April 8, 2020
The Long Haul
Day 20
“Hello in there, hello.”
John Prine, arguably the greatest songwriter of our time, wrote this haunting elegy in 1971 about a lonely, aging couple, together but alone, waiting around to die. Prine, 73, died yesterday from complications related to the coronavirus.
I saw Prine perform just once, in a bar in Nashville, on the night before I flew to Poland in a mammoth Air Force C-5 cargo plane with a crew of US Army helicopter pilots going behind the iron curtain for the first time to test their navigation skills in a friendly competition with Warsaw Pact troops. I went along as a journalist. Fast forwarding to the end of that story: the Americans won but they cheated, though I did not know it at the time. All is fair in love and war games, I guess.
Prine was, as always, brilliant and he sang his signature homage to the aging. He told a journalist much later: “I don’t think I’ve ever done a show without singing ‘Hello in there.’ Nothing in it wears on me.”
Prine explained the genesis of the song: “I've always had an affinity for old people. I used to help a buddy with his newspaper route, and I delivered to a Baptist old peoples home where we'd have to go room-to-room. And some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head.”
The coronavirus does not discriminate by age as scientists once hypothesized. It does not discriminate between old and young, sick or healthy. Anyone can get it. But if you are older and in poor health, it will kill you more quickly than younger, healthier patients.
For the first time this week the virus claimed the life of someone I know, a 70-something, bear-of-a- man living off Dykeman Street in upper Manhattan. Jody was a New Yorker to his core. Once as we were rushing to take our seats in Carnegie Hall, Jody refused to let me park our gargantuan kid-friendly, Chevy Suburban in a midtown garage, taking the wheel and while squeezing the rig into a space on 57th street better suited for a VW Jetta he bellowed:
“New Yorkers do not pay to park!”
RIP Jody.
Life is changing. Health Tsar Tony Fauci says bluntly that the future will not look like the past. The coronavirus will be a threat even after treatments and a vaccine have been developed.
Life will change dramatically, likely for the rest of our lives, particularly for those of us older than 65.
Ethical decisions that affect the elderly are already being made in hospitals everyday. Where resources are limited, the young and otherwise healthy are treated before the elderly with underlying health problems. I have no problem with this. It is as it should be. A pregnant 30-something should get a ventilator before I do.
Formal, ethical treatment protocols are being written. States are developing a roadmap, a points system for rationing care. “There are a lot of competing visions of good,” an ethics professor at Fordham told the Washington Post. “The number and gravity of judgements we have to make are astronomical.”
Like everyone else I want to know what the future looks like. We fled California to ride out the crisis here in Vermont. Will we ever get back to see our family there? By summer I expect our children will be able to come to us. When will we be able to visit them in Boston, New York, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania? Will I ever sit in Fenway Park again? Or will I ever return to Ireland or visit at Angkor Wat, perhaps during one more trip to see extended family in Thailand.
Here is what I do know about our future: senior citizens will be the last among us to emerge from forced hibernation.
Discussions are underway around the globe about how and when we can facedown the virus in public. It is clear that stay-at-home orders will be lifted in stages. It won’t be like the Titanic: “women and children first.” The first to emerge will be those who can demonstrate and PROVE they had the virus. This will be determined by testing. In China residents have an app on their phone that declares they are no longer a threat to society and are free to roam the streets.
Government as big brother! Pundits argue Americans will never accept this type of intrusion on their civil liberties. It will never happen here.
Baloney!
Americans will embrace it if they think it will keep them alive. Oh there will be grumblers, like me, and the survivalists hiding-in-plain-sight in Idaho.
But history demonstrates that when faced with war, we are sheep. We want to be led and we will go where we are told. My oldest son reminded me recently that WW II was fought by six dictators, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, FDR and Churchill. Yes, FDR and Churchill were elected but they were autocrats with almost unlimited power because we wanted them to be.
Fauci, ever cautious, thinks school children will miss summer camp but be back in their classrooms next Fall. Seniors will be in their homes much, much longer, he warns, without saying so explicitly. The most vulnerable among us may be close to home for the rest of their lives. The world is going to get much smaller for seniors.
And for many, their lives will get much lonelier.
John Prine admonishes us to not let that happen. He wrote:
“So if you are walking down the street sometime;
And spot some hollow ancient eyes;
Don’t just pass them by and stare;
Say, hello in there. Hello!”
Finally for those readers who take exception to my claim that Prine was the greatest songwriter of all time, read what Bob Dylan, my other candidate for the title, says about him:
“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism.”
RIP John Prine!
Be safe.
The Long Haul
Day 20
“Hello in there, hello.”
John Prine, arguably the greatest songwriter of our time, wrote this haunting elegy in 1971 about a lonely, aging couple, together but alone, waiting around to die. Prine, 73, died yesterday from complications related to the coronavirus.
I saw Prine perform just once, in a bar in Nashville, on the night before I flew to Poland in a mammoth Air Force C-5 cargo plane with a crew of US Army helicopter pilots going behind the iron curtain for the first time to test their navigation skills in a friendly competition with Warsaw Pact troops. I went along as a journalist. Fast forwarding to the end of that story: the Americans won but they cheated, though I did not know it at the time. All is fair in love and war games, I guess.
Prine was, as always, brilliant and he sang his signature homage to the aging. He told a journalist much later: “I don’t think I’ve ever done a show without singing ‘Hello in there.’ Nothing in it wears on me.”
Prine explained the genesis of the song: “I've always had an affinity for old people. I used to help a buddy with his newspaper route, and I delivered to a Baptist old peoples home where we'd have to go room-to-room. And some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head.”
The coronavirus does not discriminate by age as scientists once hypothesized. It does not discriminate between old and young, sick or healthy. Anyone can get it. But if you are older and in poor health, it will kill you more quickly than younger, healthier patients.
For the first time this week the virus claimed the life of someone I know, a 70-something, bear-of-a- man living off Dykeman Street in upper Manhattan. Jody was a New Yorker to his core. Once as we were rushing to take our seats in Carnegie Hall, Jody refused to let me park our gargantuan kid-friendly, Chevy Suburban in a midtown garage, taking the wheel and while squeezing the rig into a space on 57th street better suited for a VW Jetta he bellowed:
“New Yorkers do not pay to park!”
RIP Jody.
Life is changing. Health Tsar Tony Fauci says bluntly that the future will not look like the past. The coronavirus will be a threat even after treatments and a vaccine have been developed.
Life will change dramatically, likely for the rest of our lives, particularly for those of us older than 65.
Ethical decisions that affect the elderly are already being made in hospitals everyday. Where resources are limited, the young and otherwise healthy are treated before the elderly with underlying health problems. I have no problem with this. It is as it should be. A pregnant 30-something should get a ventilator before I do.
Formal, ethical treatment protocols are being written. States are developing a roadmap, a points system for rationing care. “There are a lot of competing visions of good,” an ethics professor at Fordham told the Washington Post. “The number and gravity of judgements we have to make are astronomical.”
Like everyone else I want to know what the future looks like. We fled California to ride out the crisis here in Vermont. Will we ever get back to see our family there? By summer I expect our children will be able to come to us. When will we be able to visit them in Boston, New York, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania? Will I ever sit in Fenway Park again? Or will I ever return to Ireland or visit at Angkor Wat, perhaps during one more trip to see extended family in Thailand.
Here is what I do know about our future: senior citizens will be the last among us to emerge from forced hibernation.
Discussions are underway around the globe about how and when we can facedown the virus in public. It is clear that stay-at-home orders will be lifted in stages. It won’t be like the Titanic: “women and children first.” The first to emerge will be those who can demonstrate and PROVE they had the virus. This will be determined by testing. In China residents have an app on their phone that declares they are no longer a threat to society and are free to roam the streets.
Government as big brother! Pundits argue Americans will never accept this type of intrusion on their civil liberties. It will never happen here.
Baloney!
Americans will embrace it if they think it will keep them alive. Oh there will be grumblers, like me, and the survivalists hiding-in-plain-sight in Idaho.
But history demonstrates that when faced with war, we are sheep. We want to be led and we will go where we are told. My oldest son reminded me recently that WW II was fought by six dictators, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, FDR and Churchill. Yes, FDR and Churchill were elected but they were autocrats with almost unlimited power because we wanted them to be.
Fauci, ever cautious, thinks school children will miss summer camp but be back in their classrooms next Fall. Seniors will be in their homes much, much longer, he warns, without saying so explicitly. The most vulnerable among us may be close to home for the rest of their lives. The world is going to get much smaller for seniors.
And for many, their lives will get much lonelier.
John Prine admonishes us to not let that happen. He wrote:
“So if you are walking down the street sometime;
And spot some hollow ancient eyes;
Don’t just pass them by and stare;
Say, hello in there. Hello!”
Finally for those readers who take exception to my claim that Prine was the greatest songwriter of all time, read what Bob Dylan, my other candidate for the title, says about him:
“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism.”
RIP John Prine!
Be safe.
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