of us having Thanksgiving together, that snapshot would look pretty much the same as before, just a group of friends having a few hours together to count our blessings.
With every passing year, increasingly, this is going to become the new normal. As the men cleaned up the dishes, the women tended to the babies and toddlers, and the kids went down to the basement to play, I realized, maybe for the first time, we probably aren’t going to be moving back into caves anytime soon. Even though we don’t think of it, we are all creatures of habit, and some of those habits are civility, empathy, and pragmatism. We may have dodged a bullet, at least for now.
The last thing that comes to mind about our little family report was Carl asking me if I’d be attending the New York Kennel Show in January. He’s a big time animal lover and has pushed very hard to reestablish the dog shows and obedience trainings around the country. Thanks to Carl, we have a very active program in our schools teaching kids to be responsible with animal breeding and training. It almost broke his heart, I think, that so many pets were lost after The Sickness. He loves pets, former pets, and wild animals all about the same, but he believes that since we interfered in the lives of domesticated animals, we particularly owe them a special place in our hearts and lives. And yes, Nelda, Cedric, Butterbean, and Bosco have all been spayed or neutered. They will all be entered in the local dog show obedience trials, right along with countless other rescues. We have most of the traditional breeds represented side by side with mixed breeds and pure mutts. The emphasis is on health and temperament. How they get along with each other, how healthy they are, how happy they appear to be, these are the standards they are judged on. In the end, those are sort of the same standards we try to build in ourselves.
Anyway, my job seems secure, if I want it. I’m getting used to it so I’ll probably keep it for now. I hate to say it, but I’m afraid I won’t be a very good teacher when the time comes for me to go back to the classroom although Carl tells me I’ll make a good government and
modern history lecturer at our college here when the time comes for me to pack it in.
And there’s always cheese making.